The big move from Santa Barbara to Portland, + family & adventure. Below is a gallery of 2005-06 images; click on any image for more info and a slideshow.
By this point one must be wondering why the heck I left! Well, here is one reason: that 80-acre forest west of Canyonville needed me to be closer to it to help out with our nonprofit, Alder Creek Children's Forest, and its educational programs, here serving Deborah Michel's class from South Umpqua High School.
And Lewis & Clark College is a beautiful campus in SW Portland.
Bailey and I did alot of hiking the Santa Barbara hills spring 2005 in anticipation of our impending departure.
Gail visiting us in Santa Barbara . I wonder: will anyone visit me given the increase in latitude??
Leaving Santa Barbara involved leaving many things. One place I miss is the spot on the beach where I worked out basically every morning for ten years.
In June we met Mary and Peter for a visit with our uncle Richard, followed by…
…a bit of an adventure in and around Idyllwild, up the mountains above Richard's place in Palm Desert.
Also in June 2005 Elise graduated from high school; here we're celebrating her big day…
…but we had many more celebrations to come prior to the Big Move: here are Joy and Elise getting ready for a party we hosted…
…and here are some of our special friends at the Live Oak UU Congregation wishing us well.
Moving means getting rid of stuff, and we had thirteen years of Santa Barbara accumulation to get rid of! Here are Elise and Joy at our courtyard sale.
And then it was time to leave the home we loved so much. Elise and Joy both play piano, but Joy's place is bigger than Elise's so the family piano went with Joy and Matt. Joy graduated from UCSB in summer 2006, and continues her work in a legal practice in Santa Barbara.
Elise found (and still rents) a cute bedroom in an old house with cool housemates in Santa Barbara. She works hard to afford rent, but did enjoy a trip to Paris in summer 2006! She's taking more French now so she can find a way back soon.
I also miss the sound, smell, and view from my bedroom window. For years I listened to the ocean and sea lions at night.
I was also needed to help train the teachers who would participate in ACCF activities. Here we are at one of my favorite places in the world: the top of Canyon Mountain about 3000 feet in elevation above the forest.
My housing situation in Portland didn't get off to a good start: the house I expected to move into was held up at the last minute in a lawsuit, so Bailey and I lived in a downtown hotel for a month.
But I did find some special places in Portland. Here is one, which I think of as my new ocean. I run up here most mornings with Bailey and work out.
Lewis & Clark College brought me a whole new, supportive group of faculty, staff, and administrators. Here we are at an Environmental Studies retreat in late summer 2005 in the Columbia Gorge.
Living in Portland gives me the opportunity to get down to Canyonville much more quickly than when I was in Santa Barbara! ACCF has had a booth at Cville's Pioneer Days for the last several years. In 2005 we sponsored a drawing contest, asking youth to sketch their ideal children's forest. Here is the Maunu clan of Myrtle Creek, who proved to be artistically gifted (and competitive!).
One of our teacher friends, Scott Hampton, helping out at the ACCF booth. In the foreground on left is a map of the Alder-Jordan Creek drainage. ACCF works closely with other major landholders in the drainage, including the Cow Creek tribe, Bureau of Land Management, and the timber industry. We all have slightly different objectives with our land but we're neighbors, and this model of working together is what we want our young people to learn.
Canyonville has changed in many ways since we grew up, but there is still a Pioneer Days parade, something funny-looking on top of the local restaurant, and a love of guns and trucks.
Here's local high school student Joseph, who's proud as punch of the pictures he took at one of our events. He's a great photographer!
Meanwhile, back in PDX, I needed to find a place to live. I bought a small (can you say cozy?) house near Lewis & Clark; here are Joy and Elise in the living room.
In fall 2005 I started taking my Lewis & Clark students down to Canyonville to learn about rural Oregon, which they really enjoyed. Here we are at the mouth of Jordan Creek, where it trickles at this time of season into the South Umpqua. The Cow Creeks have been replacing culverts and restoring habitat, and recently a coho salmon was spotted swimming up Jordan Creek, something that hasn't happened in years.
So we got this great idea around September 2005: let's remodel the pink plastic-tiled bathroom! Joy and Elise flew up for a furious weekend of work, and by the time they left…
We also took trips to other parts of Oregon, such as Bonneville Dam on the Columbia. The Columbia is a great example of how impossible it is to solve environmental problems by focusing on any one thing.
The drought of the early 21st century took its toll on the Proctor forest, with a number of Douglas firs succumbing to beetle infestation. This harvest, the largest in recent times on the forest, was a necessary consequence, but netted ACCF some needed funds…
ACCF has worked extra hard to be inclusive and bring together disparate interests in Douglas County for the benefit of youth forest education. It hasn't been altogether simple, and we've gotten our noses bloodied on several occasions. Thus we were happy to win a national Community Collaboration award this fall by the Hands on the Land program, which links natural resource nonprofits to federal lands across the country.
…and gave the young people of the area an opportunity to earn money and gain valuable skills while replanting. Here are four youth pictured in front of some white oak seedlings they have just planted. Our plan is to encourage the growth of oak, pine, and cedar in this area that proved so difficult for long-term maintenance of Douglas fir.
Occasionally I would escape to sunnier climes and check up on Joy and Elise in Santa Barbara, where—gasp—they were actually doing quite well on their own! Here is a boat tour on the channel in (can you believe it, northerners?) February.
I started looking all around town for houses, especially in the sleepy little neighborhood of Sellwood. Here's a late 19th century home I nearly bought…
A joy for the whole extended family was a celebration of the marriage of Brooke and Ryoko in February 2006. Brooke and Ryoko remind us that love can be cute!
Speaking of northern climes, this is what Bailey and I enjoyed in March.
In a special Earth Day event on campus, I met the Evan Williams clan. Evan founded the Environmental Studies Program in the late 1990s, but sadly succumbed to cancer not many years after. What I do at Lewis & Clark builds on Evan's spirit of inclusiveness.
Here are some more of our students, enjoying a hard day's work on the Lewis & Clark grounds.
Most of the snow, however, remained well above us in elevation, notably on Mount Hood, here framed against the gardens at Lewis & Clark.
…but somehow I finally realized: I don't have a huge family anymore! I don't need to take care of a whole house. What I need more is to be in close proximity to people, sort of like we got used to in our housing in Albuquerque, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara. A condo unit on the third floor of this century-old building in the northwest district of Portland proved perfect for me, Bailey, and our three cats.
Urban Portland proved especially apt given all the rural I had in southern Oregon. Here's my former student Jenn with Bailey on the summit of Canyon Mountain…
So school was going well last year, but what about my housing situation? Well, my cozy little house proved to be rather dark and dreary, so my house-fixing daughters returned in the spring to help me get the grounds in order and put the place on the market.
…the bathroom looked nothing like you see it here. I, um, figured out how to wash up in the kitchen sink for about four months while I stole time here and there to finish it. Here the designers pose for a photo in May 2006.
In spring 2006 Environmental Studies graduated about a dozen seniors; here they are with a few of our faculty at a celebration dinner.
…and here's Dave our educational consultant wowing the students gathered for our 2006 annual spring fair, giving lots of young people at least a day in the forest.
One project from UC Santa Barbara I have continued to enjoy facilitating is New Visions of Nature, Science, and Religion, drawing on an international cast of scholars. Here we are for our final workshop in Santa Barbara in May 2006.
I somehow end up in Cville during all the major transitions in this old community's life. Here is a sad one: possibly the last ever junior high graduation. Financial struggles and school board politics have closed Cville middle school, but its residents are working hard to keep schools alive in the community.
I enjoy working with my fellow faculty to build a stronger sense of connection and common purpose for the Environmental Studies program. In this picture we're near where Tryon Creek enters the Willamette River, part of a faculty workshop we held in June 2006.
One project started during summer 2006 was a new set of interpretive trails on the forest. We've just begun, but we hope to expand and possibly link with trails on adjacent lands, maybe even to go from the mouth all the way to the top of the watershed!
The New Visions program culminates this year in a major volume, plus four workshops in the US and Europe. Here is a view of Glasgow University, which I visited in July 2006 on behalf of Lewis & Clark prior to a New Visions conference in Oxford.
View of the Scottish highlands. Scotland is one of six Lewis & Clark overseas sites in which our Environmental Studies Program is building opportunities for student research. And guess who gets to check them all out? This coming May I fly all around the world for the first time, visiting sites in Australia and east Africa prior to a New Visions conference in the Netherlands.
Here's one of those tourist shots from Oxford. Elise really enjoyed visiting Oxford in 2003, sort of a Radiohead pilgrimage. I just go there for conferences, but the juxtaposition of old old and touristy touristy always feels odd to me.
In August 2006 the odometer ticked one more decade off and we held our 30th (not really?) high school reunion in none other but our high school, given our classmate Brody is the principal. Here we are remembering how different it felt when we were full of hormones and anxieties (neither one bothers us any more, of course).
One enjoyable reunion excursion with my high school buddy DeWayne and his son was a day hike to Cliff Lake in the Rogue-Umpqua Divide Wilderness. Here is the next generation out on a raft that we guess has been floating around Cliff Lake for maybe three generations.
In late summer 2006 ACCF hosted another set of Pioneer Days activities, including crosscut saw training. This one takes cooperation: it's sort of like a tug-of-war where you work together!
One of ACCF's early goals was to get safe road access into the forest. Three years after starting this project we finished! Here we are at the ribbon-cutting ceremony in September 2006.
Near campus is Tryon Creek State Natural Area, which offers a great field laboratory for some of our courses. On this wet day we are learning about the odd hydrology of the urban park, where Tryon Creek runs somewhat uncomfortably alongside major sewage and stormwater lines.
For over fifteen years our Berkeley club has hosted a fall Kojosho camp: it was once my joy to organize it, and now it's my joy to just show up! Here are Ken, Tom, and John doing a three-person form.
In October Lewis & Clark sponsors an Environmental Affairs Symposium. This fall we hosted Michael Shellenberger (pictured) and Ted Nordhaus, authors of the controversial "death of environmentalism" thesis. I plan to co-edit a volume on their work this coming year.
Also in October 2006 ACCF held its first Outdoor Education Day for area teachers. Here's our longtime contributor and Forest Service employee Alan starting them off on a tour of the forest. We call the forest PMF for Proctor Memorial Forest, and the trailer in the back the PMF Palace.
The forest also hosted Lewis & Clark students this fall. Here they are doing what everyone does when they see a bulldozer (thankfully bulldozers don't break too easily).
But here is the biggest surprise of all: Carolyn, the new owner of the Proctor house in Cville, discovered a stash of special Proctor things hidden behind this wall! What an amazing variety of family memorabilia, ranging from an old gun to old 16mm silent movies…
…to baby things: one of the teddy bears belongs to brother Bob, who promptly identified it. Now, how to match the baby shoes??
I'll leave with a sunrise over Canyon Mountain, November 2006. There is so much left to do!
Throughout this fall we've sponsored visits and work by area youth. Here a local YMCA group has discovered an odd hole in a tree above them, something I personally never noticed until a student pointed it out to me recently.
I had lots of fun outings with my students this fall. Here we are visiting (obviously) the State Capitol in Salem, part of what I call the hot dog factory tour, i.e. a chance to learn the nitty gritty on how environmental legislation is made.
One of the best parts of Thanksgiving for me was watching the girls gab. Here are Elise and Joy with Lyra and Ryoko at the Eisen-Proctor home catching up on all the big and little things that matter.
oy and Elise visited this fall for Thanksgiving. Here they are in front of a big metal ACCF sign we had donated to us recently, based on our ACCF logo.
Concluding a very hardworking fall for my students, staff and myself was an end-of-semester celebration in which each student shared a poster of her/his work. On this floor we featured projects from our local and overseas environmental research sites.