The Place Where You Live

Spring through fall, I live in a yurt on a former ranch in northeastern Oregon. If you were to visit, I’d take you for a walk. Wear long pants and boots for rattlesnakes.

Let’s head north through the old apple orchard. In early summer, we’ll check holes in the trunks for nests – house wrens, chickadees, red-knaped sapsuckers, white-breasted nuthatches. In fall, we’ll look for black bear scat – hard to miss – and then pick a few apples to sweeten our way. We’ll pause at the spring in the aspen grove. My son found an arrowhead here our first year. The Nez Perce hunted on these high prairies in summer and wintered in Joseph Canyon about ten miles east….Hey, careful where you step. An old rattler hangs out over there. And she no longer rattles.

Let’s go up this gentle slope through a bunchgrass meadow. In spring, balsamroot, lupine and Indian paintbrush might tempt us to sit for awhile and look out over Lost Prairie, the Grand Ronde Canyon and Blue Mountains. Then, we’ll circle around to the north slope through douglas fir, grand fir, larch and rest on a log near a pond overgrown by willow and cattails. In summer, we can look for tadpoles. In fall, I’ll hold our standard poodle back from the shrinking puddle and let you examine mudprints. Elk, I bet. And maybe black bear. Or cougar.

We’ll climb to the ridgetop. At over 4000 feet on the rimrock, we get the best views up the Wenaha Canyon from here. Check out the basalt rockall below. Neighbors say old Weatherman hid a box of dynamite there, but we’ve only found tin cans, lumber and newspapers from the 1940s.

We’ll stroll down a gentle cow trail and visit the old homestead in a south-facing hollow. We’ll peek in the three-holer and the crumbling house where frogs rule the stove and bats, the closets. We’ll meander back to the yurt through a field of rusty horse-drawn equipment – wagon, grain drill, binder – and I’ll tell you about our plans for this place.