Clearcut

My father entered my room and looked me over briefly. I lay sprawled across my bed involved in the events portrayed in a civil war history book. He didn't meet my eyes. Instead, his vision took him far beyond where I lay. His eyes traveled over me, past the white soiled curtains blowing gently in the breeze and through my second story bedroom window. His gaze finally settled somewhere deep in the midst of the coast range near where Mary's Peak rose higher than the other mountains. Marys' Peak rose up from the valley floor over forty miles to the southwest of our small farm near Palestine, Oregon. Past Corvallis nestled along the banks of the Willamette River and beyond Philomoth, a small logging town. She stood separating the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean from the fertile soils of the WillametteValley in a position where on a clear day the adventurous could view the entirety of the higher peaks of the Oregon Cascade Range.

The sun settled and set against the purple blue silhouettes of the Coast Range and in the quickly fading light of day, lost almost into the night sky, my father’s rough features were solemn and tired. After a long silence, broken only by his troubled sighs, he asked a stark question that seemed louder than his voice had ever been. Yet I knew the question to be barely audible. It was the pain in his words that screamed and deafened all of my senses.

"Will you go with me tomorrow?" he asked.

My father still averted his gaze. His vision could not meet mine as all his countenance remained focused on a place far away from the side of my bed and our small farm. A place distant from the Coast Range and long removed from the State of Oregon.

"Yes, I'll go," I said.

He remained there for another minute, turned and left the room silently. The anguish and despair remained behind him and took his place beside me. As did the sense of disillusionment with the world that the entire family was on the verge of becoming lost into. I stared at the wall ,through it, and down beyond any place of desperation that I'd ever been before. I couldn't describe where my vision took me but I knew that it was into a darkness most youngsters have never known. And, although I did not know it at the time, the following day would effect me throughout the rest of my life.

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My father was born in Spokane County, Washington in the city of the same name. Spokane, in the Native American definition means Children of the Sun. Initially this definition would serve my father well. He entered the world a welcome part of a warm, loving, home. Spokane was the type of place where most of the parents struggled against the winds of challenge and adversity that all small logging mining and ranching communities know. His parents were no exception.

When my father was near the age of seven, his father died of a sudden hemorrhage and the warm safety of a world where security, stability and sanity were taken for granted as second nature was eliminated in the timeframe of one missed heartbeat. His mother, widowed and facing the prospect of raising young children alone, remarried at the first available prospect. The result of the union plunged my father’s world into a darkness that no one can ever entirely escape from.

One missed heartbeat. One morning my father awoke loved, wanted, and at peace in his world and the next morning he found himself and his world spinning violently and recklessly further and further out of his control. That first morning would be the last morning that he would ever know any fathers’ love, especially one that was his, again. Over the coming years, he would linger many times, overwhelmed in sadness, as he reflected on his last glance of his father. Confused. Alone. Save for the memory of that man who had truly loved him. Wondering why God had chosen that particular time. Why did this man have to go?

The next several years were a bewildering excursion into a hell most adults could never hope to comprehend. It was even more senseless to the innocent mind of a small boy. Hank, my father's stepfather, was violent and reckless. A man who tore up the house and the body of a child that was not his but which had come to be his just the same. My father became a sort of useless attached baggage. Baggage that came as part of Hanks' new bride and baggage that could be set afire and kicked and thrown. Baggage that was never cherished. Not by Hank. Seemingly not by Hank’s new bride, my father’s mother. But for some reason the baggage and the ties that bind were never completely severed. It took a man of the law to finally do that. And, it was a long time coming.

But in the slow kept time between mercy and salvation, the boy endured. And waited. For like the barren, arid hills which immediately surround the Colville Valley were prone to do during the late, hot summers, Hank would explode and erupt into a hot, scorching flame. Sometimes without cause. Still the boy waited knowing the eruptions would come. When and how severe seemed to be lost somewhere in the ruins of the place his natural father once inhabited and where his mother remained. Silent. The simplest unexplainable thing could be the spark that lit up the nights in that house. My fathers' mother stayed with Hank in spite of everything. Was he the only man that she thought would take her in? Or was he in all his sinister intentions the wild adrenaline rush that sometimes people choose over reason and rationality. Whatever her reasons she made her choice fully aware. She loved Hank in the presence of the screams of her own. Exchange his physical abuse for her sexual terror and my father lived through his own version of Bastard Out of Carolina. Nothing made sense and God didn't seem to be looking when Hank exploded and imploded all over the body of the small boy.

Most of the beatings seemed directed solely towards my father and the world pretended that Hanks' drunken drinking binges and fits of rage weren't happening. My father’s mother saw and she refused to see. She never gave comfort to her son. Her choice was made and she had already moved on. Things escalated as they always do and on several occasions my father was hospitalized. Alone, terrified, and confused, he lay in various hospital beds broken and wondering why. Why his father couldn't come back to claim him? Why his life was not like the other boys in his classes? Why he could not keep Hank from striking him? Wondering what he had done to instigate this. The family moved to Colville, Washington. The beatings escalated in the new location. Finally, the Stevens County Sheriff intervened. Fearful for the safety of the boy, the sheriff removed him from the home. It was the same and getting older story that happens to children all the time. Then as now. The story of neglected and abused offspring of people who don't know any better. And what they know, they can't face.

The authorities relocated my father to a Mormon family’s sheep ranch near Tiger, Washington.

Taken in, cleaned up and salvaged, he never returned to his mother’s home and he never slept under her roof again. Finally, my father's third' family' in less than a decade took compassionate care of the boy. And for this care he worked diligently. Out of options, anything was better than Hank and the firestorms that erupted from him. My father more than earned his keep.

During the summer months he took a collection of mangy, noisy, and terminally stupid sheep up into the northeastern Washington high country. Above the Colville Valley, where the terrain becomes rugged and the prairie grasses give way to lush alpine meadows, he tended his flock. His home became the alpine, wildflower meadows that stay green once the snow is gone in late June through the very short summer. By late August the leaves are starting to turn on the aspens and the birch. Here, the snow sometimes flies as soon as late September.

It was in this high country separating Stevens and Pend Oreille counties that my father became a man. Solitary and alone he herded sheep amongst the elk and deer; occasionally encountering moose in the low country. He slept among the bears, cougars and coyotes and from the high backbone of the mountains he watched as the weather fronts brought stinging rains and lightning. The sheep sometimes panicked just as the boy had also once felt terrifying fear. At times the world seemed to be bigger than the world the sheep already knew, and as the thunder roared and the coyotes howled, the boy would calm them their fears and give them shelter. Yet no one gave the boy shelter or calmed his fears. He remained on the side of a mountain. Facing the elements of high country summers. Alone, save for those sheep.

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I awoke the next morning as my father came into my room. "Are you ready?" he asked.

"Yeah, I guess so. Let me grab some cereal and I'll be out", I said. He nodded and left the room. I got dressed into old Levis and a sweatshirt and made my way downstairs to the kitchen. I attempted breakfast and then I was outside. The rest of the family was still sleeping. My brother and sister and my mother would not be going. It was bad enough that any of us were. But they remained asleep and it was just my father and I. I had gone to sleep to the sound of my mother’s sobbing wails from their bedroom. A sound which still I can still hear even now.

Our small farm consisted of two pastures with three rail, white painted wooden fence. Over half of the fence posts were rotted and leaned at precarious angles and many of the boards were half chewed by bored horses. We could not stay current with painting the split rail fences, so many of the boards and posts were weathered. Some were unpainted and raw, boards that were recently replaced after being kicked in or plowed through by some mare trying to reclaim a lost foal.

A long lane led down to a gate where my father’s two tone tan and brown Dodge truck sat idling. My father walked across the riding arena towards the barn and as he did he pushed an empty wheel barrel. He was not whistling as he often did. He was silent. The wheels of the wheel barrel made a creaking, whining sound that was haunting and eerily out of place in the morning sun. All around us, curious horses watched the activity. Their ears were pinned forward and some of them nickered. Our oldest brood mare, Makahara whinnied. She was the neighborhood alarm clock and our neighbors set their watches to her earliest call. Always prompt. Always at 6 a.m., she announced to everyone for a mile that it was time to be fed. She was the equivalent to a four legged rooster.

Together my father and I fed and watered the horses. Usually foals ran around us. These babies that were impossbile to get into their stalls followed by frantic mares in hot pursuit. But today there weren't any foals running around us wild and out of control. Things were calm. Orderly.

Normally at this time of year, we would get one mare into a stall only long enough for her to realize that her foal was not by her side. The mare would enter the stall, only to pivot and come charging headlong back out. Her mouth still half full of that first mouthful of grain and alfalfa. Panic and the whites of her eyes showing, nostrils flared, she would be on the lookout for the lost foal. Of course the foal didn't have any concerns with the plight of us or their frantic mama. There was milk to be had whenever they needed it. On the foals' time frame, not ours. Instead the foals were content to charge into the wind, sprinting fast and full of themselves in furious bucking. Tails were carried high, their Arabian dished head and delicate features classically displayed. A mirror displaying the good Lord’s creative ability.

My gray dappled gelding got pissed at all these antics of mare and foal. Corral romper room inevitably meant delays in his own feeding. He lay his ears back and swished his tail every time any of them came close to him. He had no patience for lost foals and a mare in a panic was not of his concern. Food was.

Yet today feeding went smoothly. The youngest in the herd were all yearlings. They knew the routine. Where they were supposed to be. Who got feed first and who got feed next and so on. Today foals did not charge us. They did not go into the wrong stalls. The foals did not drive both us and their mothers crazy. There weren't any foals frolicking in the corrals, the pastures, or the barn creating chaos now. They were dead.

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Our Arabian horse farm was never successful. We produced some winning regional horses, national futurity winners and even some national champions but the success never came directly back to our farm. My parents knew bloodlines and they knew our mares and who would be best bred to whom. Yet we never had the funds to show and promote and train our babies. They were sold to other farms and it was with great bitterness that my parents realized that some of their breeding decisions had saved other farms from bankruptcy while leading our own farm nearly into insolvency. Everyone seemed to profit from their breeding decisions but them.

Yet our horses were a part of our family. We walked them for hours when they coliced. We rejoiced at their offspring. We cussed them at their stubbornness. We prayed over them when they were sick. We trespassed to repossess them when they were abused or their new owners had quit paying for them. In the show ring, when our horses performed, they were paraded about with ribbons in manes and trophies posted outside of stalls. They snuck our food and ate things horses weren't supposed to eat. Big Macs, container and all. Gum. Chocolate. Soda pop. Our oldest mare once came into our home one day. These horses were always more than animals. They were family. To lose any of them was a gut wrenching experience.

In the spring of that year we were blessed with two exceptional babies. When the first colt was born, we immediately knew that we had problems. He never got up on his own. We later discovered he was born with a hole in his heart. He was also blind. He had so many great difficulties. Yet he never gave up. Full of try, he could nurse and he could communicate. He greeted us each time we entered his stall with a little nicker.

And, he was beautiful. A Liver Chestnut with a white star and a white snip across his nose, he defined perfect. He wasn't a quitter. Neither were we. Before we realized the seriousness of his condition, we were already attached to him. My father and I would go out and nurse him every three hours. We fed him with a large baby bottle. His mama had to be milked by hand which was no easy feat. Tender and over filled, her bags were extremely sensitive. With the foal unable to nurse on his own, she was forced to rely on us to relieve the pressure. Yet each pull on her teats was agony for her and us as well.

We tried to store some of her milk in the refrigerator but later, when we attempted to reheat her milk in the microwave, the milk coagulated and turned solid. Eventually the baby learned to recognize my father's scent. He would enter the stall and the colt would begin talking to dad with short whinnies and nickers. Throughout the ordeal the colt continued his attempt to get on his feet. Yet those long beautiful legs never cooperated. He would struggle against them and fight, but yet he could not get on his feet without my dad’s assistance.

His mother watched all of this with interest but no alarm. It was as if she knew we were doing the best for her baby that we knew how. She would study us with her head bent low, her ears forward and those big gentle eyes. My father and I would bend down and lift the baby up until all the legs were on solid ground. The colt would lean against us and then the bottle would be produced and he would nurse hungrily. We never gave up either.

The vet, who also sometimes seemed a member of our family due to the amount of time he spent at the farm, finally gave us his prognosis that there wasn't any hope for the colt. We had to put him down. The news was terrible. Although the vet offered to put the little guy to sleep, my father quietly took the syringe and went into the stall. We all heard the colt nicker and greet him as the colt caught my father’s scent. As far as the colt, or "the kid" as my father had called him, was concerned, it was just another feeding. After a minute alone with him in the stall, my father injected the small perfect baby with the solution that would put him to sleep. Dad held the colt up, and until he stopped breathing, he continued to nicker to my father. The colt died in his arms.

And another “member” of our family died too.

My father emerged from the stall broken and pale. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. His tears composed of great heaving sobs and bitterness, I heard the gasping, broken sound men make when their hearts are being ripped to shreds.

Later that year, another colt was born. He too was gorgeous. Relieved to learn that he was born with out complications, we delighted as within weeks he tore around the arena and our pastures. With incredible speed, style and beauty, his movements were poetic and breathtaking. The colt’s coat was a dark gray and his black, frizzy beginnings of a mane and tail contrasted the white markings that lay across his face. He loved to run and as he charged down to the other end of the pasture, his mother suddenly realized he was missing, panicked, and tore off after him; she a mass of hooves and dust and whinnies. It sometimes took us hours to get them in their stalls. Our neighbors delighted in watching the whole fiasco. Sometimes in our frustration it seemed that the colt knew exactly what he was doing: Making fools of us humans.

Then one day the colt bolted around a corner and lost control. He went straight into the water trough. The water filled his lungs before he managed to get out. Combined with the dust of that early summer it was enough to produce pneumonia. We thought the fall had no effect at first. Then the mucous increased. He became lethargic. We tried everything to get him over it. And then came another awful prognosis from the vet. He would have to be put down as well. Once again my father did it. This time he did not weep. He couldn't. As the life drained out of that small body, it also drained from my father. He found he had nothing left inside to feel. Numb to everything, confused by fate, and betrayed by circumstance, his hopes and dreams rapidly spun out of reach.

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We finished feeding the horses and then my father grabbed some old feed sacks. The body of the second foal lay in the feed room. We wrapped him in the feed sacks and placed him in the wheel barrel. The horses watched us from their stalls. Chewing their grain loudly and popping their heads out of double dutch doors, not even their feed could keep them from their curiosity. My father wheeled the body of the colt towards the lane and the waiting pickup truck. We placed the dead foal in the back of the pickup and closed the gate. The wheel barrel remained behind us as we drove out of the lane. Empty, stark, and alone.

Although I wondered why we didn't just bury the colt on our land I stayed silent with my curiosity. My father seemed to have other plans. I had no idea what they were. We had already buried several animals in our soil. What would the harm be if we buried another?

We drove past our hushed house. My father didn't speak. He turned towards Independence Highway and then, once past that highway, we continued west towards the Coast Range. We drove, staying north of Corvallis and soon we were climbing into the gently rolling foothills and following the mountains which paralleled Kings Valley. My father still didn't say anything. We drove onward to an unknown destination in loud silence. Without the radio on, I had as my companion my thoughts and only the noise of the pickup truck provided distractions from my bewilderment and his quiet.

As we gained elevation, the trees grew larger and the shade more plentiful until we disappeared deep into the lush vegetation of the mountains. Overhead, douglas fir towered. Giant ferns filled the ground. After a long while passed, I thought of other things. My father’s impossible job. The congregation that was never happy. The people that demanded all his time even if it meant he had no time for himself. The endless problems constantly dumped on him. The bickering. The infighting. The people of God who often acted petty, uncivilized and inhuman.

The irony of a father surrounded by people yet friendless filled the horizons of my understanding with pain of loneliness and unshared burdens. People expect their pastors to selflessly give of themselves. Yet they seldom gave anything back. Do this wedding and that funeral. Save this marriage and that troubled teen. Calls came in at all hours. His one day off a week was ceremonial. In that small town, he was taken advantage of, taken for granted but rarely taken to lunch. Or treated as a man who was the same as they were. He looked out from his pulpit often full of their pain and repressing his own. As a man of God, he was not entitled to be just a simple man with all the same needs as anyone else.

We finally turned off the highway onto a logging road. The road wound up through switchbacks, tight corners and steep drop offs. Soon we crested a tall ridge that looked east over the valley. The truck bounced and swayed and the feed sacks covering the foal blew off. the colt’s original baby coat blew in the wind and his unseeing eyes watched the sky. Many times in the past, I pondered whether animals have souls and if they go to heaven. I once again found myself thinking the same thoughts. I wondered if all the beloved animals that we lost were looking down on us from heaven, I wondered why God seemed to have abandoned us again. I wondered when our farm would be successful. When we wouldn't worry about feed money, the money to pay the vet bill and the farrier, and the money to buy our own groceries.

The road climbed higher. Thinking about my father and his relationship with his extended family, I felt his embarrassment and the last remains of his pride implode. Answering their skepticism, he once told his detractors the horse business was going to save his children from poverty. His children would have plenty of resources to attend college from the proceeds of the farm. In return that family laughed at him. They thought he was crazy. Yet he alone graduated from college. Would the same family members who turned their backs on him as a child, laugh at us if our farm was unable to survive this year? Would they rub it in? Frustrated at our predicament, I wondered if God just had it in for certain people and no matter what you did you were screwed. I wondered if the pastor in my father ever allowed himself to think the same thing.

We hit a particularly bumpy wash and the truck lurched and swayed. The foal bounced with a thud and I decided it was just time to quit thinking. Eventually we came to a clearcut. Fifty acres of trees were clearcut on one side and along the southern edge of the cut we stopped the truck in the middle of the road. On one side, the mountain rose up steep and densely forested. On the other side it dropped off just as steeply. The recent harvest made the land seem naked and ominous. Stumps and smoldering slash remained where the forest had been. Far below us the trees resumed and on each side of the cut, tall trees rose and marched along the sides of the harvest massacre. Deep scars remained where the logs had been skidded onto landings. In some places, the carnage was complete. The land was scaled down to the soil.

My father emerged from the truck and I followed and met him at the back of the tailgate. We dropped the gate. He grabbed the colt’s front legs and I took hold of the back ones. Lifting the animal off the bed, we struggled to carry it over to the side of the ravine. The colt hung between us upside down. My father still didn't speak but somehow, I knew what he wanted my to do. The foal’s beautiful head hung stiff against his leg and as we stopped to rest, we looked out over the mountains and into the valley below. It was peaceful and the wind though the trees above us was soft and pleasant. Overhead a hawk circled and let loose with a shrill, piercing cry.

We looked straight down the edge of the clearcut. One side of the forest was untouched. The other side was nonexistent. Then my father motioned for me to lift the foal and we swung it behind us. On the downward swing, as it came back toward us, we flung it hard out over the ravine. It fell slower than I would have thought. Beautiful long legs caught light and the perfect head seemed to once again race the wind. The colt landed and rolled. Brush parted. He disappeared into the edge of the forest. Into darkness.

I looked at my father but he did not look at me. Mentally, he was so far from where I stood. Yet I could have touched him. An emptiness seemed on the verge of swallowing me. I felt a disturbing pain that I could not define. I felt tears but they never came. My father turned quietly, getting back into the truck. I remained staring out into the space. I looked down into the ravine one final time but there was nothing to see except the edge of clearcut carnage. I felt like it was about to overwhelm me.

Getting back into the truck, he and I rode home in silence. My father remained preoccupied in the continuing agony that he had felt most of his life. This was one more dream down the tubes. One more event that was too awful to feel. I knew that tomorrow he would return to the church on Queen Avenue and that he would resume feeling all the problems of his congregation. Dealing with their troubles and failings. Anything was easier than facing what he had to face. The former was the Lords' work. The later obviously wasn't. Maybe pastors aren't supposed to dream, I thought. Maybe dreaming was something one had to give up to go into the ministry.

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I didn't know it at the time but that colt was to be the final foal born on our farm.

In May of 1998 my parents put down the last of their horses. Our first foal born, I was in fourth grade when the filly arrived into our world. She was beautiful. A deep bay with black mane and tail and a white star on her head, she was a member of our family for over twenty three years. On many occasions she gave us comfort with her gentle steadfast presence. Highly protective, she was the only mare that would ever jump from a complete standstill through a double dutch door to fetch a straying foal. Making the jump without a scratch, my father stood dumbfounded and amazed. He later said he wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it himself.

This mare, in her final years brought joy to a four year old girl whose family couldn't afford to buy a horse but who had more than enough love to share to make up for any lack of resources. We allowed them to adopt her, although we retained ownership. I saw the mare several months before her arthritis got so bad that she had to be put down. Her gentle spirit seemed untouched by all the years of misfortune and hardship. Right before we left that day, she brushed her head up against my stomach. She held it there gently breathing the warm breath of her life against me. Then slowly she raised her head and muzzled my cheek with the softest part of her muzzle. I always hoped to someday bring her home to my own ranch. But in that gesture, I felt like she was saying that she was home. Loved by a four year old girl and at peace with her lot. It was her farewell kiss, that soft brush of her muzzle against my cheek and the warm air that she blew against my lips. I let her go. She did not pass on at the High Mountain Ranch.

But she passed on at home just the same.

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I recently heard a song on a small town country western radio station as I traveled solitary across a desolate windswept Wyoming prairie. It was by Wynnona Judd and a line from the chorus mentioned dreams and how sometimes you have to put them away when they haven't come true. Put away until a rainy day. Still cherished, they aren't yet ready to be abandoned. Instead they are tucked away on some quiet, seldom visited mental shelf. Covered in dust and almost forgotten, they wait. They wait for a rainy day when they will once again see the light. Dusted off and shiny new, I suppose these forgotten dreams are supposed to chase away those rainy dark skies. If not forever, at least for awhile.

On those few days when I am lucky enough to be home, I often walk out to the edge of the bench upon which our house rests. I follow the Pend Oreille River to the Northwest to a point beneath Calispell Peak where the river turns due north and flows into Canada. I know the mountain well because it is the same mountain where my father once herded those sheep. It is the mountain where he became a man. It is the peak upon which he thought about dreaming and upon which he put away the dreams of a boy. It has been many years since he walked those high country meadows giving comfort to his flock and it has been many years since his violent stepfather was finally put to rest. In that time my father has had wonderful dreams and many of them ended tragically.

As I gaze at that mountain, a mountain covered in firs and larch and pines, I know that the rains have poured torrentially upon my father. They poured on him as a child. They poured on him in his ministry and they poured during the thousands of times it must have seemed that God wasn't looking. They poured on him as we buried horse after horse and foal after foal. A thousand dreams died in that one day that we tossed that last foal across the ravine and down into the dark desolate clearcut. The rainy days, at times, seem to be unending.

A heart can only be ripped to shreds so many times before the remaining dreams kept high on those dusty shelves become almost too difficult to find. I did not know the day that my father asked me to accompany him up into the Coast Range the day’s importance. I did not know that another one of my father’s dreams was not just being put away for another day but that a dream had died with that foal. I know now that as we threw that beautiful baby over the edge of the road, that part of my father went down with it. A part of his spirit. A section of soul. A good portion of the part of a man that dreams great and beautiful dreams. That a part of him tumbled and fell among the burned stumps and rotting logs. Somewhere up near Kings Valley against the long ago rotted carcass and dried white bones of a purebreed Arabian foal destined for greatness, there also lies a big part of the man that is my father. Not a rotted mass of forgotten bones but vibrant and alive. And waiting to be reclaimed.

My father recently took my 82 year old maternal grandmother, my mother and my sister up to Colville to visit his mother who sits in a nursing home. Her mind is claimed by dementia. She sits isolated and alone. Yet still my father visits her. Even now she is not haunted by what happened over fifty years ago, although I know that he still is. It was a difficult trip.

They say that you can never go home and I wonder if this is still true when you have a background such as my father’s. For some reason, during the course of that trip my family visited each of the places that he lived. Not one of the houses remain. They are all gone. Burned or torn down or rotted away, nothing remains of those places but the land. It is land which supported each of them, buildings and humans, long ago.

One of the places they visited was the old sheep ranch. Nestled in the northwest shadow of Calispell Peak the ranch includes nearly 160 acres of mountainous country. My father told my mother on that day that he would like to own that land where he became a man. "A hundred and sixty acres!" he exclaimed. It would take the rest of my life after I retire to turn all of that into a great and beautiful scenic park!"

All 160 acres. Where the snow lies deep and stays long in the winter. Where the runoff runs hard in the spring. And where the high lush green grasses and blue lupin flowered meadows of Calispell Peak call out to be revisited. Looking from my own ranch, I wasn't quite sure but I thought I saw that quality. I thought I felt the brief stirrings of soul and heartbeat and yes, even dream. I can't be quite certain but I saw small clouds of disturbed dust and a fumbling hand searching for something long ago misplaced on a dark mental shelf. A hand reaching once again into the unfamiliar territory of unrealized dreams that have sat collecting dust for far too long. Waiting to be remembered. Acted upon. Lived.

It has been raining for a long time on my father. Too long for a man born in Spokane. A child of the sun.

Someday I hope to look to the northwest and see Calispell Peak and the waters of the Pend Oreille River. I hope to look upon that big blue mountain sometimes buried in deep white snow drifts and know that my father lies just over those stark lines that separate sky from rock and cloud from mass. I hope to gaze towards the northwest on a dark winter night and against the background of the cool, dancing Northern Light knowing that my father waits impatiently over there under that same glow. Nestled in his log cabin, on his ranch, next to my mother. She painting and doing her art. And he, impatient, thinking, and dreaming. Dreaming of spring thaws and hurried, rushing, wild summer plans. Dreaming of making a park out of 160 acres. Dreaming while finally knowing that the rains have stopped, that God was looking out all along and most importantly, that it is never to late to dream.

Even from the desolation of a dark clearcut.