When I didn’t know what else I intended to see in Oregon, I knew Crater Lake and Mount Hood. Volcanoes are power spots – sacred spots, I now call them – and the offer opportunities not available elsewhere. Matching consciousness to the “vibration†of such an energy is something like grounding an electrical wire so that the current may flow.
Some years earlier, my friends Jim and Michael and I had climbed onto snow-covered Mount Shasta and had spent a couple of magical hours there. We had known to connect with it – or, said more carefully, we had known to connect with the psychic energy that underlies it – and we had created a brief ceremony expressing who we were and what we hoped for. That mid-summer day’s tourists and skiers had been no distraction; we had enjoyed the day on many levels and I had not forgotten.
On Hood, though, I was alone. I arrived at Timberline Lodge in mid-afternoon after a drive of several hours up the Willamette valley, expecting to be able to spend only a little time before driving off to find some place more affordable. But Timberline Lodge offered what it called “chalet†accommodations – rooms without televisions or telephones, and with the bathrooms down the hall. This was no inconvenience, and so I arranged to stay the night.
Before even unpacking the rental car, I followed the trail around the lodge toward the mountain. I couldn’t walk far at any one time, particularly uphill, but there was no bar to sitting on rocks and communing, then walking a little farther and sitting, and walking again. Sometimes I was among trees, but mostly was walking amid bare rock.
Snow there was none, even to the top of the mountain. Ice there was a very little, just one patch, far up the side, dirty ice and ice almost not to be distinguished from rock, all of it in one sheltered fold. Drought this year, I was told.
I hadn’t come to ski but to absorb. As I had done at Crater Lake the week before, I opened to the energy of the place, visualizing grounding my energy deep within the earth while concentrating (though this is not quite the right word) on remaining in a state of deep receptivity.
Hood did not overwhelm me with energy in the way that Crater Lake had. I experienced it, instead, as a calm deep undisturbed presence. The energy underlying Hood has been there a long time and isn’t expecting to see much that’s new. (This is anthropomorphizing, of course, but after all in writing about such things we are confined to words.)
I spent a long dreamy time on the far reaches of Mount Hood, out of sight or sound of others except now and then. Sometimes I would face north and there would be Hood reaching up into the deep blue sky. Then I would turn and look far to the south, or southeast, or southwest, and see the long arrays of low mountains stretching down into central Oregon, Mount Jefferson the most obvious, like a pale blue more symmetrical reflection of Hood.
Finally I went in, got settled, and had a light supper and an excellent pint of a local ale. When I came out again, it was deep sunset, and the world was in shades of blue. The same trails, the same trees and rocks, only watch your step more carefully; be surer of your footing. No people around at all now, and the deeply tranquil surroundings settled within me. Hood was unending terrain, sharply tilted. Jefferson was a pale triangle floating amid blue and purple seas. The sky to the west was every shade of bright yellow and orange and red, and darkness elsewhere. Then it was night.
I went inside well satisfied that I could remain. Inside, I prowled around; learning the history of Timberline Lodge from a 22-minute film that perhaps nobody else ever watches entirely; looking at exhibits; wandering through the common area with greater appreciation now that I knew what I was seeing.
Timberline was a WPA project, conceived and executed as a way to employ hundreds of unemployed Oregonians while creating something of lasting value. Every bit of that lodge (which is owned by the Forest Service) had been constructed by a small core of craftsmen and craftswomen and the hundreds to whom they had taught their crafts. The buildings, the furniture, the decorative touches on walls and stairways, it all came out of this successful attempt to help people who had become desperate from lack of money and lack of work.
The lodge seemed to me to be a statement in wood. It was created by and owned by the government as a time when government was trying to do something for ordinary people. Although only the rich could have used the lodge in 1937 when it was finished, here was a project designed also, and even primarily, for the common people. It was designed to provide – and did provide – another start in life for hundreds of desperate men and women who wanted to work, at a time when there was no work to be found.
I left next morning by way of the gift shop, and among other things I bought a baseball cap that says Timberline Lodge. Silly, I suppose, but after seeing the film and examining so many beautiful artifacts still to be appreciated after nearly 70 years, I felt a part of it. At a time when government has turned its back on the people, and when my very bones feel apprehension of what is coming down on us economically and politically – in other words, socially – Timberline is a reminder that hard times need not be only years the locusts have eaten. Hard times can also germinate the seeds of renewal. Given leadership, people will remember that we are not just individuals, but families; not just families but communities; not just communities but one interconnected consciousness.
All the long drive from Hood to the Columbia, my progress was interrupted (as it had been the day before) byroad crews working, as other work crews who had built Timberline long ago. I didn’t mind waiting. Some things require time. Sometimes the act of constructing is as important as what is constructed.
Love,
Frank