the many ways in which water falls from the sky

So life continues at such a rapid pace that i am sitting staring January 23 blankly in the face totally unaware of how i got here so fast and that it is, in fact 2011. What is one supposed to even do with 2011?

With all the hype of 2010 and the Soccer World Cup i wonder how many people ever let the possibility of 2011 into their heads. At least i certainly didn't. And so here i am, trying to deal with the changing of yet another year, another coming of age and really, it's all going just way too fast. I think I let 2012 enter my mind (something about the world ending? I don't know, i think the world has been about to end for a long time, maybe just everyone thinks they are important enough to be in the generation of the final age, i mean we only have one life right? It's gotta be us!.. )

On a similar note, not only is it the strange year of 2011 but I am turning a heavily old 23 in two weeks. I don't know how i got so deeply into my 20s and i don't understnad how it happened so sneakily, constantly i am trying to hold ontop every momeny butt he master of time does not hold back.


However, as confusing and strange it has been entering a year i have never given so much as a thought to, I greeted the first of January 2011 with the glorious bang any New Year deserves. Mount Hood has a no show - fired policy for New Years day and I realized if that was the case then I should simply not leave work so i can be there without even trying to following day. The mountain was open until midnight for skiing and snowboarding and there was some expensive party event and fireworks they were advertising so i prepared myself with a bottle of wine, a blanket and glowsticks, found some friends and spent the first part of the night snowboarding under yellow lights.

SO in the parking lot of the mountain there live various mountain vagabonds. Employees who realize that life would be easier and cheaper if they simply lived in the parking lot in a car, a caravan, a school bus, or a camper. The collection of vagrants makes a nice community and often a good party. One of the residents, a red bearded man by the name of Peter C owns a little wooden trailer hut thing named the "Sauna" which is not really a sauna at all but it has a hot tub which is dirty and filled with beer and it has a wood stove which keeps it very warm and is the hang out of various homeless employees during the winter. So on New Years eve it was simply a relay of snowboarding on the mountain and then snowboarding across the parking lot to the Sauna, warming up and then returning to the mountain.

At about 10 o clock we were summoned back to the cold mountain to watch some people ride long rails and on one of our laps down we were stopped and told we couldn't go any further because the fireworks were about tot start. We happened to be situated perfectly in the snow on the mountain, right next to where they were setting them off, lying on our backs and soaking in the magic of the exploding sky.

Later it was was 11.45 and we ran up the mountain for the last time, one of the last chairs to get up before midnight, celebrating the new year on my snowboard. heaven.

Some raucous revelry later and lots of silly ambles, I was herded into a camper where I slept between two unknown people and woke up at the respectable hour of 7.15am and walked leisurely to the top of the parking lot and into work. On time and pleased with the coming of a new year.

January has brought some pretty fascinating experiences and Oregon blows me away constantly with the madness of the weather and the colossal beauty which it boasts. My rad housemate, Rachel and I have made a series of adventures around some mad places, wine tasting and cheese tasting (we stole way more cheese than was strictly allowed) and then, gloriously, to the beach, the forever dreamed of ocean. After a 2 hour drive with lots of dirty American junk food, i found myself finally barefoot, reveling in feet freedom after so many dirty socks and dirty suffocating shoes and we danced with champagne on the beach and i was just about ready to rip off my clothes and jump into the freezing sea but Rachel convinced me that i probably would be arrested (silly America)

If one drives the hour drive from Hood River to Portland (which because of different missions i have done almost every Monday for the last 4 weeks) one drives with the Columbia Gorge on your right (the border between Oregon and Washington State and a colossal body of water) and on the left the mountain is simply bursting with waterfall after waterfall. Consistently, there are streams falling lazily from the top of the mountain, through the trees you see again and again, shiny magic in torrents. How spoiled are Oregonians with waterfalls!


I have been introduced into such different sorts of beauty here. I am consistently amazed at the different sorts of way that water can fall from the sky. It's been up and down a little miserable at work lately as we have seen a lot more rain as has been necessary but it is always changing, from rain, to icy rain, to sort-of hail, to sleet, to occasional real powder... we don't have enough words in English to describe how the water falls at Mount Hood but I see and feel the subtle differences and as much as I wish for powdery snow i am amazed at the pure diversity of this one compounded element. On walks along frozen and half frozen waterfalls it amazes me that moving water itself can freeze, actually at a point where a waterfall itself stops falling, in fact it freezes as if time stopped for the winter and it sits there, in mid air, waiting patiently to fall again. (Oh if this were true, if we could truly freeze time, just for a little bit, just to get my head around 2011)

Oh it's been so beautiful but, on one of these missioning Mondays, i woke up at 6am and walked into the lounge to see one of Mark's dogs, Tyra, lying on the floor in a huge pool of blood. This was a shocking wake up call and i called to Rachel in distress and after much squeamish fear of approaching Tyra, I finally touched the dog to discover that she was in fact dead. So I phoned Mark who had slept in Portland the night before having to break the news that one of his most prized possessions had died in the night. To a man who loves his dogs like his children, this came as a shock to Mark and i think it was all pretty traumatic for all of us concerned. We cleaned up Tyra as much as we could, wrapped her in a blanket (the blanket i used to use for the bus) and waited for Mark to arrive home to do the rest. This was sort of a peculiar experience for me. For some reason- and this wasn't the case when i was younger- i am very detached to animals. In a sense I do not bother to make relationships with animals. So experiencing the distress of the people around me over the death of an animal was strange and distressing as I did not feel the same sort of loss but i felt the general distress around me from the loss the house had experienced. Furthermore, the other dog, Spirit, felt it and still feels it. A depressed dog in the house is a thick presence that one feels. She is better now but the grieving process has taken some time which makes me realize how much i perhaps underestimate the extent of animal emotion, i have never seen a dog grieving in such a human way before.

With all the times around me i have found it, yet again, difficult climatizing to American culture. I cannot even pinpoint what it is about these people that is different but the cultural norms and standards are different. I am sometimes lost and confused about why some person is being this way or being that way and so often i have heard the term "It's complicated", more often than i thought any complications could allow. Words i have never even needed to use before i find myself hearing and saying. Words like "liability" which in America is a huge thing. Everything is a liability. If a skier or a snowboarder asks me for a screwdriver to fix their bindings i am not supposed to give it to them because, as I am working for the mountain and they could fix their bindings with my screwdriver and then they could fall and blame their injury on me, working for Mt Hood Meadows and then there could be a law suit and Meadows could lose. These sort of mad situational things happen all the time, we know America is like this but it is pure ridiculousness. It's madness that if someone asks me if they could fix their bindings and i have a way to help them that I am not supposed to help them. This is somewhat against everything i believe in so obviously there are certain rules i simply refuse to adhere to. (there are always too many rules and not many of them are worth adhering to at all)

So many worries Americans are told to have, what i the Almond butter goes off and you don't know and you eat it and get sick? What is the shelf life? how can you truly know that anything is safe? And thus the conclusion to these problems is to buy and buy new things, often, "organic" things just so we can be safe because of all the things that could happen. Oh it's frustrating and mad, navigating between needs and wants and attitudes and ways of being, but as usual I thrive on madness and confusion so all in all, it's not too bad

So the weather continues to be mad, the beauty continues to be crazy and i continue to try and keep a hold of where i am in time and place, though my dreams take me to so many people all over the world that i wake up many mornings confused as to which bed, which country, which people are around me.

As a said, i love the madness, and the madness continues...