Oregon to a Missourian

Dear Gillian,

Spring is just starting to peep out here in the Heartland. The trees are budding and the bulbs are blooming. In a week or two it will be honestly green.

But Missouri is not Oregon. I think the real green every time I glance down at my right hand and see the sparkle of my UO ring. After 14 years as a professor here at the University of Missouri, I’m a loyal Mizzou Tiger. But in my heart, I’ll always be a Duck.

Oregon is a mystery to most Missourians. I asked a few of my students this week what they though of when I said “Oregon” or “Oregonians.” I was met with puzzled looks and a couple of “I can’t even imagine it.”

Missouri to an Oregonian

Dear Dad,

Remember in Eugene when you’d get those rare days in spring where, after dreary skies and an eternity of rain, the sun came blazing out in all it’s summer glory and no one came to class, not even professors because, well, the sun was shining! It’s that kid of day here in Portland. Unfortunately I’m no longer an undergraduate who can just skip a class now and then, and while it is my day off from work, I’m stuck inside studying cataloging, which, by the way, is not the kind of thing you want to do on a beautiful sunny day.

The western half of Oregon, as you know, is blessed (cursed?) with an abundance of rain. I actually don’t mind the rain. I’m not sure if it’s a gene passed down from our English roots or just the fact that I’ve spent more of my life in the rain than out of it that has made it, for the most part, a perfectly pleasant kind of environment to live in. It means that you spend a lot of time indoors or in raincoats, sure, but it also means that it’s green an lush almost all the year round.

Sticks in the window

Dear Gillian,

I never really thought I would see beauty in a winter-bared tree trunk. But I suppose it is really a matter of how you frame it.

I learned about forests in the Northwest, where the definition of “tree” is something very tall, very green and very determined to stay that way in the coldest of winters.

When I first saw Missouri in the spring, I was amazed by the lush green canopy that stretched over me like an organic tent. You don’t really walk through the forest in the Northwest – you thrash through the low fir and spruce limbs hoping you won’t get a handful of needles down your shirt. But Missouri is on the edge of the Great American Hardwood Forest – that leafy cathedral through which movie Indians crept silently and under which the village smithy stood.


Of course, the movies seldom have winter editions. Hardwoods are lush in the spring and then spectacular in the fall when they burst out into color – just before losing everything. By November, that great leafy cathedral has become a bunch of naked sticks.

But I have come to love those sticks. This time of the year, I frequently find myself staring out my window in Zen-like silence, just watching the sticks.

We have five huge windows that look out on the forest. Between me and the trees is a deck, a heated birdbath and a couple of feeders. And umpteen-dozen squirrels, as many woodpeckers, and troops of nuthatches, wrens, jays and finches who enjoy my largess. Plus the odd raccoon or woodchuck come just to torment my dog.

My wintry oaks and maples are not just figures in a still life. The are the cast of a full-fledged matinee feature.

The view of those “dead” sticks through my windows is an ever-changing passion play. I’m constantly amazed at how tree trunks so bare can shelter an ark-ful. In the Northwest, I could hear that birds were up there, but seldom saw more than a flash of feathers.

Here the lack of cover means neighbors of any species have little choice but to politely nod to each other. So I stand at my window and raise my coffee cup to the creature of the moment.

It’s a Midwest kind of thing. Not a bad one, at that.

Dad