Reflections on the Eagle Creek Fire from ‘Gorge Getaways’ author Laura Foster

People, women and men, differ from each other in many ways, but both can, and do, stupid obnoxious things. I’m trying to remember a story from the O some years back. About what was then…haven’t heard lately…an annual big spring break retreat by a bunch of Oregon college students, OSU, U of O? At a lake, maybe in California around Mt Shasta. Story made for a big news story at the time, because the students left a huge mess, a lot of trash, but even difficult to comprehend things like leaving virtually new sleeping bags and other gear littered around, which other people had to clean up.

Eagle Creek and other hiking and recreational destinations in the Gorge and elsewhere in Oregon, suffers to some extent from too easy accessibility. Eagle Creek is just a short hour or so drive from Portland. How to guard against the range of hazards posed by someone with little knowledge of the environment there or sensitivity to the caution it calls for? Outside of access exclusively through guided tours by responsible, trained and licensed people, I’m not sure what might be good alternative answers.

Where is the reverence for the natural environment that tells people that at the very least, it’s not a place where you go to have a fireworks display, or take a firearm just to shoot up stuff for the hell of it? Lots of places in rural Oregon have the latter problem…people target shooting signs, old buildings, cars, trees, generally detracting from the natural beauty of things.

The importance of including and promoting in people’s values reverence for the natural environment, in part accounts for why I feel it’s so important for people to very carefully not excessively and inappropriately use natural lands close to and even within city limits. The values instilled by experience on natural lands locally, can carry over to how people conduct themselves when they travel to natural land further afield.

I feel kind of bad for people living in the central city, a place many seek as a place they’ve heard is wonderful place to live, and being besieged by people entertaining themselves with not consideration for the effect that has on other people. Rachel..sounds to me like it’s time for you to move away…far away from the hectic part of the city as you can…before you go completely nuts.

When the rain finally starts, I hope there’s something still left of the forest on the north side of the mountains surrounding Eagle Creek.

I’m a man who grew up with a perpetually angry father that was continually stirring the pot and changing the rules to be in control. He was physically violent and was a poor communicator. There was no ‘ritual’ in his life to transition from boy to man. I would have thought enlisting in WW2 and being a B-17 mechanic in Britain would have done it, but not so. His older brother was in the army in Italy, saw his share of death and destruction, and had become a gentler man with much less ego. I was saved by the boy scouts in my early teens, and the music department in High School. There seems no reliable mentoring for male teens to adulthood; resulting in generation after generation of boys in mens bodies. A camaraderie between a father and son is rare to non existent; they both love the same woman. There is not the relationship I see so often between girls/women and their mothers. Why?
You know of course the noisy exhaust, the aggressive driving, the road rage, the swearing, the posturing, the threatening behaviors are all based in fear, based in insecurity, based in childhood, never growing up.
I suspect if you could be a fly on the wall in this kids family you would find the source of such anger and insecurity.
The bigger question is how do boys mature to men not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually so that they can become productive members of society, not destructive members.