Changes at Sea Level

A heat dome had just high-pressure cooked the Northwest, so a close friend and I drove from Portland to the Pacific, climbing quick straightaways and winding through tens of s-turns, then descending in similar fashion, past sad clearcuts, until Highway 26 ended at Highway 101. We exited north. Past a pot shop, a condemned old crab restaurant, a fancy garden store, a building supply store, a surfboard shaper shack, a quarry, a KOA RV resort, a putt-putt and go-kart and helicopter-tour place, a burger joint, and a high-wire rope course, we finally entered Seaside, Oregon, population 7,020, at about noon. 

Apart from excessive Fourth of July fireworks, Seaside doesn’t get exciting. But the town’s quaintness and natural surroundings still attract, more and more, it seems. Best known for vacations involving bumper cars and cotton candy, Seaside remains a blue-collar destination, for now. Growth and a hot real estate market have brought changes to town. The locals, though, they don’t really care. Seaside will always be Seaside, for better or worse, because of what defines the town: its salty western edge.

Bigfoot’s Restaurant had closed its doors due to Covid, but Bell Buoy was still selling crab, clams, salmon and other seafood just as it has since 1946. Traffic slowed the highway in both directions as passers-through, tourists and locals traveled north or south. We pulled into the parking lot at Seaside Surf Shop and stretched in 65-degree, sunny air that carried a hint of brine.

The Pacific Northwest had just survived its greatest heat wave on record. Portland had reached a new all-time high temperature, 116 degrees, the day before, June 28, when Seaside roasted at 103. The Tuesday vibe felt relaxed and relieved, like after recovering from the flu. Everyone referenced the insanity of the past three days: how the wind stopped blowing, a rare event on such a raw stretch of coastline, how difficult it had been to sleep in such heat, how the beach looked like sardine-packed southern California, an Oregonian’s nightmare. 

“Dude, it was 100 degrees in here,” said Dennis Smith, owner of Seaside Surf Shop. “The rental surfboards started to delaminate.” At last, something for Seaside to talk about. The place typically seems half asleep.

One of his employees, Shara Ford, born and raised in Seaside, said it took her dad three and a half hours to drive home from Portland that Sunday, instead of the usual 80 minutes. “We live on Highway 26, just out of town, and we watched it all day, solid traffic headed west until 8 p.m.” 

Disbelief lingered in the cooling air. Longtime resident Brian Anderson was painting the surf shop’s exterior, while surfboards he shaped, painted and glassed rested on the for-sale racks inside. Brian pointed to the highway, a steady flow of cars, big pickup trucks and semis, and agreed that the previous weekend was “nuts,” as he put it. “But it’s been busy ever since Covid hit,” he said. “It never slowed down. The roads weren’t even mellow last winter.”

Seaside needs a highway expansion, but residents voted against the last proposal, so a slow back-road drive north took us through the tiny downtown, a carnival-like scene of greasy-food restaurants and gaudy facades. We hungered for an old favorite, The Stand, “Legendary since 1990” Mexican-style food, where the old Seaside remains. 

“Here you go, Jennifer,” said the server, who later carried a box of food to Jennifer waiting in her car. On our table outside, a plaque remembered a local guy, Jake Soller, who Dennis and Shara and Brian knew until Jake overdosed on heroin. A woman and a young woman had lunch at the next table over, then hugged, and went back to their jobs in town. Bottles of beer cost $3.75, Recession tacos still figured on the menu and the loaded nachos tasted of vacation.

Up above, seagulls looked refreshed in the partly cloudy sky, looping around in the warm southern breeze, which normally blows from the north this time of year. Traffic at the four-way stop in front of The Stand advanced lazily. Kids with a volleyball and skateboard walked past. License plates from Michigan, Colorado, Idaho, Arizona, South Dakota, and Texas, lots from Washington, and more from California than we’d ever seen, all rolled by. A young woman with pink hair and hoodie, in a beat-up gold station wagon, yelled “Go!” out her window, breaking the calm. 

We drove to the south end of town, to a neighborhood in the cove formed by Tillamook Head. Along the way we saw homeless people wandering through parking lots and straggling down the highway. The liquor store resembled a beehive, customers constantly coming and going. 

“Seaside’s eclectic,” Katy Walstra said, with a grin. She moved here from Portland in 2006 and ended up loving the place. We sat in her backyard, three streets from the sand, sipping beer from nearby Astoria. A breeze rippled the recently-planted maples along the fence, and a stone firepit with half-burnt logs shone black from frequent use. 

“I used to think Seaside was a little rough around the edges, and it certainly can be, but so can any community,” Katy said. “People in Seaside don’t pretend it’s not there, and I kinda like that. It’s authentic.

Katy, 44, grew up in Portland and always considered Seaside a “carny town.” Bike rides on a 1950s Schwinn changed her perspective. “Driving through Seaside, you don’t get an idea of what this community is,” she said. “There actually are a lot of really cool old homes and history here. I didn’t know how charming Seaside was.” Katy paused, then laughed. “When you know Seaside was in its prime in the 1920s, it all starts to make sense. Things kinda changed in the ‘60s and ‘70s.” 

Seaside combines its kitsch carny past with the realism of today’s problems: drug addiction, gentrification and overcrowding, even heat waves. Katy sells real estate here, so she follows the changes taking place. Rain used to scare people away, she said, but growth has increased as Portland has swelled. Katy recognizes the challenges of living in a second-home community, but noted that she is lucky not to neighbor any vacation rentals. In only three years, her property value has increased over a third. 

“One of the hard things about living in Seaside now is that word got out, and there’s a lot of investment coming in,” she said. “This is great because it’s going to change the face of some of the more dilapidated structures that you see on the highway. Also, the demographic of this town is really changing. People are coming from lots of metropolitan areas that are just vastly different, culturally, than this town, and a lot of that is good.”

But Katy envisions a stark comparison for Seaside’s future. “In 20 years, we’ll be more like Santa Cruz (California), and Manzanita will be like Carmel, as money comes in and these homes get improved.” Three-story, “monolithic” mansions have replaced many of the oceanfront homes in her neighborhood. The incoming development, Katy said, “will change the face of housing and what is achievable for somebody who wants to have a job here and live here, and who doesn’t have a pile of cash. Seaside used to be an affordable place. The housing market is a lot more challenging now.”

From her backyard, the view southwest reveals the Sitka spruce-forested slope of 1200-foot Tillamook Head. A 10-minute walk takes Katy into the jungle of ferns and evergreens, on a dirt trail where she’ll rarely pass anyone else, but has seen cougars. “I can be completely removed from the craziness of town,” she said. “I think the key to happiness in living on the Oregon coast is going outside, to remind yourself why you’re here in the first place.” 

Seaside is changing, again, as if the tide rose over the town and retreated to reveal a new character to this place. Still traditional and non-elitist, welcoming and friendly, Oregon’s 69th largest town is picking up pace. Crowds thicken, roads clog, heat waves visit, tweakers roam, and downtown Seaside remains a cheap-thrills amusement park of corn dogs, skee-bowl and stuffed animal prizes. But the locals don’t budge. They adapt. They get by, feeling safe that at least their western border will always remain uninhabitable. 

Our day ended in the Pacific, straight out from Katy’s house, strangely surfing The Cove in summer, in water 15 degrees warmer than normal because of the weird southerly wind following the heat dome. No parking spaces sat vacant overlooking the shore, but the waves stayed surprisingly uncrowded. The noise of traffic and the throngs of cone-licking tourists, the new cost of housing here, the drug problems, none of that made it past the shore. We gazed at the reddening sky and darkening Tillamook Head, aware of why Katy and the others continue to call Seaside home. Like them, we were here for the ocean.

Dinosaur Watching

When I hear ravens squawking and making strange clicks I tend to stop and listen. They like to cruise along our road, Lolo Pass, which leads into the Mt. Hood National Forest, a corridor through the woods. Across the road sits a regrowing clearcut, which the ravens now ignore for the lack of tall trees. The ravens remind me that I live in the mountains, and their company replaces the human connections that go missing here.

Then, suddenly an oversized, red mid-90s Chevy pickup races up Lolo Pass, two hundred feet from my house, with 4-wheelers and gas cans in the back. A stench of diesel drifts through my forested backyard, lingering long after the truck’s roar has faded. 

Mt. Hood has always harbored recluses, and its history since “settlement” has made this area home to giant pickup trucks and the red-necked men and women who stomp on their gas pedals. The truck traffic that passes by on Lolo Pass provides entertainment like raven listening.

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Illustration by Lori LaBissoniere O’Neil

Yes, some trucks serve utility purposes such as hauling trailers or construction materials, but most are meant to make a statement. I’ve come to appreciate, in a scientific sense, the statement-makers the same way a birder might prefer to train binoculars on, say, rare migrating species. 

With Lolo Pass bordering my home, I don’t need binoculars to truck watch. I don’t even need to see the trucks first. The behemoth Dodges, Fords, and Chevys that haul ass past me make their presence known. It’s part of the purpose, something like a vulture spreading its wings to intimidate others hungry for a piece of roadkill. 

Stranded on the side of the road, in front of a neighbor’s house, a classic late 80s red Ford pickup with overhead KC light bar and big mud tires rests with a (permanently) flat tire. Some of the big-truck passersby like what they see in that vintage model and give it a rev of diesel stroke as a sign of respect and admiration. This always makes me laugh like a mischievous raven. 

Our section of Lolo Pass is a thousand-foot straightaway with a moderate slope, which invites big trucks to open the throttle going up or down. Sometimes I’ll hear one ripping up-road, then recognize it by sound coming back down later. It’s a guttural sound, literally emanated from the depths. Trucks like these celebrate fossil fuels. Some have oversized tailpipes or smokestacks on the side, and the speed at which they rumble past suggests intentional overuse of fuel. Almost all are dirty with mud or highway filth, flouting the power of internal combustion. I’ve come to identify their owners as dinosaurs.

The connection between dinosaur fossils and the fossilized remains of zoo- and phytoplankton, which gave us oil, is obvious. But closer analysis of the drivers, who I also see in the grocery store parking lots, tells me that their political and cultural views are also grounded in the ancient past. 

Many resemble loggers, “pave the Earth” types who consider Nature to be here for our taking and use. Others look like gearheads or hillbillies, people who value motors over clean rivers and tall trees, white lives over all others. Sometimes stickers on the trucks announce these opinions. “Pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Jesus.” NRA member. Timber Unity (a logging community group with far-right ties). Plenty of American flags, and occasionally a Confederate. The other day I saw a six-by-six-inch green sticker in the shape of Oregon, with Fuck Kate Brown (our Democrat governor) written in the middle — the driver of this 80s-era pickup looked in his late 70s, very white, like a ghost belonging to a past era. 

These dinosaurs seem stuck in a pre-twentieth century world, clutching to a glorious past of environmental destruction, conquest, segregation and slavery, and a strong white majority across America. Their man, the current president, upholds this rearview approach to the future. 

How dominant the dinosaurs were, until they met their meteoric fate. Unable to adapt, to survive through trying times, the oversized reptiles croaked. Today’s carbon-worshipping dinosaurs face the same fate. Fossil fuels are staging their final surge in the face of replacement. Oil companies can read the writing on the wall — renewable energy will ultimately convert cars and trucks to battery-powered — but the big-truck drivers aren’t known for their literacy or scientific understanding. 

Electric pickup trucks already exist, made for yuppies, yes, but they’re forging a new path regardless. Sputtering, the dinosaurs feel threatened as they see their culture disappearing, so they cling to it with all their steel and might, exhibiting a tour de force each day on Lolo Pass. But think of how much more raven talk I’ll hear when Dodge and company run on batteries. Such foresight keeps me calm when another truck drowns the sound of caws and clicks.

Walking to the Creek

Almost every daily dog walk takes us to Clear Creek. One hundred feet out the front door, down our gravel road, across paved Lolo Pass Road, and along another gravel road, both sides of which were clearcut a decade ago, way before we moved here. Walking through the clearing, about ten acres in total, alders and maples still stand taller than the Christmas tree-size Douglas-firs planted after the loggers left. In spring, invasive Scotch broom blooms bright yellow, ferns unfurl, and the chaos of leafing and flowering makes me sneeze. 

On a clear day, before leaving the road for the path to the creek, whose gentle white rush I can already hear and see one hundred feet ahead, I like to follow the bend in the road, then turn around to face east, and let my eyes rest on the brilliant white glaciers and triangular peak of Mt. Hood eight miles away. 

The stubborn female dog, Yuki, pulls her hardest toward the creek path each time. She’s a water dog, and the creek is her paradise. Her brother, who we call Bozo, is the opposite, but he likes the creek because the grass grows fresh and tasty down there. 

A foot-wide dirt trail gently slopes between centennial Doug-firs on the left, part of a historic cabin property, and the large stumps and raucous undergrowth of the clearcut on the right. Green leaves of all sorts — tall grasses, tiny white flowers, salmonberry — crowd the way, but the dogs speed right through it while I look at what’s new, which plants are taking over as spring leads into summer. 

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Watercolor by Lori LaBissoniere O’Neil

Toward the bottom, forest shelters us on both sides thanks to a mandatory creekside logging buffer. Healthy cedars grow here where a spring emerges from the earth, making a muck of the footpath. I step on rocks fringed with sorel, an oversized three leaf clover, or step in mud, and pop out of the trees and onto the rounded rocks of the creek bed. A ribbon of gin-clear water ripples past, about twenty-five feet across, its level and intensity determined by the date and amount of the last rains.

From this spot I can see a few hundred feet upstream, to a boulder as tall and wide as me with arms outstretched. The creek can’t move it, so it goes around on one side, but wraps the boulder on both sides after a storm. Gentle rapids liven this whole stretch of creek, water flowing and tumbling over rocks, making perpendicular lines of white and a sound that pauses the day, the sound of infinity. On the opposite side of the creek, trees and bushes grow right to the water’s edge, and a big leaf maple sprawls over a small pool where fish might lurk. A house sits perched on the steep bank above, mostly hidden behind the curtain of green. 

Looking downstream, where the creek smacks into boulders held in place by a few hemlocks and cedars, another pool forms, this one riled with current as the water abruptly doglegs to the right — from here, another half mile to the Sandy River, then another sixty miles to the Columbia, and finally one hundred twenty miles to the Pacific, without a single dam in the way. Prime salmon habitat, you might think, but no, not any more. That aspect of this land has been removed, channeled, logged, drained.

Manmade objects obstruct the otherwise idyllic view. A ten-inch pipe, verdigris with time, crosses the creek above the dogleg. A rusted steel suspension cable holds it in place, like a mid-twentieth century aqueduct. It carries our drinking water from Minikahda Creek which cascades down the forested slope in the far distance. Power lines droop overhead here, too, feeding the house across the creek, although behind that house run the stately high-tension lines which connect The Dalles Dam with Portland, and which buzz eerily when wet with rain or snow. Above the creek’s dogleg turn the historic Steiner cabin presides. Its rustic style and dark cedar shingle siding help it blend into the picture, minus the round hot tub that might one day crash into the creek. No one lives here, making the creek feel somewhat natural.

I like to wash my face in the creek, stand by it watching and listening, imagining what it looked like before the loggers, beaver trappers, and developers arrived. At this spot and at others downstream where we sometimes go, I often look across the water, into the thicket of leaves and mottled tree trunks, hoping to sight a black bear or cougar, because I know they exist over there, way, way behind the creek. But the only animal I’ve seen along the creek, besides fish fry, is a small black water ouzel which flitters from rock to rock, sometimes chirping, and our two little dogs.

We didn’t know about Clear Creek when we bought this house. The previous owners told us it was Still Creek, but that’s a few miles up the mountain. Other Clear Creeks exist in the area, including one that flows into Clear Lake on the south side of Mt. Hood. Our area is rich in rivers and creeks, including the Sandy River on the other side of our property, likewise less than a thousand feet away. But private property blocks our path to the Sandy, so we’ve made Clear Creek ours. We’ve taken our year-old daughter to the creek since she was a week old, dipped her pink little hands in the cool water, to her fascination. If we were salmon, it’s where we would return to, no doubt.

[A few days ago, Lori walked our daughter Alix and the dogs to the creek, a found branches and shrubs cut and scattered every which way. Someone had chainsawed the vegetation that grew between the creek and its storm channel. What was a gravel island with salmonberry, small alders, and other bushes is now a mini-clearcut. I haven’t even gone to see it, my allergies bad enough to keep me away in the first place. This is exactly the sort of abuse this creek has sustained since the white man arrived in the 19th century. What excellent stewards of this land generations of fellow neighbors have proven themselves to be, even today. At least this instance of idiocy won’t affect the fish.]

Fry Pool

“The great mystery of salmon is the return to the place of birth. The salmon not only finds that river after traveling thousands of miles away, but it returns to the very same stretch of gravel in that same crook in the same stream where it was born some years before.” - Mark Kurlansky, Salmon

Watercolor by Lori LaBissoniere O’Neil

Where we normally go to Clear Creek, under Doug-fir, cedar, and a ten-story cottonwood, a boulder forces the current to one side. Taller and wider than I am with arms outstretched, the boulder only becomes an island after heavy rain, when a smaller channel fills on the boulder’s other flank. Once the creek drops back to its normal height and bed, a small pool remains beside the boulder, lazily fed by the creek. Half a foot deep, the little pool spans only fifteen square feet, just big enough for salmon fry.

I’m always looking for fish in the rivers and creeks here. Not because of some fisherman’s instinct — I’m only a novice — but because I’m an amateur ichthyologist with a focus on salmonids. Before the dominance of Euro-Americans and their insistence on natural resource extraction, the Sandy River basin raised uncountable legions of salmon. Now only a token few return each year.

Chinook, coho, and steelhead (I’ll collectively call them salmon), all members of the five-million-year-old Oncorhynchus genus, have made tributaries like Clear Creek home since the creek appeared, hundreds of thousands of years ago. I keep my eyes open for them, hoping to witness a remnant thread in the former web of natural life here, rarely with luck. 

Since the 1800s humans have ravaged Clear Creek (and almost every other waterway in the region) in a variety of ways, all of which negatively affected salmon. The removal of beavers and large woody debris in the stream stripped away the pools and shelter that fry need. Roads crossed and paralleled the creek, leading to erosion which chokes salmon eggs with sediment. Dikes, berms, and channel straightening cut the creek from its floodplain, which sped the water’s flow in storms and carried the gravel needed for redds (spawning beds), and the fry, away. Wetlands were drained, homes built, fires accidentally started, and hundreds of acres were commercially logged between the 1960s and 1980s, exposing the creek. 

Hatcheries downstream on the Sandy River introduced salmon that compete with the native stocks for food — outsider fish that would change the native species’ stream-specific DNA. 

Two dams blocked the lower Sandy for almost a century, but by the early 2000s they no longer made sense, or dollars, so Portland General Electric removed them. Today, Clear Creek connects with the Pacific Ocean via the Sandy and Columbia rivers, unobstructed, an anomaly in the Northwest.

Private landownership along much of Clear Creek makes salmon habitat restoration all but impossible. Yet despite the ravages, salmon still return to Clear Creek, mostly to its small, less-damaged upstream tributaries, as if forgiving us.

The other day, during a routine dog walk to the creek, I stood over the boulder-side pool half-expecting to see some baby fish, and did. Not even the size of my pinky finger, the toddlers, called fry, moved as a group through the shallow water. Greenish-brown with black spots and big black-centered eyes, I assumed they were coho. The fish biologist at the Zig Zag Ranger station, a few miles from my home, told me Clear Creek produces the third-most number of coho smolts (juveniles that head to sea) in the Upper Sandy basin. But they could have been rainbow trout (which can become steelhead), or maybe chinook, or even something else. In a relatively fishless creek, a fish is a fish. 

As I watched them relax to my presence, obviously curious of me, I felt like I knew the creek slightly better now. Here was an exhibition of the aquatic life that remained. Normally the only wildlife I see on the creek is a black-feathered pair of ouzels. 

Eighty-degree heat lingered in the forecast, and I figured these fish might die. A few days before, I had toiled to remove a shredded blue tarp from a small wood jam in the creek, so without thinking I began to move rocks so that more water would enter the pool. With each rock the fresh, clear streamlet intensified, especially after rolling basketball-sized rocks from the edge of the creek’s swift flow. 

Lori watched as she held Alix, cheering me on as the intake grew. 

“They like it.”

I glanced over and saw the fry cruising their pool and checking out the influx of new water. I kept at it until debris clouded the mini stream and began to enter the pool. 

“I don’t want to silt it.”

“They’ll be fine. The water level’s already going up.”

I looked for the fry every few days, whenever we were down on that stretch of creek. A large ring of dried sediment surrounded the smaller pool, but it and the fry had survived the summerlike weather. I excavated more, despite a bit of rain. Like the generations of Oregonians before me, I was trying to intervene in Nature’s affairs without really knowing what I was doing, without understanding the machine I was attempting to tinker with. Fortunately, I worked on a very small scale.

I’m not sure how the fry could endure the summer in a creek without permanent pools. If the side flow I helped open ceases as the creek drops, they’ll have no fresh water and their pool will seep and evaporate away. I fear returning in late June to find a scattering of faded fry belly-up on the grey gravel. Like the loggers, fishermen, and trappers here before, Clear Creek knows no pity. But the creek at least possesses a divine reason behind its madness.

A week later, heavy spring rain raised the creek enough to fill the side channel. The pool became creek as water wrapped around the boulder with a steady current, rendering my rock removal work useless. I might have helped the fry through the dry days, but this storm would have taken or protected them anyway. A few days after the creek dropped again, I stood patiently over the pool and did spot a few fry swimming alongside the boulder, future salmon or trout, perfectly used to this sort of thing, unlike myself.

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The Sap Sucked Out

Illustration by Lori LaBissoniere O’Neil

There’s not much to do where we live, on the western flank of Oregon’s Mt. Hood, besides immerse ourselves in Nature, which is why we live here. So my wife Lori and I had been watching a red-breasted sapsucker prospect our backyard trees lately, especially the dead Douglas-fir trunks that stand like old columns surrounded by living green — think Roman ruins in modern-day Rome. When we had the skeletal snag trees removed, we kept the bug-infested trunks twenty-feet tall for birds like red-breasted sapsuckers, of the woodpecker family. They serve as natural bird feeders. 

The sapsucker would flit from trunk to trunk — a white/black/red rush in flight, then a ravishing spot of vermilion poking around the Doug-firs’ furrowed bark. We always stopped to watch. Peck at a tree, scurry up or around it, peck some more. They’re always busy. A few times I saw a pair of sapsuckers chase each other in flight through the trees, making distinct calls like I hadn’t heard before. The sapsuckers were welcome here, a part of our mountain backyard community, a distinguished bird whose looks, work, and rarity made the robins and thrushes seem common, exurban. Only the songbirds could compete.

At home the other evening, I noticed a radiant yellow-gold light on a row of evergreens in the late afternoon sun, backdropped by the high ridge and wooded slope that glowed golden-green in the warm June air. I ran to grab my camera, took a shot from behind the gate, and realized I needed to crop the road from the picture. Passing through the gate I saw a small object in the very middle of the road, on the double yellow lines. My eyes picked up red, and some mottled mix of black and white. I walked to it and confirmed my worst-case hunch. A sapsucker. Just earlier that day Lori had shown it to her friend as it hunted for lunch, and they joked it reminded them of a red-headed friend of theirs. No blood, no loose feathers, but its head no longer shone vermilion, just a mute red. The life had left even the color. 

Salmon and other animals lose radiance just after they die, and I hear human eyes fade, too. The bird looked shriveled, its three colors less distinct from one another, like a tangled mess with red at the top. No backwoods rednecks had been able to crush it with oversized truck tires yet. Blunt force trauma, maybe from one of the many dump trucks that rumbled past that day. Or maybe from an everyday car or pickup. Bird numbers in North America have declined by a third since 1970. Busier roads probably don’t help. I lost motivation to take the roadless photo, and went inside. 

I had to tell someone, which meant Lori, and she cried. But as we mourned a sapsucker I was really thinking of George Floyd, and his fellow martyrs, so casually killed by a cop. It almost seemed disrespectful, while people protested on the streets, braving tear gas and billy clubs, but I let her grieve. Our backyard is immediate and full of life — it doesn’t arrive through the news from some remote place, important as that news may be. A life like Floyd’s is worth many, many sapsuckers, as many as mine, but still we couldn’t ignore the loss of a bird who livened up our sliver of forest. 

After crying, and finding cheer in our eleven-month-old daughter, Lori took a shovel and moved the corpse before it became a crusty, feathery stain in the middle of the yellow-lined road. She set it in the open, on the edge of the clearing across the road, so a vulture might make a meal of it. I wondered if the sapsucker’s mate would notice it there. I hated to think of the empty nest that night, or a half-full nest, and couldn’t mention this to Lori. Maybe it had chicks right now. But what about Floyd, his family, his children?

We were supposed to have dinner outside that night, after a sunny, seventy-degree day, and make a campfire afterward. Instead, we ate indoors, and the firepit remained dark. I didn’t feel like being in the backyard, which seemed emptier now, and although we didn’t mention it, I think Lori agreed. 

We’ll get used to the slightly duller way it was before the sapsucker showed up. And we’ll see how long it takes for another vermilion head to poke around the dead trunks, to restore the local biodiversity and beauty. I know, it was just a bird. Lives like Floyd’s matter immeasurably more. But we live in nature out here, like all the other animals around us. They’re our neighbors. For us, a car-killed bird is like a dead pet. A new void in life, yet nothing as tragic as what the outside news brings us these days.