Summertime down on the Umpqua

Like a bunch of belligerent grade-schoolers hopped up on Hostess cupcakes, dozens of Anna’s hummingbirds are locked in a West Side Story rumble above my deck, hammering out rights to our feeder. Each time I open the screen door, they scatter as if I were a flat-footed beat cop rounding the corner, twirling my baton.

According to a 1980 Audubon bird encyclopedia, the Anna’s then nested almost exclusively in California. A 1961 survey of Long Beach Peninsula birds doesn’t mention them at all. So their big invasion seems one more indication among many that warmer temperatures are marching steadily northward.

Climate change or not, you still can live here at the seashore and barely break a sweat from one year to the next, the cool gray blanket of treetop-level clouds moving in each day at dawn to tease the moss with tastes of dew. Maybe we’ll end up with weather more like San Francisco’s, but probably never San Diego’s.

There must be some secluded patch of genes hidden somewhere back in my DNA that demands real heat from time to time, and it felt delicious last week to camp with my six-year-old daughter down on the Umpqua River in south-central Oregon while attending an old friend’s wedding.

Forgetting one afternoon that my personal curly brown “cloud cover” is quickly thinning, I managed to sunburn my scalp and can look forward to a scolding from my dermatologist when I see her later this month. It’s a small price to pay for sharing an authentic, old-fashioned home wedding, and seeing my intrepid kid herding uncooperative minnows through the algae-cloaked backwaters of a meandering summer stream.

The 85-degree days took a kingfisher dive into the 40s just past dark, and it was too dry anyway to shoot off illegal bottle rockets, so we quickly retired to our old tent to read fairy tales and tell scary stories – Elizabeth’s were better told and scarier than mine. Adjusting to the baked pasture mattress, we slept off and on, working to keep cold toes tucked under covers. As the sun’s first rays found the valley floor, we set off on successful 7 a.m. raids on the Elkton bakery, pirates in search of pastry.

Cattle grazing on the pastoral hills of Douglas County remind me of my old Wyoming home. My friend Donelle, a former Wyoming cowgirl, had her home blessed with sage and sweet prairie grass before marching down brightly painted verandah steps to marry on Independence Day. We later talked of my visceral longing for the smell of sagebrush, the defining incense of the mountain states.

Someday, I promise myself, I’ll build that summer cabin in the transition zone between the Wind River Mountains and the Red Desert.

Something about the setting along the Umpqua reminds me of America of 85 years ago, trim houses set amidst lawns patrolled by turkeys and lazy tomcats. And as in 1918, these warm days of watermelon and ripe cherries are counterbalanced by a faraway war.

Granted, ours brings news of only one or two dead American boys a day in contrast to the thousands that died in each of the great battles in that long-ago War to End All Wars. But there’s something dreadfully similar in the creeping sense of having bitten into bitter fruit. The happy pleasures of being welcomed as liberators are fast dissolving, the sweet water is turning to salt.

It was an easy victory only to the president’s speech writers, the same ones who have advised him to portray the growing number of doubters as trying to “rewrite history” when it actually is the White House that’s slopping on the whitewash, now telling us this war never was about weapons of mass destruction.

It’s not that deposing Saddam Hussein was an intrinsically bad idea – the world’s better off without him, if indeed he’s dead. But this isn’t a war for Iraqi freedom, or to destroy unconventional weapons, or revenge 9/11. It’s about empire building by the radical fringe element that’s taken over leadership of the once calm and conservative Republican Party.

We ordinary Americans of 2003 aren’t any more interested in empire than were our grandparents. Porches, shady lawns, cold rivers on hot days, learning to drive on daddy’s lap – this is what we’re about, these are the things worth fighting for. But they aren’t what Bush’s war is about. We shouldn’t let our boys die for lies.