Newsletter
The 10,000 things are lively and raucous and calling to us all the time. But here the pace eases enough for noticing deeply, not broadly. The pause, the turn, the closer look — that’s what 30 years of journalism taught me. It’s what I’ll bring to the newsletter. Perhaps it will offer a pause for you too, in your journey among the 10,000 things.
The first issue
I wrote it cold. It still burns.
It’s a beautiful September day on the Willamette National Forest, sunny, not too hot. Standing on a forest road midway up a narrow gorge east of Oakridge, I notice three narrow columns of smoke rising across the gorge in a steep sea of dense trees. I can’t help thinking the smoke looks benign. I imagine small campfires hidden on the ground beneath two-hundred-foot-tall trees. And then a single tree torches like a massive flamethrower shooting hundreds of feet skyward. More trees ignite, brilliant orange against the wall of green on the steep hillside, and I am glad the road is on the opposite slope and I’m surrounded by the people who fight these massive wildland fires for a living.
As a reporter, I kept myself out of news stories. As a novelist writing about the place I live — the place I love — what I’ve seen flares through my fiction. How could it not?
The characters, the plot, yes, that’s all make-believe. What happens on the landscape, that’s as true as memory can make it.
I was there in 2009, the afternoon the Tumblebug fire ran away with itself. When I was writing The Booker Rebellion, that moment on the road, the candling tree, the shock of the speed of it, came back to me. It’s in the book now.
Now here in 2026, a fire’s long impact shows itself. I walked up a knoll east of Waldo Lake to place an antenna for a ham radio volunteer deployment. That knoll sat in the 2022 Cedar Creek burn, a monster blaze that lasted months and blackened 127,000 acres east of Oakridge. Bushwhacking across the corpses of burnt timber and among the dead snags, I got a broad view of the forest, the sharp line between living stately trees and the dregs of that burn. And I saw what comes next: the bright pink of fireweed blossoms, the narrow leaves the only green on the ashy soil. The fire gave it what it needs to thrive: full sun, no competition.
In summer, the lightning comes. The fierce fires burn. Central Oregon is burning wildly now. The creatures, all of us, fight or flee. And then we make our peace with it. And then the green returns.
