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New Starts
At the top of Mitchell Grade, I stop my car and get out to stretch my legs. The central Oregon high desert plateau stretches out below me, the little town of Mitchell the sole evidence of human habitation. Scrub, sagebrush, tumbleweeds, and the occasional juniper tree dot the land, baked hard in October by the relentless sun of the summer months. Beyond, far beyond, rise the Cascade Mountains, shrouded blue in mist and Dali-esque in the heat waves that rise from the desert floor. I look at the road winding across the desert and for some reason think of Oz. Then I am suddenly thinking of the women who came this way before me.
I've made this trip so many times, from the small Treasure Valley town where I grew up to my home in the Coast Range. I've never stopped here before. I usually leave early and stop for breakfast at Austin Junction, about an hour's high-speed drive from my parents' home in Brogan. Then I start the long descent through Prairie City and John Day down to the high plain. I do this to beat the heat driving across the desert. It's flat, and the elevation's still about 4,000 feet above sea level. But even with air conditioning, the sun's glare on the road is almost unbearable. A cold drink or fresh coffee in Mitchell is the only break for hours.
But this trip is different. I've stayed later than usual. It seemed right. I've come home to celebrate my mother's life on the occasion of her death, and my father needed someone to cry with for as long as possible. I've been there eleven days, sitting with Mom while she slowly made her way to the other side, then taking charge of "the arrangements," organizing the food, keeping Dad from punching an insensitive mortician at the crematorium, looking through old family pictures, all the things you do when you don't really know what to do. Now the wake is over, and it's time for me to go home.
This morning I let Dad cook breakfast for me. My five brothers and sisters and their families went home a couple of days ago. Yesterday Dad went fishing. Before he left, he took me into their bedroom and opened one side of a large closet. "Would you pack up your Mom's things while I'm gone?" he asked, "I just can't face it. I want to give this stuff to Goodwill where it might do someone some good." Then he pulled a blouse off a hanger. "Take this home with you, and if you can't wear it, give it to someone. Your mother looked so pretty in this. I'm not sure what I'd do if I met someone else on the street wearing it."
I packed up Mom's things, bags and bags of them. I felt sad that she died with all of these things when for so many years she made do with very little. I set aside her favorite stocking cap and mittens to take home with me, packed them up carefully in a small bag with the blouse. I put the bag in the trunk of my Subaru. When Dad came back, we loaded the rest of the bags into his car and took them in to the Goodwill store before he changed his mind.
But it's not my mother I'm thinking of at the top of Mitchell Grade. I've been thinking about her for a hundred miles or so, but now, with a third of Oregon spread out before me, I'm thinking about those other women. Maybe it's the rest of the cargo in my trunk, the two buckets that stand beside the bag with my mother's clothes and the bag with the urn that contains her ashes.
Dad asked me to be the keeper of the ashes until he and Uncle Jack and Aunt June were all dead. Then they should all be buried together, he said, in the single plot next to their parents' burial space, four urns in one space. "They say they'll only allow three," he told me, "but I think that's because they're afraid they'll break something while excavating. If our urns are all put in the ground at once, how can they object?" I don't know. I'll deal with the objections when the time comes.
In my trunk, along with the bags of clothes and the urn, are two large five-gallon plastic buckets, one green, one white. You've probably seen a thousand just like them. Restaurants get things like pickles and mayonnaise in these buckets. They give or sell them for a buck apiece to anyone who will haul them away. My buckets contain starts of Harison's Rose, dug that morning from the clay beside one of my uncle's rental houses.
I have a long love affair with Harison's Rose, also known as rosa harisonii, rosa x harisonii, or Harison's Yellow, depending on whether you are of the camp that thinks it a distinct species or of the one that regards it as a cultivar. You may know it as "the yellow rose of Texas." However you think of it, this ubiquitous rose appears again and again all over the western United States. But it is not native here. Wherever you find Harison's Rose west of the Mississippi River, a settler placed it there. It is not a wild rose.
I first met Harison's Rose in my grandmother's yard. "I got my start from the granddaughter of the first woman who brought it to Oregon," Nana said. This, my father would say, was one of Nana's fantastic stories. Being Irish, she had a knack for making up extraordinary explanations for the most ordinary things. But I believed her. I took a start from her rose and planted it in the yard of the house I was living in. It thrived, and each spring the double sulfur-yellow blossoms lit the back yard like ruffled sunlight.
Harison's Rose spreads through purple-colored pips and by putting out root nodes. It likes to be clipped back to create new growth each spring. When I rented my house, the tenants killed the rose by allowing Bishop's Weed and blackberries to choke it out. I went back to my grandmother's house in Dexter to get another start. The man who bought her house after she died had mowed it to the ground repeatedly. There was nothing left but a smooth green lawn. He told me that there used to be some rough growth in that spot but that careful tending had produced the nice yard I saw there. Now you know two ways to kill Harison's Rose.
So when I found Harison's Rose in my uncle's rental-house yard, I had one more chance to start this rose in my garden. The morning I left Brogan, we dug two buckets of brambles, covered them with more of the thick clay, and soaked them in the hard water of the area. I put them in my trunk, beside the urn and the bag of clothes.
At the top of Mitchell Grade, I am suddenly aware of how hot it is getting, even at this altitude, and that the rose starts in my trunk are baking in the heat. I open the trunk. Despite the extra water they got that morning, the leaves are curling and drooping. That's when I really start to think about those women who came before.
I can see before me the next few hours of my life, how the highway winds across the desert and up into the distorted mountains. I will cross that desert in a couple of hours, climb up over the imposing mountain range before me, cross Stinking Water Pass (smelling of sulfur and rumored to be poisonous) and Drinking Water Pass (where clear springs offer the first pure water in a hundred or so miles), drop down into the Willamette Valley, and then climb the modest climb of the Coast Range to be home.
But my doppelganger, that pioneer wife in her covered wagon, was looking at weeks of her life from this same vantage point.
If you've ever followed the route of the Oregon Trail, you know there are places where you can still see the ruts made by wagon wheels more than 150 years ago. Pioneers set off in Conestoga wagons with just what they could carry in them, looking for a new start, a better life. Whole families set off to travel a couple of thousand miles with the only the contents of a wooden wagon bed about six feet by ten feet. They brought food, furniture, cooking utensils, clothing, books, and in at least some cases, starts of treasured garden plants in slatted wooden buckets.
Many died along the way. The survivors buried the bodies, weighting the graves with stones to deter scavengers, and continued on. When the oxen flagged after months of hauling the heavy wagon across rocky and uneven ground, the survivors started to divest themselves of the wagon's contents. We know from many written accounts that pioneers littered the trail with fine furniture, artwork, and other niceties that were not necessities. But there are no reports of abandoned plant starts along the trail.
When they set out from St. Louis or Independence, the pioneers often followed the Missouri or Platte Rivers. With a river, water was plentiful. But those who trekked across eastern and central Oregon found themselves without a reliable water supply. Rivers are few and far between here. Water was scarce and consequently tightly rationed. But those rose starts survived. In my head is a picture: I imagine a woman who was willing to leave everything she owned behind except the roses from her garden. Did she give them a portion of her own water each day, sharing their thirst? She must have done so. You can find evidence of the care they got all across the west. I pour the rest of my bottled water into the buckets. I still have coffee, and I can fill up my bottle again in Mitchell. That other woman had no such guarantees.
The beads of sweat forming on my forehead drive me back into my car, and I start the descent to Mitchell. By twilight, I'll be planting those roses in my own yard, a yard that surrounds my home, a home fully equipped with the things that make my life comfortable. I'll soak them again and let them recover in the coolness of evening in the Coast Range. I won't let anyone mow them.
My father, nearing 80, is tired. He's tired from caring for my mother during her long decline, but mostly he's tired with the sadness of having lost a companion of 55 years. The oldest, I've been promoted to matriarch of the family now. It's a new role for me. I know he'll be needing my support — one more set of responsibilities for me to shoulder. I don't know how I will manage from across the state or even what I'll have to manage. But I'll have Harison's Rose in my yard to remind me that I really don't have things so hard after all.
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AUTHOR NOTES:
Marianne Klekacz will graduate from Marylhurst University in June, 2005, with a B.A. in English/Creative writing. She is currently in the second semester of her M.F.A. program at Pacific University. She is the author of the chapbook Life Science, which won the Edna Meudt Memorial Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies in 2003.
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