Linda Crew

We have to dig a well at Plunkett Creek, one of our tree farm properties. It’s silly, actually. We have no intention of building, but in order to maintain the right to build, we have to go ahead and do it. I wonder if the people who made these laws thought of these consequences--ugly and perhaps unoccupied white trailers parked here and there, blighting the forest zones of Oregon. They’re place savers. Why can’t we just have a legal paper stating the property is buildable sometime in the future? Since that doesn’t seem to compute, and we’ve paid a price reflecting the right to build, we must build to protect our investment.

As the self-appointed Director of Cute of this operation of ours, I have vetoed the ugly trailer bit and hope, for the same money, to have some locals build a little cabin. Even the smallest picnic house requires all the services.

Thus, the well. Yesterday we went up to the Kings Valley property with our timber manager, David Brinker, and watched him do the witching. My husband and I both held the witching wires and felt them go nuts over the spot where David said we’d find water.

I thought it was exciting and magical, but last night I went on line and found nothing but material debunking the whole idea of water witching. No proof ever of it working, they say. And lots of stories of people doing just what we did, holding the wires where X marks the spot and claiming they’d felt them move in a decisive way. These people were not being written of with admiration!

But everybody, including David, has stories of having found the water with witching and coming up dry when the witching process was bypassed.

So, next week, we’ll drill. I want to watch. I can’t wait to see if David’s right. Stay tuned! I promise an honest report of happens.
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We are celebrating the brand new availability of our dear friend Margaret J. Anderson’s charming novel, IN THE KEEP OF TIME, as an eBook. Originally published by Knopf over thirty years ago, the story of four English children sent to Scotland for a bit of summer vacation in the countryside has many fans who adored the book as children themselves and now want to share the time-slip adventure with their own children. That the book--as of today--can be speedily downloaded is especially good news for all of those who have been unable to find the out-of- print paper versions.

It seems particularly appropriate to me that my first book read on a Kindle should be this tale of travel to the past and to the future. It's a story that offers up much food for thought for young readers about the way we care for our planet and yet manages this without miring itself in the darkness of many of the current dystopian titles being published. As a Scot, born in Lockerbie, the charming lingo of “wee bairns” and the like come naturally to Margaret, and her background in science afforded her a prescience in imagining the consequences of global warming long before it was much discussed.

I love picturing a brand new generation of readers being introduced to this exciting and yet somehow cozy adventure by the parents who loved it when it first came out so many years ago. IN THE KEEP OF TIME is a book which has stood the TEST OF TIME!
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When I fell in love with and acquired a twenty-five acre forest parcel on the Luckiamute River in Western Oregon last spring, I thought it was amazingly free of invasive species. None of the English Ivy I hate so fiercely. Just a bit of Scotch broom—nothing we hadn’t seen and conquered previously on other acreages. No poison oak, thanks to being on the west side of a coast range ridge, just outside the oak savannah range. To me, it was a wonderland of wildflowers—the meadows blooming with wild roses, larkspur, columbine, Douglas iris and others.

What was I missing? Only the fact that I didn’t know Japanese Knotweed when I was wading through it. It turns out to be an incredibly invasive species, and our new land had plenty. No sooner had we signed the purchase agreement than we got a call from Peter Guillozet, manager of the Luckiamute River Enhancement Project. He offered the help of his grant-supported program to bring in teams of forestry workers to eradicate the weed and replant the streambanks. Since this is work we’d be trying to do ourselves anyway, we were glad for the help, pleased to learn that a coordinated effort was underway.

We were invited out to the charmingly named Happy Workers Club yesterday, an old one room school on Luckiamute Road, to meet our neighboring landowners and hear about efforts to eradicate this fast spreading weed. Peter gave a talk about this plant and showed frightening comparison maps of its spread in the UK and Ireland between 1900, when it was starting to be deliberately planted as a garden ornamental and 2006, by which time it had pretty much taken over the whole island. We’re talking old growth knotweed over there! Seriously, Peter said, the roots of this stuff could eventually eat your house. It could ruin the streams for fish.

But here in Oregon, we’re not going to let that happen. I just loved this meeting—a bunch of like-minded people getting together to figure out how to do the right thing. Few issues in life seem this straightforward: Japanese Knotweed is bad and we must get rid of it. Nobody disagrees. Everybody seems to just want to take care of their forests and be good stewards of the land.

A big thank you to the environmental foundations which are supporting this project—the Bonneville Environmental Foundation and the Meyer Memorial Trust. And thanks to the volunteers coordinating the effort.

I’m so happy my husband and I can be part of this.

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