Dec18
Posted on Dec 18 by Ruth Davis
If you know me at all, you know that my standard line has always been “I hate the desert.” And yet, here we are, volunteering at Kartchner Caverns State Park in the high desert of southern Arizona for the next four months. We are surrounded by mesquite trees and century plants and prickly pear cactus, and I am truly and deeply loving the landscape. In some ways I have surprised myself. But in others, not at all. Because I chose to be here. Because Marika really wanted to spend a winter in the desert for the birds. Because I know it’s not forever. Instead of focusing on the things in the desert that are not my thing (the dryness, the lack of water), I’m appreciating the gorgeous expanse of sky, the intense quiet, and the ring of mountains all around. They are just far enough away that there is an openness, but it’s not infinite, offering a kind of sheltering, spacious comfort. We arrived on the first Tuesday of December and began orientation and training the next day. One of our jobs...
Nov22
Posted on Nov 22 by Ruth Davis
It’s been a lovely two months of leisure and travel as we’ve slowly made our way south from our plover job in central Oregon. We traveled north up the Oregon coast with stops in Tillamook and Nehalem Beach State Park, enjoying the windy beaches and small artsy towns. Then we finally left the coast and drove inland to Sauvie Island, just north of Portland. Sauvie Island is part wildlife refuge and part farmland, no gas stations or laundry, but there is an RV park, right along the Columbia River. We stayed for a week, enjoying the quiet of the off season, and the birds flying through, even though that meant hunting season. On several different days we drove halfway to Portland, then Ubered to the art museum and the Japanese Gardens. Another day we found a decent bagel and lox spread, and enjoyed the exhibit about Leonard Bernstein at the Portland Jewish Museum. And we got together with my most influential and inspiring writing teacher, Tracy Trefethen, who I haven’t talked to in 20 years, who lives in Portland. She came...
Oct12
Posted on Oct 12 by Ruth Davis
Twenty one years ago, Marika, our eleven-year old lab mix, Zasu, and I were on our longest RV trip in our 24 foot motorhome – six weeks along the Oregon coast. We had come for a birding festival in Charleston, near Coos Bay, at the beginning of September, and then we spent the next five weeks inching our way up the map. We spent time in Florence and Newport, then hopped and skipped up to Astoria, over the long, long bridge into Washington, then back down the coast as far as Bandon, before finally heading home to Phoenix. It was so fun to stay in a place for a few days, do laundry in small towns, and drive no more than a hundred miles in a day, if we drove at all. It was the first time we talked about someday, living in an RV full-time. According to the Oregon campgrounds book that we were using back then to find campsites, Tillicum Campground had ocean view sites. They didn’t take reservations, so we decided to put up a prayer to...
Aug24
Posted on Aug 24 by Ruth Davis
All is well here on the Oregon coast. We are so grateful to be in this cool climate, with clean air, the forest and the ocean, and lots of fresh seafood. We are enjoying our snowy plover docent job, though, after 9 weeks, it’s a bit repetitive telling people the same information about the plovers. But we’ve also had some delightful conversations with visitors, and I love giving out dog cookies to all of the dogs who are heading to the beach. And I wrote a song about the snowy plovers, which still delights me every time I sing it. (Click here to hear it.) And we love the area, the campground, and being able to hear the ocean from our campsite. And we both so appreciate that we get to climb the dune and walk on the beach every day as part of our job. We work 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, which is a little more than we’d prefer, but it’s worth it. Our dear friend Judy came to visit this past week, and we...
Aug22
Posted on Aug 22 by Ruth Davis
We spent a gorgeous summer on the central coast of Oregon volunteering with Fish and Game as snowy plover docents. Our job was to walk along the beach! and share information with visitors about the snowy plover, a threatened shorebird that nests in the soft sand during the summer. I am delighted to share my Snowy Plover song with you. I loved writing, rewriting, and, of course, singing it. Just click on the blue words THE SNOWY PLOVER SONG below to play the video. If you’d like a copy of the words to learn and sing along, let me know! ENJOY! THE SNOWY PLOVER SONG by Ruth Davis...
Jun28
Posted on Jun 28 by Ruth Davis
It’s been almost a month since we pulled out of Phoenix and headed west and north to the Oregon coast. It was an easy, wide open, 5-hour drive across the desert to our first overnight camp in Yucaipa, California. The county park has great camp sites tucked into high desert and trees. We leveled and did the usual unpacking, which includes putting out the slides. But the rear slide was stuck in the closed position. I got up on the roof to see if anything was stuck in the mechanism, but it looked fine. So we agreed to stop trying, in case we got it out, and then couldn’t get back in. Without the back slide extended, we lost two and a half feet of floor space in the back half of the RV. We had to squeeze past the stove to get to the bathroom and the door only opened half way. And the bed was up against the drawers, with no walkway around, which meant Marika would have to climb over me to get in and out,...
