50 Years on the Rocks

The tops of the central Oregon foothills hold nearly the same height, stepping down from Three Fingered Jack to the flat, stiff terrain below. Beyond the pocket-sized local airport, the scrubland tilts away, scattered with homesteads that rise and fall across bluffs cresting in the still-blind orange of reddened sunsets. The pressure for developable land in the region is palpable, yet the widening horizon and fault-block mountains cast their shade on mostly nothingness. It has always been hard for me to think of this place in terms that are anything but large.

Baker Hills was the name of my fathers first church. While there wasn’t much by way of hills in Baker, I always appreciated the somewhat uncommon reference to nature in the church fathers naming deliberations. Baker was his first and also only church, a feat of rare permanence in the pastoral profession, and though recently retired, the church was still pressed into the Badger family lineage like a watermark, faint yet indelible on every page. A season of anniversaries was upon us, and the roots of the family tree from which I sprouted were celebrating 50 years of marriage. “Which, also means 40 years at the church,” mother, would add. The ever present fact-checker who flourished as a kind of full-time immutable and un-mutable commentary-track on life.

In a rather grim twist of fate, at least so far as my self esteem was concerned, my parents’ friends all seemed to be passing the bicentennial mark at the same time as them. And despite “comparison being the thief of joy”, the Badger offspring couldn’t help but feel subtle barbs embedded in the stories mother shared of all these friends seeming to hold elaborate gatherings to mark the occasion, and all these elaborate gatherings seeming to be funded by their children, and all these fabulous gatherings apparently organized and hosted by these nauseatingly spotless progeny. Nevertheless, my parents decided on a different route. They chose simplicity for their memoriam. No rented ballrooms or barnyards. No acropolis or coliseum where they could wow the crowd with their tales of triumph over the insatiable demons of divorce. Nope. Just four days in the high desert with our comparatively skimpy but no-less plucky crew. 

Not one to plan in advance, or plan at all, really, I realized ten miles from the destination that I would be arriving empty handed. This was problematic on a variety of levels, but especially now because this might cause a delay in dinner. We Badgers didn’t dally with warm food. Dinner was served when it was goddamned good and ready. Thankfully I had an ace up my short sleeve. When one has spent a lifetime consistently lowering expectations, showing up to events with grocery chain flowers still flapping a half-ripped discount sticker can win surprising levels of appreciation from the family unit. So I lurched into the strip mall parking lot with one hand on the wheel and the other googling the appropriate flower to commemorate fifty years, and then, for extra credit, the color.

And so the weekend commenced. The daily itinerary revolved around mealtimes and trips to the pool with optional group activities including bike rides, pickleball, tennis, putting practice and exercise walks. My nephew taught me farkle, my mother taught my niece hearts, and my brother-in-law taught us all a skill he nasally imported from a different gene pool altogether: the ability to perform a noon-day nap splayed out on the sofa located directly in the nerve center of this cacophony. 

Correction. There was a schedule. There would be a moment. A  finale. While yet unscheduled, it was as inescapable and boundless as the Portland rain. It hung in the background of all Badger family get-togethers. When would dad need his moment? A closing ceremonies that would inject an extra huzzah of hosanna. The message rarely landed with the impact envisioned and the prelude was predictably awkward but this reality never dissuaded the reverend from converting the dinner table into a pulpit and his family into a flock. On the continuum of coerced family bonding experiences, the 50 anniversary homily was especially memorable. But for none of the reasons intended by the host. 

The chalet where we gathered sat at the base of a rolling series of irrigated hills that rested just above a daily parade of white electric carts driven by tense looking men and their bags of metal sticks. These men would march around the grounds muttering to themselves and cursing the pinewood and alpine grass that swallowed with small blinks their white and yellow orbs.

The chalet deck, (and what a fabulous word that is, chalet ) was wide enough for the whole family to lounge, taking in together the futility of the golfers and the twilight zoology on greenery that stretched vastly beyond the links in either direction until meeting the rabbit brush and red root that dotted the foothills that shoe boxed the resort.  Should the parameters of hosting require grilling action, the deck was book-ended on the south rail with not one, but two chrome plated barbecues. While admiring the half moon stainless steel ashtray fastened pin-high to the corner nearest the dueling barbecue’s, mother noticed and piped in, “unlike the houses we rented back when you were young”, she said, with just a spoonful of displeasure, “they allow for smoking here.”  

Fifty or sixty years ago, prior to the Field Guide era, most ornithologists would not accept sight records of unusual birds unless they were made at the wrong end of a shotgun barrel. Or so we were informed by my sister’s husband Dolph, who was reading a book aloud he had discovered in the board game closet. Were these persnickety gun-toting bird-doctors shuffling around our back deck, I thought to myself as I scanned around for flutters, they would have been treated to a few rarities of the species that included the bohemian waxwing, the pinyon jay and the common redpoll. These arid high desert birds, along with the meandering fawns and dottling does, treated the manicured lawns like their own personal putting greens, padding about as they deemed fit, nabbing insects and spilt pretzels along the way.

As I relaxed amongst the aroma of sweet juniper and sunbaked stone I reflected on the years when arriving here each summer was the centerpiece of my calendar year and the when the nightly conversations with friends and family held amongst the faint clicks of crickets and smell of distant barbeque served as a critical staging area for my youth as it slid into adulthood. If one has spent much time in therapy or been subjected to work-related team building exercises, they might be familiar with a question that can take many forms,  perhaps most simply put as this: “What is your happy place?” I tended to ignore the question when presented, considering it too vague or artless for serious consideration. But once upon a time I found myself in a group I respected when this question was posited and so attempted to actually take the question seriously. “What was my  ‘happy place’?” As I scanned the rolodex of my memories, and flipped through the scrap books of nostalgia, I realized, that in so much as I had a “happy place”……. this was it. Not this specific chalet. But this spiritual geography. This space. With these people.

In my youth, many summers were spent just a donkeys bray away from our current residence, in a similar jut of Oregon’s high desert. We stayed most commonly at a sprawling residence (at least, to my 12 year old mind) much more opulent than our standard vacation digs.  Given the pastoral professions well known paltry compensation package, it occasionally inspired the more well heeled in the congregation to offer us discounted accommodations. And so we’d spend a week with cherished friends during those summers of youth that seemed to roll on endlessly and took up leisure of the highest order, inhabiting a kind of untethered and reckless glee which throughout my many years of exploration and adventuring since has been difficult to match. Indeed, despite preening atop german alps, skimming below vietnamese karsts, and bathing in white sand balinese sunsets, nothing has captured quite the same sense of whimsy. Of pure whimsical joy. As this land.

And then, it happened. The priest could stand without ceremony no longer. He called together a hasty gathering in the living room where he set out upon a very drawn out, very sermon like speech whereby he (with occasional fact checks from mother) spent nearly three hours attempting to unravel their fifty years together into something that resembled chronology.

To begin, he said, as he scratched at his cheek, well, where to begin? I popped the cork on a wine bottle and began to pour.

For approximately three decades the activity I was now partaking was a strict violation of Badger family protocols. An instant black mark on the families moral ledger. So deep and binary was my certitude around the ails of ale, that even when dining with secular friends whose parents poured themselves a glass with supper I’d rush to judgement, “holy hell!” I’d think to myself, attempting to maintain a poker face while every nerve ending sparked at the acridic aroma of devils punch in the room. What kind of lecherous hog beasts were raising my little league teammate? 

Despite nearing 80, dad remained energetic and wiry. He held a half head of silver hair above smiling grey eyes that could maintain empathic contact endlessly with anyone willing to meet them. In 1972 he completed his studies at a prairie bible college and upon graduation heeded the call as a biblical scholar and marched off to seminary. His plan, as he would eventually get to in his current deliberations, was soon derailed by a family friend who sensed the leadership qualities and social charisma in the good natured and unsparingly positive fella, and encouraged him towards a different path of service. Once starting upon the pastoral path, he never strayed.

However, fathers anniversary speech was not his strongest work. At one point, as my attention drifted back to the room, he was explaining his professional detour from teaching to preaching, and was unpacking in forensic detail a former romantic interest whose existence occupied scant space in his chronology but somehow expanded to take up maddening amounts of real estate due to dads new-found penchant for rabbit trails.

It wasn’t by choice he had become so frustratingly tangential. As they say in prizefighting, “Father Time is undefeated”, and the cognitive bumper rails that keep conversations on track had visibly weakened in recent years. The puzzlement of watching a once great orator completely lose their sense of timing, or time at all, was illustrated perhaps most vividly by the quizzical looks my 11 year old nephew was shooting up at me as he observed the speech. Of course, he was especially reliant on facial expressions at the time because I had both of his hands pinned to his sides and was sitting on his chest. This measure of physical restraints was only undertaken out of necessity, after enduring an array of earflicks from my nephew that hampered my attention to dad, whose super-human room-reading skills meant he was immediately sensing our distraction and empathically being drained of energy as a result. 

Why did the booze flow freely when for thirty years it was prohibited? Great question. On this weekend, I decided to finally ask it. Inquiring as to what mountain Moses stumbled down with stone tablets in one hand and an copper chalice of Hennessey in the other. When did we receive the good news for all generations that the booze would now abide? When I queried my parents this, their jaws slacked and their pupils widened, as if more pixels might shed light on a question that apparently had never entered their minds. And indeed, based off their answers, it hadn’t. 

And so drinking was allowed. Almost welcomed. Though no one could quite say why. But at times like this, when the family is bumping along unevenly and the goofiness and absurdity of sharing a bloodline is on full display, when the aperture widens and one is reminded  that the people in this room had known every phase, every break up, every broken bone and noisy tear on the journey since you were born, when it all becomes almost too much reality to bare, a little drink was a very good thing indeed.