First of all, I am very sorry to have been out of touch for a whole year. Though all is okay now, as the title says, 2024 was a bumpy year. Full post to follow soon.

May as well call it what it is. I hoped, I intended, to at long last get book 5 finished and published by the end of this year. But once again, I failed.

Everyone’s life is always somewhat of a juggling act, and life on our farm, for Jeanette and me, is especially one. We moved here closing on twelve years ago. Neither of us had ever lived anything other than urban lifestyles. We had no concept of what we were getting into. I am not in any way saying that Jeanette and I have any doubts or regrets about our choice, or the life we live. For us, the life amidst such beauty—we live in a valley that is, where our farm is located, perhaps one mile wide, with mountain ridges rising up sharply on either side, and the beautiful McKenzie River running through it—living so close to and in tune with nature, interacting with our animals, and even dealing with the constant and often unexpected challenges this lifestyle brings, has become a life we cannot imagine living without. We cannot imagine becoming city-dwellers again.

But it is a reality that life on a farm is one of relentless, never pausing work. Down time is not really a thing. There are just degrees of busy. This does create a constant tension with my being able to write, because being able to complete writing a book and publish it requires, on my part: (1) time to write, and (2) the ability to focus deeply on the characters and story, in order to immerse myself in and create its fictional world.

And over time—relentless, unforgiving time—something else has been added to the mix. I was 60 years old when we moved to the farm. I am 72 now. The years have taken a toll. I have arthritis in my lower back, which causes almost constant pain and stiffness. When we moved here, my Multiple Sclerosis had been mostly dormant for about ten years. Sometime around 2018 it woke up, and has stayed that way since. I’m still very fortunate, in that it is, for MS, a relatively mild, well controlled case, and my neurologist says that given my age and the prolonged stability of the disease, it is unlikely to progress. But my feet are always somewhat numb from it now, and it causes pain in my legs with some frequency. Also, from an injury that occurred during 2020, I am missing one of the four tendons in my right shoulder joint. Although I have managed, through focused exercise, to restore the shoulder to almost normal range of motion and strength, it, too, experiences an amount of chronic pain. So, whereas at age 60, and the early years after that, I could put in six to eight hours of manual labor in a day without difficulty, now a full day of physical labor is more like four hours. I move more slowly and tire more quickly. As a result, things take longer to complete now.

Nevertheless, even though as this year progressed and the likelihood of completing and publishing book 5 by the end of the year was clearly slipping away from being realistically possible, I had really hoped that I would at least be able to complete writing the first draft during the last months of the year, which are usually the lowest level of busy we get in this life. But even in that, I have completely failed. I have not been able to write.

Jeanette, my wife, is my life. She is everything to me. Over the past few years, she has developed a very serious problem with her vision. It actually started before we moved to Oregon and the farm, when we still lived in Houston, Texas in our “city lives.” Occasionally when she would become very tired, she would experience double vision. Back then, it was a rare enough phenomenon that she could shrug it off.

Over the years, living here in Oregon, it gradually became something that manifested more frequently, that became more difficult to ignore, but for the most part, she could still, with effort, cause the double vision to go away. But over the last two years, that has changed. It has gotten worse, especially over the course of this year, to the point where it has become a constant.

Let me explain what I mean when I say she has double vision. With normal vision, what our two eyes separately perceive is melded into a single image by our subconscious brain. To try to visualize this, imagine that what you see is like a flat screen TV image out in front of you.

More and more frequently, and all the time for most of this past year, Jeanette has been seeing two separate, distinct flat screen TV images, side by side, one slightly higher than the other. I honestly cannot begin to imagine how she has managed to deal with that.

This is not a “normal” eye issue. Most ophthalmologists, including our regular eye doctor in Eugene, do not have the expertise to deal with it. In fact, here in Oregon, there are very few specialists who do deal with this issue. When we first began trying to get her help with the problem in early 2022, the only specialists we could find to consult with, and there were only a few, were in Portland, Oregon, the state’s largest city, a five and a half hour round trip away. Over the course of 2022 we made several trips to Portland, so she could be examined by two specialists there. They did rule out several possibilities that could have been causing the problem: she had not had any head injuries, and an MRI of the brain eliminated a tumor as another possibility.

Normally, the eyes are positioned in the skull so that their visual beams of focus are exactly parallel, and when the eyes move, the muscles controlling them move them in tandem so that the fields of vision stay parallel. That way, although the two eyes produce two distinct visual images, they are so similar that the subconscious brain can meld them into a single image, which is what our conscious brain “sees.” The two Portland specialists we consulted explained that Jeanette’s eyes were not aligned in perfect parallel. After ruling out the injury and brain tumor possibilities, they both theorized that she had always had this condition, but that for most of her life, her subconscious brain had, through shear brainpower (she is a Very smart person!), overridden the dual images and melded them into one. However, as she aged, and as the dual images more frequently “broke through,” her subconscious brain could no longer overwhelm the reality of what her eyes were actually seeing.

Imagine trying to do anything in your daily life while seeing two of everything you look at. That is what Jeanette has been dealing with constantly this past year

Correcting the condition can be possible, but it first requires diagnosing which of the many muscles connected to each eyeball are causing the misalignment. If that can be done—and determining which muscles are involved is to a certain degree more of an art than a science—then the muscles can be surgically detached from the eye, and reattached in a location that will hopefully correct the misalignment. One of the two specialists we consulted, who was not a surgeon, stressed that in most cases, multiple surgeries are necessary because figuring exactly how and where to move the muscles to correct the alignment tends to be somewhat of a trial-and-error process. The other Portland specialist, who was a surgeon, initially planned to do the surgery. But as he tested and tried to measure the alignment of Jeanette’s eyes over the course of several appointments, he eventually told us that he could not do surgery, because he was unable to determine, with sufficient certainty, which muscles were causing the problem, and if he were to move the wrong ones, it would cause the problem to get worse, possibly irreversibly so.

Then, in late 2022 or early 2023, a new specialist, Dr. Sabah, moved to Eugene. Jeanette was finally able to get an appointment with her in June. Dr. Sabah said at that appointment that she believed she could fix or at least improve Jeanette’s double vision (although the more she examined Jeanette’s eyes over the course of two separate appointments, the less strong a result she felt comfortable promising—Jeanette’s was clearly a difficult case). Then came six more months of waiting for a place in her surgery schedule. The surgery finally took place about two weeks ago, in mid-December. During the surgery, Dr. Sabah detached one muscle from each eye, and reattached them in a different location.

I cannot stress enough the degree to which accurately diagnosing which muscles are causing such a vision problem, and how they must be moved to correct it, is not some kind of simple, mechanical process. Each of the specialists did the same sorts of tests: holding up different strength prism lenses in front of one eye, while repeatedly covering and uncovering the other (and I have no idea what they learned from that); and telling Jeanette to focus on their fingertip while they moved it around in different directions in front of her face, while studying how her eyes moved. It is obviously very much a process based as much, if not more, on personal skill, intelligence, and judgment, as it is on any science.

It was a major surgery, under general anesthesia, that took about two hours. Recovery for Jeanette was quite painful for a number of days. But Dr. Sabah worked a Christmas miracle. We are still in awe. When Jeanette looks straight ahead, she now sees only a single image. As she told Dr. Sabah in the post-op check-up a few days before Christmas, “Now when I wake up in the morning, there’s only one ceiling fan rotating on the ceiling up above our bed.” She does still have some degree of double vision peripherally, when she looks to the side or down—something Dr. Sabah said was almost certainly going to be the case even if she was able to achieve the best possible outcome—but for her primary field of view, Jeanette has normal, functioning vision again.

You may be wondering why I have been telling all of this. It is because, especially as the date for the surgery grew closer over the final months of this year, I have been so worried and anxious about Jeanette, my love, my life, that I have been completely unable to have anywhere near the ability to focus on the fictional characters and story of Halfdan and the Strongbow Saga. The cares of our real lives made the fictional world, for a time, unimportant and inaccessible to me.

So, for all of you who have been waiting so very long for the next installment of that story, I have failed you. Again. For that I am very sorry. I have not by any means given up on Halfdan’s story. I will keep working on it, and intend to get it to you. That is the most I can tell you for now.

One last thing. I do understand how long so many of you have been waiting for me to continue Halfdan’s story. I am both deeply sorry and deeply embarrassed that I keep letting you down, and I very much appreciate the kind words and incredible patience some of you share when you communicate with me through this website. There are some, though, who choose to be rude and unpleasant in their comments. For those people, don’t bother, don’t waste your time. I have ultimate control on whether any posts appear here, and snarky posts go straight to trash.

In April of 2012, eleven years ago, Jeanette and I moved onto our small farm in western Oregon, in the McKenzie River Valley. It was a life-transforming event that has brought us many adventures.

Although we had no experience with either, we decided early on that we wanted to have chickens and sheep on our farm. And so, in May of 2012, we bought, and brought home, our first generation of chicks. Among them was an Ameraucana hen whom we named Hawkeye.

Hawkeye, on the right, with the rest of our first generation of chicks, at about three weeks of age.

We have, by now, been through many generations of chickens, some purchased as chicks, others hatched by our hens. The average lifespan of a chicken on our farm has tended to run somewhere between five to seven years. Hawkeye, however, has been the exception. She was still with us until sometime last night. Had she lived for a few more weeks, she would have been eleven years old.

Hawkeye in her prime.

She laid small, bright blue eggs, although in recent years, she laid them only rarely. She still had lots of spunk, but starting about four months ago, she started showing signs of aging, in a very cute way. As she walked, she would occasionally start to lose her balance, would flap her wings frantically trying to regain it, then fall over on her side. The she’d lay there for a few minutes, looking around as if she was wondering, “What just happened?” Eventually she would climb back up onto her feet, or occasionally, we’d help her get back upright.

Our chicken coop is in a corner of our barn, which we enclosed with chicken-wire mesh, and in which we built several nesting boxes and various roosts, which the chickens sleep on at night. For several months now, Hawkeye had been unable to sleep on the roost at night due to her poor balance–she would too often fall off after she fell asleep–so she had taken to sleeping on the floor of the coop, in a little nest-like depression she scooped out below one of the nesting boxes, near the roosts. The coop’s doors open into a section of fenced pasture, roughly thirty yards long and twenty wide, that the chickens can free range in. Despite her instability, Hawkeye still liked to try to roam the pasture with the other birds. However, it eventually became more than she could manage. About ten days ago, when Jeanette and I went up to the barn to give the chickens their afternoon snacks (we do spoil our animals a bit), Hawkeye was not with the other birds who gathered round. I found her under some overhanging blackberry vines along the fence, at the far end of their pasture, lying on her side and apparently no longer able to get up on her own. I picked her up and carried her back to the coop.

Hawkeye on the way back to the barn, after her final day of free-ranging.

She went downhill fairly quickly from there. Within a few days, she could no longer get over the thresholds of the coop’s doors and make it outside, so she stayed in the coop. And perhaps five days ago, she became so weak and unbalanced that she could barely move around in the coop. We’d often find her lying flopped over on her side, but still alert, head up and looking around, so we always made sure she had food, including treats, on the ground in front of her, and she would eagerly eat them. Hawkeye was not a quitter.

But this morning she was gone, literally. We have been fortunate to have never lost any of our flock to predators, other than some birds we lost in the first years to hawks–and that ended after we befriended and began feeding the large community of crows living near our farm, in exchange for which they drive away any hawks that come near. But something, possibly a fox, or a racoon, or a possum–we’ve seen all of those at times on the farm–went into the coop last night, found Hawkeye on the ground, dragged her outside, and ate her. This morning all that was left was a few scattered pieces of skin and feathers.

Before we had chickens, we would never have guessed how much personality they can have. Hawkeye was a sweet, cute, spunky bird, and we will miss her.

I am very sorry to have to announce that I have failed yet again to meet a target completion deadline for book 5. This book has, from its earliest beginnings, been much more of a struggle for me than the first four books. I had hoped that I was now far enough along that I could push through to completion by March (after failing to meet my previous December goal), but the writing just isn’t flowing that smoothly.

I am continuing to work on it, and will get it out this year, but at this point I am not going to state a new date until I’m sure I can achieve it. I am very, very sorry–I know so many of you have been waiting a very long time for more of Halfdan’s story.

I am fairly certain by this point, by the way, that the title will be Into the Wildlands (although perhaps it should be The Long Wait).

April and May of this year have been unusually cold and rainy, which has caused both downsides and upsides.

As I explained in my February 27^th post, although Jeanette and I love our life on our small farm in Oregon, it is very challenging because there is always work to do. There is never any real “down time,” when we have nothing to do; there are, at best, periods of the year when we are—barring some unforeseen mishaps that must be dealt with—somewhat less busy. Those are the periods when I plan to fit my writing into our schedule, but after ten years of life here, I obviously still struggle to balance being an author and living on a farm.

Late winter through early spring in a “normal” year are one of the somewhat less busy periods. Our primary farm related tasks during those months, outside of the work of every day life, are starting the seedlings of the numerous different crops we will eventually plant in our garden, and, as they grow up-potting them to larger size pots. I had hoped, this year, during the time between seed starts and up-potting, to scramble and complete writing book 5 of The Strongbow Saga. But as I explained in my previous post, this, once again, was not a normal year. We lost a large block of time repairing a fence line that was damaged in a snowstorm, then I lost even more time when I learned I would have to have cataract surgery on both of my eyes. That pushed my hoped-for completion date of writing book 5 to, in a best case scenario, late May or early June.

That hasn’t happened. The eye surgeries did not go entirely smoothly. In theory, the surgery on each eye, which replaced my aging and cloudy natural lens with an acrylic implant, and which also was supposed to correct some distortion in my vision due to astigmatism, which is caused by irregularities in the shape of the cornea, or surface of the eye, would have left me with 20-20 distance vision, and I would have needed to wear glasses for reading and close work. In theory. As the surgeon said, when he first reviewed the status of my vision several weeks after both surgeries were done, “Sometimes we hit a home run, and sometimes the process takes several base hits.”

The surgeries improved, but did not fully remove the astigmatism in my eyes. To (hopefully) correct that, I will need a laser surgical procedure called Lasik. But that has not happened yet, because I’ve had to have two other procedures to correct other issues. It turned out that I had some debris from the removal of the old lens remaining in my right eye, clouding my vision slightly in that eye, which required a laser procedure to clean up the debris by vaporizing it. Then it turned out that the artificial lens that was implanted in my left eye had over-corrected and made my vision far-sighted in that eye, so last week I had a different (and quite uncomfortable) laser surgery procedure to reshape the surface of the left eye and hopefully correct the farsightedness. Assuming that was fully successful—and I will supposedly find out later this week—I will still need the Lasik surgical procedure for the astigmatism. Aging bodies suck!

All of this has required numerous trips into town, both for the procedures themselves and for various pre- and post-operative check-ups. From where our farm is located, it requires about an hour and a half round trip just for the driving time to town, on top of whatever time the actual business in town requires. We love living out in the country, but it is not always convenient. Needless to say, because of the further loss of potential writing time, I have once again  failed to meet my hoped-for completion date of book 5.

So, what is the new plan, and current projection for book 5? My new goal is to finish writing book 5 and publish it by the end of this year. I’m going to have to try to find bits and pieces of time where I can, and summer is the busiest time of the year. In so many ways, though, this is already not a “normal” year.

In a “normal” year, by the end of May we would have already planted in the garden most of those plants we began as seed starts weeks or months ago. But April and May have been unusually cold and rainy. We even had a light snow just a little over a week ago. Many days, even when it has not been actively raining, the ground has been too wet to work. The downside of all of that is that we still have much work to do to get our garden in—most of our numerous plant starts are as yet still unplanted—and because of the late start, our garden will for the most part be much later than usual producing the various vegetables and fruits which we both enjoy fresh and preserve by freezing and canning, to feed us throughout the rest of the year.

But there are also upsides. One is that after we do get the garden planted, there is going to be somewhat of a lull, while the plants grow larger, before they begin producing harvest-able crops. That does not happen in a ”normal” summer, and I plan to use that time to write.

Additionally, we were very concerned, because we have been in drought conditions here in western Oregon for several years, about the poor condition of our pastures, and their resultant inability to provide sufficient food for our herd of heritage sheep. In anticipation of that, we had reduced the size of the herd by aggressively harvesting from it. But after weeks and weeks of rain, our pastures currently look the best they have in years, so that crisis may have been averted, for this year, at least.

So, to summarize, although book 5 is once again behind schedule, I am still working on it, and still plan/hope to publish it this year, though now that will not happen until closer to year’s end. And in separate Strongbow Saga news, which I failed to mention back when it happened, I did publish the German language edition of Book 4 back in January of this year. The series is still progressing, just not as smoothly or timely as we all wish that it would.

The German language edition of book 4 was published in January of this year.

on February 26, 2012, Jeanette and I reached Oregon.

Ten years ago yesterday, Jeanette and I reached Oregon, after a several day road trip from our former home in Houston, Texas. Within a week after arriving, we had found the small farm where we now live and entered into a contract to purchase it.

Neither of us had ever lived on a farm before, or had any experience with farming or livestock, but we were ready to make a lifestyle change. It certainly has been that. It has been a fascinating, challenging, often fun and exciting, and at times exhausting and overwhelming experience. Every summer we plant and grow a large garden, and preserve, by freezing, canning, or fermentation, much of the many kinds of vegetables our garden produces, and which provides us with food throughout the year. Our first year on the farm we created, around a single, old apple tree growing on one edge of the property, an orchard which has flourished over time and now gives us a summer and fall bounty of peaches, pears, and several varieties of apples. We currently have a flock of twelve chickens plus one rooster that keeps us supplied with eggs, and a herd of heritage sheep that provides us with delicious, lean, healthy grass-fed meat. We have learned so much from living here, from all of the new skills, experiences, and challenges we’ve had to master. It has truly been a wonderful new life for us.

Jeanette has been the perfect partner to share this adventure with. She clearly was made for this kind of life. It has even brought out some previously unsuspected Oregon superpowers, including an amazingly acute power of observation that would make Sherlock Holmes proud. I still vividly remember one mid-summer morning in 2012, as we were walking from the house up to the barn, to let the chickens (a much smaller flock back then) out of their coop. She suddenly stopped and frowned, then pointed at some blackberry vines we were passing. “Look,” she said, “something has eaten some of the leaves on this plant.” She looked around some more, then pointed at a spot on the ground nearby. “And what is that strange looking poop?” I had been oblivious to what she had spotted. But that was how we first learned we had deer roaming the property—a discovery that months later, in October, led to our first meat harvest.

But nothing is ever all positive. Life doesn’t work that way. The amount of work this life on our farm demands of both of us is constantly, relentlessly high. And we’ve had some hard times here, as well as good, and some struggles. 2020 in particular was a tough year, with three serious health problems for me, one of which dragged on into 2021, plus a major wildfire that threatened to destroy our home, but thankfully got no closer than the top of the mountain ridge that overlooks our farm. Additionally, since at least 2019, and maybe earlier, every year has brought some significant unanticipated issues we’ve had to deal with, that have too often eaten away at the time I’d planned to use to complete writing book 5 of The Strongbow Saga. That has been the biggest downside of our life here, and a curse that seems to keep delaying Halfdan’s story.

In theory, the winter months here are our “down time,” to the extent that we have any, and are supposed to be when I have time to write. But from mid-November of 2021 through the end of the year, much of our time was consumed by visits from members of our family, plus a very old and dear friend whom I had not seen in over twenty years. Especially after almost two years of semi-isolation due to the pandemic, the visits were wonderful and joyous experiences, but no writing occurred during them.

My new goal became to finish book 5 and publish it by the end of April of this year. But that goal, too, has already fallen to the curse. We had a major snowstorm during the last week of December, which dumped about fourteen inches of snow on our farm. The weight of the snow crushed the blackberry vines that grow on the fence lines along our driveway (and which provide us with gallons of delicious, sweet berries each summer), and broke fence-posts along the fence in several places. It took Jeanette and me over two weeks, working off and on, to clear the dead and damaged vines off of the fence along one side, so that I could remove two broken fence posts and replace them, and so we could prune, train to the fence, and hopefully salvage what was left of the vines that used to produce the majority of, and without question, the best, of our annual blackberry crop.

A heavy snow in late December crushed these blackberry vines and damaged the fence buried now beneath them.

It took the better part of two weeks to cut out all of the dead and damaged vines, and repair the fence they had been growing on.

The burn pile of the dead and damaged vines we cut off of the fence.

Unfortunately, the fence we cleared and repaired was much less damaged than the fence on the opposite side of the driveway. It is still untouched, and the pasture behind it will be unusable until we can get it repaired.

We’ve also had to devote time over recent months to reduce the size of our sheep herd. It had reached 26 sheep after the 2021 lambing season—a far cry from the two ewes and one ram which we began the herd with back in 2012. Western Oregon has, for several years now, been in the grip of a severe drought. A consequence of the drought is that our pastures do not grow the deep, lush grass that they used to each spring and summer in our early years here. Without that kind of pasture production, our farm cannot support a herd of 26 sheep, so we have been working, since the early fall of last year, to downsize the herd. For us, that means harvesting sheep: giving some to neighbors who know how to butcher their own meat, two to my son, when he visited in December, and butchering several for ourselves. For the first time since we began harvesting sheep, we have focused on females, instead of limiting the culling to males, in order to reduce the number of lambs that will be born in the spring. After I harvested a mature ewe a week ago, the herd is now down to 19 sheep. That is still too many, given the fact that the drought is continuing, and our pastures are already clearly not showing the rate of new growth that is needed. We will have to continue downsizing the herd over the rest of this year, but that, like everything else, takes time. Harvesting a sheep and butchering it takes me pretty much two full days of work.

Year after year of drought, and its effect on our pastures, have forced us to aggressively harvest sheep this year to downsize the herd.

And just within the last few weeks, the curse struck again. When Jeanette and I went for our annual eye exams recently, I was informed by the doctor that the cataracts in my eyes—I’d known for some years they were slowly developing—had reached a point that he advised surgery to correct them. In case you are not familiar with what cataracts are, I’ll explain. Your eyes contain a lens which is what allows you to see by focusing the light entering the eyeball into an image on the retina, the “viewing screen” of nerve ends on the back side of the eyeball. Without a lens, your eye cannot focus. But in most people, as they reach an age, the lens becomes cloudy, causing a deterioration of the quality of vision that, if not corrected, can eventually cause blindness. Fortunately, cataracts can be very effectively treated by surgery: the doctor cuts open the eye, removes the cloudy lens, and puts an artificial, acrylic lens into the eye. In modern, well-equipped eye surgery centers the operation is done partly by computer-controlled lasers.

I had surgery on my left eye three days ago, and will have it on my right eye in two days’ time. It can take the eyes up to two weeks after the surgery for the vision to stabilize, so I’m not going to be functioning at full capacity for a while. For example, on the day of the surgery, for most of the day looking through my left eye was somewhat like looking through a piece of glass smeared with butter. Although the vision in that eye is still somewhat blurry, it is much clearer now, but I periodically have the disconcerting sensation that the ground, or surfaces in front of me, are sloping downward away from my left side, which causes me to feel a bit dizzy at times. And because I opted to have the lens implants with a focal setting for distance vision, after the surgery on my right eye, for some period of time I may be unable to read, until the eyes stabilize enough for reading glasses to provide the necessary close-in focus.

So, what’s the bottom line? I am clearly not going to finish writing book 5 by the end of April, much less get it published by then. My new goal is to get it out by late May or early June. And to help achieve that timeline, I have belatedly accepted the fact that I have not managed to successfully be both a writer and try to handle all of the work that this farm life requires, especially now that I am 70 years old, and do things a bit more slowly than I used to. Going forward, I have resolved to start hiring out some of the work that is needs to be done on the farm, including repairing the rest of the fence line that was broken in the December storm. I will get this book, and the next one, to you, I promise.

It has been far too long since I have posted an update here—not since my rather grim post in late January about our hard year in 2020. I apologize for leaving you all in the dark, about Jeanette and me, and about book 5. I also apologize to all who’ve tried to send me messages through various formats, which I have not responded to. I have not had time to spend on social media in recent weeks.

I am happy to report that this year has been far, far better than the last. Jeanette’s and my health, overall, have been good. The mystery condition in my legs was finally diagnosed as a fairly rare, and thus not readily recognizable, symptom caused by my Multiple Sclerosis. It was affecting the autonomic nervous system in my legs that assist with the circulation of blood, causing the blood flow to slow, and blood to pool in the veins until it leaked out into the tissues and caused the swelling and nasty looking rash and sores. It is mostly under control now—I still have occasional pain in my legs, and so far they do not let me hike as far as I used to do regularly. But then again, I will turn 70 in a few weeks, and my legs are not the only parts that are showing wear and tear from the years. I miss a young man’s back! The fix for the leg condition (and very appropriately, the wonderful physician, a dermatologist, who finally diagnosed the condition is named Dr. Fix) was surprisingly simple: I have to wear compression stockings on my legs to assist the blood circulation. May all of my problems find such simple solutions!

This year, like every year, brought its own unique mix of joys and challenges. We have been fortunate, living in relative isolation on our farm, to have been able to avoid most of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, which continues to rage around the world. In fact, just yesterday we learned of a new and potentially more dangerous variant of the virus that has developed in Africa. Jeanette and I have paid the virus the cautious respect it deserves: we got vaccinated as soon as we could, more recently have gotten booster vaccinations, and we religiously wear masks, regularly douse our hands with sanitizer, and try to maintain safe distancing whenever we must leave the farm and go out in public. It continues to baffle me that so many still refuse to get vaccinated, when by now millions upon millions of people have been vaccinated, with no ill effects, whereas the Covid-19 virus continues to kill relentlessly—as I write this, we are nearing 780,000 deaths from it in the U.S. alone, and millions more have died around the world. Those who spread lies and misinformation about the vaccines have a lot, including thousands of unnecessary deaths, to answer for.

Here on the farm, nature, and the change of seasons, play a large role in our existence. In late winter this year, as we always do, we began the early stages of working on our garden, which we depend on to provide a large percentage of the vegetables we eat throughout the year.

Seed starts for the garden.

Spring brings lambing season, always a fun time, although occasionally also sad times, when a lamb does not survive. We do not take extraordinary measures to try to save unhealthy lambs. Our ancient-breed heritage Soay sheep are by nature very hardy and self-sufficient. We do not want to weaken the herd by introducing members with weaknesses or ailments that might be reproduced over time.

Deedee, one of our Soay ewes, with her twins.

Sigrid and a dead lamb.

Although there were a few underperforming areas—every year there always are—overall, our garden and orchard had a very successful, productive year. Some crops, in fact were our best to date, including eggplant, peaches, pears, and apples.

The garden in midsummer.

One of our peach trees, loaded with fruit.

One day’s harvest of apples and pears.

At times the bounty felt like a mixed blessing. Heavy production means long hours of preserving the various crops, so we can enjoy them over the many months until next summer’s crops come in. Late summer and early fall are consumed by freezing and canning vegetables, and Jeanette baked many, many pies this year, which she divided into portions and froze to provide desserts during the winter.

Now that’s an apple pie!

We had enough rain in late spring to allow our pastures to produce lush growth, giving us hope that they could provide our sheep plenty to feed on through the summer.

Lush pasture in early June.

But western Oregon was gripped for most of 2021 by a severe drought, and in mid-June it was hit by a record-setting heat wave: the temperature hit 116 degrees Fahrenheit on our farm, and across Oregon over 100 people died from heat-related causes. By midsummer, our pastures had been burned dry and lifeless, and we were forced to buy hay and alfalfa to supplement what little the sheep were able to forage.

What grass was left by mid-July was so dry it crunched underfoot.

The effects of the heat and drought by midsummer.

For a second year in a row, thanks to the extreme drought and heat brought on from the effects of climate change, Oregon had a brutal wildfire season. At least, unlike last year, we were not directly threatened on our farm, but through most of August and much of September our farm was wreathed with smoke from large fires, the closest of which was burning only about six miles away.

Smoke over the farm and mountain ridge behind during September.

But I have digressed. What you really want to know is what about book 5, yes? I made strong progress on it in late 2020 and the early months of this year. Although having time to write is never a realistic possibility during the busy months of summer, I very much hoped and intended to be able to complete writing book 5 in the fall, setting it up for publication in early 2022. Alas, I’m not going to meet that goal. In the early spring, rather unexpectedly, my German author-partner, Ruth Nestvold, who together with her editor husband, Chris, produces the German translations of the books in The Strongbow Saga, delivered the German translation of The Long Hunt. As those who have read it know, that was a very long book—over twice as long as any of the first three books–and it took a very long time to translate, far longer than Ruth had anticipated. Whenever I have had time to work on The Strongbow Saga since then, I have mostly been working on formatting the Kindle e-book edition of Die Lange Jagd—I contract out the formatting of the EPUB e-book version, which I received back only recently, and the print version, which I’m still waiting on. Because of its length, preparing the German edition of book 4 for publication has been a much longer than usual process. However, I owe it to my German partner to get the book published, and available for sale, as quickly as I can, so that has taken precedence over working on book 5.

I anticipate publishing book 4 in German within the next week or two, after which I will immediately resume writing book 5. However, at this point I cannot realistically hope to complete it before the end of this year. I promise to push hard, though, and get it to you as early as possible in 2022, before the rhythms of life on the farm can once more consume my time.

As Jeanette and I continue with the amazing journey our lives together have given us, we wish you all peace, happiness and safety for the holidays and the coming year.

I had intended to title this post simply “2020,” and post it before the end of the year. It was intended to be a summary of what we had, at times just barely, survived over the course of the year. But 2020 still strikes out at us when it can, so only now do I have the time to write this.

Looking back now on my March 3^rd post in early 2020—my last post before this one, other than the Book 5 preview in December—it feels like a last communication from the before times, from before when everything changed, and a warning of what was to come:

“We—all of us, not just Jeanette and I—are embarked on a very momentous year. The earth’s climate is rushing toward irreversible damage faster than any scientists anticipated, causing ever more frequent extreme, erratic, and destructive weather events. We are, as I write this, in the early stages of what may develop into a dangerous, world-wide pandemic, which could not only cause numerous deaths, but also drive the economies of much of the world, including the United States, into recession. And here, in the United States, we are facing an election which may well determine whether our democracy, as the founding fathers intended it to operate, will survive. We do not seem prepared: our populace is facing these dangerous challenges in a more divided, polarized condition than I have, in my lifetime, ever seen.

We are all in this life together. We must realize that. If we cannot learn to pull together, to try to combat the serious threats we are facing, I do not know what will happen, but I fear things will not end well.”

Covid-19 did in fact become a world-wide pandemic. As I write this today, over two million people have died of the disease world-wide, and over 400,000 of those deaths have been in the United States. And although vaccines have recently become available, it will be months, and hundreds of thousands more deaths, before the pandemic can be considered even somewhat “controlled.” To put the numbers in context, the U.S. has roughly 4.25% of the world’s population, but to date has suffered about 20% of total world-wide deaths from the pandemic. There is no way to white-wash this: in the United States, we botched it badly. Thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens died unnecessarily. The pandemic was always going to be horrible, and a struggle. It was made far worse by the incredible incompetence of Donald Trump and his administration. They have the deaths of thousands on their hands.

My March 3^rd statement that the United States was facing an election that “may well determine whether our democracy…will survive” may have seemed to many who read it at the time as over the top alarmism. Yet what have we all lived through since then? An election that has been repeatedly certified by state and federal officials as clean, fair, and essentially problem free, was repeatedly challenged by Donald Trump as fraudulent. When, in over 60 cases, numerous state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, did not agree, Trump incited his followers—those who chose to blindly accept his lies over the readily available, widely accepted truth—to violently attack the U.S. Congress, in an act of insurrection.

For now, just barely, this country has survived as a democracy. Whether it will continue to will depend upon us all. It is alarming that despite clear, convincing, and readily available evidence to the contrary, millions of Americans chose instead to believe the lies told by Trump and his enablers—including numerous Republican members of Congress, and conservative media, especially the Fox News Channel—that the election was somehow fraudulently stolen from him. As I have written before, it is a terrible danger that there is no longer a single, commonly accepted “truth” in this country.

But let me take this year-end summary back down to a personal level. 2020 was a terrible year for the world, for everyone in it. My heart goes out to all who lost loved ones to the pandemic, who are facing financial struggles or even ruin due to the ravages the pandemic has battered the economy with. For Jeanette and me, it was a very hard year, too. This is our story.

In “normal” years, we measure how the year went by how our garden did—we put much effort into it, and a large percentage of what we eat comes from it. Another measure is how our herd of heritage Soay sheep fared.

When the year began, even despite the gathering storm clouds of the pandemic, it looked likely to be a good year for the farm. Our pastures were the lushest they had been in years, after several years of drought. The spring brought us a healthy crop of new lambs, and a good start to the garden.

Unfortunately, it was the calm before the storm.

In late February, while pruning a tree, I injured my shoulder. At first, I thought it was just tendonitis, a recurring problem I’ve had since we moved to the farm. But when it did not heal, I sought medical assistance, and in March learned, from an MRI exam, that one of the four tendons in my right shoulder joint had ripped loose from the arm bone. It was, at the time the MRI result was reported to me in late March, surgically repairable. Unfortunately, I received the diagnosis two days after all non-essential surgeries were temporarily banned in Oregon, to preserve essential medical supplies.

I did, eventually, receive the needed surgery on my shoulder, in late May of 2020. But whether that particular type of injury can be surgically repaired is time sensitive: if too much time passes, the detached tendon atrophies, and there is no longer anything to reattach to the bone. When the surgeon got inside my shoulder joint, that is what he found (and with 20-20 hindsight, he should have ordered another, updated MRI before proceeding with the surgery). I ended up with a shoulder that now not only is permanently damaged, in that certain ranges of motion are no longer possible due to the missing tendon, but also that was further weakened and damaged by the multiple incisions into the shoulder muscles during the surgery. I am frankly still at a loss to understand why, when he realized the situation, the surgeon did not just back out without doing additional damage.

Back to the garden. The theme of 2020 as the year of the plague carried over. Our garden was hit with multiple plagues of destructive pests. In prior years, during the spring and early summer we could typically harvest almost a cup of raspberries every morning, to enjoy with our breakfast, when we walked up to do our morning chores with the chickens and sheep at the barn. This year, our garden was overrun with an explosion of population of voles, small, rat-like rodents that live in tunnels underground. Most of the new shoots of raspberry canes that grow in the spring and produce fruit were eaten off at ground level by the voles. The canes that did survive and produce fruit were scoured clean every day by swarms of starlings, the bird equivalent of rats. We literally did not harvest a single raspberry from the spring crop.

The voles hit many other crops hard, as well. We have an eight-year-old asparagus patch that normally produces quite prolifically. In 2019, we enjoyed fresh asparagus from April through late July. Although the crop started strong in the spring—and the asparagus patch is surrounded by a low, wire-mesh fence, to in theory protect it from pests—the voles discovered it, tunneled under the fence, and quickly began eating new shoots off as soon as they appeared above the ground. But their damage went far worse than that. When growing asparagus, every year you let a certain number of the shoots grow up into tall—about four or five feet high—fern-like plants, that over the course of the summer give nourishment to the asparagus roots and crowns underground, that produce the crop each year. In normal years, by mid-summer our asparagus patch looks like a fern-like hedge along one side of the garden. But this year, the voles not only ate the new shoots, they also cut down and ate all of the ferns. By late summer, there were none left, and the patch itself was filled with their tunnel openings, worrying us that they may have eaten the roots and crowns as well. We will not know until the coming spring whether we even still have a viable asparagus patch, or if it was destroyed.

Besides the asparagus, the voles ate probably 50% of our pepper crop—sometimes we’d walk into the garden and see them, climbing up on the plants and gnawing at the fruit—and at least 30% of our eggplant. In the orchard, although we were on track in early summer to have our best harvests ever of peaches and pears, in the end we lost at least half of both crops to birds (starlings again, but also crows, which felt like a betrayal, given our long-running relationship with our local flock of crows), and our entire cherry crop.

But the garden travails actually proved to be the least of our struggles in 2020. On the evening of July 30^th, I felt like I might be about to have an attack of diarrhea (and I apologize in advance if this is too graphic). It was something quite different. I had, over the next several hours, repeated instances of large amounts of blood gushing from my bowels. After one occasion, I staggered out to our living room, collapsed onto the sofa, then my head fell back (I learned this from my poor Jeanette, who dealt with it), my eyes rolled back into my head, and I stopped breathing. Jeanette grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, crying, “Jud, come back to me!” until I finally started breathing again, and regained consciousness.

The EMT crew arrived soon after. Not surprisingly, my blood pressure had fallen dangerously low. I was transported by ambulance to a hospital in Eugene, and spent most of the next five days there. The bleeding continued for some time, and I ended up having five transfusions to replace the large volume of blood lost. Eventually, the bleeding stopped. Disconcertingly, despite several exploratory procedures, including an endoscopy, a CT scan, and a colonoscopy, the doctors were never able to determine where or why the bleeding had occurred.

If there is a single picture that captures 2020 for us, it is the following one, taken by our driveway camera, of Jeanette, walking up the drive to check the mail on one of the days when I was in the hospital. At the time, neither of us were sure whether I’d be coming home. It is a visual moment in time reflecting pure stress.

But thankfully, I did make it home. I was physically weak for some time afterwards, and we were both emotionally shaken.

In mid-August, a new problem arose. I developed a large, red lump on the side of my left ankle. It was roughly the size of a tennis ball, cut in half and painted red, stuck onto the side of my leg. Jeanette, who is a retired nurse, was concerned that it was cellulitis, a potentially dangerous infection. I did not have the emotional energy to deal with it, and tried at first to ignore it, hoping it would just go away.

Then came Labor Day, 2020. Our farm is located in the McKenzie River Valley in western Oregon. On the night of September 7^th, Labor Day, there were high winds. We’d been planning to grill lamb burgers that night, but changed our plans and threw together a simple meal inside because of the wind. About 8:30 PM, our power went out. We learned later that about ten to fifteen miles upriver, the winds had knocked down a power line, and started a wildfire that spread rapidly, driven by the wind. A small town called Blue River, close to the origin of the fire, was completely destroyed during the night, and emergency alerts went out for residents downriver to evacuate.

We went to bed that night blissfully unaware of what was going on. Our farm is in a cell phone dead zone. When at home, our cell phones depend on our household Wi-Fi system to operate, and that died when the power did.

We awoke the morning of September 8^th to a surreal view. The sky was a dull, yellow-gray haze. The sun wasn’t visible. The ground was covered with charred, blackened leaves and pine needles.

Charred leaves littered the ground.

We walked up to the street to check our mail and paper, and noticed that the neighborhood seemed deserted. As we reached the mailbox, my cellphone began screeching an alert tone. The message said, “Wildfire. Code 3 evacuation. Go Now!”
A few moments later a police car, from the nearby city of Springfield, came driving slowly down the street. The officers stopped, and asked what we were doing—were we waiting for someone to come pick us up? When we said no, and explained that we really didn’t know what was going on, they said a wildfire was spreading rapidly down the valley, and we needed to leave as quickly as possible.
As quickly as we could, we loaded our car with what we thought were essentials: changes of clothes, important documents, dog food for Sigrid, our Border Collie, etc. For some reason, I loaded all of our emergency lanterns and batteries we kept on hand for power outages. I still don’t understand that thought process. There was nothing we could do for our chickens and sheep, other than hope they would make it on their own. Our property is mostly open pasture, which is grazed by the sheep, so if the fire did reach it, hopefully any burning would be a relatively low-level grass fire.
We eventually ended up in a motel in Eugene, roughly 30 miles from our home. Even that far away, the smoke was so heavy that people were warned to venture outdoors as little as possible.

The smoke was heavy in Eugene, thirty miles away from the fire.

We lived in the motel in Eugene for eight days. After the first day or so, we discovered geographic maps available online that were updated daily, and showed the progress of the fire. We could zoom in and see how close it was to our farm. Although it came quite close, burning the top of the mountain ridge right behind us, fortunately it never reached our land.

The restrictions of the ongoing pandemic complicated our evacuee life. Most restaurants were open only for take-out. We ventured out of the motel room only briefly, once or twice per day, to take Sigrid for walks or to pick up food. Netflix was a very welcome companion.

The fact that we were already in Eugene—plus the fact that my leg was becoming increasingly painful—did lead us to see our primary care practice and begin the odyssey of trying to figure out what was going on with my leg and treat it. The initial diagnosis agreed with Jeanette’s worry—probably cellulitis—and a short course of antibiotics was begun.

Finally, on September 16^th, we learned that residents of the valley, up to milepost 19 of the McKenzie Highway, were allowed to return to their homes. Our farm is literally at milepost 19. We gratefully made our way home. By the time we arrived, the power was even back on, although the contents of our refrigerator and three freezers, including most of the summer’s crops we’d processed and frozen, were spoiled from eight days without power.

Approaching a National Guard checkpoint as we returned to the Valley on the 16th.

The photo below, showing the burned ridge-top behind our home, shows how close the fire came. The wildfire, officially named the Holiday Farm Fire, burned approximately 25 miles of the McKenzie River Valley. It spread almost 20 miles during the first night’s wind storm. Fortunately, after the first night, the high winds died down and the fire moved from the valley floor up onto the mountain ridges on either side of the valley, away from most homes and communities. But vast areas of forest were burned. And in the fire’s aftermath, extensive salvage logging—a controversial practice—is now occurring. Every day, all day long, empty logging trucks race up the McKenzie highway past our farm, and return carrying the blackened trunks of trees, many huge, old growth ones. Vast areas of forest are being transformed into barren clear-cuts. It will be decades before this once pristine forest valley recovers, if it ever does.

But the fire was not the last of our 2020 troubles. The issue with my leg—eventually it spread to both legs—has proved to be a “stump the doctors” mystery. Repeated bloodwork lab tests, a biopsy, and an MRI have all been inconclusive, but the condition, whatever it is, has gradually gotten worse. Multiple medications, aimed at theorized possible causes have mostly proved unsuccessful. By New Year’s Day, both legs had severe skin eruptions and discoloration, swelling, and the ankle and knee joints were painful and swollen, to the point where I could barely fit shoes on my feet.

Things are a bit better now. After researching the National Institute of Health’s Rare Disease site, I suggested to my doctor that possibly I could have Brucellosis, a bacterium carried, often asymptomatically, by various types of animals, including sheep—we have a herd of heritage sheep. By this point she was willing to give any reasonable theory a try, so ordered blood tests to look for the Brucella antibody, and put me on a long-term program of Doxycycline, the  antibiotic used to treat Brucellosis. Although the blood test came back negative, the antibiotic has gradually reduced the inflammation in my legs, to the point where there is almost no swelling or joint pain, and the skin inflammation has receded to just the areas around each ankle. So, although at this point we still have no idea what the condition in my legs is, it does seem that, due to the improvement brought about by the antibiotic, I have some kind of systemic infection., although it is a mystery why signs of infection do not show up in the lab tests. I am still a long way from well, but at least, for the first time in a long time, the condition of my legs seems to be heading, though slowly, in a positive direction.

So that was our hard year. Jeanette and I still find ourselves feeling emotionally, and often physically, exhausted many days. But we made it, and are keenly aware that in this past horrible year, and its continuing effects in the current one, many people did not, and many others are still struggling to survive. It is too often uttered as a cliché, but our thoughts and prayers are with you all. And on the bright side, a brush with mortality is a strong motivator to complete things still undone. Book 5 is on the way, and book 6 will follow.

Here, underneath our 2020 Christmas tree, is a little present–a link to a secret page on this website, where you’ll find…drumroll…a preview of book 5.

This doesn’t mean the book is coming out eminently. There’s still considerable writing, editing, and publishing work to be done. But look for it in 2021.