Journey’s End, and New Beginnings

Today is two months from the date my wife, Jeanette, and I first reached Oregon. So much has happened, and things have been moving so fast.

Our plan was to live in a rental house in Eugene for a number of months, while we became familiar with the area and began our search for a permanent home. We’d already looked at a number of properties on a quick trip in January, as well as regularly checking listings online that our realtor sent us, and did not think the process of finding a “final” home in a price range we could afford would be a quick one.

Good thing our lease was month to month. Within less than a week, we found our dream home, on five acres located on the McKenzie River to the east of Eugene. It’s modest in size–something we wanted–but a beautiful house that brings the outdoors inside, and is surrounded by breathtaking views. We moved in two weeks ago today.

The first night in our new home, a rainbow appeared over the mountains across the river.

We are still in a state of mixed astonishment and bliss. The closeness to nature and the beauty here are breathtaking. The weather can be fascinatingly mercurial: today, we’ve had steady, gentle showers (typical eastern Oregon weather for this time of year), periods of unusually hard, driving rain, intermittent spells of bright, warm sunshine, and one hard hail storm that left the ground briefly covered in white. The air here smells and feels fresh and crisp, and the background noise we hear is no longer the constant sounds of traffic, and frequent police helicopters circling overhead, but instead the murmur of the fast-flowing river, visible from the window of my new office where I’m typing this, the honking of wild geese that are nesting on a nearby island and often fly low over our land, and the occasional crowing of a neighbor’s roosters.

Evening fog rises over the river, and hides the tops of the mountains on the far side.

But we are constantly mindful that our own good fortune and happiness comes at the cost of someone else’s misfortune and sorrow. Another couple built this home as their dream home after moving to Oregon, but they lived in it only a few months, then lost it in the recession. For us, it was a manifestation of our “trust fate” belief: when we first saw the property, it had been on the market for less than two weeks, was a bank-owned foreclosure (and the bank was eager to get rid of it), and was priced at less than half of its original tax listing valuation the year it was built, just before the recession (and the recession hit Oregon very hard, the economy here is still in rough shape, and property values have plummeted). For its original owners, it must have been a crushing disappointment. I hope they find a new dream.

The land itself was once part of a large farm, and is almost all open pasture. We see it as a blank canvas on which to paint our new life. One one side, where a single, large old apple tree stands, will be a small orchard. We’ve scrambled during the past two weeks and planted seventeen more small saplings, a mix of fruit and nut trees, so they can get a start during the once-a-year spring planting season. It will take two to three years for them to begin to produce, and we didn’t want to lose this whole year. I’ve tilled and we’ve planted the first bed in what will eventually become a sizable garden plot, we’ve planted blueberry bushes and raspberry canes (blackberries grow wild all across the property) and a small asparagus bed–additional efforts that will not produce for a year or two, so needed to be begun. Today we cut up one of the large wardrobe boxes from our move and turned it into a makeshift brooder. Some of the feed and hardware stores here stock baby chicks during April–another of those brief spring windows that have to be seized or it will be missed until next year–and we’ll be bringing some home tomorrow.

The initial ground-breaking for the new garden.

Soon the spring windows of opportunity will all be passed, either seized or missed until next year. Soon all of the boxes will be unpacked, and life here will begin to find its new routine. Soon I once again will return to Halfdan’s newest adventure. When I left him, he, too, was preparing to leave on a new voyage, sailing east from Denmark….