“One, two, three - go!” Two leaves, picked from the ground in the middle of their
decomposition, pirouetted down to the water. I watched from my perch on Red Fox Bridge as my leaf got caught by a loose strand of wind, giving my dad’s mottled leaf a slight advantage. The two of us crossed to the other side of the bridge to look downstream where Tryon Creek cut through the riparian vegetation. The leaves took their time, traveling under the bridge and out of sight. My red suede shoes, perfectly suited for playground clambering, gave away my impatience as they jiggled up and down atop a rung of the bridge’s railing.
From up the trail, the muted thumps of a runner turned into timbrous thwacks as she reached the wood bridge: a drumroll for our leaves as they approached the finish line. Three strides and she was across the bridge, and our attention returned to the creek’s surface. My dad’s leaf emerged first from the bridge’s cool, dark underside. Mine lagged behind, content with its tour of an unseen eddy below our feet. I felt the warmth of the early autumn sun, of Dad’s face, reminding me that it was all a game.
“To everything, turn, turn, turn . . . there is a season, turn, turn, turn . . . and a time to every purpose under heaven,” he hummed to the Byrds song in his head as we made our way back to the visitor’s center. “Did you know that the lyrics are from the book of Ecclesiastes?” I stumbled over the name of the biblical book, my mouth struggling to create space for the word. Another tidbit from Dad’s encyclopedic brain to tuck away for later.
~
My dad has taken a winding path through his seasons. As an elementary school student in small-town Iowa, he wrote a report about Oregon because its state tree, the Douglas fir, shared his name. He free-wheeled through much of his young adulthood, itinerantly pursuing higher education in Iowa, New Mexico, Utah, Nebraska. He ambled golf course maintenance to journalism, then from teaching to law. Now, he has been settled among the Douglas firs as a public defender in a suburb of Portland for more than two decades. At the dinner table, Dad fills his airtime with stories about children set adrift from their broken families in the gyre of foster parents and far-flung relatives. He occasionally comes home late after visits to his displaced two-, seven-, thirteen-year-old clients at their current homes.
“Well, my client wants to live with mom and not grandma, but mom hasn’t showed up to the last couple hearings,” he begins to explain. “Mom passed her last psychiatric exam, which is a good sign. My client’s two half-brothers are together in a foster family and don’t want to go back to mom, though. Ideally, we would keep all the siblings together, but I don’t think the Department of Human Services will do that.” Our family, still intact and nearly picture-perfect, has heard about countless similar moms and daughters and brothers. I ask my dad a few questions about how this little girl is faring through this tumult. What do my classmates and their Nike executive parents talk about over dinner, I wonder?
I know my dad best on the weekends. Our tradition of Pooh sticks, our name for leaf racing in Tryon Creek’s own Hundred Acre Wood, is a steady metronome throughout my childhood. The different shoes carrying us to Red Fox Bridge change the percussive landscape across time. The rhythm tapped out my footwear, once my red suede slip-ons and now women’s running shoes, complements the walking bass line of my dad’s all-occasion Saucony’s. Although my dad’s favorite model of shoe was discontinued years ago, he has continued to find and buy pairs online, drawing out his part of the ensemble as long as possible.
As I switched from perusing the children’s shoe rack to the women’s section, my dad became my first and favorite weekend running partner. Six decades of use are beginning to limit how long his hips will cooperate on runs, but he proudly tells me about recent runs along shorter loops of familiar trails. Dad’s Sunday mornings in summertime are for trail runs, waffles, the early First Unitarian Church service, and mowing the lawn in his indigo and violet sweatsuit from the mid-nineties. My best summer weekends at home fit snugly into this pattern of my dad’s entrenched habits.
My feet are now bound for a new, less comfortable home in neutral pumps and black loafers, continuing their beat on urban sidewalks instead of the soft trails of Tryon Creek State Natural Area. In little more than a month, I will walk from the jade green carpet at the Portland airport onto a plane that will deposit me and my one-way ticket on glossy, muted flooring in Washington, D.C. A handle of days later, I will begin my new job at an environmental policy organization, where I will work for the next two years.
Although I have spent a winter in D.C., the heavy heat of East Coast July is foreign to me. For me, the best of summer is Tryon Creek, and the best of Tryon Creek is summer. Around the time of my first memories of Pooh sticks with my Dad, I began going to the park’s summer day camp. Magic hid behind every leaf I passed, given away by the twinkle of dappled sunlight peeking through. The sparkle of a cascading rivulet flowing through lush understory, positioned right at my eight-year-old’s eye level, signaled that my own Narnia lay on the other side. A perfectly spherical mouse the diameter of a quarter, dawdling across multiple trails my group took in a single day, was more than a slow creature bound for elimination by natural selection - it was a heroic figure on a brave mission through the park. Even my dad’s trees, the ubiquitous Douglas firs, had a backstory. The frills sticking out from under the scales of Douglas fir cones, counselors told us during story time, were the feet and tail of mice that fled a forest fire eons ago. On a hike, my camp counselor pointed out the tree’s rough bark. “The Douglas fir is the grooooviest tree in the forest,” she told our group with a 70s-inspired shimmy that made us giggle. The splendors at Tryon Creek, fantasy novels sprouted in moist Oregon soil, rustled through my young mind’s eye.
In high school, when I led the same summer camp, I gathered my group for breaks near the large, metal circles of storm drain covers that made for perfect lunch spots. The creeping, omnipresent moss had begun to claim the storm drains as its own, but it could not fully camouflage the alien, three-foot-wide disks. The natural world that so enthralled me was, it turned out, not always so natural. Socrates Tryon staked his claim on the land in 1850, and he continues to watch over the park as a life-size cardboard cutout in Tryon Creek’s interpretive center. He later sold the forest to be used for timber in nearby iron smelting. Logging within what are now the park boundaries continued for the better part of the following century. Part of the natural area was slated for development before Multnomah County and a nonprofit of concerned citizens bought the land to turn it into a park in the 1970s, a victory over urban expansion heralded by current park staff. Today, it is wedged at the boundary of a well-to-do partm of Southwest Portland - my neighborhood - and Lake Oswego, one of the most affluent suburbs in the metro area. Missing from the park’s origin story I heard from camp counselors and the interpretive center’s exhibits were the people who lived at Tryon Creek before Tryon himself arrived. The land belonged to the Clackamas people, but I learned about the Clackamas and other Native communities at the Oregon Historical Society, not at Tryon Creek.
~
One of my favorite camp traditions as a camp counselor at Tryon Creek was a song about the park’s flora. “Aaaa Douglas fir, a Douglas fir,” I would sing, my hands clapping over my head with each repetition, “itty-bitty shrub and a Douglas fir.” My campers giggled as they rushed to squat down like a shrub and stand stick-straight to be trees in time with the lyrics. “A sword fern, a sword fern” - all arms and legs outstretched - “itty-bitty shrub and a Douglas fir.” I picked up the pace of the song, testing the campers’ bodily coordination as the motions become faster and faster. The triumphant campers whirled to the ground as the song ended.
Faster, faster. I am rushing now, too, hurtling towards the less-than-known and asking a lot of myself as I prepare for the eastward launch. The cadence that has underpinned my decades on the West Coast is winding up, turning into a blur of activity. “...ittybittyshrubandadouglasfir!”
Song lyrics, circulating back from the recesses of my mind, often hold the baton to direct my perspective. In my search for music to load onto my first MP3 player in middle school, I unearthed Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits in my parents’ CD collection. The sunny countenances of the two frothy-haired singers, already overexposed in the album art and undoubtedly faded further under my parents’ care, drew me in to the music. Starting with the songs I recognized from car rides with my dad listening to the oldies radio station, I explored their repertoire. The duo has perennially guided me over troubled waters, providing an answer to every situation in the form of acoustic harmonies. Their music echoes through my memories of a winter I spent in Washington, D.C., in a program through my university.
“I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song,
Twenty-two now but I won’t be for long,
Time hurries on, and the leaves that are green turn to brown.”
My time in D.C. was brisk, with spring beginning to show its pale pink and bright green in the cherry blossom trees surrounding Tidal Basin just as I prepared to leave. Many elements of my short time in D.C. were unfamiliar, patterns that require more than a few months of acclimation. Following the stream of working professionals in grey and navy D.C. uniforms on the escalator down into the Metro station, I turned my tote bag so that the floral pattern was tucked under my arm, exposing only the gray fabric to my fellow commuters. The ivory and aged brick buildings announced their age and importance, thumbing their noses at my West Coast and its youth. The weather, though - the weather was familiar. The flush in my nose and cheeks and the sharp air in my lungs when I stepped outside into a snow flurry reminded me of morning walks across an icy playground and frosted soccer field to the public bus stop in Portland.
In other ways, too, Washington, D.C., isn’t as different from the West Coast, my region-as-home, as it first appears. I will be living near Rock Creek Park, which winds its way through the northwest quadrant of the city. When I ran there last winter, my feet fell hard with each step on the concrete path, and multiple lanes of traffic directly adjacent served as a constant reminder of the urban setting. The foliage did not welcome me into its fold. Bare, nameless deciduous trees stood passively, unconcerned with my passing. Without mnemonics for species names and restricted to the crevices between busy streets and residential neighborhoods, the park flattened to little more than a movie backdrop, another man-made edifice of this built environment.
Perhaps I didn’t give Rock Creek a fair chance. Upon closer inspection, it bears striking resemblance to Tryon Creek. Like Tryon, Rock Creek was Native land claimed by European-Americans soon after their arrival in North America. In the antebellum years, the land was worked by slaves at the Georgetown tobacco plantation. During the Civil War, the land that became the park was completely logged before being designated as the country’s first federally managed park in 1890, a story arc reminiscent of Tryon’s conversion from stolen land to industry fodder to venerated green space. Like Tryon, Rock Creek Park fringes neighborhoods saturated with wealth and class privilege. The first daughter’s family, as well as dozens of embassies, are within walking distance of Rock Creek’s path towards the Potomac River. My presence in the two parks is both a privilege and a reminder of unjust histories and systems from which I benefit.
I have yet to intimately learn Rock Creek flora, the dips and turns of its trail system. Hints of the park’s secrets glimmered as I passed, caught by the winter sunlight, when I ran there last year. A knobbly mass of roots buckled my knees as I climbed up a hill on a run to explore the nearby trails. I looked up at the branches, my brow furrowed at the tree’s audacity to make its home on the steep incline and trip me. Looking back, I realize that I cannot even remember what the tree looked like. I was the one in the wrong. The memorable plant names and folk stories that endear Tryon Creek to me, as well as the centuries-long narratives that were left out of my early experiences at Tryon Creek, are out there, alighting on Rock Creek’s breeze. It’s up to me to listen.
My dad has followed me to D.C. twice before: once for a spring break academic program when I was in sixth grade, and again for a national competition during my sophomore year of high school. In those visits, he stood carefully on the periphery, letting me grow by being with my peers. Rock Creek is one of his favorite places in D.C., too, although we have not yet run there together. I can already see us at the stone bridge crossing Rock Creek near my apartment, picking up the choicest fallen leaves and letting them go downstream. My dad is scoping out nearby baseball games, upcoming professional conferences, and cheap flights to D.C., eager to visit in the next few years.
Is my dad still following me at this point, or am I following him? Unlike my mom, a through-and-through West Coaster, my dad’s life history predisposes him to support my efforts to uproot and replant my life across the country. Snippets of his moves in earlier years knot together through his important documents: a Michigan birth certificate, a Utah State diploma, bar exams passed in Nebraska, California, and Oregon. I am parachuting down to my job in D.C. to settle for a time, knowing I will undoubtedly land on a trampoline that will send me skywards and elsewhere soon after. Like with my dad’s salary as a public defender, the public good will take a significant cut out of my nonprofit sector pay. If my dad can bounce from state to state, doing good while making a pittance, why can’t I?
~
Oregon’s state flower, the trillium, is a delicate, tripartite white bloom. It is a
breathtaking harbinger of spring. At summer camp as a child, I was told that each plant blooms only once every seven years. Although that is not true according to field guides, each flower still feels like a gift, the park revealing its secrets just for me. Over my last spring break of college, the trillium were flowering in abundance at Tryon Creek. Clusters of a dozen or more peered out towards me and my dad as we followed our familiar trails. The trillium were wind turbines on a grassy hill one moment, then bright pinpricks of light shining through a threadbare fabric held against the sun.
As the trillium stood mute, watching us pass, I got the distinct feeling that the blooms were waving me farewell. Their ivory petals, cupped into the small palms of princess waves, swayed gently when a breeze moved through. Goodbye Douglas firs, goodbye Douglas, goodbye Dad.