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Archive for the ‘Jacksonville’ Category

Today I went back to the Jacksonville Woodlands to do the Petard Ditch Loop, a 1 1/2 mile hike that starts at Rich Gulch, which I covered here. To get to the trailhead, either hike up to Rich Gulch as I described in that post, or drive further up Oregon Street to the streetside trailhead [...]

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While I was hiking in Rich Gulch, in the Jacksonville Woodlands in Southern Oregon, I walked a little ways above the former mining works to the area called Frenchman’s Gulch. It got that name due to the numbers of French families who made their way into the area in the 19th and very early 20th [...]

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Although it’s not a great photo, this place, the Jacksonville Woodlands, is my favorite place to hike. It’s a rink of privately-acquired (though publicly accessible) woods surrounding the historic town of Jacksonville, Oregon, where part of my family is from.
I wrote up my favorite hike there as a sample for a column I was planning [...]

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My latest publication came out Sunday in the Medford Mail Tribune. It was an essay on the changes I’d seen in the town my mother grew up in, Jacksonville, Oregon. It was published in an occasional 2A column called, Southern Oregon Journal, which doesn’t get posted online apparently. The reaction to it was very positive, [...]

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Jacksonville Cemetery.

Click picture to return to Table of Contents.
The next several weeks passed slowly
in lonely walks or quiet visits to
the men he’d come to care so deeply for.
Kinney, Miller, Sachs, and Washington,
the Doctor and Helms and Thurmond and their wives.
People stopped to give condolences, Father
Blanchet, Mr. Barnum, Billy. Father
Blanchet blessed the barn with his [...]

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Jackson Creek.

Click photo to return to Table of Contents.
The tunnel closed around him, an arch of brush
that locked the sky out except those gaps the moon
got in through, the broken light skirling over
the water’s shifting, leaping surface. He followed
that erratic scribble up the creek
within the hairy vein whose shape lent direction
to his suddenly fractured [...]

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Miller’s Grocery.

Click photo to return to Table of Contents.
“I’ll tell you something Nicholas-no matter what the size
a place is, it’s full of fear and joy and drama.
Look around you! This dying town,
half in boards, is as full of stories as Shanghai,
yes, or Alexandria.”

They walked together, Nick
and Thurmond, up California buying groceries
and supplies, both [...]

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City Hall.

Click photo to return to Table of Contents.
Although the trees were leafless now that spread
their bare branches above the City Hall,
still, they formed a bower as though the boughs
had grown together, woven as tight as a rush
mat. The rain, when it came, would run down
around this canopy and the women who stood beneath [...]

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Lathrop House and Barn.

Click photo to return to Table of Contents.
A faint and far-off heartbeat struck his sleep
from down below. He felt his sense, a captive
to the Toledan sky of dreams, reach through the starry
space and felt, conversely, sense from outside
make its way to him. It’s like the rain
that seeks in falling on the ground [...]

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St. Joseph’s.

Click photo to return to Table of Contents.
A month went by in total, three more weeks
that filled with money matters, men, his brother.
He’d talked with Beekman, straightened up accounts
and found out what was left his brother, very
little after all. He’d spoken then
with the lawyer, Duncan, set the house in order
titling it to Nicholas, [...]

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