On a Wednesday in September of 1992, my dad called about a farm. Two hundred sixty-five acres in the Willamette Valley had come up, and he wanted to know if it had promise. Back then unirrigated farmland in the area went for something like a thousand dollars an acre. It still blows my mind to say that out loud.
I drove down to have a look. About a third of it was forest. Another third was good farmland. One border ran along Muddy Creek. There was an old farmstead and a trailer where a mother and daughter lived, eighty and fifty-five years old. Up on the hills between the fields and the timber sat a couple of five-acre Christmas tree farms. In between lay oak prairie and savanna, the kind of open ground where a few trees had been standing long before any of us showed up.
A forester in Corvallis named Bob Latham found it. He figured the timber was too young to cut, but he passed it along anyway. I parked at the northeast corner and hiked straight up through the forest.
What I walked into didn’t look like young trees. It looked like a harvestable stand. There was Douglas fir sixteen, eighteen, twenty inches through and a good eighty to one hundred and twenty feet tall, a lot of them climbing right up over the oaks. You could read the whole history standing there. It had been oak country once, open ground, grazed by cattle. Somewhere in the late fifties or early sixties the cattle went away. And out in that old pasture stood three big Douglas firs, forty to fifty inches across, with huge limbs, the kind a tree only throws when it grows up alone in the open. Those three had seeded the whole hillside, ninety or a hundred acres of forest, in thirty or forty years.
Jack put his hands on that ground years later. “I remember growing up,” he wrote, “the smell of the air and soil was different under the oaks than it was in the forest.” He was right, and standing up there in ’92 I was looking at the reason for it. The fir had taken the high seat. The Oregon white oaks underneath were fighting for light and losing.
When I broke out on top, the view stopped me cold. I don’t remember whether I found a phone booth on the way home or waited until I got there. Either way the call was short. “This is a gem. We need to buy it.”
A week later I drove Jan down and we walked it together. We loved it.
My folks ended up buying it on their own. Before long they’d hired an architect named Gary Day and built a house near where I had come out of the forest. I supplied much of the lumber for it, beams and framing and siding and finish, hauled in by good friends in the business. When the house was finished, they named it Raindance Ranch.
All three of our boys arrived in the years after. Nick, Jack, and Zack grew up out there, playing, hiking, planting, working. That ground is in them and always will be.
The oaks got their due eventually. There’s oak savanna out there now, restored, a lot of hard work in it. A researcher from the Corvallis area, Dennis Albert, studied a piece of one of the old oaks that had fallen and counted the rings back to 1608.
Jack runs the Oswego Lake Watershed Council these days, and those trees never left him. “My grandparents introduced me to oak trees in 1996 on their ranch in the Willamette Valley,” he wrote not long ago, “a playground of ponds, creeks, crops, woods, pasture, oak prairie, and savanna.” He thinks about them the way you think about elders. “These trees are older than me,” he wrote, “but their young offspring are brand new. Each acorn carries the story of its ancestors and the memory of the place.” And about what it means to have land like that handed down: “These trees have grown under the care, or neglect, of many generations. Each generation has both the benefits and the responsibilities of the land.”
He calls an oak a memory and a connector. He got that right.
Most of the timber out there is seventy to eighty years old now. The old farmhouse still stands next to an older orchard, and the new orchard up by the house, near where I came out of the forest thirty-three years ago, has filled all the way in. The wildlife flourishes. Back in that ninety acres of fir, though, the oaks are mostly gone, nine hundred, maybe twelve hundred of them in there once, most of them dead now, a few still hanging on with a branch or two of leaves.
Which brings me to a table.
When I was a senior in high school I took wood shop, like I had every year, but that last year I wanted something big. My dad had two thick redwood slabs he’d salvaged from a log that had rolled to the bottom of a canyon decades before. Somebody had cut it up, chainsaw or otherwise, and the slabs ran four or five inches thick. I built a table out of one of them, posts, rails, and that big slab on top. When I finished it, it went to my dad’s forestry company and sat in the conference room at Hammon, Jensen & Wallen for a few years.
When my dad left the firm, we had to get the table out. My best man, Bruce Nikolai, who I grew up with back in Orinda, and I, and a couple of others, stood there working out that the thing was too big to fit through the office door. So we slid a window open and took it out that way.
It sits at Raindance Ranch now, out past Monroe toward Alpine, on ground that was holding its own trees long before it ever held that table.