32
Wednesday, July 5, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
The Summer of
Women
Here on the Figure 8, it
is the summer of women.
I admit to difficulties in
the transition. For lengthy
seasons in this life I have
operated altogether outside
the influence of women,
marooned entirely alone
on the desert, for instance,
or crammed into warships
with a battalion of humor-
less leathernecks. And if
anywhere there truly is a
man’s world, look no further
than the Marine Corps berth-
ing spaces on-board naval
shipping: It is like living in
a bobbing jar full of angry
hornets.
But this summer my
daughter is here. An adult
now, she is training and
studying for the demands
of the hard career she has
chosen, and together with
my wife they have —
either by accident or design
— embarked on an aggres-
sive plan for my re-educa-
tion and re-integration.
I am being “main-
streamed.”
Thus far, my faulty gro-
cery-shopping strategies
have been corrected. I now
understand that the shortest
distance between two points
is not, after all, a straight
line, but rather a meander-
ing, philosophical, ingredi-
ent-reading, chatting, back-
tracking, calorie-counting,
and randomly deviating
course between the sour
cream and the salad dressing.
I have been wrong about
that for years.
Also, there are certain
things that must never go in
the dishwasher, ever, under
any circumstances — for
reasons that are apparently
classified. This is also true of
the microwave. And, alarm-
ingly, there are strict proce-
dures and protocols involv-
ing various detergents and
temperature settings on the
washing machine.
In my own defense, I
have always done my own
laundry. For years I just used
shampoo because I couldn’t
see any reason to buy 10
different kinds of soap. I
mixed colors and washed
everything with warm
water. It worked. I have now
learned that this was bad
behavior.
I haven’t simply turned in my
man-card and given up.
I think I still have the
dogs on my side, but ulti-
mately they are, as well as
the colt, eunuchs, which
isn’t helpful when I try to
build a coalition of men to
defend my less-considered
tendencies.
And it isn’t just my wife
and daughter who look at
me sideways. Elsewhere on
the rancho there are two agi-
tated mares, seven attitudinal
chickens, and a lunatic barn-
cat — who kills things daily
— all of them serving to
remind me of Karen Blixen’s
marvelous line from “Out of
Africa”: “You know you are
truly alive when you are liv-
ing among lions.”
Women, I think, have
consistently failed to realize
and exploit their full pow-
ers. Women stand poised on
the very precipice of world
domination. It’s likely they
always have, and even more
likely that they already know
this. I don’t know why they
haven’t yet — unless it is
because they’d just rather
not.
Please don’t misunder-
stand me. I haven’t simply
turned in my man-card and
given up. I resist this new
wife-daughter axis daily, in
guerilla fashion, occasion-
ally and weakly resorting
to a rather juvenile kind of
muttering under my breath.
Which is probably bet-
ter than caterwauling and
throwing fine china at the
menials like Richard Burton
on a three-day bender in St.
Tropez.
Meanwhile, when the
women in my life blast off
to yoga and I am allowed to
peek at the news, I see that
the President of the United
States continues tweeting
like a 6th-grader who just
swallowed a lemon, and the
entire state of Illinois has
been downgraded to junk
status.
A s t r a n g e s u m m e r,
indeed.
I’m exaggerating all of
this, of course. But it does
raise a poignant question:
what would I do without
these lovely women that I
love? I have some ideas,
none of them good, and most
of them involving strange
visions of myself wan-
dering aimlessly through
the Nevada desert in torn
trousers and ratty slip-
pers, looking like a bald,
piratical hybrid of Harry
Dean Stanton and Edward
Abbey.
The truth is, I am
enthralled and grateful daily,
and despite the corrections
— some harsher than others
— of my attitudes and behav-
iors, I am in full admiration
and appreciation for the
women in my life. While it
is true that they occasionally
drive me to the slippery edge
of total insanity, I wouldn’t
change a thing.
I feel like the speaker
in Jim Wright’s poem
“A Blessing,” who is
approached by horses in a
spring pasture. Their world,
he knows, is entirely their
own. “There is no loneliness
like theirs,” he says, accept-
ing that there are things
about them he will never
understand. But even across
that gulf, they have walked
over and welcomed him as a
guest, and he longs most to
be amongst them.
He stands admiring them
for the longest time and then,
suddenly, realizes that his
love for them is so encom-
passing, so joyful, so power-
ful, that “if I stepped out of
my body I would break into
blossom.”
And so it is these warm
summer evenings, with the
dogs napping and shadows
stretching across the grass,
when we gather on the porch
to unwind the day and find
each other again, that I lis-
ten to my wife and daughter
quietly talking and laughing,
and watch them when they
don’t know it, and feel every
cell in my body beginning to
bloom.
Family
of driver
crushed by
tree sues
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) —
The family of a Washington
man killed when a tree fell on
his car in the Columbia River
Gorge seeks $2.2 million in
a lawsuit against the State of
Oregon.
The suit filed Wednesday
in Portland asserts the Oregon
Department of Transportation
has a duty to maintain trees
along Highway 30, and the
tree that crushed 27-year-old
Jorge Figueroa showed obvi-
ous signs of decay.
The
Covington,
Washington, man and sev-
eral relatives visited Latourell
Falls in two cars on June 28,
2015. The tree fell shortly
after they left the parking
lot of the popular tourist
spot.
The suit says Figueroa’s
wife was seriously hurt in the
incident. His mother-in-law
and 1-year-old daughter were
also in the car, but escaped
injury.
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