Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Applegater. (Jacksonville, OR) 2008-current | View Entire Issue (July 1, 2014)
Applegater Summer 2014 Little Applegate’s Neds Bar Timber Sale Thank YOU, Applegaters! Voters approve new service district by jOhN gERRITSmA The Medford District Bureau of Land Management’s goal is to produce 46-million board feet of timber in 2014 and 2015. The Neds Bar and South Fork Little Butte sales will be the Ashland Resource Area’s contribution to the Medford District timber harvest for 2015. While the Neds Bar project is located in the Applegate, the South Fork project is in the Cascades south of Highway 140. The Neds Bar Timber Sale analysis area is within much of the Little Applegate Watershed. The area was previously assessed under the Bald Lick project (2005) and encompassed both the Bald Lick and Bobar Timber Sale projects. The timber sale offering for Bald Lick in 2005 did not sell. Subsequent community and collaborative efforts resulted in the Bald Lick and O’Lickety timber sales, as well as the Lick Stew stewardship project. Currently, the Ashland Resource Area is undertaking a number of data- gathering exercises for the Neds Bar project including surveys for sensitive plants and animals, and cultural sites. Foresters and engineers are developing feasibility plans for accessing and/or harvesting potential timber stands. Timber stands in the previous Bobar Timber Sale area and stands within the remaining Bald Lick analysis area not subsequently harvested are subject to evaluation for the Neds Bar project. Excluding current and recent past projects, approximately 5 - 6,000 acres are left to assess for treatments including timber harvest and noncommercial thinning. The subsequently developed initial plan, based on current field assessments, is called the “Proposed Action.” (For more discussion of the term Proposed Action, see the Council on Environmental Quality regulations for implementing the National Environmental Policy Act.) The Proposed Action will describe a potential treatment level in the assessment area meeting the District’s Resource Management Plan’s standards and guidelines. The general description of the Proposed Action will be introduced in the scoping process (anticipated for May-June 2014), and may or may not be the selected alternative in the future decision for the project. As a result of the scoping process, there will likely be additional alternatives developed to address social, economic, and 5 environmental issues unresolved by the Proposed Action. I intend to develop a Public Involvement Plan for the project with the greater Little Applegate community. This plan will list actions to be taken to ensure community concerns and considerations are appropriately addressed. I see opportunities for some level of influence in the design of the project, and certainly for participation in developing alternatives to the Proposed Action. Key community groups such as the Applegate Neighborhood Network, the Applegate Partnership, and the Siskiyou Upland Trails Association will be contacted to help develop the plan. I will make the process as public and as open as possible, so those who wish to be included in developing the Public Involvement Plan (irrespective of community groups) may contact me at 541-618-2438. John Gerritsma 541-618-2438 Ashland Field Manager Medford District Bureau of Land Management jgerrits@blm.gov With 75 percent of voters approving, the 4-H, Master Gardener and Agricultural Service District was created to provide secure and stable funding to our Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center. The support and appreciation of so many Applegate folk, both for the campaign and for me personally, are what makes this such a great community. The work is not done with the counting of the ballots, but the support of the people will mean a great deal as we move forward with implementing this new district. The ability to plan, deliberately, without the year-to-year uncertainty of relying on the county general fund, will allow Extension to continue and improve the successes of the past 100 years of service to our community. I hope you will continue to contribute by taking classes at Extension, utilizing their professional, scientific resources, and helping to plan for an Extension that will serve our children and grandchildren. Thank YOU. Jack Duggan shanachie@hughes.net Ed. Note: Jack Duggan is a Land Steward volunteer at Extension and manages his family’s tree farm on Forest Creek. BOOKS & MOVIES — Book — The Plover Brian Doyle Oregon can be very proud. Brian Doyle’s new book, The Plover (St. Martin’s Press, April, 2014), is about travels on a small retrofitted fishing craft, The Plover, named after a nondescript little bird that is nonetheless a tough traveler of great distances. The protagonist sailor Declan—a minor character in Doyle’s earlier Mink River—sets out from the Oregon coast, heading west. Far west. The Plover is poetry masquerading as prose, and delightful hints of literary lingo (and bits of Gaelic and Hawaiian, pidgin and not) find their places in this eccentric sailor’s yarn. A liar’s lingo: “no thinking on this trip … and don’t get all literary on me either.” We should say things just once and “let them shimmer there in the air.” Never repeat. This is Doyle turning word handsprings in front of the critics and reviewers and naysayers who say he shouldn’t shouldn’t shouldn’t. After saying shouldn’t, Declan/ Doyle proceeds to do more thinking and repeating and philosophizing than a whole raft of philosophers. This is a book about story. “We are starving for story, our greatest hunger.” Declan’s friend and sometime crew mate Piko is appointed “captain of the Plover for one hour exactly, and Piko as his first act of command commands that everyone get off the boat for a while, onto the beach, and tell stories, ...we are getting all solipsistic and narcissistic on the boat, and stories are the antidote.” Also a passenger on the boat is Piko’s little daughter, Pip, who is compromised because she was run over by the school bus that was supposed to pick her up for kindergarten. She cannot walk or talk, but she adds an angelic dimension; she communicates with birds and who knows what else. She may be brain damaged, but, then again, maybe not: “I see you smiling Pip. I see you in there.” There is evil in this world: a pirate ship lurks, a looming tension through much of this fabulous fable. Piko is grabbed away from the Plover for a time, then rescued by Declan. The villainous pirate skipper apparently had a harrowing childhood, “some sailed some jailed” and a mother who disappeared: “her body stayed but the her of her left. Burned on the altar.” (Has anyone anywhere ever written better than that?) After an abusive childhood, the skipper wants control. Money is important, and power is important—only because they bring control. Declan seeks the help of island officialdom to rescue Piko, and there are hilarious litanies of bureaucratic ineffectiveness, in the midst of which Doyle inserts this sailor’s lament: “Sometimes you can’t tell the rain from the ocean.” Seems to fit the “help” we know of ubiquitous bureaucracy. Taramauri is a very large island man who is actually a woman and who boards our Plover mysteriously in the night. Two rats and a warbler with a broken wing are along for the ride. All have opinions, of course, as do the oceans, the sky, and the land. In the beginning, before any of these eccentric characters come aboard, a seagull flies above the Plover. Declan talks companionably to the gull, even as he damns it as a flying rat that barfs up fish guts and poops on the cabin roof. The gull looks interested but noncommittal. After many days on the open sea with the gull as his only companion Declan awakens one morning following a furious storm to find that the gull has disappeared. Anyone who has waited until something or someone is gone to realize how much that something or someone is missed will be grabbed by Doyle’s agonizing depiction of the forsaken bereft loneliness that is the ache of all the world’s search for connection. There have been many reviewers and critics who compare Doyle to Faulkner, Joyce, Melville, Whitman. I won’t do that, other than to say that in the last Brian Doyle book I reviewed for the Applegater, Mink River, Doyle channeled the great mystic poet William Blake, but for Plover’s ever-perilous sea journey he often calls on the more pragmatic Edmund Burke for words to rig his jib, and when that doesn’t quite meet his wordster needs he ventures outside the lines with “as old Ed Burke should have said but didn’t.” Feckin’. Leave it to the Irish—and Doyle is as Irish as they come (Irish by way of Brooklyn)—to take that now universal vulgarism and sprinkle it abundantly all naughty- nice. I revel in the language—and the poignant, picayune, and powerful lessons about life—in this book; I read and re-read many passages. But I press on, just like any feckin’ reader of dime novels in the feckin’ corncrib, to find out if the pirate ship is going to again catch up with the little Plover. And I’m not telling. Julia (Helm) Hoskins 541-899-8470 julmudgeon@aol.com Ed. Notes: After reading this review of his book, here is how Brian Doyle responded to Julia: “ah that made me grin – thank you – you GET it – the highest of compliments B.” Doesn’t get much better. (Published with consent from Brian Doyle.) The reviewer is the author of She Caves to Conquer, a book about a young woman who escapes the Midwest, moves halfway around the globe and finds caves that have been occupied for nearly 4,000 years. — Movies — 10 best animated films for kids in 2014 Our official movie reviewer is on hiatus, but that’s not cause to fret! Here’s a list of animated films to enjoy with your kids this year, in order of release date (courtesy of swide.com). TITLE RELEASE DATE Mr. Peabody & Sherman Muppets Most Wanted Island of Lemurs: Madagascar Rio 2 Legends of OZ The Good Dinosaur How to Train Your Dragon 2 Planes: Fire and rescue The Boxtrolls Big Hero 6 March 7 March 21 April 4 April 17 May 9 May 30 June 19 July 18 September 26 November 7
