A12
REGION
East Oregonian
Saturday, August 7, 2021
VOICES
ANYONE CAN WRITE
Nearly 40 years in the business have taught me that readers
long for meaning and a connection at a deeper and more
universal level.
And that’s why the East Oregonian will be running, from
time to time, stories from students who are in my writing
class, which I’ve been teaching for the past 10 years in
Portland.
I take great satisfaction in helping so-called nonwriters ﬁ nd
and write stories from their lives and experiences. They walk
into my room believing they don’t have what it takes to be
a writer. I remind them if they follow their hearts, they will
discover they are storytellers.
As we all are at our core.
Some of these stories have nothing to do with Pendleton or
Umatilla County. They do, however, have everything to do
with life.
If you are interested in contacting me to tell me your story,
I’d like to hear from you.
Tom Hallman Jr., tbhbook@aol.com
Tom Hallman Jr. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer for
the Oregonian newspaper. He’s also a writing coach and has
an aﬃ nity for Umatilla County.
Special moments
only happen once
By CARLA KELLEY
Special to the East
Oregonian
I remember Camp Pine
Valley because it was the site
of my ﬁ rst kiss, delivered by
a sweet nerdy guy named
Frank.
He was 12. I was 11 but
working hard to look older.
Frank was a skinny guy
who wore thick glasses. His
real name was Franklin, but
at that time in his life he
preferred Frank. We both
longed to be reading books
instead of choosing up ball
game teams, but books were
in short supply at Camp Pine
Valley. He was not interested
in sports, which endeared
him to me. I could swim and
paddle a canoe, but I couldn’t
catch or throw a ball or run
fast, which guaranteed that
I would be chosen last in
the frequent team selections
endemic to summer camp.
Most of summer camp
for me was about these daily
rejections and other athletic
failures, like my ﬁ rst horse-
back riding experience when
the horse lay down and tried
to wipe me oﬀ its back. But
amidst these juvenile humil-
iations, Frank picked me to
experience a ﬁ rst kiss, his as
well as mine.
I recall that he held my
hand at campfire sing-a-
longs. I felt loved. Suddenly
I was not all alone anymore.
That was special. That was
very special indeed.
After the eight-week
summer camp session ended,
we campers left the woods
and hills of the Laurentian
Mountains and returned to
Montreal where most of us
lived. Frank and I “dated”
a bit after camp, although
“dating” is a big word for
what we did. We had abso-
lutely no private time
together.
A date with Frank meant
his father drove him to my
house. Frank and I would
climb into the back seat
of his dad’s big sedan and
hold hands, while both his
parents sat in the front. Then
we would all drive to see a
movie.
This in itself was excit-
ing: not because Frank was
holding my damp hand in
his, but because it was illegal
for anyone under 16 years of
age to attend most movies in
the puritanical Quebec Prov-
ince of 1957. His nice parents
would attend the movie with
us to bolster the lie about our
ages as we bought our entry
tickets.
I have no recollection of
what movies we saw, but I
recall several of these dates.
Best of all, I could now brag
that I had a boyfriend, which
vastly improved my social
status. Frank was deﬁ nitely
a good thing in my life in the
autumn of 1957.
A few months later, our
little romance came to an
abrupt end when my father
took a new job — in Iowa. In
1958 our nuclear family did
what no one in Montreal’s
close-knit community ever
did back then: We moved
more than 1,000 miles away
from Montreal and all our
relatives.
I recall a few letters back
and forth between Frank and
me, but soon the intervals
between them lengthened
until the correspondence
stopped. Kids our age had no
access to expensive long-dis-
tance phone calls. Letters
written on paper and ink
took a long time to arrive.
I got busy adjusting to my
American high school and I
never saw Frank again.
Or did I?
Flash forward to April
2021. I am living in Portland,
Oregon. This is my 11th city
since leaving Montreal in
1958, but I have been here
40 years. I moved here in
1980 from city number 10,
which was Pittsburgh, Penn-
sylvania. I have a career and
a life. Camp Pine Valley is
a distant memory; I have to
do research to even recall its
name.
I’m still in touch with a
couple of people who live in
Pittsburgh. One is a professor
at Carnegie-Mellon Univer-
sity. My friend contacts me
when there’s news about
someone we both knew back
in the 1970s. Last April, my
professor friend sent me an
obituary from a Pittsburgh
newspaper. On the same
day, I received a second
copy of the same obituary,
from someone else in Pitts-
burgh whom I had not seen
in decades.
The subject of the obit-
uary was a well-known
professor of the history
of art and architecture in
Pittsburgh. He had degrees
from McGill, Oberlin and
Harvard. He had published
nine books in his ﬁ eld, many
of which recorded his ﬁ nd-
ings from excavations of
famous cathedral sites in
Italy. He had won a Guggen-
heim Fellowship among
other prestigious prizes. He
was internationally famous
for his writings on architec-
tural and cultural history.
His name was Franklin.
There was nothing in the
obituaries about his atten-
dance at Camp Pine Valley,
but this was deﬁ nitely Frank-
lin of the ﬁ rst-ever kiss.
By some trick of memory,
I do not recall meeting Frank
when we both lived in Pitts-
burgh in the 1970s. Frank
was then a young professor at
Carnegie-Mellon University.
He was married; I was newly
single after a painful divorce.
Somehow, 40 years after I
left Pittsburgh permanently,
both of my friends from the
‘70s who sent me his obitu-
ary retained the memory that
I knew Franklin.
Maybe Franklin’s name
came up when I lived there.
Maybe we met, disliked
each other and I deleted
the meeting from memory.
Maybe I met him and told
other friends who taught at
Carnegie-Mellon about him.
Maybe he never forgave me
for dropping our teenage
correspondence. Any of
these scenarios is plausible;
I just don’t recall.
Thinking about Camp
Pine Valley after all these
years reminds me that the
camp put on a production
of “The Wizard of Oz.” I
was cast as the Tin Man.
My solo song was “If I
only had a heart.” I hold
Franklin’s memory dear
because his kiss awakened
my young heart. That only
happens once.
Ryan Brennecke/The Bend Bulletin
A small amount of snow remains on South Sister as a vehicle travels July 30, 2021, along the Cascade Lakes Highway in
Central Oregon.
Snowy summer skyline fades to brown peaks
Central Oregon
glaciers, snowpack
feel the heat of
climate change
By MICHAEL KOHN
The Bend Bulletin
BEND — Winter brought
above-average snow to the
Central Cascades. Then
a summertime heat wave
melted most of it away.
Now Central Oregon’s
glaciers could experience
signiﬁ cant melt as the snow
that normally protects them
in the warmer months disap-
pears.
The rapid snowmelt that
occurred in spring and early
summer has left midsummer
snowmelt at historic lows,
said Larry O’Neill, an asso-
ciate professor at the College
of Earth, Ocean and Atmo-
spheric Sciences at Oregon
State University. What’s
more, this snow season —
with its unusually rapid melt-
oﬀ — is going to become the
new normal, he said.
When snowpack melts
early in the year, it can have
negative consequences
on water resources and
the health of the glaciers.
Reservoirs struggle to ﬁ ll,
river levels remain lower
than normal and rangeland
can deteriorate. For those
who enjoy scaling Mount
Jeﬀ erson, North Sister and
other Central Oregon peaks,
it can mean an early end
to the climbing season on
several mountains.
“The slightly warmer
than normal spring and
the June heat wave melted
nearly all the snowpack,”
O’Neill said. “We entered
spring with near-normal
snowpack in the Central
Oregon Cascades, but unfor-
tunately it melted out about
three to four weeks earlier
than normal.”
The impact of this is
less snow in late summer to
melt into streams, causing
streams to ﬂ ow at
lower levels than
normal. That can
impair habitat
for ﬁ sh and wild-
life. The weak
snowpack in late
summer also dries
out forests, creat-
ing conditions for
wildﬁ re.
“ T h is snow
season is a perfect example
of what the future will look
like,” O’Neill said.
Glaciers melt off more
rapidly when the protective
snowpack that covers them
disappears, said Anders
Carlson, president of the
Oregon Glaciers Institute,
a nonprofit that works to
preserve glaciers through
science and education.
“This will be a very bad
year for them,” Carlson said.
“With the snow retreating
and disappearing so quickly,
this exposes the underlying
glacier to melting sooner
than in more normal years.”
The melt-oﬀ comes amid
historically hot weather in
Central Oregon. Tempera-
tures recorded in Bend
reached all-time highs in
late June, culminating in
107-degree weather on
June 30. At Warm Springs
on June 27, the temperature
soared to 119 degrees, tying
a state record.
June this year was the
second warmest June on
record, dating back to 1895,
O’Neill said. June this year
was 8 degrees above normal
compared to the record of
8.3 degrees above
normal recorded
in June 2015.
The thread-
bare snow cover,
combined with
the hot tempera-
tures, is a double
whammy, Carlson
said, potentially
driving glacier
melt at a rapid rate.
“This can be a force
multiplier but in a bad way,”
Carlson said. “Longer peri-
ods of time with more
glacier ice exposed to hotter
temperatures all equals a bad
year for glaciers.”
In years past, even in
summer, Mount Bache-
lor, Broken Top and Three
Sisters are covered in snow.
Collier Glacier on west
slopes of North Sister would
also be blanketed in snow.
While the sight of so
much exposed mountain
may be jarring for some
Bend residents at this time of
year, experienced mountain
climbers say they are getting
used to the snowless skyline
west of the city.
“It doesn’t surprise me,”
said Cliﬀ Agocs, co-owner
of Timberline Mountain
Guides, which runs moun-
taineering trips in the
Cascades. “I have been
working in the mountains
in Oregon for 12 years now,
and I have just seen the slow
progression or fast progres-
sion depending on how you
look at it.”
Agocs blames climate
change for the rapid loss of
snow in the Cascades each
summer. Temperatures have
warmed, on average, by 2
degrees over the past century
in Oregon, and the snowpack
is down by 20% since 1950,
according to the Environ-
mental Protection Agency.
A report from the Oregon
Climate Change Research
Institute, released in Janu-
ary, states that temperatures
will rise by 5 degrees by the
2050s. It adds that snowy
days will be cut in half by the
mid-21st century compared
to levels at the beginning
of the century. Snowpack
will decline by 60% by the
middle of the century, the
institute projects.
Because it’s safer to
climb when loose rocks are
still frozen together, Agocs’
guided climbs end when the
mountaintops thaw out. Ten
years ago that meant climb-
ing into early August. The
trips now end in early July.
“That kind of change
shouldn’t be recognizable to
one person over a decade,”
Agocs said. “It’s really fast.”
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Have executive leadership experience and
a commitment to restoring salmon and
protecting tribal treaty fishing rights?
The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission is seeking a dynamic,
high-level strategic thinker, a great spokesperson, and an effective
manager to serve as its Executive Director.
Help guide the organization tasked to provide technical assistance and
coordinate the fisheries management responsibilities of its four
member tribes—the Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Nez Perce.
Be a part of the tribal effort to put fish back in the rivers
and protect the watersheds where they live.
To see complete position details, visit:
www.critfc.org/executive
Position closes August 31.
COLUMBIA RIVER INTER-TRIBAL FISH COMMISSION
YAK AMA · UMATILLA · WARM SPRINGS · NEZ PER CE
Por tland, Oregon · www.critfc.org · (503) 238-0667