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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 18, 2017)
4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL JANUARY 18, 2017 O PINION Three tips for living well BY JOEL FUHRMAN, MD For the Sentinel The way you take care of yourself is a more crucial determinant of your fu- ture happi- ness as your savings ac- count. Many people in- vest in their financial future, but they never consider their health future. A large nest egg is of no use to you if you’re not there to spend it! As you plan for your health future, you must consider the three important components that pay the biggest dividends: nutrition, exercise and positive mind-set. Nutrition Make every calorie count as you strive for lifelong health. Eat lots of foods that are rich in nutrients and low in calo- ries—and remember my health equation, H (Health) = N (Nu- trition) / C (Calories). Also re- member to regularly include foods that have special can- cer-protective features, notably the G-BOMBS, Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries and Seeds. Exercise Exercise regularly. Make it a part of your daily routine. A gym membership is nice, but there are plenty of other opportunities to work out your body over the course of an average day. Take the stairs, for instance, instead of the elevator. Walk or ride a bike instead of driving. Take frequent exercise breaks and do something active for just three to fi ve minutes, then go back to work. Positive mind-set A healthy mind-set is a pre- requisite for a healthy lifestyle. The best way to develop one is to be optimistic and surround yourself with people who en- gage in and support your health. Show people you care about them with your actions, not just with words. A positive mind-set results from your goodwill to others. It is like putting deposits in your lifespan account. These are the three essential habits of health. The more you practice them, the more routine they become. You won’t want to act any other way. Many people—healthy and unhealthy people alike—are often obsessed with food. The goal is to live a fully balanced life where people, food and ex- ercise are all in the right place. The key to fi nding food’s place in this delicate balance is by practicing the three habits of health until they all become a natural part of your life. Balanc- ing your diet style for optimal health is part of, and most natu- ral and effective when it is con- nected to, balancing your life between exercise, rest, sleep, recreation, work, family, friends and intellectual pursuits. Offbeat Oregon History Oregon’s biggest mud puddles are once-and-future inland seas W estward bound on the old Ap- plegate Trail in the early 1850s, the party of settlers halted in confusion at the shore of a vast, placid lake. Its waters stretched nearly all the way to the hori- zon, with just a thin rim of dim- ly glimpsed ridges beyond to in- dicate that they had not reached some sort of preternaturally calm ocean. The settlers, by now, had passed a few of these alkali lakes as the trail brought them westward. This one was the big- gest they’d seen. Its size wasn’t what was star- tling about it, though. What con- fused them were the wagon ruts — the well established Apple- gate Trail was marked by a deep set of wagon-wheel grooves that carved a path across the high Southeastern Oregon plateau over which they journeyed. And those ruts led straight into the lake. Of course they tried to fol- low them into the lake for a few hundred yards, but it quickly became clear that its water, in addition to being miles wide, was also deep — deep enough, at least, to stop a wagon train. But the western sky lay on the other side of the big wa- ter, and there was nothing for them to do but to travel around it. They toiled their way north, and then west, and then south again, following the rim of the vast lake to its opposite shore, a journey of something like 100 miles. Sure enough, when they got there, they found the heavy wheel ruts of the Applegate Trail climbing nonchalantly out of the waters of the lake and continuing on their way west- ward toward Eugene City. Upon their arrival, the em- igrants learned that nobody else knew anything about the vast lake they’d had to detour around. They wondered where it might have come from. It remained a mystery until, several years later, there was another season of dry weather — and the lake dried up once again. Today the disappearing lake is known as Goose Lake. It’s a vast shallow basin, shaped like an arrowhead, right on the Oregon-California border just south of Lakeview. And right now it’s as dry as it’s ever been … but that will probably change when this winter’s snows melt. Several springs drain into Goose Lake; but Goose Lake drains nowhere. It merely col- lects rainwater and snowmelt during wetter years, and lies there baking in the high-desert sun, quietly evaporating away, until it’s either replenished by another year’s rainfall or dried up into a powdery moonscape. The year 1846 must have been a dry one, because that’s the year the Oregon Territori- al Legislature commissioned brothers Jesse and Lindsay Ap- plegate, with eight other early Oregonians, to fi nd a safer alter- native to the Oregon Trail. For Jesse and Lindsay, the quest was personal. On their own journey several years before, they had lost two Applegate children, drowned beneath the roaring cataracts of the then-untamed Columbia as the party struggled to cross it in their caulked wag- ons. The trail the brothers’ par- ty blazed diverged from the main Oregon Trail path at Fort Hall in Idaho, and dove down into northern Nevada and Cal- ifornia before dipping back up into southern Oregon, crossing the Cascades, and then turning north along roughly the same path taken by Interstate 5 today, en route to the southern Willa- mette Valley. But apparently the late 1840s were pretty dry, and they unwit- tingly left a big, miles-wide ob- stacle squarely in their path. The lakes of Lake County, including Goose Lake, are sort of unusual. They are, essential- ly, vast mud puddles, and their shores expand and contract ac- cording to climactic conditions. During the last Ice Age, those mud puddles were more like a network of small inland seas, many hundreds of feet deep and covering hundreds of thousands of acres, surrounded by lush vegetation and home to a wide variety of animals as well as human communities. One such lake, which covered the future townsite of Fort Rock under several dozen feet of water, was the home of a community of people 14,000 years ago, who left behind a small trove of wo- ven sagebark sandals and copro- lites (very old dried-out or fos- silized excrement) that form the oldest evidence of human habi- tation in the Americas. And you can still see where the shores of those old inland seas used to be, in wave-worn features in the surrounding rimrock. With the changing climate, though, those seas literally dried up. Year over year, the water in them evaporated away. And thus, the dissolved salts and im- purities of an entire small ocean wound up concentrated in the waters of a cluster of little lakes and ponds — many of them quite large in surface area, but relatively shallow. Some of these dried sea-beds can be quite dangerous when conditions are bad; if one in- gests enough alkali salts, either by drinking the water or by breathing the blowing dust, it can change the body’s acid-base balance in disastrous ways. It’s thought that the dusty bottom of one alkali lake, near the town of Jordan Valley close to the Ida- ho border, sickened and killed Jean-Baptiste “Pompey” Char- bonneau, the frontier mountain man who had been the baby born to Sacagawea on the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1905. Lake Abert in particular is very salty; it and Summer Lake are the remnant of an ancient inland sea called Lake Chewau- can. Abert’s waters are fi lled with a dense population of brine shrimp, which are an important food source for the migrating waterfowl that blacken the Lake County sky in the spring; but like Goose Lake, it, too, is dry- ing up. But this winter’s heavy snowfalls suggest that help, in the form of plenty of snowmelt to fi ll the lake and relieve the stressed brine shrimp, may be on the way. And when the Earth enters its next ice age, those ancient basins will be ready and able to resume their old role as the containers of Oregon’s own net- work of high-elevation inland seas. Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Or- egon history. For details, see http://fi nnjohn.com. To contact him or suggest a topic: fi nn2@ offbeatoregon.com or 541-357- 2222. RIGHT: The eastern shore of Abert Lake, one of the rem- nants of the inland sea called Lake Chewaucan, as seen from Highway 395. Abert Lake, the waters of which are very salty, is home to a dense colony of brine shrimp on which migrating waterfowl rely for food. (Image: F.J.D. John) $ PUUBHF ( SPWF 4 FOUJOFM 116 N. Sixth Street · P.O. 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