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
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