March 30: Clem Work “Reflecting on the impermanence of life”

Sometimes when I need to reflect I go to the Church of the Blue Mountain, and so I found myself there the other day. The snow had melted, exposing the rocky path as Peaches the lab trotted ahead. Aha! A metaphor for life’s little nagging annoyances, something upon which we may stumble, maybe even come crashing down. That led me to consider what Sebastian Effinger and his family encountered across the valley in the Rattlesnake as pioneer settlers in the 1880’s. The German immigrants homesteaded similar but even harder land–what was in fact a glacial moraine left over from the last Ice Age, with a thin skim of soil over rocks and more rocks. Day by week by month by year they cleared the soil for crops and fruit trees, hauling the never-ending rocks on sleds and piling them into gray-brown ropes of misery.

Sebastian climbed high into the Rattlesnake and built earthen dams, and his sons helped him build the wooden flumes to carry the water down to irrigate his land. Sebastian bought more tracts and by the time he died in 1916 owned more than a thousand acres. What he and his family built echoed the ageless dreams of settlers, as reflected in Isaiah 41: “I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys;
I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.”

But by 1921, the Effingers’ claim over the land so hard-won was over. Older children had left the state. The youngest bachelor son, Louis, cared for his aging mother, Matilde, but was snared by the state’s cruel WWI sedition law. He didn’t go to prison, but paid a large fine. Not long after, he dropped dead in his field. The land became a dairy farm for a while, and eventually part of the National Recreation Area.

Today, there is virtually no trace of the Eden the Effingers carved out. It has turned back to wilderness; “humans have acceded to nature,” as Albert Borgman, who knows this story, put it.* So were the Effingers’ lives for naught? In a geologic time span, they were a mere blip. Yet their heritage is the memory of their stalwart courage and faith—even if it was, as Albert says, “labor poorly spent.”

The tragic scenes of the villages turned to kindling by the tsunami in Japan reinforce this idea of impermanence to me. The little meadow in Pattee Canyon where we now make our home was once home to a sheepherder—of whose existence there is not a trace. In another blip, our mountain valley home will have evanesced into a memory, and maybe a few aging photos. What will I leave behind? Memories? Genes? Lessons? Narrative? Life’s impermanence sends me humbly in search of God for comfort, but then I realize He is with me every step of that rocky path.

*“Holding on to reality: the nature of information at the turn of the millennium,” by Albert Borgmann