My wife and I were reminded what a glorious spectacle the American West is when we took a recent road trip: on the Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway through the southern Cascades and northern Sierras, over to wine country, and up the Oregon Coast.
The climax, as our most dramatic and troubling site, was Yosemite National Park and its environs. The place was an environmental history course packed into a couple days.
Abraham Lincoln was the first president to protect Yosemite Valley from development, in 1864, and it ultimately became one of the most iconic parks in the nation.
I hadn’t visited since I was a kid and for the first time entered on the east side via dramatic Tioga Pass, seeing the glorious high country at 9,000 feet. We were appropriately blown away.
Then came 21st Century realities.
I was too tardy to secure a reservation in the park proper so we stayed at Evergreen Lodge out the northwest side, a pleasant and historic place that barely escaped last year’s 400-square-mile Rim Fire, set by a careless hunter.
The flames literally burned to the edge of the lodge pool and its sunset deck, and it must have required a heroic effort to save the place, […]
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The last thing I wanted to do is read about a friend’s death from brain cancer.
Then I couldn’t put it down.
The book is Waking Up Dying – Caregiving When There Is No Tomorrow, a self-published memoir and critique of the medical system by Robert Duke, husband of Shearlean Duke, who died.
It’s a well-written, remarkable compilation of narrative, e-mail updates, lists, sidebars, and medical documents edited and organized by Cami Ostman of Bellingham, WA, a writer who did her own book on trying to marathon on seven continents.
The Amazon link is: http://www.amazon.com/Waking-Up-Dying-Caregiving-Tomorrow/dp/0975328611.
Shearlean (pronounced ‘Shur-lean,’ and southern-born) was chairman of the journalism department at Western Washington University, where I taught for five years. While my employer was Environmental Studies, I worked with Shearlean while advising Planet Magazine, a student environmental quarterly.
She was a vigorous 60-or-so when I met her, a Los Angeles Times vet who had overcome a tough early life to not only be successful and competent, but generous and supportive. Nice! Not every administrator can claim that.
Bob was a technical writer. The two approached her illness with journalistic intensity, questioning, fighting, hoping, and coping.
Out of that came a remarkably honest account of the inevitable unhappy ending, the yucky responsibilities […]
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