Even Hood River is too close, the twenty miles between morphing greener and more progressive-democrat every mile west. I like
the weather in T.D., the way the rain peters at Rowena. I like how the woman who cuts my hair has an unironic beehive and plainly
doesn't give a shit. She circles me in white New Balance, clipper-precise, bitching about the hipsters down the freeway and
how they wrecked a perfectly nice town, suspicious of folks without local lineage. And though she could likely kick my ass
in a bar fight, she eyes me like I'm a scary clown and passes the collective trauma: Those damn Rajneeshees took over at Antelope,
tried to kill us up here -- poisoned the salad bar. Go look it up. You'll see. I read opinions in the local paper: the editor loves God,
the 2nd Amendment and not me. Not my rainbow bumper sticker. Not my public displays. And after three years I'm still
as iffy as those redshirts when they first arrived with their Bhagwan smiles, flush and buying local. Nothing much
thrives in the Oregon desert without help or luck, so far removed from Portlandia small plates and all that yoga, so easy
to be swallowed in the expanse, the sky so catholic I had to relearn how to breathe, to pray. I'll never cede myself to local
norm, but I'll always take in the rimrock evening, absorb the benediction of dry air and red lenticular clouds, always turn to
the deep end of the sky. I've learned to see in the dark, now. I can see for eons in this rolling sage cosmos. I'm not sorry I came.
by David J.S. Pickering
the weather in T.D., the way the rain peters at Rowena. I like how the woman who cuts my hair has an unironic beehive and plainly
doesn't give a shit. She circles me in white New Balance, clipper-precise, bitching about the hipsters down the freeway and
how they wrecked a perfectly nice town, suspicious of folks without local lineage. And though she could likely kick my ass
in a bar fight, she eyes me like I'm a scary clown and passes the collective trauma: Those damn Rajneeshees took over at Antelope,
tried to kill us up here -- poisoned the salad bar. Go look it up. You'll see. I read opinions in the local paper: the editor loves God,
the 2nd Amendment and not me. Not my rainbow bumper sticker. Not my public displays. And after three years I'm still
as iffy as those redshirts when they first arrived with their Bhagwan smiles, flush and buying local. Nothing much
thrives in the Oregon desert without help or luck, so far removed from Portlandia small plates and all that yoga, so easy
to be swallowed in the expanse, the sky so catholic I had to relearn how to breathe, to pray. I'll never cede myself to local
norm, but I'll always take in the rimrock evening, absorb the benediction of dry air and red lenticular clouds, always turn to
the deep end of the sky. I've learned to see in the dark, now. I can see for eons in this rolling sage cosmos. I'm not sorry I came.
by David J.S. Pickering
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