HinesSight

Highway 20 fire closure on Santiam Pass raises arson suspicions

So many wildfires are burning in the Cascades and central Oregon. Today a fire started just south of Highway 20 in the Potato Hill area between the Santiam Junction (of highways 20 and 22) and the Hoodoo ski area. 

Bend's KTVZ reports:

A new wildfire prompted closure of U.S. Highway 20 west of Santiam Pass and a second closure near Suttle Lake Tuesday afternoon, hours after three new brushfires erupted around the Newberry National Volcanic Monument south of Bend, one prompting evacuations of Lava River Cave and the Lava Lands Visitor Center, authorities said.

Willamette National Forest officials said the fire was reported around 3 p.m. near Potato Hill, around milepost 76 on Highway 20. The fire began on the south side of the highway but jumped the highway and was burning near Lost Lake.

Crews and air resources responded to the fire, estimated late Tuesday afternoon at about five acres, burning in the area of the 2003 B&B Complex Fire, the 90,000-acre blaze that was the largest in Deschutes National Forest history.

Eastbound traffic was being stopped at Santiam Junction and westbound traffic at Santiam Pass. ODOT warned, “This could be a lengthy closure, so travelers should consider using an alternative route, avoid the area or expect delays.”

The other closure was a mile east of the intersection with Suttle Lake Loop.

This is bad.

The only (small) good news is that currently ODOT's TripCheck site is reporting that while Highway 20 is closed to eastbound traffic at Potato Hill, westbound traffic is being let through via a pilot car. Be sure to check for current updates if you plan to travel to or from central Oregon on Highway 20.

[Update: I read the TripCheck report wrong. Just saw a tweet that explains both eastbound and westbound traffic now is being let through via a pilot car, so even better news.]

A Facebook friend who lives in the Sisters area clued me in to the Highway 20 fire and road closure via a post. Some commenters wondered, as I did, about whether there's a non-natural reason for the rash of fires breaking out near roads.

Meaning, someone is starting them on purpose.

Understand: there's no proof of this. Maybe careless people are responsible. Maybe smoldering lightning strikes are coming to life. It just seems strange that several fires in central Oregon started near roads today. The KTVZ story also said:

Meanwhile, three new fires south of Bend were reported around 1 p.m., One fire, Incident 1036, was stopped at two acres and fully lined by late afternoon, with crews working to contain it, said Deschutes National Forest Public Affairs Officer Jean Nelson-Dean.

A second fire burned two miles southeast of Lava Butte, on the east side of Highway 97. It also was lined by late afternoon and crews were working to contain it.

Probably investigators are looking into the possibility of arson. I can't imagine why someone would want to torch Oregon's beautiful forests, but humans are capable of some crazy stuff. 

For now, the priority has to be on getting the fires under control. Commenters on the Facebook post painted a disturbing picture of how things are in the Camp Sherman, Black Butte Ranch, and Sisters area.

We should be OK, though lots of smoke/ashes and eerie looking today.

The sun is totally obliterated and it is not even 7:00PM, but very ominous feeling. My deck is covered with ashes.

These fires (including Newberry Crater) seem suspicious to me. Starting independent of other fires, and near highways. 

My wife says I shouldn't tell you this, but I am anyway

I usually do what my wife, Laurel, says. But this morning, after we talked about my health problem, I went to my laptop and wrote just the title to this blog post. 

It's taken me all day to decide whether to do what the title says.

Since I'm typing this now (8 pm), that's a pretty good sign that while I recognize the truth of what Laurel told me -- there are nasty people out there in social media who will make fun of you for being honest about your urinary problem -- as a long-time writer and blogger I feel like I'm in Word Jail if I can't openly express how I'm feeling.

Plus, I've found that when I'm honest about speaking my mind in a blog post, often, if not usually, some people will tell me, "Thanks, that's how I see things also, but usually nobody talks about this stuff in a public way."

So what the hell... now that I've gotten a few sips of wine in my system and loosened my writing inhibitions I'll just speak as if I were at an AA meeting. 

"Hi. I'm Brian. I've got a peeing problem. More exactly, a urinary retention problem apparently caused by many years of a gradually enlarging prostate that finally stretched my bladder to such an extent it doesn't work well anymore."

A few weeks ago I got up the guts to talk about this in a blog post, "Given my peeing problem, be warned about asking 'How are things going?'"

Since, I had more testing and a non-cheery consultation last Wednesday with my urologist who basically said that prostate surgery might help me, but even after surgery I'd probably still have to use a catheter to urinate as I am now, just less often.

After the Urodynamics testing my wife and I had to wait for over an hour in an exam room before the urologist gave us the news. Anticipating he wouldn't have much positive to say, I spent much of the hour crying on my wife's shoulder, leaning over in a chair with my hands pressed to my forehead all totally depressed, and looking at my iPhone to distract myself.

And that was the high point of my day. 

Now, a few days later, I've gotten a Xanax prescription from my family physician to help me sleep at night. Leg cramps, maybe brought on by stress, have been waking me up. Even though I'm going to get a second opinion on my bladder condition, and I certainly haven't given up hope on recovering, it's just damn tough to face the prospect of not being able to pee properly for the rest of my life.

I'm 68 and otherwise in good health, so I've been envisioning that my "golden years" would be more pleasant than they are right now.

But in my saner moments, which come and go even in my current anxious/depressed/worried state, I realize that, as I said in my first post, everybody is dealing with some sort of problem. 

Everybody is struggling with something. 
Some ways into my urinary problem treatment, I'd find myself getting a bit irritated when I saw people going into a restroom and coming out in a short time, their peeing business all completed with no problem. Heck, I even look upon our dog peeing a dozen times during our evening dog walk with envy.

I had an obviously erroneous feeling: that most people were living happy carefree lives, just as I had before my urinary retention problem popped up. 

Well, here's the truth. My life always has had plenty of problems. I wasn't completely happy before my emergency room visit, just as I'm not completely happy now. There's always something messing up our life, physical, psychological, social, whatever.

On the positive side, I feel more compassion toward people with obvious health struggles now. Someone using a walker, crutches, a wheelchair. Someone battling cancer, heart disease, diabetes, fibromyalgia, whatever. 

Life is tough. Every single person I encounter, no matter how cool, collected, and I've got my shit together they appear, has some real problems they're having to deal with as best they can. 

Just as I am. My peeing problem isn't anywhere near as serious as what other people have dealt with for months, years, decades, maybe a lifetime. 

I'm not saying that we all need to be completely transparent about our personal struggles, just that I've learned, and am still learning, that keeping our problems to ourselves may feel like the right thing to do in our hide in a cave moments, but we need to remember that everyone needs a shoulder to lean on.

And it's tougher to be aware of those shoulders if you don't say, Hey, friend, I could use some support. 

So this is one reason I've decided to add a "My peeing problem" category to this blog (in the right sidebar). Dealing with it is a big part of my life right now. Not so much physically -- using a self-catheter to urinate only takes about 5 minutes four times a day or so -- but psychologically. 

I'm a philosophical sort of guy. My wife is a retired psychotherapist. Which basically means that we're just as screwed up as everybody else is, but we can maybe describe and analyze our screw-ups a bit more cogently than most other people can.

In future posts I want to talk about how I'm dealing with what might turn out to be a chronic health problem. (Click on the "My peeing problem" category to find them.) For now, I'll just speak a bit about my biggest struggle: getting out of the confining cage of my own self-absorption.

Like others with a serious health problem, I've been spending a lot of time with doctor visits, pharmacy visits, dealing with medical supply companies, adjusting my lifestyle to fit my condition. All that is necessary. Yet it also drives me crazy. I'm tired of focusing on me. I want to get back to relating with the world as normally as possible, like I did before.

I want the part of me that has a health problem to be as small as possible, so there is more room for all of the other people, activities, loves, causes, passions, and such that were my main focus before my consciousness zeroed in some three months ago on what my bladder was doing (or, failing to do).

I'm coming to feel that story-telling is what I've got to work on. Meaning, I'm spending way too much time and energy on making up stories about how my life is going to go from here on out. 

Sometimes those stories are positive: "I'll get a second opinion. The doctor will have a brilliant solution to my peeing problem. I'll be back to normal, or near-normal, is less than a year." Sometimes those stories are negative: "I'll never get better. Instead, I'll get worse and turn into an angry depressed old man whose only joy in life is boring other people with talk about how his urinary tract doesn't work right."

(Hey, I'm off to a good start with my blog posts!)

Here's my saner-moment take on this. I wasn't able to predict that I'd get the problem I have now, so why the heck should I have any confidence in my ability to predict what will happen in the future? 

Which doesn't mean that I shouldn't plan ahead -- like I am with arranging for a second opinion. That's clear and present reality. However, I'm finding that what hurts my precarious mental health is making up stories about alternative health futures that are almost totally fictional. 

Often I feel like commentators on cable news who utterly failed to predict that Trump would become president, yet, now that he is, confidently hold forth on what is going to happen next with President Trump. With them, I think, "Hey, you guys were clueless about how the election would turn out, so why should we believe your prognostications of how the Trump presidency will turn out?"

Likewise, I don't know. 

That's one of the mantras I repeat when I'm going to sleep. I don't know. 

It helps me a lot. What I know is how I feel right now, what I have to deal with right now, what needs to be done next right now. Yeah, I know this is a cliche for people in tough situations: "One day at a time." But it's a truthful cliche.

Lastly, I've been heartened today by a couple of things my wife and daughter shared with me. Laurel, my wife, has memorized this poem by Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things," which I found by Googling a line that she recited to me this morning.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

And this afternoon my daughter, Celeste, sent me an Instagram post by actress Lena Dunham. 

Given my peeing problem, be warned about asking "How are things going?"

Seems like it's time for me to come out of the closet. A medical problem closet. One that too many of us -- especially men -- keep ourselves in. 

I've got a peeing problem. Now, this isn't unusual for men my age (I'm 68).

I'd been taking several prostate medications that appeared to be working fairly well. But a few months ago a UTI, urinary tract infection, kicked me off into a state of hardly being able to pee at all rather than my previous state of having to pee too often.

Urinary retention obviously isn't anything to ignore.

I had to wear a catheter for two weeks after going to the emergency room. That was followed by going to a urologist who scheduled various tests. I'm still being evaluated. The basic problem seems to be an enlarged/stretched bladder that, hopefully, will get back to normal (or near normal) after what I'm doing now: not-so-fun, but necessary regular self-catheterizing because more pee is being produced than is coming out.

I'm not writing this blog post to tell you all about my medical problem. What's more interesting, and way more universal, is what I've learned from this experience so far. 

Being a (wordy) blogger, for now I'll just hit a few highlights of what my urinary adventure has taught me. Later I may expand on these lessons.

(1) Keeping a problem private is fine. Until it isn't. 
At first I had no desire to tell friends or relatives about my peeing problem. After all, it isn't like I was on crutches and could say, when asked what happened, "Oh, bit of a fall on a black diamond ski run; just one of those things." I felt like withdrawing into a cave where I could lick my urinary tract wounds in private.

OK, not literally. I'm nowhere near that flexible. I'm talking psychologically.

Gradually, though, I began to have a feeling that keeping this private was too much of a strain. So I told a few friends, but not many. I still had a typical male sense that I should just tough out what I was going through pretty much on my own -- naturally with the support of my wife, doctor, and dog.

Which reminds me of my tennis-playing days at a club level. I was part of a group of four men who played doubles every week for years. Our conversations weren't exactly deeply personal, as evidenced one day when one of the guys mentioned his divorce. It turned out that he'd been separated from his wife for maybe a year. He just never felt like talking about it.

Four women who knew each other well... I'm pretty sure the divorce would have been discussed at every get-together. 

(2) Being open about your real life usually is a very good thing. 
Yesterday and today I had two experiences that propelled me into deciding to open up about my peeing problem. Probably not coincidentally, they both involved women.

I'd been having leg cramps at night that seemed to be caused by my body tensing up with a need to urinate several hours into sleep-time, but not having the ability to do this. Both my urologist and primary care doctor weren't very helpful or even particularly sympathetic, basically saying I needed to figure this out myself.

So I set out for my favorite Salem marijuana store to get some topical cannabis and some vapeable mixtures of CBD and THC for relaxation and pain relief (both of which worked great, by the way!). 

My "budtender" was a woman in her 40's who listened to my medical tale with attention and compassion. In the course of discussing the benefits of cannabis, she was very open about her own health problems -- which were complex, extensive, and way worse than mine.

I told her not to take this the wrong way, but I felt a lot better after hearing about her medical challenges. Not because she had them. Because she was handling them so well. In just a few minutes we went from being complete strangers to sharing some intimate details about our lives.

Her openness was refreshing. I drove away from the marijuana store feeling good about both the products I'd purchased, and the free gift of this woman's candid communicating about her own health struggles.

(3) Vulnerability isn't a weakness, but a strength. 
Then, this morning I fired up my iPhone's "Calm" meditation app. I enjoy listening to the Daily Calm guided meditation where a woman with a pleasing voice and (no big shock) calm demeanor addresses a different theme each day, 

Today it was Vulnerability. Good timing, because what she talked about fit in with my above-mentioned conversation in the marijuana store and my increasing feeling that when someone asks me 'How are you?" it isn't always good to glibly answer "Fine."

The Daily Calm woman spoke about this.

Sure, regaling a supermarket check-out clerk with the details of your health struggles after she says "How's your day going?" while weighing a bunch of organic bananas really isn't appropriate. But when a co-worker or close friend asks about how we're doing, being honest probably is better than being fake'y.

"Not so good; I've been feeling isolated lately." "I'm struggling with some family problems; thanks for asking." "My back pain has been driving me nuts; hopefully it will feel better soon."

It takes courage to trust in being truthful. You have to believe the person you're talking to actually wants to know how you are, rather than engaging in the familiar ritual of "How's your day going?" "Fine, how about you." "Great, just great."

This almost always isn't true, which gets me to my last point.

(4) Everybody is struggling with something. 
Some ways into my urinary problem treatment, I'd find myself getting a bit irritated when I saw people going into a restroom and coming out in a short time, their peeing business all completed with no problem. Heck, I even look upon our dog peeing a dozen times during our evening dog walk with envy.

I had an obviously erroneous feeling: that most people were living happy carefree lives, just as I had before my urinary retention problem popped up. 

Well, here's the truth. My life always has had plenty of problems. I wasn't completely happy before my emergency room visit, just as I'm not completely happy now. There's always something messing up our life, physical, psychological, social, whatever.

On the positive side, I feel more compassion toward people with obvious health struggles now. Someone using a walker, crutches, a wheelchair. Someone battling cancer, heart disease, diabetes, fibromyalgia, whatever. 

Life is tough. Every single person I encounter, no matter how cool, collected, and I've got my shit together they appear, has some real problems they're having to deal with as best they can. 

Just as I am. My peeing problem isn't anywhere near as serious as what other people have dealt with for months, years, decades, maybe a lifetime. 

I'm not saying that we all need to be completely transparent about our personal struggles, just that I've learned, and am still learning, that keeping our problems to ourselves may feel like the right thing to do in our hide in a cave moments, but we need to remember that everyone needs a shoulder to lean on.

And it's tougher to be aware of those shoulders if you don't say, Hey, friend, I could use some support. 

I had to struggle to begin writing this post. Now, I'm glad I did.