I flew out to Eugene, OR to see my sister for Thanksgiving. Her house was the endpoint of my Westing trip and I hadn't been back there since I moved out last December. A lot has changed since then. More has changed than in any single year for me before.

I don't really want to get into all of that, or into the nature of Thanksgiving, or what it's like to have it with your sister when both your parents are far away. I don't want to get into what happens when people's menu requirements are different. What I want to write about is that on Saturday afternoon my sister, my girlfriend and I drove out Rt. 126 into the mountains. We went past the town of Blue River, turned right on the Cougar Dam road, went past the dam and the hot springs, and parked at the French Pete Creek trailhead. We had gotten a late start so it was three by the time we parked and we only had about an hour and a half of daylight left. There were two red pickup trucks parked there in a mossy hollow that was so green it took time for my eyes to adjust. Chicago at this time of year is totally devoid of green, a concrete and asphalt island in the tawny prairie. My lungs tingled from the heavy oxygen content in the Oregonian air. I quit smoking two weeks ago and I think they are putting out their little bloody tentacles again and grabbing onto the oxygen actively as it flows past in its little red blood cell canoes. The trail followed French Pete Creek through a grove of old growth woods, the most impressive of which were giant Western Hemlock trees. They rise straight and their branches stretch out straight and delicate, the needles are of a gentler green than other evergreens. Hemlocks are gentle in lots of ways, and walking beneath them called me down. We could see up the creek into the notch in the mountains, and the peaks were all recently dusted with snow. The water is very high right now, after two weeks of rain, so the creek roared by. A creek there is a river here. French Pete Creek is this time of year, an icy green color, where it is not foaming white over the dinosaur egg rocks. It was really a straightforward walk. We talked for a while and then shut up and listened to the quiet. The path followed the creek's bank, and drifted higher up the slope of the mountain on our left when the bank was too steep for a trail. My legs are used to the flatland now, and they burned the whole way. We turned back even before we reached the un-bridged crossing of French Pete Creek, which in the summer you can ford. During the walk back the ladies talked to each other and I followed along, lost in euphoric thought, the kind I don't really have in the city. My muscles relaxed and I had the urge to touch every tree, to lick the rocks and the leaves, to take it all back with me. Before we got back to the car we turned off the trail and walked down to the water. I hopped rocks until I was on the edge of a deep cool pool of the sort I would jump into in summer time, no matter how cold. An enormous dead hemlock rose straight above us, bare as a burnt pipecleaner. The ground beneath it had eroded and its root system was exposed. The rocks were all damp, but I sat on one anyway, and felt its cold seep. The water was so loud there was nothing to hear and I watched the way it moved over a drop into the pool and sprung back up off the hard bottom and tumbled over another drop. I closed my eyes and breathed and remembered how water, its sound in particular, heals me when I am heartbroken. I am not heartbroken now, but the feeling was reassuring. I don't know how long my eyes were closed. Long enough for me to feel like I had been peeled. My girlfriend touched my head and I opened my eyes and we headed back.