Oakland Sunrise

I normally wait until evening to upload my photo, but this is no normal day. Today, we will traverse the lower one-third of the large state of Oregon, our destination the Klamath Basin, and Lost River High School. We leave at 11:30, play tonight at 6:00, and we'll be back home in the 1:30 - 2:30 a.m. ballpark. We will see the southern end of the Umpqua Valley, the Rogue Valley, cross the southern ribbon of the Cascades Mountains, drop along the wide stretching Klamath Lake, and then into the arid reaches of southeastern Oregon. The weather should hold dry and clear - no snow or icy roads to worry about.

I began my teaching career in Klamath, at nearby Mazama High School in 1986. I served a one-year temporary position for Paulann Peterson, an English teacher then at Mazama, who later went on to become Oregon's Poet Laureate. She took off that year to pursue a creative writing fellowship at Stanford. I like to take credit for her later success in poetry, because without my subbing for her, she would have had to stay in teaching that year. That's my story, and I'm sticking with it ;)

We had a good year there, and our son Josh attended Lost River that year. While the academic experience lacked something, we had a great time in the outdoors. 

The basketball season has hit that point where it's easy to see how the grind has affected everyone. Kids look tired. Coaches look tired. Ten hours on a bus is no day at the spa. But the end is in sight - less than a month until the end of the regular season. And then the playoffs. We're tied for second in our league right now after dropping a game Tuesday we easily could have won that would have placed us in first. But, as William Stafford says in his poem The Way It Is, "You never let go of the thread."