Curing cabin fever

This week’s weather has known no constancy. A bit of sun, then hail. Then chilly sunlight. Then pounding rain. Then more pounding rain. Then a bit of hail, and all the while, chill and chill and chill.

So this evening, with clouds breaking and the air, well, approaching warm, I found myself in the living room with a hellish bout of cabin fever. A volume of Yeats, one of my favorite poets, lay on my lap, but I kept thinking I should go for a ride. “No,” I thought, “the weather’s going to go to hell again.” I opened the Yeats, skimmed it, put it aside. I looked out the window again. Shook my head. Opened the book again, skimmed it again, shut it again. It was 6:30 p.m.; I looked out the window once more, wondering if the weather would be decent for the reminder of the day, or if ominous clouds would roll in and break at any moment.

Finally I said the hell with it, and geared up for a ride.

I didn’t want to go far, didn’t need to go far. I just needed to get out for a little while. A few minutes thought gave me the answer: ride up Skinner Butte.

Clouds over the hills

Skinner Butte is about a 10-minute ride from the house. On the north end of Eugene, right at the Willamette River, the Butte lay a shadow across the original Western settlement in Eugene, by one Eugene Skinner (I don’t think I need to explain the names).

Eugene stretches from butte to butte – Skinner Butte to the north, Spencer Butte to the south, and both connected by Willamette Street. At the top of Skinner Butte, the smaller of the two, you can look in any direction and see Eugene, and beyond Eugene you can see, well, the valley hills. Eugene is safely ensconced in the southern end of the verdant, vibrant Willamette Valley, and while breath-taking, you don’t exactly get far-reaching vistas. But, standing at the top of the butte, I watched the rain clouds break over the southern sky, just west of the top of Spencer Butte.

Closer to Skinner Butte, all around downtown the evening sunlight glinted gold off the trees. Something that has always endeared me to Oregon, is the sheer amount of greenery. Our cities have not forgotten trees, and Eugene has them everywhere. Big and bright, shining green in new spring leaves, it was hard to believe how rainy and stormy the past few days had been.

Calm at the top

At the top of Skinner Butte, the world was very quiet. A few other souls (all in cars) had come up to take in the evening. Over in a pickup, as I backed out the Ural to rearrange it for the bike-and-butte shot at the top of this missive, a man shot me a thumbs-up and a big grin. On a bench at an overlook to my left, a man in a hooded sweatshirt sat barefoot, meditating. I prefer my meditation while sitting over a 750cc boxer engine, but I understood where he was coming from.

With each minute on the bike and each minute at the top of the butte, my cabin fever faded. The scent of wild fennel – a swath had been cut through the greenery just beyond the parking lot – wafted up me. I looked to the east, to the big “O” of Autzen Stadium and the Willamette River nearby, the foothills of the Cascade Mountains farther out. I thought of Jodie, and my Ural, and our upcoming wedding (summer 2009), about work and our pets and all our goals and dreams.

“Are you happy?” I asked myself.

I grinned and nodded. “It is a good life,” I said to myself, “and I am happy.”

A couple minutes later, with the time now around 7:15 p.m., I felt ready to head home. The dog needed feeding; Jodie would be home soon and we would have dinner too, and I wanted to browse through a bit of Irish folklore first. And a beer. I wanted a cold, delicious beer. We recently opened up a homebrew clone of Newcastle brown ale, and there was a frosty mug with my name on it in the freezer.

The meditating man shifted, and bent down to put on his shoes. He was done too. He started walking down the hiking path down the Butte’s south face. I nodded, walked to the bike and suited up. The cabin fever was gone. It was a beautiful evening, and I was a content man ready for some more riding.