NEHALEM: The river, the mountain, the valley and the sea
My first exhibition of paintings in oil is a love letter to the Nehalem Valley, her welcoming people, and the wild beauty that is everywhere.
My dog and I walked under the branches shading
the trail. A young Stellar Jay followed overhead,
hopping from branch to branch as he
mingled with the shadowy leaves.
There is so much we don’t know.
The small graceful animals of the wood—
lit here and there by dappled sunlight—
come quietly into my consciousness
and then out again, ultimately unknowable,
like fragments of a dream.
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The ancient Nehalem glides over the stones,
Shining and singing in soft gentle tones,
She flows into my heart and right down to my bones,
The ancient Nehalem glides over the stones.
— Carl Whiting, 2019
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The first people who settled here called the mountain
Neahkahnie, which means “home of the creator,” and
they called the valley Nehalem, or “home of the people.”
Sometimes, when the waves are up on the coast, there
is a fine salt mist in the air around the mountain.
This mist settles in the valleys, tracing the contours
of the hills and softening the afternoon light.
Sometimes Neahkahnie lifts this moisture up to
generate its own clouds. I don’t know the word for
“breath of the creator” but I know what it looks like.
This breath will stream up and over from the north like
a greying comb-over. Other times it will lift to fill the
sky over the Nehalem Valley, dwarfing everything below
in a finery of ever-changing color and pattern.
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When morning comes the mountain is lit first,
her pines and ridges bright and awake against
creases of slumbering blue shadow.
Soon the far shore begins to glow,
and finally the closer firs and grasses
of the islands in the bay.
That’s when I’m most aware of the water;
when the valley is just waking, and the
gleaming slender channels cut like slivers
of mirror against their darker banks.
Whatever the day will bring,
whatever mood I happen to wake in,
I always say hello to the mountain first.
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Over the bay, the towering clouds billow and drift.
The evening light still lingers on the horizon as
the sky in her upper reaches turns to blue black ink.
When the wind is soft and the lights of the houses
begin to shimmer on the water, I recall a pirate ship lamp
that rested on my nightstand when I was small,
and I imagine I might be in Tahiti.
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It is called Lazarus Island because in winter
the island becomes submerged, only to rise again
each spring. Several dozen elk will swim out to
graze on the sweet grasses in the milder months.
When I painted this elk, I started with his eye so
that he could watch me from the surface of the board.
I find that beginning with an animal’s eye helps me
stay on track as I work to capture their wild,
confident manner. See, for example, the mysterious
pale crescent reflection in the eye of the Stellar Jay,
and the cheer I tried to capture in the eye of the
Violet-green swallow.
All around us, there is such startling beauty.
All around us, there are so many ways
to know this world.
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Out where Highway 101 crosses over the Nehalem
I approached a man sitting in an idling tractor.
“Hello, may I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“What kind of field is this?”
“What kind of field?”
“Yes…well, I am painting it, and I want to
name it accurately. Is this a hay field?”
“It’s silage. Silage is cut wet.”
“And then when it dries, it turns to hay?”
“No, it won’t ever be hay at all.
You feed silage to the cows wet.”
“Oh. So this is a silage field?”
“Yep.”
A week after I finished this painting,
They knocked down the small red building.
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I am the wind that wavers,
You are the certain land;
I am the shadow that passes over the sand.
I am the leaf that quivers,
You the unshakable tree;
You are the stars that are steadfast,
I am the sea.
— from I am the Wind,
Zoe Akins, 1912
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A pair of Violet-green Swallows was observed
assisting a pair of Western Bluebirds in raising young.
The swallows guarded the nest and tended the
bluebird nestlings, and after the bluebirds fledged,
the swallows used the nest site for their own young.
—Cornell Lab of Ornithology
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The rubber stop sign in front of the post office
inWheeler offered us a quiet little welcome
when we moved here. It didn’t shout at a person
the way the tall ones do, and it seemed to take
being regularly run over with cheery resolve.
A little while back my neighbor, Barbara, was reading the
newspaper at the Roost. Though we’re both regulars, she
typically keeps to herself, and so I was surprised one
morning when she addressed me directly:
“When did you get back from Chicago?”
“A day or two ago.”
“Well, I knew you were working on that
stop-sign painting, so I was a little sad to see it
crack and fall over while you were gone.”
“It did seem to be on its last legs.”
“Yeah. So anyway, I was having coffee and the
guy comes to replace it, and I went out there.
I told him I knew somebody who might want
the old one. He looked at me kind of funny,
but I put it in a plastic bag. It’s over there,
under the table next to the stuffed chair.”
She grinned broadly.
And that’s how a humble symbol of small-town life
became my favorite symbol of community.
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A visual interpretation of Tela Skinner’s poem, Subduction.
This was my first oil painting after moving to this rugged,
seismically active region.
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This particular crow is a regular visitor to our home, soaring down to accept a peanut and then carefully hiding it in a corner of the yard with an air of comic secrecy .
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Crows are adaptable, playful, and wonderfully observant.
They fly in great numbers past our house to somewhere south every evening.
Once in a while I’ll see one wing over into a barrel-roll for no reason I can fathom
beyond the joy of doing it.
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A watercolor painting published in the Squid, a literary publication devoted to
writing and art on the northwest Oregon coast.
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