What Is Elk Creek Notes?

I didn’t record an interview this week. Instead, let me explain my greater purpose in launching Elk Creek Notes, which intends to be a journal of a place and how it responds to the changing climate and human care.

It will be two years this week that we have lived on the banks of lower Elk Creek, just above its confluence with the Rogue River above Shady Cove, Oregon. For years, my wife and I have been hunting for a riverside home. While helping with end-of-life care for our sister-in-law, my wife discovered this home and, finding it virtually perfect in every way—nestled in the mountains, isolated from light pollution, pastures of grazing horses across the creek, and surrounded by wildlands—we made the move. The existing home we purchased is heated and cooled by a heat pump, has a metal roof and defensible zone, but there are, as everywhere, risks galore.

These two acres see almost 55 billion gallons of water pass through each year. Elk Creek drains approximately 135 square miles of canyonland in the Southern Cascades. Much of the year, the creek is only a few feet wide, but in the winter it can become a 90-foot wide torrent. The first weekend we were here in January 2024, the water rose to within six vertical feet of the house. We did know what we are getting into by moving into a flood plain and wildfire-prone area, but seeing the water cycle behave like a wild animal still startles when placed against the backdrop of a life mostly spent in urban areas. Water in the wild is not a faucet-controlled resource, it is shaping the environment in unruly ways. The way nature crafted the world we know.

As a couple in our 60s, we also represent a trend. Older people are moving to the wilderness-urban interface (the WUI or “woo-eee”) far more than younger folks—the WUI is the fastest-growing residential zone in the nation, and 87% of the population growth in these regions is people over 60. In part, this newsletter will address aging in place in an increasingly risky environment, extending an experience I’ve been living since I started hosting a weekly multi-generational Zoom call in 2020, when my brother was dying from a rare brain cancer. We gather—my parents, aunts and uncles, my generation who are becoming grandparents, and often members of the following two generations—and talk about life, the choices and plans we make, and now we managed first the passing of my brother, then my step-father, and now my step-mother’s descent into dementia.

The human story is about making our way. How can we embrace our relationship with a place as a caretaker and member rather than the owner-operator of property? How can we become small-i indigenous to a place, as Tom Brown explained in a 2019 Sustainability In Your Ear interview? I suspect it is not only in learning every facet of a place but in teaching the next generation.

It takes time to make a future. Please spend some time with me to discover the life of Elk Creek. I hope that growing our awareness about the impact of human activity on nature will help.

When we first moved in, a yearling deer got his first horns. They stuck out in straight points like the antennae on a Soviet satellite, and he got his name, Sputnik. For two years, we’ve watched him mature, which included illnesses, such as deer fibroma (which was expressed as growths that looked like fingers growing from his back and a pronounced sac on his throat), and as of last week, we suspect his death from hemorraghic disease or Chronic Wasting Disease—if the latter, Sputnik would be the first deer in Oregon with CWD.

During the last couple of months, Sputnik had declined. He was lethargic and would sometimes spend hours sitting in a clearing near the creek, but in recent weeks had started drooling profusely, hanging his head, which had a drooping ear, and barely reacting when I walked outside. Because hemorraghic disease typically kills in late summer or fall, and based on his lack of fear response—he used to bound away—we suspect CWD. On Christmas Day, he was shaky, emaciated, and very slow. See for yourself:

We reported Sputnik’s condition to the Oregon Department of Fish & WIldlife, who asked us to bring in his head if he happens to die and we find him. We haven’t seen Sputnik since that day.

It’s cold. Let’s enjoy a warm Spring day on Elk Creek.

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