Editorial Not that deep

The reservoir on the shoulder of the Oregon Cascades is nearly full from the North Santiam River boiling down its channel brown with mud cut from the mountains above.

Only a few days before, stumps were visible in mud flats off the point of the town of Detroit but now they are covered, only the top branches of Aspens that grew tall over the last few years of drought poke above the water, young trees that found a place to grow in fertile earth long covered by shallows.

Stumps and new growth together form an ebb and flow of vegetation, a rhythm of life driven by changes in depth of just a few feet of water.

Looking across the lake now it is easy to forget that stumps lie barely beneath the calm surface. The mind's eye wants to believe that the lake is as deep as it is wide, that there is great volume to the water, not just great surface.

It's not that deep.

At least there is some water. It is hard to imagine existence in blasted out villages thousands of miles away that sit stump-like on brown plains of sand where drought has parched the soil, where women have stripped hills for firewood and children eat soup made from grass.

It is hard to imagine there isn't more depth there, too, something sustaining old men and women and children clinging to the soil in danger of being whisked from the surface by winds of war or just of time. Of course, all of us will be whisked away, eventually.

Not far from those villages is Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, 29,035 above sea level. There nothing grows, it is all rock and ice and there is so little oxygen the brain begins to die.

But like the stumps just below the surface of Detroit Lake, Everest lies near the top of a shallow ocean of air, its peak only five and one-half miles above the sea, less than the distance between Sisters and the small rounded cone of Black Butte.

All life on the surface of this mud-caked ball depends on that thin ocean, the wind that blows leaves from New England maples, brown sand from village streets in Palestine, dust storms in China that powder the Oregon Cascades just now giving water back through the Santiam River above Detroit Lake, all this exists within a living skin thinner than mold on the skin of an orange.

Yet the mind's eye wants to think that life is as deep as it is wide, that it has as great a volume as it does surface.

But it's not that deep.

There is no escape under the waves, for there the pressure mounts and the sun's warmth fades so quickly that 5,000 feet below sea level it is cold and dark and life-like jelly ekes out an existence by hovering at soot-filled chimneys of undersea volcanoes.

Less than a mile. You can walk it, it is not much longer than the main street of our town. The oceans are just shallow basins, not nearly as deep as they are wide. They seem deeper because we can't see bottom.

All our turmoil takes place in nearly two dimensions, the noise and hatred and love, it all lives within a world that has length and width but nearly no depth, it is deep only because we are so small that we subsist between the surfaces of our oceans of water and our thin ocean of air, we inhabit a thin skin of wind and foliage and moisture that at times feels as though it might blow off our planet at the slightest sneeze of God.

Skyscrapers and bridges are tiny on the scale of mountains, the mountains only a slight roughness on the surface of a wet rock spinning through the universe.

Yet from this microscopic vantage, we build tools to look out at the stars, gaze backwards in time to glimpse the beginning, simply because we want to know.

We love, not merely multiply. We create, not simply to eat but for the joy of creation and to reconcile with the knowledge that we live also on the surface of time, itself a dimension with direction but no volume.

Detroit Lake is nearly full. Soon the water will be covered by bright silent sails and the frantic buzz of motors and screams of laughter as cold water bounces above inner tubes floating above stumps below and into a thin blue haze of smoke from dozens of camp fires around the shore.

Eric Dolson is the publisher of The Nugget Newspaper.