78. New Year's Day Plunge

About 10 or 12 years ago a friend talked three of us into taking a New Year’s Day plunge into cold Wallowa Lake. Four became nine or ten the next year, and progressed to over seventy last year. It’s become a local tradition, with farmers, ranchers, government workers, shopkeepers and college students home for the holidays all gathering to greet each other and celebrate the calendar’s turn.

 

As I’m one of a couple who’ve made it every year, I get calls about it from the newspaper, and from others who can’t remember the time we jump, or whether the event is even on again in 2015 or 2018 or today. 

 

Last year’s seventy-plus was a big gaggle of plungers, towel holders, and onlookers on the boat ramp waiting for the countdown, diving in with screams and shouts, and drying and hugging, congratulating and Happy New Year’ing afterwards. When people started asking this year, with Covid on their minds and mine, we decided to stagger it. I quickly divided the alphabet by four and suggested a 10 a.m. start, and then 15-minute intervals for the rest. The newspaper and Chamber website picked that up—and off we went!

 

The first group was the largest—some people didn’t get the word, and there were a few alphabet cheaters—but the 25 or 30 in that group implicitly understood Covid and the crowd and acted accordingly. They went in small family and friend groups, separated from each other and the next group by recommended distances without saying it, shouting Happy New Year and Good Bye to 2020 to the sky, and then hustled to warm cars.

 

The fifteen-minute intervals were too long—they could have been five—but the idea was solid, and groups two, three and four, with 10-12 in each, made their runs. 

 

And it occurred to me that this was exactly the way to begin 2021. Not with midnight music and too much to drink, crowded dance floor or arm-in-arm Auld Lang Syne, but with an outdoor event with friends, neighbors, and visitors talking and laughing across distance, doing something together, holding the health of others and wishes for a better 2021 in common. 

 

And if the few dozen of us at Wallowa Lake this morning can continue such good-natured contagion for the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be doing our part to still this pandemic.

 

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26. Waiting for the shoe...

to drop.

Wallowa County is a large and until recently remote area: two million acres in the far northeast corner of Oregon; the population hovers at 7,000, with fewer in winter when snowbirds go south; many more in summer with hiking trails, fishing streams, a beautiful lake, rodeo, powwow, car shows.

We are now officially a tourist destination, with fishers, hunters, riders, hikers, painters, photographers, coming to the place where grandpa shot elk and great aunt Lucie had a cabin, where dad went to Boy Scout camp and mom rode her horse in the Chief Joseph Days parade. In recent years we’ve added art galleries and bronze foundries, and now, even in Pandemic times, people with license plates that read Kansas, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada come to see what the Tourism Department has dubbed one of the “Seven Wonders of Oregon.”

We’ve been blessed, lucky, or both on the Covid-19 score—as of today we have had just 18 people test positive and only one death. We’ve followed Governor Brown’s guidelines pretty well, staying away from crowded indoor spaces, wearing masks, taking our exercise, meals, and beers outside.

A local preacher-lawyer took the state to court and a judge in Baker City stood with him and others to keep churches open. The Oregon Supreme Court told the judge to reconsider; he wouldn’t, and about that time a large church in nearby Island City defied the state and spread 200 cases in the wink of an eye. No new words from the preachers.

But Umatilla County is close-by, and its Wal-Mart Distribution Center and processing plants are statewide hot spots. The numbers in Bend, Oregon and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, both bigger and more posh tourism area than ours, are up. We watched while Sun Valley had an early spike—skiers brought it from California, they said.  Oregon overall, quiet and seemingly safe for months, now regularly tops 400 new cases in a day.

The Main Street of Joseph and the shores of Wallowa Lake are crowded with tourists.

We wait for the shoe to drop.

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