December 23, 2024
Oaks Bottom
Another good day that nudges us further back into normalcy. We make it farther afield today than we have yet, and it makes it feel like our world is enlarging again rather than shrinking.
There’s a medical appointment on my calendar this morning and Bruce volunteers to drive us to it over at Keizer’s Interstate facility. It would be easy enough for us to get there on the Max, but since he’s made the offer it’s nice to have the lift and the chance for another visit. He drives over to Caffe Umbria to share some caffeine with me and then two hours later we swing by the apartment to pick up Rachael. The time goes quickly as we trade stories, and I’m blown away by his showstopper tale of his trip through the Taroko Gorge in Taiwan over fifty years ago. It’s one of the best first-hand accounts I remember hearing, the sort of tale that would be the feature of a good film or adventure novel. Paul Bowles and T C Boyle and Redmond O’Hanlon come to mind.
Rachael’s coming partly for her own errand. She needs new glasses but there’s no optometry appointment available for a couple of weeks. She’s hoping if she just shows up with her prescription they’ll sell her a pair of glasses based on it. She heads over there as soon as we arrive, while Bruce and I chat in the waiting area and wait for my name to be called.
My appointment today is for a field of vision test, another part of baselining the state of my eyesight. It’s a familiar test that I’ve taken a few times before, and probably many of you have also. They alternately test both eyes with the other masked over, and while you stare straight ahead at a bright light you exercise a clicker to indicate whenever you see a flash of light out on the perimeter somewhere. They’re essentially testing for blind spots.
I do fine with the left eye, clicking often as lights flash randomly throughout the whole field. My vision isn’t as clear as it was, but at least it doesn’t feel like I have any blind spots on that side. The right side is different of course. I can’t even see the light straight ahead. I exercise the clicker exactly once, and that was more of a guess than a certainty. So there’s some information it’s hard to deny the reality of.
In the meantime, a frustrated Rocky returns from the optometrist’s. They agree that they can make distance glasses for her based on her prescription, but she also needs a pair for closer vision too, probably as progressive bifocals. They won’t sell that pair to her though because she needs a newer prescription for it. It’s not all bad news though - she’s found the glasses she wants, and they offer to hold both pairs and sell them as a two for one special once she comes back with a new prescription.
And then we’re off for the main event for the day - a trip down to Oaks Bottom, arguably the best birding site in the inner city. It’s a dry day today and possibly the only one we’ll see for a week or more, so I really want to take advantage of it. Bruce volunteers to drive us down near the Sellwood Bridge and drop us off. From there our plan is to walk through the refuge and then keep walking north along the waterfront bike path until we come to Tilikum Crossing. From there we’ll cross over to the west side of the river, grab lunch at the Daily Cafe at the base of the OHSU tram, and then catch the streetcar back to our neighborhood. A big adventure!
As we drive south Rachael receives a call on her phone and then hands it up to me. It’s a call I’m pleased to receive, one I’ve been waiting for. It’s the rheumatology department, calling to schedule me for the initial visit I’ve been referred to them for.
It takes a minute for what they’re telling me to sink in. My first thought is that it’s good news that the rheumatology appointments are at Interstate, the nearby facility that’s nearest to us and will be a snap to get to. I’ll just take the Max. And then she tells me what she has available as the earliest appointment. It’s on February 21st, over eight weeks away. What?
I explain my situation, say that I’d understood that it was urgent to get in (but why, I don’t know - I’m not really sure yet what rheumatology’s role in my treatment plan is) and I need an earlier appointment. And I can travel - are earlier appointments available down in Sunnyside or over on the west side in Hillsboro? Nope. Interstate is it. It’s just blind luck that the rheumatology department is so close by, because in fact in all of Kaiser’s northwest region that covers Oregon and Washington there’s exactly one rheumatology department. It’s Interstate or nowhere. She offers her regrets and puts my name on a callback list in case there’s a cancellation.
So that’s so pathetically bad it’s almost comical. There’s nothing to be done about that today though, so we proceed with our plan for the day. Hold that thought though, because we’ll come back to it.
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The walk through Oaks Bottom is a big success - well, a pretty big success with some disappointments. After Rachael stays with me while we walk down the trail from the upper level to make sure I don’t topple over the edge we split up. She’s off on her own to get an actual walk in, and I head down a muddy trail toward the lake to do some birding. The plan is that we’ll meet at the opposite end of the park in an hour or two, at the spot where the unpaved lakeside trail ends at the paved bike path through the refuge.
The birding is good, but not quite as good as I’d been hoping. There aren’t all that many birds out on the water today, and there are few close in. There’s the vision thing I’m working through that affects my ability as a spotter, but the other thing is that even though it’s a dry day it’s overcast and grey - suboptimal conditions for my eyesight, but also about the worst daylight conditions for the new Canon I need for anything far out on the water. It’s a camera that really performs best under bright light conditions - in places like Tucson, for example. We really should go to Tucson, for more reasons than one.
Still though, I come away with 13-1/2 species for the day*. A pretty modest list, when usually in the past I’d come back from outings like this with a list of twenty or more. I’ll make note of it though as another benchmark of my status and progress; and even though I’m not really quite pleased with any of the photos themselves I’ll post them here as a different sort of baseline to look back on.
And the half-bird? That’s the one I can’t give a positive ID to because the one fleeting shot I got of it was so poor. I’ve studied it as well as the list on eBird of species that have been spotted here this winter, and there’s only one candidate I can come up with. It’s likely a red-necked grebe, so I’ll log it with a question mark. And it counts as a double, because we’re still in 2024 so it goes on that list also as bird #303.
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Rachael has called a few times to touch base, and has probably put in two or three miles more than me by walking beyond the trail. Toward the end though she calls to let me know she’s getting chilled and that we need to think about heading toward lunch. I’m about done anyway, so ten minutes later we meet at the agreed upon point and start walking the nearly three miles to our lunch spot. We keep a good pace the whole way, at least by my walking standards - maybe averaging 3-1/2 mph? I’m really quite heartened by the whole outing. I do fine walking, and feel like if I figured out how to get down to Oaks Bottom by myself I could come down on my own - if we ever get another dry sunny day, that is.
We enjoy our lunch at the Daily Cafe - Rachael has a salad and I have a pulled pork sandwich with fries - and we reminisce over the many lunches we had at the original Daily Cafe that used to be in the Pearl District about two blocks from our condo. It was a regular part of our daily routine for our first years here, when we’d telecommunicate a few days a week to our offices down in Salem. We’d spend the morning working, walk over to the DC for lunch or a late breakfast, put in the afternoon hours and then hop on the bikes to ride down toward Oregon City or north along the Columbia or up Cornell and Thompson into the west hills toward Skyline. Good times.
And eating here brings back another flashback memory, from the spring of 2010 when I was in recovery from the ruptured quadriceps tendon I suffered on our cross-country ski trip to the Dolomites. After being on my back and essentially bedbound for the first several weeks after surgery, I can still remember the first time I was able to walk over to the Daily Cafe, slowly and carefully feeling my way with crutches. I can still see that first curbside and feel the fear when we came to it and I summoned the nerve to step forward over the edge.
All in all though, another fine day. We’ve got a streak going.
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** American crow, Rock pigeon, Northern shoveler, Common merganser, Song sparrow, Dark-eyed junco, Wood duck, Pied-billed grebe, Gadwall, Mallard, Double-crested cormorant, Great blue heron, American coot, Red necked grebe?
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