Ed and I caught the bus in Phoenix shortly after 10 this morning and arrived at Lithia Plaza Ashland about 11am and then spent the next two hours walking the paths next to the creek. These six pics are just a sampling of the 60 that I took.
Ashland, Oregon is one of my favorite towns in the world. Though I've not ventured far from the Pacific Northwest ever in my life and thus realize that my experience of the world is limited, I still find it hard to imagine a town ever pushing Ashland off my top ten list.
Lithia Park is one of the things I love Ashland for.
Here we have just hit the section of the path just past the playground where suddenly we seem to be cut off from civilization. If not for the bark dust and gravel path and the occasional trash barrel and picnic table nestled in the trees beside the path we seem to be alone with nature. Especially when, a few steps later the sounds of squealing kids is replaced by the sound of the creek water rushing over rocks and birdsong and maybe breezes ruffling the leaves.
At the large pond about a twenty minute walk up ahead ducks swim and turtles sun on the rocks.
We crossed back and froth across the creek several times via foot bridges like this, standing in the middle at times to watch the water rush by or look up or down stream trying to identify trees and plants. Ed was able to spot fish in the water but try as I might I could not.
This was taken from the middle of that bridge pictured above which is just below the duck pond.
This is the smaller pond near the park entrance butting up against one of the Shakespeare Festival theaters. I think of it still as the Swan Pond because there used to be a mated pair of swans that lived there back when I was first introduced to this park in the early 80s. When I was going to college in Ashland in the late 80s I would sometimes bring my reading homework to Lithia park. The Swan pond here and a picnic table on the creek bank just past the playground were my two favorite spots.
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The bridge over the creek on the Plaza in downtown Ashland. This is the same Bear Creek that flows past our trailer park near Phoenix ten or so miles north.
I stood on the bridge and pointed the camera downstream. The ones I took of the upstream view didn't turn out so well as I was facing into the sun.
After crossing the bridge and following a dirt trail several yards I spotted this steep stair. I had to as Ed to come help me down it.
At the bottom of those stairs I aimed the camera upstream towards the bridge.
And then down below my feet.
I adore Ashland Oregon. I fell in love with it while going to college there in the 1980s.
We're just have to stop waiting for internet breakdowns and doctor appointments for excuses to go spend time there.
I thought this would be a good follow up for yesterday's TT about the Shakespeare material I have out of the library. The above video is a brief tour into the Elizabethan Theater, one of the several theaters that put on Shakespeare and other plays between February and October each year.
And as a bonus, here is a link to another video featuring a stroll through the beautiful Lithia park bordering the theaters, just one of the many wonderful highlights of the town of Ashland, OR.
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This YouTube is of an Easter Egg hunt at the Lithia Park in Ashland, Oregon about ten miles south of here. Lithia is my favorite park in the entire Rogue Valley. I used to hang out there to do my homework or class reading when I was going to then Southern Oregon State College (now known as Southern Oregon University) in the late eighties.
The video was shot and posted by the Ashland Daily Tidings, Ashland's Newspaper. I just discovered there are nearly 200 more videos posted by the Tidings so I'm going to be exploring them for potential posting in the future, looking for things that show off the local color.
I love Ashland and would like to live there but it is currently way out of our price range. But you know what? I'm going to stop being ashamed of claiming my love for it and my desire to spend more time there.
That might sound strange if you don't know this area but there is a lot of tension between the 'artsy,' 'tree hugger,' 'elitist egg heads,' and the 'working class,' 'Jefferson Stater,' 'red neck,' 'Libertarian,' 'Patriots,' among these valley communities whose economies were once dependent on mining, agriculture and timber and have been suffering the throes for the past thirty or so years of a transition to a tourist, retirement (read out of state millionaires), and high-tech dependent economies; similar in some respects to what happened to the Silicon Valley in the last thirty years of the 20th century.
Note that I put all the labels in quotes to indicate that for the most part they are the pejoratives each side uses against the other. I don't hold with stereotyping and labels lend themselves to that kind of thoughtless empathy-blocking relating that is as unattractive in the one as the other. It is probably evident from a casual perusal of Joystory that my sympathies lean toward the 'artsy' and the 'tree-hugger' and the 'egg head.' But I spend more time among those with the 'working class' and the 'red neck' sympathies and I know them to be good people with hearts of gold and no more deserving of the disdain directed at them then are those to whom they direct their disdain. I just wish they could all see each other past the labels the way I do and could come together to solve their community problems in a win-win way.
Not least (but not only) because these tensions were a direct cause of the inability to create a long term solution for our local library funding. Players on both sides made in-your-face power plays that aimed at win-lose solutions that showed no respect for the dignity or the legitimate anxieties of the 'other side.' The solution that opened the doors of the 15 library branches after seven months of closure is temporary, covering only two to three years and some consider it 'union busting.' So the joy of having the libraries back is a bit dampened by the sorrow of seeing so many of my favorite people (read librarians) loose so much (read jobs, benefits, income) and the anxiety of watching this whole drama play out again in two years.
OK. This post kinda went off track. But I'm going to let it stand and swing it back to topic in closing. To restate my intent: I'm going start practicing a sense of serenity about owning my love of Ashland and all it symbolizes for me in spite of the fact that I interact daily with those for whom 'Ashland' is an expletive because of what it symbolizes for them.
