Home Archives Reading Room Search ... West Links Spring 1999, Volume 16.3
ESSAY Tim Gilmer
The Soil Inside Us Tim Gilmer graduated from UCLA and received a master's degree from Southern Oregon State College. He lives near Portland, where he farms, writes, and teaches writing at Clackamas Community College. He is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship in literary nonfiction and has published fiction, essays, and articles in Writers' Forum, The Oregonian, and New Mobility magazine. At the age of twentynine, I finally left the San Joaquin Valley and moved north to Oregon, to a land where crops in blocks of tens of thousands of acres no longer dominated the landscape. From a jet you could look down and see the true character of the land. Rivers, fed by creeks and streams which carved the ground into unusual shapes, flowed down from mountains. Gone was the checkerboard quilt of greens, yellows, and browns that covered the valley floor of California. Oregon land west of the Cascades resembled a jigsaw puzzle, the kind where fine variations in green make it difficult to distinguish one piece from another. East of the Cascades was dry and vast by comparison. I settled first in the Rogue Valley in Southern Oregon, west of the Cascades, and the first thing I did after unpacking my things was plop down in the brownishred soil outside my rural apartment and work my hands in the dirt. It was April of 1974, time to get my first garden going. I scooted around on my butt, childlike, digging with a shorthandled shovel, breaking up clods with my bare hands. Days later I had fashioned a gardensized farm, complete with beds, furrows, and irrigation ditches. | |
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