Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Garden Court
(1892)

"The rumors of EndDays might have been preliminary."

The Muse and I had been at each other’s throats forever, probably because it seemed to us that The World had been slavering at our throats for even longer. Eventually, too much turns into too much, and something must give. The usual give-and-take that enables any relationship sometimes falls out of balance. This situation isn’t usually anybody’s direct fault; it’s just one of those things that tend to happen regardless. Perhaps we become a little too much of this world rather than simply within it. I lose patience and seek escape. The data center controversy had gotten the better of me before it seemed to get The Muse. She was deliberately making herself into a public target, daring to say what few would have had the temerity or ability to voice. I couldn’t keep my big yap shut, either, at least not in the face of taunting social media. My center-of-the-universe place, where gravity reliably worked right, felt threatened. Neither of us had been sleeping that well.

The Muse had a Port Commissioner conference on the Oregon Coast. She quickly agreed to attend and invited me along. It would be our escape, a few days spent in a more agreeable situation. Between our many obligations, we rarely get away. I prefer to tend my cats and maintain my sacred routine. She’s usually too busy. We only very occasionally relent and agree to vacate the property. This time, The Muse’s able engineering finishing the drip irrigation portion of our freshly installed automated irrigation system would facilitate our absence. In the past, we’d ask someone to set sprinklers or The Muse would construct a Rube Goldberg-quality system of battery-operated timers that would invariably fail to properly operate at least one sprinkler. Leaving usually meant discarding something from our garden that our absence had killed. This time, our experience could be different.

The Muse worked fiendishly, obsessively in the days leading up to our planned absence. She even conscripted me for my upper body strength, popping little connectors into half-inch vinyl hoses. I was trying to get through my own terminal checklist, so our crabbiness only escalated as our departure date neared. We left, but not until well after noon on that day. This was an unusual departure time because I’m usually an as-early-in-the-morning-as-inhumanly-possible sort of traveler. The Muse had just a few more drip connectors to link up and test. I had shirts to iron, anyway. As we pulled out of the driveway, I asked her to check for availability in the little boutique hotel in the town of my birth, only fewer than a hundred and fifty miles away, but located in a radically different world. She found one room remaining and reserved it. We had a first-day destination.

We travel by the seat of somebody else’s pants. We often choose our destination after leaving, refusing to consider the end very far in advance. We ramble, purposefully aimless as clouds. We’re almost always refugees of some encumbering space and time, vacating those premises for something reliably different. Reservations often seem anathema to our travel objectives. We’ve been known to make our reservation five minutes before we show up to fulfill it.

I wanted to visit a story that has long held my interest, the story of my maternal great-grandparents, Clara and Nathaniel, and their parents, too. These were what I call Rimrock People, first-generation inhabitants of one of the harshest regions on this planet. Emigrants from the East, Oregon Trail survivors who took later-day Donation Land Claims in what must have seemed to them like the end of the earth. Dryland wheat country, if you clear it of stones, and an unlikely degree of moisture arrives. Clara’s folks landed in Buttermilk Canyon, a relative Eden in a wrinkle of high and terribly lonesome hills. Nathaniel’s folks’ claim had nothing but land and an adjunct section of timber far removed. Their claim had nothing but views. No trees. No water. Only views of Mt Rainier in the far, far distance, and a hazy Mt Hood to the West.

It was Nate’s job, as the oldest surviving son, to drive the stock down the draw and into Buttermilk Canyon, where an all-season stream flowed and where Clara lived. The trip was at least two miles each way, but if Nate rode the lead horse, it was little work and only a little more patience each way. Buttermilk must have seemed like Heaven to Nate, whose fate had cast him to inhabit a much tougher space. Nate and Clara fell in love and became my grandfather’s parents. They toiled and prospered, as people have always done in Rimrock Country. Buttermilk Canyon still holds the ranch that still belongs to Clara’s family. I couldn’t imagine ever leaving such a place. Nate’s folks lost their claim, probably in one of those panics for which the end of the Gilded Age was famous. I inherited little besides grit and sincere appreciation that I’m a Rimrock kid rather than a city one. My life has been relatively easy, considering, though it sometimes overtakes me, anyway. It overwhelms me and demands that I take leave for a spell, even if taking leave leads me even deeper into my backstory.

It occurred to me as The Muse and I drove along that dusty county road beside a wheatfield my forebears probably first leveled, that EndDays preface what will never come to pass. They amount to only so much fuss and feathers, and might be better acknowledged as beginnings instead. Our present incumbent seems both bound and determined to resurrect the panicky economy of the eighteen-nineties, when my great-grandmother Clara’s dad was a blacksmith in his thirties, full of possibilities. I recently met one of our sheriff’s deputies who claimed to be a cousin of my mother’s second cousin’s daughter, the granddaughter of Clara’s sister Roxy. Each ending was apparently only faking, because it sprouted some beginning which would later fake yet another ending into yet another beginning again. I was not always proud of my hard-scrabble heritage. Now I am proud. Not the sort of pride that tends to come before a fall, but the sort that tends to come just after the fall comes and no one’s actually injured; no end appears. A fresh start emerges instead. May we return once this excursion’s finished to find another new beginning awaiting us to continue the story, which certainly seems to be never-ending. The rumors of EndDays might have been preliminary.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz