The back porch of Oak House at Valley View is a platform for hanging out...watching clouds across the valley, reading one of the books from home, playing music, drinking a cup of tea on a cold afternoon. You meet people hanging out. You hear their stories. The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
A long-haired man in his early 60s saying that the first time he came to Valley View was in 1957 when he was 10 years old. He came up riding on a horse with his Dad from the valley below. The area around the hot springs was deserted. He most distinctly remembers that his new Levis chaffed his legs badly against the horse's back on their return to the valley floor. His parents had first come here on their honeymoon in 1935. He remembers his Dad playing the piano at the small ranch where they stayed. The ranch couple dancing to his music.
The back porch, the hot springs' pools are places of stories from folks coming here for decades and folks coming for the first time. The land itself holds stories. The canyons are filled with crude, stone artifacts made the small hunting and gathering bands that first sought game and plants in the valley wetlands. The Orient Land mine is over the next ridge, its gaping mouth the result of a huge explosion in 1893 in which a dozen miners died. The stones and the mine tell silent stories. The couples in the hot pools speak of more current stories: of their comings and goings, their wounds and their healings, the beginning and the end of relationships, their memories and their imaginations.
And from the back porch, the clouds tell their stories...across the valley, evening storms compete with the dying sun in a thunderous struggle of light and darkness. Ben builds a bonfire by the large pool up the creek. Folks gather to soak under the stars. And to tell old stories and create new ones while the earth and sky continue to create their own, long narratives.
