Terry O’Casey is the minister of the High Lakes Christian Church in La Pine, Oregon. He is also the President of the 2010 Oregon Christian Convention. Terry knew I would be driving from Califorina to Oregon to participate in the Spring Rally for the Convention and he invited me to spend the night.
I jumped at the chance, because I sense Terry and I are kindred spirits. It was Terry who let me know that John Muir came from a Restoration movement background and who was a solid believer in God’s amazing work in Creation. As I result, I read a couple of books on Muir; one a biography and the other some samples of his writing. Of course anybody who has been out of doors in California is well acquainted with Muir.
Terry also is an avid student of the Bible and taught me quite a bit in the one day we had together. I met one son, Isaac, but the rest of the family was away, including his wife who was working up in Willapa Bay in Washington. She is an avid outdoors person herself and I hope to meet her some day.
We went birding soon after my arrival and I was able to see two lifers within an hour — Barrow’s Goldeneye and the long sought American Dipper, also known as the water ouzel. The ouzel was John Muir’s favorite bird. The dipper was building a nest, going after moss along the river and swimming/flying it back to the nest construction under a walking bridge. We crawled down almost into the river to see the nest under construction.
The next morning we went into the woods and sure enough, another two lifers for my list: Jameson’s Sapsucker and the Northern Saw-whet owl.
Central Oregon is a beautiful area with lots of different geographical features: lava flows, Ponderosa pines, Cascade lakes, mountains and waterfalls, pumice, obsidian, bluffs and tufts. Well worth a visit in the late spring. It was a week or two early for the songbird migration to be fully underway, but a joy to see what we did.
