J.M. Kerr was raised on one of the last homesteads in Western Oregon, on High Heaven Road in the Coast Range foothills of Yamhill County, which his pioneer parents settled in 1929. He died of natural causes at the age of 94, the last to pass of eight siblings, and the extended Kerr Family gathered at the homestead for his memorial service in July 2019.

Rarely, a minus tide is low enough to expose a ghost forest to the sea air in Neskowin, Oregon. The petrified Sitka spruce trees, more than 2,000 years old, were drowned by an immense tectonic shift during a catastrophic earthquake in 1700. The ocean rose up to cover them. Now, once or twice a year, tourists with selfie sticks explore the seabed forest.

The 25,000-acre Boardman Tree Farm disappeared in stages, a little more cut down each week, until only a slash pile remained. The grid of poplar trees, a popular Eastern Oregon location for walks, weddings and meditation are being replaced by cows, pigs and potatoes. A mega-dairy built on the property was swiftly shut down in 2019 due to vastly illegal groundwater pollution and enormous lagoons of manure.

The old press of the Statesman Journal has gone dark. For the first time in 161 years, a daily newspaper will no longer be printed in Salem. I spent one of the last nightly runs with the pressmen, my Hasselblad and ten rolls of film.

Much of the town of Gates, Oregon, burned in September 2020, as the Santiam Fire raged over the Cascade Mountains and through the Santiam Canyon. In an unprecedented weather event where high winds met ultra-dry conditions, the Oregon Fires decimated many small towns statewide.

In December my brother awakened me with an early morning phone call. "The house burned down," he said, in disbelief. "I'm on a neighbor's couch." The house was the house in Hillsboro where we grew up, where he and our parents still lived. The fire department could not determine a cause, only that an explosion had occured, the flames were thirty feet high, and the house was gone in thirty minutes. Last week, as I drove up to the ruins, two deer bounded out of the ashes. I don't know what they were looking for. I only found a few things that were even remotely recognizable: My grandfather's tools and coin collection. My father's tie rack, with bits of carbonized polyester. A couple cast iron pots. Melted porcelain and glass. A stack of my charred and soaking-wet college papers, all stuck together, with notes for songs-in-progress. A sheaf of letters regarding wheat and other crops, written in very old-looking script. Metal skeletons of mattresses and chairs. The chimney, tilting, holding up the three remaining boards of the roof. What could only have been the stove, stuck under a melted bathtub in the crater of the kitchen. A doorknob attached to a door-shaped chunk of ash. The rusted guts of the grand piano. And the fir tree on the western side, 60 feet tall now, much larger than when it served as my family's Christmas tree in 1982 when we moved in. I was two years and my brother two weeks old. The tree is half burnt but the other half shows signs of life. It may survive.