Pull up a chair. We are not walking today but looking out of my window, something I was forced to do most of last week since I had to navigate the consequences of a fall. (All good now, no worries.)
I resumed photographing the squirrels on my balcony. When you stare out of the windows for hours at a time you can eventually identify a cast of characters by their distinct markings. By now we are on a first name basis.
Meet Fire Ear, my favorite, since s/he’s fearless, happy to look me straight in the eye and defiantly pees into my flowerpot during visits. Every single time.
Then there’s Mohawk, whose tail is either fashionably barbered or the proud emblem of victory in a previous fight.
Nipped Ear has obviously been victorious as well, and is aggressively defending his position at the peanuts when other squirrels arrive.
Red dot is the leanest of them all and shy,
Butterball only appears when the big guys have had their share,
and occasionally there’s an enterprising Baby.
The word squirrel is Greek in origin: it comes from skiouros, from skia, meaning “shadow,” and oura, meaning “tail.” When they sit up and move their tail straight one could think of it as a bit of an umbrella, I guess.
There are a whopping 200 species across the world, all born altricial, or completely dependent on their mothers for the first three months of their lives. They hoard food in caches for lean times, able to dig up stuff even under a foot of snow. Some 25% of those stores are lost to raiders, some are never dug up, which in turn helps to grow new trees, in theory. Not in my flowerpots, where nuts disappear en masse.
They are crepuscular, that is most active at dusk and dawn, so they can hang out when it gets hot during the middle of the day. They also sport hyper mobility (they can rotate their ankles by 180 degrees,) which allows them to climb in amazing ways, with forearms stretching, while the backless are anchored to the tree limbs. Oh, and their teeth never stop growing. Good thing, too when your perennially wear them down on hard nuts.
It brings me such joy to watch them, prohibitions to feed them close to the house (they might start nesting in the rafters) be d-mned. The poem below could not be more apt.
Checking out what’s inside the house!
Here is a field recording of Squirrel Flower – longtime readers might remember the location, deCordova sculpture park in MA, I wrote about it here.
I’m not asking you to walk with me today. Rather, sit back and let me regale you with a tale of failure: the failure to hike to a seemingly easy destination, Cape Falcon at the Pacific coast.
The sign should have been a warning, the generously left behind walking sticks not been ignored. The path seemed perfectly fine, until it wasn’t. Landslides that had felled trees could be ignored, climbing over the trunks was not a major effort.
But then the mud set in, in depth and fluidity that you really could not walk on it without sinking in to the ankles. So you had to find stepping stones, utilize the root systems of the old growth trees or make side detours, only to find your way back to a path that was now covered with mall rivulets of running water.
Jumping puddles….
I gave up halfway in, saying good bye to the dream of seeing the Pacific ocean from high up, off cliffs that I had never visited before.
Let me hasten to add that of course it was not a failure. It was an adventure in a damp, dripping, moist, muddy universe that provide innumerable shades of intensely saturated greens, gentle rain that was barely felt, squishy noises that echoed delightful childhood memories of stomping around in your ladybug rubber boots.
The forest verdant. Wet. Full of new growth, pretending spring was already here.
It was also a reminder of how privileged we are to live at the threshold of so many different micro climates, the dry, steep cliffs of the Gorge on Wednesday, the temperate rainforest at the coast on Friday, all easily reached with a short drive.
Failure, as a concept, was on my mind because of two things I read recently. Both told stories about the consequences of failure, with both acknowledging that our society is particularly, grossly even, success oriented, with success structurally reserved for a few. Failure, then, can lead to compensating mechanisms that prove to be intensely destructive. At least that was the upshot of a thoughtful, well argued article by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic, The Narcissism of the Angry Young Men. The essay discusses the misfits who become killers, sometimes mass murderers,
“show(ing) them, in general, to be young losers who failed to mature, and whose lives revolved around various grievances, insecurities, and heroic fantasies…. But these young males, no matter how “quiet,” are filled with an astonishing level of enraged resentment and entitlement about their roles as men, and they seek rationalizations for inflicting violence on a society they think has both ignored and injured them. They become what the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger called “radical losers,” unsuccessful men who feel that they have been denied their dominant role in society and who then channel their blunted male social impulses toward destruction.”
Highly recommended reading, which, in my case, was paired with an essay by Costica Bradatan, a Romanian immigrant and Professor of Humanities at Texas Tech University discussing his new book, “In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.”
In a tongue in cheek assessment of his own predilections he writes:
“America’s noisy worshiping of success, its mania for ratings and rankings, the compulsive celebration of perfection in everything served only as a facade. Behind the optimistic veneer there lies an extraordinary fear of failure: the horror of going down and going under, of losing face and respectability, of exclusion and marginalization. It’s not success but failure — the savage fear of it — that lies at the heart of the American dream. The country is custom made for an aficionado of failure like me.”
The book is devoted to four major historical figures actively courting failure in their pursuit of meaning and transformation (or religious transcendence.) I have only read the chapter on Simone Weil which is available here, and was much taken by Bradatan’s narrative approach (and skill) and not at all by his conclusions. There is something about the proscription to be humble, to let failure lead you inwards on some self discovery journey that rubs me as too convenient in a society that is set to clamp down on anger and resistance provoked by injustice. (I must also admit that I will never be able to be a neutral reader on the saintliness of Ghandi, one of the four figures discussed in this book. Remember, Gandhi advised the Jews in Germany to offer passive resistance to the Nazi regime—and to give up their own lives as sacrifices. He told the Jews to pray for Adolf Hitler. “If even one Jew acted thus,’ he wrote, ‘he would salve his self respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole of Jewry and leave a rich heritage to mankind besides.”(Ref.)
Yes, excessive anger leading to mass shootings is catastrophic. But humble cowing in front of oppressive forces that promise enlightenment and salvation if you keep your voice down and obey, is not desirable either. There are too many requests for being humble in the air right now and I always wonder about the underlying societal frictions. I do believe it is important to experience failure (and not shelter kids from that experience, in particular) and learn from it, perhaps grow through it, but let’s not tie it to humility beyond curbing our narcissistic streaks. There’s a slippery slope from humility to servility to conformity and consent, in my not so humble opinion.
One last glimpse of Friday’s wondrous views: neither humble nor proud, the elks were taking it easy, some as mud-caked as their photographer by the end of the day. Pretty amazing.
Music today is America by Jewish (immigrant) composer Ernest Bloch who lived at the Oregon Coast.
PS: This WOULD have been the view, photograph from internet:
Hike with me. Pack the sunhat, yes, I mean it. If you are lucky we encounter another windless, cool but sunny day that brings the landscape into sharp relief and makes for long shadows.
The hike leads up to an old cherry orchard with a single remaining tree, on the Washington side of the Gorge, a longish hour’s drive straight East from PDX. I did the whole 5-mile loop some years ago, this time managed 2/3rds of that which counts as a grand achievement given the steep inclines.
The views of the Columbia river and the basalt cliffs are spectacular, once you up there after parking at river level.
The screes are impressive, walking on the unstable stones path is another matter. Not so much dangerous as simply requiring tons of concentration that you don’t loose your footing. Much time spent with eyes on the ground when they should be scanning the surround for its stark beauty.
Should you be so lucky, you’ll see a bald eagle flying in the distance just when you look up, eventually settling in one of the dry oak trees that dot the hillsides. If you quietly approach, you might find flickers as well, perfectly camouflaged against the lichen covered rocks. And always, always, ravens.
During the breaks to catch our breath, my fellow photographer and I talked about how differently serious photographers approach the views of the landscape.
What for us is still a marvel, a breathtaking exposure to beauty no matter how much affected by human habitation and intervention, is for others a grievous example of the loss of all that was pristine.
Some long for untouched nature, while I certainly am grateful for the roads and tunnels built into the mountains so I can reach meadows that are crisscrossed by paths carved by men, and orchards built into oak tree habitats.
Which is, of course, not to say that we should not be stewards of the earth. Plenty of reminders all around – the drought is visible, even this early in the year,
the river low.
Evidence from where we looked down the promontory confirms that we continue to ravage the planet – trains carrying oil or coal that traverse the Gorge endanger us all. Coal trains pollute the air, contaminate the ground and water with coal dust, and contribute to climate change. Oil trains endanger lives and environment with their potential for accidents. In 2016 a 96-car Union Pacific train carrying highly volatile Bakken crude oil derailed near this location, setting off a massive blaze. 47,000 gallons of escaped oil, 2,960 tons of oil-drenched soil, contaminated groundwater, and $9 million in cleanup costs, cause by Union Pacific’s failure to maintain the tracks. It was a miracle that the small town of Moisier was mostly spared. (Here is the link, once more, to our documentary film that tells the whole story.)
Of course it is stunning, as always, how tenaciously nature clings on, even under challenging conditions.
I was reminded of a poem by Lucille Clifton that urges us to rethink our relationship to nature and the responsibilities we have not just for our own species but for all others as well. A perfect entry into a week where I will follow up with another hike that shows the effects of climate change in a different fashion.
generations
people who are going to be in a few years bottoms of trees bear a responsibility to something besides people if it was only you and me sharing the consequences it would be different it would be just generations of men but this business of war these war kinds of things are erasing those natural obedient generations who ignored pride stood on no hind legs begged no water stole no bread did their own things
and the generations of rice of coal of grasshoppers
from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton.(2020)s
Music today is an incredibly beautiful tune from Mongolia’s steppes – Wandering, played at about the tempo that I was walking up those cliffs. The whole album Cycle by Hugjiltu 胡格吉乐图 can be found here.
It’s getting ridiculous. Here we live some 15 minutes away from the center of a medium-sized city, and yet it feels like we are out in the woods, something we cherish – in principle. We love the trees, the seclusion, the birds. We tolerate the various critters, from field mice to wood rats to rabbits that share our vegetable garden.
We have gotten used to the deer that eat everything from my peas to my hostas to my roses, forgiving their rapacious appetites that even empty the bird feeders directly in front of our windows for the pleasure of seeing “real” wildlife cross our yard several times a week.
Then there are the coyotes. What used to be an occasional sighting during dawn or dusk on the road (a road jokingly known as coyote highway, since it connects several neighborhood parks and ravines,) has now become almost a daily occurrence, during all times of the day. In our yard, where all these photos were taken, as well as the street.
Not only that. Last week our substantially-sized dog, a German Shorthair pointer, ran out, barking his head off when he saw the coyote standing right next to our wheelbarrow. The coyote fled into the trees, only to re-emerge within seconds and approaching the dog, face to face, with a “play-with-me” downward dog posture, only to depart when we started screaming in order to get our dog back to safety, me with camera in hand.
Downward coyote….
Corner of the wheelbarrow lower left
Sniffing the garden bench….
It is half scary, half wondrous to see a wild animal so close. Clearly they have increasingly habituated to human locations. Part of that is our own fault. Although we keep our garbage cans closed (when there are increasing numbers of coyotes with fewer prey spread between them, they tend to go for the garbage,) we do have bird feeders. Feeder spill attracts rodents, which in turn attract coyotes. So far they have not shown signs of aggression to humans, respond with flight when we stand our ground and yell at them or wave our arms, but that might change in May when they have pups. It means always having the dog on leash, and never ever have small kids unsupervised in the yard.
We started to keep count of the daily showing, both in the garden and on our walks in the neighborhood. It is not unusual to see three or four during a single 24 hr period. Which brings me to citizen science. It is pretty amazing how much of scientific knowledge these days can be and is crowd- sourced. Here is an informative NPR podcast about what citizen science is and how ordinary people like you and I can participate in meaningful ways.
How do you do it? You can sign up on apps and websites that steer you to the right ways of observation, recording and sharing of data. Here is an example from Scientific American. You can go to CitizenScience.gov or SciStarter and see which projects tickle your curiosity. If you’re already hooked on something, why, birds come to mind, you can go to specialty programs like iNaturalist or eBird. The Audubon Society has a great Backyard Bird count every February where you can count the birds for 15 minutes to help establish which species flourish and which are on the decline. Not only will your observations help advance science but there is the additional benefit of sharing in conversation with other like minded people, no small thing in these times of isolation for many of us.
“The wisdom of the crowds” was a concept that popped up as early as 1906 when Sir Francis Galton, horrid eugenicist as well as gifted scientist, let’s face it, analyzed bets about the weight of an ox at the country fair. He realized that the average of all bets came within a hair’s width of the actual weight of the bovine. Collective wisdom was superior to any one individual guess. Aggregate answers are only superior, however, if certain conditions are present:
The guesses have to be independent of each other – you cannot be influenced by other people’s assumptions.
You need to have diverse guesses – people from all over the spectrum, from experts to laypeople who do not share the same biases.
There is a need for decentralization – people need to draw on their own, private, local knowledge.
Data need to be aggregated. You can take averages, but there are other forms as well.
The areas in which citizen scientists can make contributions are endless. A quick look at the reports unveils topics as widely disseminated as bird populations, migration patterns, bees, mushrooms, frogs, decline in ice sheets on northern lakes, northern lights, ticks, small stream flow, archeological looting and even new planets. (Ref.) Well, maybe not endless. The search for signs of extraterrestrial life by citizen scientist, an enterprise offered by UCal Berkeley’s SETI Research Center, shut down 3 years ago. SETI@home, a two-decades-old crowdsourcing effort to hunt for signs of E.T. in radio telescope data using internet-connected computers, was terminated because “we were scientifically at the “point of diminishing returns.”
I guess I stick to counting coyotes.
Music today- Joni Mitchell no regrets coyote…. about very different kinds of tricksters…
Yesterday was the first night of Hanukkah. The photo below appeared all last week in various Jewish publications, a timely reminder of how close light and darkness, faith and fascism existed in the past. Not surprised it resurfaced this year across many voices. It was taken by the wife of Rabbi Akiva Posner the last night of Hanukkah in 1931. They lived across from the NS headquarters in Kiel, a small Northern German harbor town, and were acutely aware of the rising danger. The family left Germany early, in 1934, and due to the Rabbi’s diligent warnings, the community of ca. 800 Jews in that town lost fewer than 1% to Nazi murder because they heeded the signs without complacency.
May the lights shine in remembrance, warning and consolation for those of us who celebrate this minor holiday.
***
Between the bustle of the holidays and the end-of-year fatigue my capacity to write in-depth musings is limited. Maybe the same is true for your capacity to read, but maybe not. Therefore my compromise for the rest of the year is to link to some texts that I found interesting, or funny, or meaningful – and for whom I had a nice challenge to pick appropriate visual companions.
We’ll start with something that today’s title riffed of: Thoughts on slow birding. The idea, in a nutshell, is to forgo the hunt for ever more, ever rarer species, but instead get your fill on what’s right in front of you out of your windows, at your feeders, in your backyard, on your balcony, the glimpses taken on your walks. Here is the link to the article that favorably reviews a book about just this topic, Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard,” by Joan E. Strassmann, an animal behaviorist and biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis. If you have a bird enthusiast for whom you still need a present this would be handy, but spendy at $27.
The library has the book – wait time in Multnomah County is 14 weeks, however, which tells you something about birders in our communities!
Photographs of diverse sparrows, finches, robins, and one Rufus Towhee were all taken last week in my immediate surround. Slowly and patiently.
Music today is a sweet song of calm and peace from Beethoven’s late string quartets, Op. 135, to go with the “Let’s take it slow” motto. I chose that over the 5th Symphony, although it is claimed that the beginning notes were borrowed from the song of the song sparrow.
Walk with me. This time there’ll be the bonus of learning some choice German curse words, if you listen closely enough. Muttered under my breath when I realized after a 40 minute drive to the wetlands that I had brought the camera but forgotten the memory card. My iPhone had to suffice, so you’ll get some December landscape impressions, but no close up of the birds I had come to see: the first mergansers of the season.
Less preoccupation with photography meant more time for contemplating the good news I had come across in various sources this week while thinking about the World Biodiversity Summit in Montreal. The UN’s COP 15 conference is trying to set worldwide new goals to halt and reverse nature’s diversity loss. A lot has been written in this context about the potentially catastrophic outlook for nature and humans alike, given climate change and human destruction of natural habitats. I thought I’ll pick something positive to demonstrate there’s stuff we can do. And certainly reason to stick with hope, our daily exercise, remember? (More positive examples can also be found down on the UN’s website.)
European Honeybees have taken over much of the American landscapes at the expensive of native species (there used to be 1500 to 1700 native species in California alone.) Biotic homogenization, as ecologists call it, is happening across the world. Variety disappears and the same dominant species are found everywhere. This is a problem, among other things, because vulnerabilities to disease or temperature change might be tolerated differently by a more diverse population. If something threatens the honeybees and they happen to be the only pollinators around, we’re screwed. (I guess you learn some English curse words as well…) Invasive species like honeybees (now found everywhere in the world other than arctic regions) outcompete local species for food and share their own parasites they actively contribute to the demise of native pollinators.
It is also an economic question. Honeybee hives are trucked around the agricultural industry to pollinate crops ($15 billion of them!) that blossom at different times. The pollination industry itself scores about $250 million annually, with weekly rent costs for hives reaching stratospheric heights. All not so much needed if you had your native pollinators who live in your region and do the work for free. The solution: plant pollinator habitats, also know as “hedgerows!” There are now Bee-Better Certification programs that “lure investors away from extractive industries like fossil fuels and towards regenerative approaches to farming—practices that rebuild soil, store carbon, and support biodiversity—can be good for the planet while also healthy for the bottom line.”(Ref.) It will take a long time for these programs to work, but it is a start. Building corridors of mixed plants among the monocultures of blueberries or almonds or grapes might give native bee species a shot at survival.
2. And here come the drones:
Scientists have developed drones that spy nearly extinct plants in hard-to reach places like mountain sides and cliffs. Many local plants that have no defensive mechanisms like bitter taste, or thorns or the like against grazing by imported animals, now exist entirely in nooks and crannies that protect them up high, in Hawaii, for example. The drones can spot them and they have scissor equipped arms that allow them to snip small clippings of the plants. Biologist use those to propagate and thus enlarge the population of the endangered species.
Some parts of the scientific community have woken up to the fact that much indigenous wisdom can be used to protect species that are vulnerable to certain environmental conditions. Clams, for example, do not well when conditions become too acidic, a problem that is steadily growing with the increasing acidification of our oceans due to our burning of fossil fuels. Their shells become less resilient and that fragility opens clams up to predation and disease. Researchers have looked at Indigenous Sea-Gardening practices across the Pacific Northwest, where Native tribes cultivated clam beds for millennia. Caretakers crushed the shells of harvested clams and strew the fragments back into the sand. Apparently these crushed shells release carbonate into the water, neutralizing some of the acidity. Lab experiments are now done to concern and expand the possibilities of lowering pH levels this way.
The scientists are also looking at another Indigenous practices: regularly tilling of clam beds, which loosens the sediment and mixing in shell fragments. “This repeated digging could bring oxygen to burrowed clams, open more space in the sediments, and alter seawater chemistry.” (Ref.)
***
Much diversity where I walked, due to bird migration. Besides mergansers there were swans, tons of varieties of ducks unknown to me, hawks, herons and egrets. The rain paused just long enough to get a good hour of walking in, useless camera heavy in the backpack, soul light in my chest, geese above me. What privilege to be by their side, as described in today’s music.
Walk with me. I know, we’ve done this loop in the State Park at my doorstep many times before. Yet every year I feel compelled to post the photographs of a yellow/orange-dotted world that appears early November, signaling transition, like yellow lights are wont to do.
There is something so utterly optimistic about yellow or orange dots swarming tree trunks, or yellow leaves providing contrast for the increasingly milky brook, or migrating birds – thrushes to be precise – fitting into the color scheme. A last Hurrah before darkness settles in.
There is something tangibly sensuous about the moist surfaces,
and something mysterious about the lamellae and gills.
A recently launched organization called SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks) is devoted to study and protect fungi to safeguard biodiversity and curb climate change. They have a pretty slick website and ambitious plans to map mycorrhizal fungi, tiny organisms that intertwine with roots of certain tress and nearly all the other plants in specific forests. You can see videos of their field trips in South America and Europe and learn about the scientists involved – they call themselves Myconauts, a clever contraction of the mushroom subject and the associated explorative adventures. For a shorter, quite educational summary essay I went here – much to learn.
No need to return to Chile, though, as much as I’d be tempted – the visual harvest in forests closer to home is just as beautiful.
Independently, since I was reading about fungi, I chanced on new research that shows fungal DNA in various human tumors. We have no clue if there is a causal connection – if fungi, in other words, could be responsible for certain cancers – we just know there is a link.
A small number of fungal cells have been found in 35 different cancer types, with fungal species composition differing among them. What are they doing there? How did they get there? Are they participating in pathology, or are they just taking advantage of immune system suppression in cancerous tissues? Or maybe there are immune cells that ate fungi and carried sequences to a tumor site?
If we knew what their role is we could use them in diagnostic procedures as markers for pathological growth. Or, more excitingly, if we knew how they got into the tumors we could theoretically have cancer-fighting drugs hitchhike on those cells and deliver the chemo specifically on site, a breakthrough in therapeutics.
Enough, let’s not spoil a perfectly glorious fall walk with thoughts of disease or environmental destruction. Let’s enjoy the ruffled beauty,
and the occasional daily wild life in search of a tasty morsel.
And for sound today there is some use of bio data sonification to help a listen to some oyster mushrooms. Changes in electrical resistance are converted into control signals for a eurorack modular synthesizer. The guy who records all kinds of fungi, electronic musician Noah Kalos, a.k.a. MycoLyco, is based in North Carolina. His goal: “just being able to find a signal that we can really observe helps to raise awareness that fungi are all living, we’re all part of the same thing.”
Alternatively, we can just listen to Massenet’s classical capture of thoughts in fall.
How much beauty can you compress into a single day? Inordinate amounts, it turns out.
It helps, of course, if you live in Oregon, and if you define beauty in the most subjective ways, regardless of whether you look at art or nature.
Come with me then, in the morning, to sneak a peek at herds of elk, in what could count as morning fog, but is more likely a mix of that and the intolerable amounts of smoke and haze wafting over the state from the Camas fires. Indeed, the entire stretch from Portland to the coast was filled with smoke.
The landscape looked worthy of a romantic painter, though, and the elk impervious. Kaspar David, where are you when we need you….
All of this was seen on the way to Astoria, itself shrouded in clouds on and off as well.
Reason for the field trip was the current exhibition at the CCC Royal Nebeker Gallery, The Ship Show, which was all about – you guessed it – ships.
Ben Killen Rosenberg, Clatsop Community College’s Printmaking Instructor, who conceived of and curated the exhibit, explains his concept for this show:
“When visiting Astoria, I always stop to watch the ships traveling up the Columbia River. Large vessels bringing goods or carrying vacationers from places near and far away pass by– a visual delight for all who see them. Ships are mysterious and romantic; they speak to an earlier time and a slower pace of travel, as they pass through vast bodies of waters. Ships can also be ominous harbingers of cruelty and environmental damage. From news reports I’ve followed, I’ve learned of ships carrying illegal cargo or using slave labor changing the GPS locations to avoid being caught by the few authorities on the “look out. Out at sea, in stateless open waters, the environmental impacts and horrendous labor conditions are monitored by almost no one. This is a show about ships as we know them–cruise ships, tanker ships, container ships, offshore vessels and fishing ships–it’s a Ship Show.”
I won’t be reviewing this one other than general remarks, since I have some of my own work in it as well as that of a close friend, but I urge a visit for the opening reception on Oct. 27, at 6:00pm. Not only will you be able to wrap your head around a remarkable variety of work (as well as quality differentials) by 20 artists working with different media. You can also admire Kristin Shauck’s success in hanging a show that would challenge the most experienced gallerist given the range of contributions.
Importantly, you will have a chance to look at a print that was one of the most beautiful images I have seen all year – and this has been a year pretty full of beauty. It was created by Royal Nebeker, who died some years ago, and for whom the gallery is named, after his distinguished career as an artist, but also a beloved teacher at the College and a strong community activist.
I will write about him, now that I have discovered him, (seemingly the last Oregonian to do so) in some future essay. For now let me say that the print could not be captures on camera to do it justice, but it is an incredibly suggestive and emotionally charged piece.
Here are some of the works on exhibit, paintings, photography, sculpture, and photomontage.
Powerful watercolors in background by Henk Pander
Anna Fiedler’s “Adventures are never fun when you are having them” can be yours for $2500….
Local photographer Roger Dorband captures Astoria like no other.
And here is work about the impact of climate change, any guesses?
The day started with nature, had art in the middle, and ended in the woods. A perfect sandwich to nourish the soul. A 3-mile afternoon hike along Ecola Creek, off 101 near Cannon Beach, provided plenty of daily wild life, and swathes of ferns, some now glittering with sun that had finally broken through.
Someone had left a mason jar with flowers and seashells in a tree hole, like an offering. Beauty in the gesture.
The rains will settle in tomorrow, FINALLY. Cherishing the last of the light.
Here is Ernest Bloch’s beautiful Epic Rhapsody, America – the composer lived in Oregon, and the 3rd movement shows some big ships in the video…..more importantly, I love his music.
Walk with me. It’ll transport you into a world of wonder, visions of fairy tales where gnomes and goblins, witches and wolves cannot be far behind. Unless they’re sent into hiding by the onslaught of photographers…
The short and wonderfully wheelchair accessible hike through a 45 acres coastal marsh and old-growth cedar preserve can be found in Rockaway Beach near Garibaldi. Three years ago, a universal access, raised boardwalk opened, leading across a boggy swamp next to Saltair Creek, filled with humongous skunk cabbages, salal, pine snags and alders. Unfortunately there are very few places equipped with benches across the one mile loop, so that people who have difficulty walking without pauses might have a hard time.
Fungi, wild fuchsias, alder berries and late asters frame the walkway
Part of the loop, if you want to make a full circle rather than an in and out, is even more enchanted, since the absence of man-made structures allows you for a short moment to imagine yourself in a prehistoric temperate rain forest in all its sizable glory, roots and all.
Eventually you reach the largest of them all, an old red cedar, 154 feet in height and almost 50 feet in circumference that stands like a giant among the hemlocks and the Sitka spruce. It is said to be between 500 and 900 years old, in terms of mass one of our state’s biggest trees. It nurses younger hemlocks who send their roots down into the decaying remnants of the trunk.
Old growth forests have played a major role in the fairy tales of my childhood, places of danger and dread, but also of shelter and heroic quests from which the hero/ine emerged triumphant. Think of Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White or Rapunzel in their various woods. Forests have been places of lawlessness but also hiding spots for justice warriors (Hello, Robin Hood!) If you are interested, there is a lovely book on forests in the cultural imagination and what their climate-caused disappearance would imply (written and anticipated already in 1992), by Robert Pogue Harrison – Forests: The Shadow of Civilization.
“If forests appear in our religions as places of profanity, they also appear as sacred. If they have typically been considered places of lawlessness, they have also provided havens for those who took up the cause of justice and fought the law’s corruption. . . . In the religions, mythologies, and literatures of the West, the forest appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray.”
Just like the airy, feathery boughs of cedars contrast with the bulky forms of century old root systems, so do enchantment and disenchantment. For me as a kid, hiking in the Böhmewald during visits with my grandparents primarily meant magic: seeing birds, finding mushrooms, being surrounded by sounds and smells not quite familiar. But a sense of fear was never far behind. You could get lost, there might be predators (on 4 and 2 legs, we were warned,) and the remnants of the Brother Grimm indoctrination lurked on. Did witches exist, after all?
That fear has never quite left. Every time I watch a movie that starts with someone running or stumbling through a forest, I start to tense up, knowing that doom is impending. It doesn’t help that we now regularly get the view from above, these endless drone shots of trees and trees beyond horizon. Have you noticed how often films and shows use these tools with abandon in about any land- or cityscape, glad for their new toys? Of course I watch a lot of movies, junk and otherwise, evoking the forest, Hanna, The Revenant, Leave No Trace, The Blair Witch Project, and lately The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power among them, where I have developed some affection for a plucky harfoot heroine named Nori. But I digress.
The sense of mystery remains as well. Woods are so incredibly nuanced, in their layers, their simultaneous presence of life, decay and death in all imaginable stages, their function to provide food and materials for survival, crowned by their ability to clean the air for us – I stand in awe, every time these thoughts resurface during visits to the forests.
According to the U.N. we are losing 2.5 billion acres of forest – the size of Iceland – every single year. As Olivia Campbell put it:
“Climate change is our collective moral test, the physical manifestation of our sins of gluttony, sloth, greed, selfishness, consumerism, and unchecked industrialism. We have entered the threshold of a forest filled with lush, healthy greenery and teeming with diverse wildlife. The question is, will there be any woods left by the end of the story, or have we run out of places to hide?”
Music, how could I not, is about a fairy tale set in the woods….
Walk with me. I’m systematically doing the rounds of all my special places that will close certain hiking loops after September 30th, to protect migrating birds. Wednesday I was at Tualatin River National Wildlife Refugee.
Fall already visible in the colors. Oaks turning red, yellow poplar leaves dropping, ponds green with duck grits, the whole landscape begging for water colors. Henk Pander, Erik Sandgren, where are you when we need you?
I had come expecting a few straggling flowers and was not disappointed. You have to imagine them bathed in strong smells of wild Thyme, Camomile and something quite sour, hinting at fall.
The usual suspects were still hanging out or taking off for a spin:
Cedar waxwings were stocking up in the Hawthorne,
And then there was this guy, out of the blue, having me stop in my tracks. An adult male harrier, otherwise known as a “gray ghost”, my learned neighbor told me when I asked for help with identification.
You know how during fire works they wait until the end for one final mega explosion? I felt that nature was celebrating the end of summer with a similar display – the pelicans flew over my head, landed in the water, circled and then spread out. Likely on their way down south. Just a stunning sight, and auditory experience, with their wings flapping so close to me.
Anyone with a tendency to anthropomorphize would swear he was grinning at me…
And yesterday off US Hwy 30, some mix and match of the traveling parties, ibises looking on :
The muskrat decided to get out of the way fast, camouflage and all.
Squirrel, on the other hand, was unperturbed, just watching the pelican show while nibbling.
I felt reminded by nature – and in turn want to remind the many people who are dear to me and having a rough time right now – that we aren’t done yet! Change is in the air.
Music is about the Equinox (9/22/2022,) the mood fit.
