Trails Through Burned Places

This week the advanced crosscut sawyers of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest met along the banks of Icicle Creek. Officially, we were there to review our skills as well as the state of the crosscut saw program, and discuss the actions needed to keep such skills and program alive in the 21st century. Unofficially, it was the biggest trail crew campout I’ve been on. We sawed some logs and admired the shavings coming out of kerfs, ate together, told stories and laughed while the creek thundered through its precipitous gorge.

For years we have tended trails through burned places, from the Methow Valley to the Yakima Indian Reservation, along Lake Chelan and deep into the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. Trees killed by fire continue to drop for many years. The experience of hiking on these trails has been altered from a fairly stable forest environment to one that changes and grows as succession follows its course.

For those of us who saw, working in a burned area adds a layer of complexity to our task. Trees are killed and weakened by the fire, and it’s hard to predict what factor might tip a tree in gravity’s favor. The slightest puff of wind on your back snaps your head up to look around. Escape routes are visualized and cleared before sawing starts. Where are you going to run if something comes loose?

When it’s time to hike back to camp, pants are streaked black and faces are smeared with char. We are all the same, not minding the ash and charcoal. This is what we do. We are Dirt People, every one of us.

So good to gather with others of our kind, and dedicate our summers to the way of the crosscut saw.

 

Back on the Trail

We wait six months for this–the first real day out on the trail. The weather has turned hot and the rivers and creeks are running high with melting snow. It’s time to get out there.

Time to remember how it feels to walk on dirt paths. Time to find out what we forgot to put in our packs. Time to start the chainsaw and set teeth into wood for the first time since last fall. Time to stride out and hike. Muscles remember all the moves. Ears remember the sounds: running water, varied thrushes and winter wrens, jets passing over. Nose remembers the smells: the honey of unfurling cottonwood leaves, the pungent dust of rotten Douglas-fir, chainsaw exhaust. Skin remembers the feelings: sweat under band of the hard hat and where the pack straps go over shoulders, the pecking of tiny sawdust particles thrown from the saw, the slight change in temperature toward coolness when walking over a patch of snow.

It all comes back in a rush, and the corners of my mouth can’t help turning up in a smile. I greet the first pure white trilliums. Home at last.

 

A Small Discovery

Maybe you already recognize the thing in the photo. Maybe if I tell you that it’s about an inch and a half long, you’ll know what it is.

The weather has turned warm and dry, although there were two mornings with snow on the ground last week. Warm and dry means a flurry of activity around this micro-homestead. The doors stand open all day, and the cat and I go in and out. The honey flow is on, and the bees fly to and fro with single-minded focus. Two of the garden beds are planted with greens and cole crops, so I water daily. I was offered some chickens and have been embroiled in a carpentry project to create a backyard coop. My challenge was to use what I had on hand or could scrounge. I ended up buying three 2X4s, a box of screws and two hinges. The rest of it was constructed using scraps from building the addition, the bedroom storage, and updating the exterior trim. I had chicken wire and my neighbor contributed a piece old metal roof cap. For door handles, I decided to cut some willow sticks.

I became a devotee of sticks in the garden when I lived with a filbert grove. Filberts grow in thickets and one of the ways of tending the plants is to coppice them. Old wood is pruned out, which encourages young shoots to come up from the stumps. Any time I needed to create supports for plants, I just went into the filberts and cut what I needed. Nothing like a straight flexible stick. Now I have a willow tree which I have coppiced so I have a source for garden sticks (also known as withes, an Old English term). These can be used year after year. As I was sorting through my collection, this shape caught my eye. It jiggled, so I took a closer look.

It’s a chrysalis! Last fall, some kind of caterpillar spun a cocoon and attached itself to this stick. It rested sheltered and undisturbed against the end of my shed. The caterpillar spent the winter in this pupal stage, but any day now an adult insect will emerge. I caught the gleam of liquid in one of the tiny fissures in the chrysalis. A butterfly or moth is folded up inside waiting for the right moment to come out into the light and air. It will pump its brand new wings and take flight.

I used other sticks for my project and set this one aside where I can monitor the progress. The chicken coop is completed, a funky two-story A-frame contraption complete with a ramp, roost, and nest boxes. Three young chickens were installed this evening. I have joined the ranks of backyard poultry keepers and am looking forward to getting acquainted with these birds as they finish their transformation from pupal pullets to adults.

I will be truly lucky if I can witness the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly like Maria Sibylla Merian did so many times (I wrote about her here). These small wonders and discoveries are all around, if we just allow ourselves to notice.

 

Some Reflections on Earth Day

These are belated Earth Day reflections, as I’ve been on a writing retreat. Also, I’m a slow thinker.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the classic book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher, first published in 1973. I was a teenager when it first came out. Schumacher’s book was re-issued in 1989 with a new preface and introduction. A quarter of a century ago, his ideas were described as “radical”, “leftist”, and “anarchist”. Now I would call them “prescient”.

The root word of economics is oikos, Greek for “home”. Literally, economics means the management of home. We have come to think of it as the exchange of goods and services that are produced and consumed. And lately, “the economy” is seen as having huge influence on financial well-being (or lack of it) of individuals and nations. “The economy” has gone global and gotten very complicated.

Schumacher was a Rhodes scholar in economics, an economic advisor to Burma, and for twenty years an economist with the British National Coal Board. Although not an entirely original thinker, he had a gift for synthesizing ideas and a way with words. He places economics in a social context, and he reminds the reader that it is not a hard science although it would like to be. It is a derived body of thought, an abstract framework that disconnects itself from both humans and nature. It is based on assumptions that differ from the laws of the universe (such as what goes up must come down). Schumacher foresaw that this disconnection would lead to social and environmental disaster.

“If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence.”

“Every increase in needs tends to increase one’s dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear.”

In the 1970s, Schumacher was speaking out against confusing capital with income. Natural capital is what humans have found, and not created. It is irreplaceable and without it we can do nothing. Air. Water. Soil. Minerals. We continue to spend it as if it will never run out, and go to increasingly convoluted lengths to obtain it. Hydraulic fracking, anyone?

According to Schumacher, the three principles that should guide economic choices are: health (of humans and the environment), beauty, and permanence (these days called sustainability). He warns against confusing material wealth with spiritual well-being, insisting that all people need both. Those of us who consume the most resources are not assured of having the most satisfaction.

As far as the question of scale, he suggest we consider what we are trying to do. Humans need both freedom and order. Freedom in our activities as individuals, order in the world of ideas and guiding principles. Therefore, we need a variety of structures to encourage both freedom and order. Large centralized systems destroy freedoms because they concentrate power in the hands of few, and they are vulnerable to chaos. The best we can hope for is some sort of flexible structure that can cope with a multitude of small-scale units. On a small scale, there is more latitude for experimentation and local problem-solving. If something small doesn’t work, the consequences don’t bring down the whole system. Therefore, small is beautiful.

While on retreat I skimmed the book and made notes, then wrote the essay. I walked and reflected, unhappy with my conclusions. It’s an old book. A lot of water has gone down the river, flowed into the ocean, condensed as clouds and fallen as rain over the mountains and gone down the river again. If Schumacher was still alive, he’d be able to shake his head and say “Told you so. Too big to fail? Ha!” I felt sad. In the 70s, it seemed like there was still a chance to turn things around. Now it feels too late.

I’m reading a new book now: Apocalyptic Planet by Craig Childs. It’s the perfect antidote to my Small Is Beautiful blues. Childs runs with the idea of cataclysmic destruction, traveling around the world to witness desertification, melting glaciers, colliding continents, rising sea levels, etc. Bottom line: Earth is a violent place and has reshaped itself many times. Five times in the planet’s history most of life has been wiped out. It is generally agreed that we are in the sixth mass extinction right now. Our lovely interglacial Holocene epoch is morphing onto the next thing. The planet is changing, aided by anthropogenic factors (human population growth, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere). Spin the wheel, round it goes, where it stops nobody knows.

What I like about Childs’ writing is that he engages fully with the process of observing. His sense of wonder is unflappable. It might be the end of the world as we know it, but aren’t icebergs amazing? And deserts? He interviews scientists, quotes data, and it is scary stuff. The world is always ending. And beginning. Humanity is just a little piece of it, not the central character in the story. We have been inconvenienced by the unruly planet numerous times in the past, having to migrate to safer ground. Any sense of control we have now is pretty much an illusion and always has been.

How to live then, staring into the mirror at apocalypse? Step one is to manage that existential fear by not needing much. Rachel Carson equated man’s war against nature as a war against himself. So step two is to make peace. Step three is to feel at home no matter what. I’m sure there are more steps, but three is as far as I’ve gotten.

Economics shares the root oikos with ecology, the study of home. When I think of Earth, I think of home. A whirling blue ball twirling around a yellow star in the vastness of space. Home sweet home. Small is beautiful.

 

Celebrating Trees

The first Arbor Day celebration was held in Nebraska on April 10, 1872. Now countries all over the world observe a day in April to plant and care for trees.

I drew some coloring pages for The Nature Conservancy to share with kids at last weekend’s Arbor Day event at the Yakima Arboretum. TNC has become more involved in the conservation and management of the diverse forest on the the east slopes of the Cascades. The forest communities vary with elevation and distance from the maritime climate on the crest. I drew low elevation ponderosa pine forest, mid-elevation mixed conifer forest, and high elevation subalpine forest. At first I was daunted by the notion of fitting an ecological community in an 8.5″ X 11″ format, but decided to just capture the highlights. It was fun to draw, remembering places and adventures in the woods. (You can click on the drawing for a larger view.)

Arbor Day is for all kinds of trees, but I confess I am partial to the native ones. Also heirloom fruit trees. What about you?

 

Spring Beauty

Spring Beauty, Claytonia lanceolata

It feels like spring advances and retreats. After a sunny day, the return to snow showers seems like backsliding. Perceptions are as dynamic as the weather: sunny, cloudy, windy, pouring rain. If you don’t like what’s happening now, just wait five minutes.

That’s the nature of spring. In fact, the days are sliding inexorably toward midsummer. A pair of bluebirds is spending time around one of my Grampa-built birdhouses. Some of the 99 daffodils I planted last fall in Gramma’s memory are blooming. I’ve been harvesting wintered-over kale and other greens from the garden tunnel, and the yard is awash in violets. My energy for home and garden projects rises on bright days and is dampened on days like today as wet flakes dribble from the pale sky.

It’s the same at work. On sunny days we can’t wait to get out to the trails, and chafe at the office work that keeps us inside. On days when we do get out, we find that the road to the trailhead is still snowed in, or it’s raining buckets. The rivers and creeks are running high as the snow melts. As winter disappears, spring beauties follow the edge of the snow, blooming with their close associates the glacier lilies.

Beauty, especially spring beauty, is consolation for all the uncertainty. Uncertainty at the job–the continuous budget battles and shifting priorities of the political landscape wear a person down. Uncertainty in my small circle of coworkers/friends as a colleague’s wife battles cancer. I rarely listen to the news any more because the media brings me stories of things that feel so messed-up and wrong. All I know is that I keep going to work in order to stand up for the stewardship of public land and wild things, support my friends, live as simply and mindfully as I can, and bring my full attention to flowers and rain and birdsong. When I put my fingers in the soil to plant a seed, pull a weed, feel the sun’s warmth I know I have touched something that is going right in the world. The return of spring beauties is another thing that is right in the world. Seeing their white and pink petals threaded with ruby red is music to my soul.

 

Coyote Tears

Crocidium multicaule

One of the first spring wildflowers to bloom on the Columbia Plateau are these gold stars, annuals that grow only an inch or two high, but in such numbers as to turn whole stretches of the shrub-steppe a cheerful yellow. I have always known them as coyote tears and I never see them without remembering a story I was told long ago.

You must understand that the Yakama people have always lived around here, and many of the lakes and rivers and creeks bear names from their Sahaptin language. The landscape is animated by their history and stories. Many tribes have stories of Coyote. I imagine a sharp-nosed person with big ears, and a scruff of tawny hair. Wearing patched jeans with frayed hems and a raggedy flannel shirt, Coyote is a Northwest native. He drinks cheap beer and throws the cans out of the window of his rusty old pickup. You might think “Oh, just another redneck,” but then you see the tail and the knowing eyes and you wonder. The Yakamas call him Speelyi.

One time, Coyote was walking through the timber and heard a voice saying, “I throw you up and you come back to me.” It was Chickadee, and Coyote was curious. He watched as the small bird plucked out his eyes and tossed them up. The eyes landed on a tree branch to look around, and plopped back into Chickadee’s eye sockets when called.

“That’s a pretty good trick,” thought Coyote. So he had to try it himself. He plucked out his eyes and said “I throw you up and you come back to me.” The eyeballs went up to a branch to look around, then came back to Coyote’s eye sockets. Coyote went around like this, juggling his eyes and chuckling and thinking about ways to make some money from this trick.

At this point, different things happen. In some versions, two ravens hear Coyote talking and steal the eyeballs. Or the eyes get lost. Coyote ends up blind and stumbles around without his eyeballs. He steals eyes from other people and they don’t work right. He tries huckleberries but they are too small. He bumps into a pine tree and feels around, finding two blobs of pitch. He puts those in his eye sockets, and can sort of see. Everything is all blurry and gummy, and he walks around crying. Where his tears fall on the ground, little golden flowers bloom. Coyote must have wandered and cried a lot, because there are many of those flowers coloring the rocky ground yellow in the spring.

They say it might have happened that way. From what I know of Coyote, I guess it could be true. He’s still around.