Allure

Much of the internet is about getting somewhere immediately. Instant updates, surfing around the globe without the time-consuming travel, clicking straight to the cute/funny/shocking cat image (a meme is pure punchline, no build-up). Porn sites are about the act, not the foreplay.

Outside, meanwhile, in the reality-based community, Nature reveals herself more slowly. Even the ephemeral bloom of a poppy has a dance if you slow down enough to watch. The green parts, revealing a hint of petal one day, then the outer layer drops away, and the flower unfurls, shedding dewdrops and beckoning bees.

 

The petals' embrace becomes open arms. More bees visit. Wind shimmies some dew the the ground as sun leads the rest skyward.

The petals begin to wane, the danced-out anthers fade, and they drop away to reveal the next act, the seed pod. Because all this allure, the tempting and teasing, the growing siren call, leads to re-creation (any recreational enjoyment the bees or flower-watchers may experience is just the by-product). It's meant to be fruitful, not just gratify an instant.

 

A few days of promise, one glorious day of flowering (and deflowering), and then weeks of setting seed. Not as showy, but not over, either. The bulb swells, it's crown grows. Skin touched by the sun tans from green to silvery blue, more moon-like with each day. The crown clothes itself in delicate velvet. Inside, clinging roe becomes rattling seed, each one no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, each one the source of next year's dance.

Happy Solstice

 

The longest day is here. Looks like pagan bonfires and dancing are not in the works, which is just as well. After an exhausting week of pounding an iron bar through unyielding rock and driving, I'll be lucky to be up past the latest twighlight.

Happy New Baktun

The moment of the winter solstice has passed, and with it the change from the 13th to 14th baktun of the Mayan long count calendar. Look for Jaguar Eagle to do well in the next state elections in the Yucatan, but for the rest of us, things may look pretty much the same as yesterday. 

The last time the baktun rolled over, about 1618 AD by the calendar of modern Americans, it hailed an era of accelerating decline for the peoples who had lived in the New World. Not that the 12th Baktun had been all that greaty for the Maya, who had long since slipped into post-Classic decline, but the arrival of colonists in el Norte harkened a more darkened outlook still for the 13th. 

Not being Mayan, and having a shorter attention span, my interest has always been in the annual solstices. Not so much the equinoxes, which although they capture a moment of balance, are just place markers. The solstice is a true transition. Today, the daylight stops decreasing, and it is night's turn to cede ground every day for the coming 6 months. Personally, I went through a fairly major transition on the summer solstice, and look forward to this one, to longer days and a brighter future. 

Most Americans tend to pay more attention to Christmas, which comes in a few days. It's hard to believe that December 25th was the original intent, since the symbolism of a new birth and hope fits so well with the Winter Solstice. But once doctrine gets hold of something, sense may as well give up. 

Even the people who heed the celestial and seasonal calendars these days tend to do so without much understanding of what it once meant. In the post-modern world, we borrow bits and pieces of ancient knowledge without much awareness or regard for the total systems, and call it New Age. At this moment, there are people spending time with supposedly sacred crystals that came not from a personal quest into the mountains, but from a store, and ultimately as the lucrative by-product of industrial mine. The stones don't tell them that they need to check the garlic stash for sprouting, or start weaving this year's berry basket, or even to check the elk movements; they are remarkably free of information and inspiration that would have been useful to almost every other generation of human. 

But then, who am I to criticize? Making some attempt to connect to something bigger is usually a good thing (Nuremburg '36 being a counter-example, and come to think of it, Schicklegruber was a fan of wacky occultishness), and I guess if a sense of personal well-being comes from a crystal. Likewise, if you go to sleep tonight feeling relieved and blessed to have survived another End fo the World, then good for you. 

Me? I'm gonna go check the garlic.

 

Some Mountain Photos

 

First, Silver Star. I saw this on a clear summer day. There was just enough wildfire smoke in the air to slightly blur everything. Normally, pastels make me yawn, and I like bold and saturated colors. But the almost impressionistic softness rapt me in happy appreciation.

 

Not far from the first photo, looking south across the river to Oregon, I caught sight of Mount Hood.  The cones in the foreground may be Boring Volcanoes, one of the best oxymoronic-sounding geologic names I know. 

 

On the same trip, returning home, I went through Chinook Pass for the first time. Just after peaking, starting down the west side, you come to this view of Tahoma/Rainier. Wordless.

Fire

Smokey Valleys above Wenatchee

About a century ago, hellfire stormed the northwest, eating forests and roasting animals and people alike. Rumble-thunder lightning struck parched ground hard, and roaring flame exhaled firestorms whose smoke-clouds dwarfed their rainless thunderhead mom and flung embers with ferocity and intensity that made their lightning-bolt father hang his head. 

Little Smokes in Sagebrush Steppe

A couple of storms (not to mention a road crew and other inattentive humans) did wander into beatle-kill forest this year, sparking fires that did some damage to timber and homes, but nothing on the order of a century ago. Nothing on the order of what could happen, what many people think will happen, when we have a truly long hot summer and the fire crews get stretched too thin. This year, most of the big fires were late in the season in the NW, and some of the fuel is gone to ash, never to burn again. But the planet keeps warming, the trees keep dying and drying, and one of these years the perfect storm (violent and parched as a moonshiner trapped in a dry county) will char the Cascadian east.

I know people who fight these fires, and hadn't really thought I'd be joining them, being about twice the age of the average line fire-fighter, and unable to jump in with advanced skills like meteorology, aircraft maintenance, logistics, GIS,..you get the point. But as the season wound down this year, someone approached me about maybe doing archaeology on fires. 

Smoke in the Gorge

Huh? Yep, there's a use for an archaeologist when there are fires on the loose. One of the main ways to fight a fire is to bulldoze a fire line, a gouge of bare earth that won't burn. And if you do that through an archaeological site, it's gone. No second chance to analyze that Clovis point in context, or to let that burial rest in peace. 

So what? There's a freaking fire, a lot of people would say, don't worry about some stone chips when lives are at stake. True, especially when the stake is about to flash ignite. But modern fire fighters are not scurrying around the active front, swatting at the flames. They're strategically setting perimeters, sometimes days in advance, and if someone with the right kind of data and eyes trained to see the sites can help that battle line avoid loss of something ancient or otherwise special, why bulldoze blindly?

I'm kinda hoping it will work out. Having not spent a couple of weeks in a tent, waking before dawn and eating camp food before hiking rugged ground in sweltering heat,I can imagine it fuzzily, happily. Doing something new at my age is good, and they wouldn't send an old guy into the maw of a firestorm, I figure.

Picture This

Visual anthropology no longer captivates me to the point that I subscribe to the journal (Visual Anthropology), but then again it's more fun to toss out a few observations than to talk all academic. Oh, and I take a ton of photos, and once in a while I get the urge to get something more than a forgotten jpeg. Most of the time, though, there's just the passing instant of the shutter clicking, capturing something.

This is some of my combat photography near the end of a Sponge War, an extremely popular part of the elementary school's field day. On either end of the field of battle are lines of big buckets filled with water and sponges. In the middle is a line they can approach, but not cross. Being there with my first grader, the sense I got from the kids was more of "I'm gonna get wet! Yay!" than anything about a war. Lots of kids just squeezed sponges on themselves and each other directly.

My visual cortex is not so interested in deconstructing socialization rituals, but it does suggest that I report the following about this photo:

• My daughter's about to whip a sponge at some unsuspecting boy. I think she missed, but scored a hit for grrrldom.
• The kid at the left is just off the field of battle, and has evil Joker make-up. More extensive than most of the face-painting I saw that day, and he seemed to be exhorting people on the field of battle while himself staying clear, slightly elevated. But not enough for anyone to do what he was saying. He must be a member of the priesthood in this culture.
• The field of battle is within sight of, but obtrusively below and outside of, the high school athletic field, Monumental Architecture on the neighborhood scale. These kids will be there, one day; they'll traverse the cultural landscape as they grow. [I know, this sounds like I am delving into socialization, but it's only because I do so revel in cartographic visualization.]
• It being near the end of the action, a lot of kids had lost interest in the battle, or in taking sponges to the buckets to re-load. A few, like mine, took the mission pretty literally, and kept picking up sponges (not always re-loading), firing again and again.

So much more could be wrung from this picture (way more than a thousand words, were I aiming for publication), but those seem like the highlights, and it's late. I'll drift off and maybe dream about what other people see in this photo.
 

Summer Solstice

Damn right, it's a portal.

Happy Solstice, Summer 2012 edition. 

As with several other solstices, I find myself in motion. During a decade or so of living in Hawai`i, most of my mainland trips coincided with a solstice, taking advantage of either the cheap airfares that the carriers offered to islanded expats to fill up return flights dumping Kalikimaka tourists, or getting away over the summer. Either way, being on a jet stretching or accelerating a longest or shortest day of the year. 


And now, again, only covering a much shorter distance (physically anyway). I'll pack up a truck and head 1.1 miles away to disgorge the contents (even at their exorbitant mileage rates, U-Haul will haul in less than a pentabuck). Nothing as obviously different as heading from the tropics to a Mid-Atlantic Winter, or even from a sub-tropical winter to an Interior Northwest blizzard, but a huge change.


The Solstice is maybe just a Symbol. But I'm not one to resist the temptation of grabbing onto the boomerang's pause as a moment of significance, of being (breathless) as the season turns. Decreasing to longing, or lengthening to contracting, the solstices have a magic that the dull equivalency of an equinox will never match. Ecclesiastical turn turn turn, Byrdsong jangling the hippie heart, the weightlessness of a cosmic shift,...however you want to feel it, the solstice sings to those who listen. 

I don't pretend to know how it will turn out. Usually, I'm more  fan of the Winter Solstice, dark though days may be, they're guaranteed to lengthen from there on out. The Summer one, depending on your perspective, is the augur of decline, or the peak. In the maritime northwest, I tend to think of it as more suited to the Western calendrical canon defines it: the beginning of Summer, that point at which days become warm and welcoming. 

At 47 or so, it may be optimistic to interpret this particular solstice as a parabolic peak, a halfway point of life, but then again, I'm happy enough not to look at it as a peak at all, just a vertex of some sort, a turning point. Maybe I'm riding that boomerang's return, turning my gaze to perceive what was once just a backdraft. Or maybe not. All I know is that I am moving.

Garden 11: The Hoop House

September, and tomatoes are finally ripening.

I tend to go with the flow (Disclosure: rarely in the main stream, sometimes along a flux as inscrutable as neutrinos through granite), and opt for simply ept over the fancy engineering available to today's gardener.

But the flow's so slow with the maritime Northwest Spring, especially this year. The sun may climb quickly from it's root-bound Winter Nadir to the sunshine daydream of a Salish Summer, but the clouds wet and dark rob the light and waylay the warmth. So to get some early(ish) greens and tomatoes and beans going, I decided to goose the flow a little this year. 

June 2011: The plastic comes off.

This photo shows only the hoops, but imagine it covered in clear(ish) plastic, trapping air to tap photons that make it through the clouds; these shivering ragged survivors do manage to warm things up a bit. Not enough to affect soil temps, though, which I measured frequently and never saw get past the low 40s Fahrenheit before I yanked the plastic and let the real summer in. 

Anyway, the shot from the roof there illustrates my approach, which stems from frugality and some would say lassitude, though I prefer to think it is clever(ish).

• Dig a 12 by 4 foot bed sloped slightly down south.
• Lay out a 25 foot soaker hose up and back.
• Get some skinny pvc, stick one end in the ground in a corner the bed.
• Go down the long side, planting another every 2 feet.
• With the help of a boathook or friend, bend these over and stick the other end in the ground.
• Get a roll of heavy clear plastic sheeting, and lay it over the hoops and secure the long edges.

The only thing you cut is the plastic sheet, and there's no exotic material required. Easy. Cheap.

Spring's greenhouse reborn as Summer's tomato cage.

Plastic retraction time comes when the tomatoes start pushing against it, which as luck had it this year was when we started to get real stretches of clear sky, sun showering down on chlorophyll for hours on end. At which point I took a couple of old tomato cages I'd made a while back out of leftover fencing, and laid them over the hoops. Just guide shoots up where you want them and they'll flop on top, maybe even sling a few of the branches below. Watch for fruits growing into wires, but otherwise you're pretty much done til harvest. 

South of the tomatoes, I had lettuce and spinach, some of which had an extended growing season as the growing tomatoes kept the sun from hitting tender leaves all day. To the north was a single row of string beans, climbing twine to a line strung from eave to eave on the end of the house, but that's another story.


From the post-Equinoctal perspective, the hoop house seems like a worthwhile investment. Digging the bed was by far the most labor intensive part of it, and that gets easier over time. Everything is off-the-shelf and inexpensive, and one person can make it in under an hour. The tomatoes alone pay for it the first year. I'm glad I finally did it.

Garden 8: Summer Rain

Summer sun took it's time peeking through on the far south Sound, but Olympia has not had decent rain for a while. Clouds taunted us garderners with their rainlessness (robbing lumens to boot), or else absconded while the sun turned its full attention on evapo-transpirating moisture from our sandy soil. 

I resorted to soaker hoses and occasionally setting a sprinkler to spradiate over a few feet in dire need. I don't use a lot of water, though, for a bunch of reasons: plants on life support depress me, I'm devoted to a Creator named Evolution (who will not abide cheating for long), water costs money, and water from a pipe has too many additives and subtractives to match the vigor of the H2O that falls from the sky.


Now we are in the midst of a steady rain. Not the light mist that dampens the surface and leaves roots begging  for more. Not a sudden downpour that erodes and runs off. Just hours and hours of rain falling on flowers, washing foliage, quenching roots down to their deepest. And the plants will respond; even the light dose earlier this week had them stretching higher, flexing and filling out, darkening green, multiplying blooms, growing fruit, and just generally splashing brighter and bolder brush-strokes across the canvas of gardens. After this drink, if we don't backslide into too many days of mold-inducing cool wet weather, the plants will drink in sun and go off.


So while other Olympians may be cursing the souply ground at Lakefair or the damper on other weekend activities, I'm thankful for this liquid gift. Sitting here, hearing drips hitting deck like some tireless woodpecker, I see not the greyed weekend, but the saturated weekend. Some sunny day in August, I'll revisit this rain in the form of tomato flesh, squash, beans, greens, and all the other transmogrified precipitation climbing back skyward from my patch of ground.

Pleading the 5th

The flag says the wind is waking on this 5th of July. The sole sign of the 4th is an over-stuffed trash can, visited now by a raccoon who nearly tricked me into missing sunrise, but this is all aftermath. I'll get back to it eventually.

A glow through the curtain crack told me it was after 4AM, when the sky near the Canadian border wakes and stretches, scratches at the dark, itching to become dawn. My family sleeps; I slip onto the balcony to see the shift. This is my church.

Above, the celestial blue is deep, but shallower than bottom, already less than the darkest our short Summer night offers. The horizon rolls out red as I stare out toward sea level, maybe 20 feet below my vantage and stretching for miles across the Strait.

Straight lines, but none of them able to withstand close examination. First and most obviously fallen: the horizon. A seismographic line of dark beneath the red, mountains pushed up by countless quakes, volcanic peaks like Baker and Glacier stand in for the big events, while mumbling multitudes remind me of the lesser but commoner rumblings that keep the Cascades rising.

Just above, lines between blood red and bled red, between the warm hues and blues. Infinitely many and fine lines. All straight in my pitiful little human view, but arched across the planet's fulsome curvature. And just where are the lines between redder, red, blue and bluer? I cannot pin them down, each dissolves color into colour, moving as unchecked as the rotation of our sphere through aeons, never to be delineated.

The water's surface, could I see it off in the dark distance at the foot of the rising Cascades, would be as straight as it gets. Pre-dawn calm, glassy smooth, perfect reflectory for the light show and the jagged silhouette of the mountains. But curving around the globe, warped by tides, and at any close view too cleaved and waked, blown splashed eddied and flaked to be truly straight for even a few feet. Water flows and will not be imprisoned by plane geometry, though for a crystalline moment it may let you squint and imagine mirrorine perfection, time unmoving.

Over the next hour, the calm is invaded as the approaching sun awakes winds. First, rifflets--islands forming. Then an archipelago. No white-top chop, not yet waves, really, no undulating horizon, but still the glass has shattered, letting me know that the flatlining peace of the un-dawned day is about to pulse to life and light. Before too long the meditative reflections have been swept away: the schooner's mast rippled apart, the seismograph of hills even more spastic, the stars and planets lost again.

Still, there are islands of calm. Lees maybe, or less romantically, sheens of oil or whatever was in last night's fireworks. But the way the wind blows and the tide flows, and these islands of calm remain, I suspect they are the deep waters running still. In and around one, a seal's head and wake sketch dances on the surface, then disappear. A pause, and then another dance. Neverlasting, never over. A fishing hole, maybe, some mystery known only from the underside.

Closer, in the thin strip by the strand, a raccoon mama emerges from the rip-rap and scrub-brush to investigate a trash can filled beyond capacity by last night's revelers. My eyes obey evolution and look. The tableau beyond, no matter how sublime, cannot compete with the creature. Like a fly crawling across a master's canvas, it demands attention, at least momentarily making the human eye follow motion and forget art.

But not for long. I've seen a grander motion already, and resolve to focus on it. From peaks left of the big mountain, shadow rays have shot subtly through the glow. Fanning darker into the lightening sky, lines of blue hue washing the warmer colors, paradoxical announcement of light soon to come. My eye rides them down to their center.

And in a bowl twixt peaks comes a brilliant green flash. More than a flash, a growing bubble, bursting finally into the yellow curve of the rising sun.

And day dawns.

Quickly the red draws itself on a line west, beyond my view. Maybe at my zenith, still there for the watchers beyond Tatoosh, but soon enough passing them as well, racing across the Pacific, chasing away stars and dragging up winds in its wake.

The sun stabs straight at me, as it always will over water. This low, the glaring orb remains attached to the long ellipse of the blade, and for the first time I see the sun's first reflection as a paddle, the sun a knob on the handle, slender Salish style, dipping into the sea. And so starts another journey.

Garden: Part 2, Hardened Surfaces

Pretty Irrelevant Photo

 

I've spent more than my fair share of time removing gravel, sidewalk, and rocks to let soil kiss sky and revive again, but it's also my experience that a gardener needs some barren, hard places. Fully sun-baked if you can get it (and we are just now in that part of the year where that's possible, Pugeteers): harsh, a thirsty patch that won't drink any water, a callous upon the land.

Why? So you can kill weeds, first of all. In drought-strangled Virginia, I could toss a weed any old where and the sun would delight in beating the life out of it. Here, it might just as easily take root and manage to slip by and set seed. And even if the one laying on the driveway does have seeds, they're on concrete. A few may wash down to a crack or blow away to fertile ground, but mostly this is the end of the weed road.  Speaking of which, every time the car pulls in or out of the drive, the weeds get pulverized: first step on the soil road.

Because yeah, the hard-top better be helping me make soil, or I'd rip that shit out. I confess to being a dirt farmer, soil is my primary produce, everything else is after. My garden aspires to the urban homestead ilk, and I'd just as soon turn my weeds back into soil than put them in a bin for the city. Same with compost--am I just gonna give away my biomass? Huh-uh.

The Utilitarian Herb Dryer

The driveway may not be as pretty as the first photo, but it's a better herb dryer. Put 'em on the asphalt, and it goes even faster. This is where refinished furniture, paintings, screens wet from being cleaned (yeah, like I do that) and whatever else needs drying goes on a sunny day. 

And when it's not a sunny day, having a hard surface is still nice. To walk on without being in the mud. To let the rain wash the dirt off something. To send some sediment and water to that soil patch downslope. Level hardscapes rarely ever exist. You may think it is, but water will prove you wrong. Anyway, completely level slabs are for chumps. You want gravity and water to help you clean it off, and not just willy nilly. 

There's also something about a barren patch in the midst of a garden that provides balance. The hardness feeds soil's softness not just with organics and sediment, maybe, but metaphysically, or maybe that's just the sleep deprivation talking. The hard speeds the spin of the soil-weed-soil cycle, at any rate. Weeds thrown upon the altar sate the more ravenous of the soil gods.

So yeah. Gardens should have hard surfaces. For those and other reasons. I have no brilliant or pithy summation. What did you expect from someone who delves into a garden series with a post about barrenness and concrete, death and dessication? Stay tuned, it gets easier...

Gardening Post 1

There have been other garden posts here before, but this is the first one lacking a decent title. And by decent, I mean smart-ass, obscure, and/or irrelevant. 


This is my fourth spring gardening in Olympia, and meteorologists say the region is a month or so behind schedule in terms of warming up. Even without the delay, the climate here allows for snow peas, strawberries, and lettuce on the summer solstice, which has blown my southern mind each and every year. Back in Old Virginny, where 90+ temps have become common even in May, the season for these has long since passed, and green is  turning brown.

 This shot is from the roof of my house, looking down into the front yard, which loses some grass every year. The road-side bed has wild strawberries, herbs, camas, a saskatoon, and the usual array of weeds, volunteers (as in, weeds I can use), things I cannot remember, and sprouts trying to fight their way through the strawberry blanket. This was the first bed I carved from the lawn.

At the far lower left is a glimpse of the driveway, along which I planted a row of blueberries in year two. The bright green patch has some strawberries that came to me from a neighbor wilted and unhappy late last summer. They're producing well right now, so much that there are some left for me after the kids have their fill. This be also has burgundy shamrocks that I may or may not have planted, spreading into a nice blanket and providing my youngest with an inexhaustible supply of tangy treats. There's also some mint edging, artichokes, bitterroot, oregon grape,...and of course stuff I cannot recall right now. 

The stone walkway comes from road cuts all over the state. It has taken years to accumulate. Stonecrop from an island up north is filling in the spaces, and is starting to bloom now. I had creeping thyme, but it gets as ugly and invasive as a neo-conservative after a while, and I ripped it out. 

The triangle beyond is mostly new, having been excavated last fall and winter to make room for a meadow full of stuff from east of the Cascades. Violets, lomatiums, sage, blue fescue and other grasses, hawkweed, camas,...and various things that either arrived as seed or stowed away in the roots of something else. Also here: a dwarf Fuji apple, lavendar, more herbs, a dahlia or two, calendula,... I'm not adamant about having a purely native garden. This plot is basically an experiment to see whether the hottest, dryest part of an Olympia yard can sustain things that would be more at home in the sundrenched Columbia plateau. 


The far corner has a sickly cherry tree, a garlic patch, and a circle of snowpeas that form a little fort where my young daughter can sit and snack, hiding from traffic driving by. There's also another saskatoon (like the strawberries, transplanted during that brief window of bad transplanting weather last summer, but in this case refusing to fruit as a result) and a mystery blue or huckly berry. Winters squash and cukes are poised in these beds, ready to take over after the garlic is done. There are also onions and some scarlet runner beans just taking hold. 

Out in the back 40 the mix of haphazard planting and geometric removals of grass continues. Along the fences are berries. A few fancy black and raspberries that I actually paid for, but also some wild himalayan blackberries that I prune into something like temporary submission, thimbleberries uprooted from logging roads, and mystery berries that were set out for free by the road this spring (but which had so little roots that less than half seem to be surviving). 

It's hard to see, what with the grass that I let grow tall and free, but there are three rectangular beds that are the closest thing I have to a traditional vegetable garden. They are more or less 4 by 12-foot beds, the size I can irrigate with a 25-foot soaker hose. Snap peas are producing heavily in one as onions are finally feeling warm enough to grow. There are radishes just beginning to be ready, beets still a ways away, and carrots only now sprouting their first true leaves. Summer and winter squash are planted, ready to fill in as the earlier crops finish. One bed has a variety of tomatoes. At the north end of each bed, where they won't shade everything else out, are hops. Willamette and/or Cascade planted a couple of years ago, and Fuggles a couple of weeks ago. 


The tall stump (footholds cut in it for the girls to reach its perch) is slowly being swallowed by native blackberries that I am experimenting with (a subject you will see here, and probably in future posts). The perimeter of that bed has Quinault strawberries just about to ripen, a native bay, a rosemary bosai'd by the last winter, and mint. Oh, and a lilac, fireweed, iris, and a cool green frog.


Maybe you can spot what's left of the rhubarb in the background, regenerating after harvest. The copse of alder that fills most of the yard has lots more native blackberry, hazelnut (I get withes and bean poles from it, while squirrels and jays hog the nuts), and various woodland plants I've snagged and tranbsplanted. Among these, oceanspray is doing really well, and in a few years should yield some digging sticks (it's other common name is ironwood). 


Not shown is a tiny hoop house with tomatoes and lettuce south of the house, and a more ornamental bed along the fence at the north end of the house, with ferns, red and evergreen huckleberries, and the neighbor's rhodies arching above it all. There's another similar one across an isthmus of grass that has shrubs on a tapestry of groundcovers, most all of which is native.


So there you have it, the basic, dull introduction. More like there I have it. I used to keep a garden journal in Virginia (but the dust with a broken computer, I think), and am a little ashamed that it took me this long to get going again. Are you still reading this? Congratulations. All I meant to do was start keeping track of what's growing, where, and when. You are incredibly dedicated.



 

Sprout

Since the winter solstice (26 days ago), I've been cooped up aside from wandering the wind-froze canyons of Portland for a couple or three days. Tending the fire and a cold, scrounging up meals, near hibernation. A big cold snapped and sent clouds running for a few days, but the little cold kept me in for the most part, watching the hoar accumulate in the long winter shadows until it looked like we'd been snowed on. I ventured no farther than the woodpile and the bus stop. (And let's be honest, like most middle class enviros, I took the car ride when offered and the bio-fueled bus thus rode on one rider less efficiently.)

But coming home from work the other day, done with a hard week and virtuously waiting for the bus, I saw the light. Twilight, I guess, but anything that keeps the 5:30 sky from being something other than dark counts in winter. Like thousands of generations before me, I breathed a sigh of relief that the days would not just keep getting shorter forever, felt in my ear the tenderotic breath of Persephone.

So today when the clouds thinned and the rain that has pissed incessantly on the south sound since the sunshine daydream let up for a couple of hours, I fled outside. Needed to flea the air in this house: smoked by fireplace, caughed by denizens, staled by cold and spored by mold.

Required as well--fingers in the earth. So it was into the front, to a triangle of bare dirt and its assortment of uninvited and well intended plants. Down on my hands and knees pulling weeds, killing my back but healing my soul. On a material level, the goal was to get rid of dandelions and cheatgrass, clover and other aggressives, root out the competition for the collection of camas and lomatia, bitterroot and alliums, a suite of eats native to the northwest, if not exactly the Puget basin. This will be a meadow, dotted with sage and lavendar. I'll probably wait til another round of weeds sprout, then slice their roots and let them die before putting out the mixed bag of seeds I've been collecting east of the Cascades. The front yard, in full sun and tilted to get the most of it in summer, is my microcosmic eastern Washington.

At the bottom of the yard is a garlic patch. Over a dozen dozen sets surrounding a small cherry tree. Set out last October in the lowest part of the yard, and thus the wettest and coldest, the garlic was a worry for me. The patch froze hard within a couple or three weeks of having been planted, and then it got warmer and wet. The pattern happened again around New Years, with a bigger freeze and complete saturation after. I figured there'd be heavy losses.

And it looks like that even as you walk up to the patch. Only down on all fours, fingertweezing out offending grasses, are the sprouts visible. In the meadow too, tips of tulips and tiny bursts of bitterroot appear to eyes in near-earth orbits. As the weeds come out, violets come to light. Get microscopic in the microcosmos, and signs of emergence are everywhere. In among the mouldering leaves of last year, lavendar shoots emanate. Sedum, beat up and rolled around over the winter, has unveiled the genius of it's strategy, setting down roots from every scattered frag so they can knit themselves together and blanket the poorest ground. Budswell (gods, how I love saying that word)
has begun on blueberries and saskatoon, fat embryonic liko getting ready to greet the air.

It doesn't take much to make me happy. A few more minutes of daylight, the tintiest indication of growth...the promise of a phenomenal future when grey births green, when foliage feeds flowers, when seeds escape their stale dull insides and start growing, reborn and eternal.

Dormancy

A decade of tropical living, gardening and bush-whacking through jungle scrub and desert, eroded my memory of dormancy. Arrowroot and olena clung to an ancestral habit of sprouting in spring and retreating in winter, but for the most parts seasons were worn down and subtle: high temps dropped 10 degrees, mangoes had new shoots or flowers or fruit. But the ground never froze and the trees declined to drop all their leaves and retreat for months.

The Puget Sound lowlands have a bit of a blunted seasonality as well, out vast basin of water keeps the summer from getting too hot or the winter too cold, but there's no escaping trhe latitude, a little past the halfway point from equator to pole. Even the warmest winter lacks the light to keep leaves happy, and as you may have heard, the clouds here jealously filter out as much winter sun as possible.

So the trees that invest in something more than miserly needles are forced each autumn to surrender their wealth, dropping leaves to replenish the soil, and letting the sap settle back down to rest before the spring engorgement. Some plants compltely retreat into the ground, ceding the airspace. Some big critters hibernate, while hordes of insects and their arthopodic kin fall back even further into pupae and eggs, all the winter hiding places of the summer swarms.

Humans bury themselves in layers of textiles, avoid the cold rainy outdoors, and maybe withdraw into depressive solitude. (I'm guessing that over the years, I'll post more entries in winter than summer. One day many people may read this blog, but the making of it is a thing I accomplish alone, buried deep in the loam.)

Winter and dormancy always get saddled with the death metaphors, with the pall of loss and sad decay. Their contributions to fecundity lack the photogeneity of spring. Who wants to turn away from the flower in bloom to look at grey decay, at ill-lit muck?

But the frozen exoskeleton and waterlogged leaves fuel the spring growth. The respite from insects and warm weather give the plants a chance to recover and regroup. The cold and wet winnow the unhealthy. And hidden below ground, roots and hyphae may not be so dormant, the infrastructure for the superstructure often advances before and after any action is evident up top.

And not so much here, but in the desert regions there are species that go dormant for more than a season, beyond a year. Baked in mud, buffeted by winds, biding their time and witholding action until the right rain hits and then bursting forth with astonishing vigor from some unimpressive husk.

Seeds may not be dormant as biologists defined it, but an inert capsule that holds in it the germ of an entire organism seems like a special case of the same phenomenon. The joy of gathering seed each fall, knowing that the seed from one plant can birth a whole bed of progeny is one of the things that keeps me gardening and happy. I've seen seeds buried for decades or longer sprout when given the chance, and there are species whose seeds are engineered to outlast the elements in wait of the wet year or the fire that triggers growth.

My garden is about done for this season, and there are plenty of perennials, bulbs and bushes gone dormant. I'll find some excuses over the winter to go out and work--removing a stump or planning new beds, maybe--but in general I'm goign into garden dormancy as well. Other pursuits spring to life: writing and carving, reading and dreaming. At least some of these will prove to be roots that strengthen next years growth.

Cypress Moon

Somewhere sometime back I said something about sticky places, specks on the globe that have the power to hook a guy, play out the line sometimes for years before reeling him back, maybe let him take off on another run, but always that little bit of drag, that tugged lip, pointing back like Elvis's lip did to Memphis.


Maybe I also blurted out something about how new places keep sticking to me: ancestral farms and grandma's and mother's houses, gardens of my own, settlements Virginian and Hawaiian, grounds in both Washingtons. Maybe I revealed that Cypress Island is one of them near my latest abode.


And already it is clear that this island is where I will end up in the August moon. In the past two years, events have conspired to send me there and then. Today I learned that it will happen in the third as well: a descendant of the islands only Zoe (so far as I know) needed to reconnect with her kin's story and organized a trip, a coworker who took over a restoration project wants to walk the place with an archaeologist, and then there's me--more aware than ever that an August trip to Cypress is a treat not to be refused. 


Treat? I mean blessing. And so the fishing metaphor ends (because that would be a sham, as you aware of my paltry angling acumen must already be thinking), with me swimming willingly back to this place, as I hope to to Nu`alolo in the coming year. Lured by the aroma of those sweet springs, beckoning tendrils cast into the deep blue, that vast and shapeless world, luring the shad, o'opu, and salmon. 


So, maybe a fishing metaphor after all, but more of the ancient and collective "the run delivers fish" kind than the "guy in a bass-boat with an armada of lures" kind. Either way, I'm hooked.

Cannery

After lunch on July 4th, I rounded up the girls and we went to the edge of town to a strawberry farm. One of those U-pick places, which every time I hear about make me think it must be run by the Yupik people, but there were none to be seen. You park, you pick up baskets. you go into the field where a girl points out your row. I felt like the guy at the stand insulted me by asking if I wanted just one basket. Like what, my girls cannot pick? You think I'm some yutz out here for a photo op, some family event bagged for the bragging in a christmas letter later?

Turned out that no, he didn't. It was just that I'd happened to arrive during the last hour of picking before they turned loose the commercial pickers. Out in the field, the row boss saw right off that we were there to pick, there to fill up a couple boxes. Apparently, my 5-year-old is a mighty picker for her age.

Most of the season, they put people on a row of lush plants that can absorb the collateral damage of toddling beginners and their bumbling parents. They eat some, they drop a lot, they seek out the biggest fruit and bring a pound or two home, where they discover another few ounces stuffed into one of the kids' underwear.

Since we were interested in jam-worthy quantities, and since we were able to pick the ripe without destroying the not yet, the row boss gave us a corner full of a small local variety. We raked in the clusters hanging out in the open. Swept one hand through leaves and picked with the other. Plucked and snagged and hooked. Hundreds of nickel-sized berries piling up.

The little ones are nice for jam: no need to cut, red-ripe through and through, full o flavor. Not necessarily big and photogenic, but then, I'm looking for sustenance and substance, not a politician.

I'm not a survivalist or a millenialist, not a farmer or feeder or families, but getting off the food grid, where everything arrives from somewhere else and tastes the same,...well that I like. Jam of our own (I swore to the kids we will do something in addition to strawberry this year, since they spent the last year with nothing but that) is a step in that direction. That leaves me about 1800 calories per day short of sustaining myself most of the year, and my summer garden is way too small to provide food enough for canning.

My grandmothers, born over 100 years ago, canned a lot of what they ate, but buying food eventually got too convenient, and one had to spend her days in a textile mill, which monopolizes the day with wages-earning and weariness. Still, I remember trips to the basement, shelves lined with jars of beans and beets, pickles and tomatoes. The trip from field to shelf to kitchen was a few dozen feet.

My mom continued some of that. We canned tomatoes and pickles a few times. Mostly because there were too many tomatoes and cukes, but partly because they tasted better just knowing we had grown them (and partly because we tended them well and didn't put them in a truck for days and a shelf for months). Buy a can, and you miss the rich steamy aroma, the satisfaction wrung from a hot tomato peeled without burning your fingers, the ritual steps that yield a proper pickle.

Buy the can, and never know where the stuff came from. Maybe the risk of cantamination is lower these days, but you have no idea what was sprayed on them beans, what campesino lost his familia farm and spent his days picking this for a corporation. Buy the can and get the same dull product time and again; it is uncanny for vegetables to be so uniform.

Dry it, freeze it, or can it yourself--especially if you grew or picked it yourself--and you can taste the life. You can walk again through that strawberry field, make it last forever.

Tender

Native blackberries of the NW snake along the ground. They weave windfall twigs and failing fronds and each other into the mat of forest soil. They snag hiker feet and even though the thorns are pretty small, people pretty much think of them as a nuisance. A few know that the berries are supremely tasty, but they are tiny and sparse on the ground compared to the Himalayan blackberries clinging to every roadside and vacant lot in the NW like some savage velcro mutant.

But I've been letting them carpet the wildish back strip of the yard for the past couple of years, and this year I spent a few more hours messing with the weave. I plucked mustard weed, which unchecked will shade out the berries. Pinched some leaders, rerouted and rooted others. Avoided walking through the patch.

Gave that blackberry blanket some tender loving care. Because I am tender of this tiny piece of earth, and tend to think that something that's native and nutritious is worth tending to.

I could, and sometimes do, make like I do stuff like this for noble reasons (just ask my family who have to hear my spoutings, not just via blogview, but at any odd hour), but I just like spending time outside rapt up in some job, especially when it will end up yielding food. The work itself is pretty easy if you remember that nature is boss and sets the schedule; a few minutes of weeding now might take an hour in two weeks, and still won't bring back the sun swiped in the interim.

In this case, the earth reciprocated. The berries this year are huge compared to what you generally find in the wild. Freed from some of the competition by my selection (seemed natural enough to me), they sucked up soil and sun and now lie fat and sweet and happy in the morning dew.

Which is probably how people became tenders in the first place. Those big eyes saw something tasty and the big brain figured out that it was because of the gap in the canopy or the lack of some other plant or last summer's fire. Most archaeologists would say agriculture is on the order of 10,000 years old, and recognize that humans have used fire to change the landscape for tens of millenia. I think it's also pretty likely that there are a bunch of behaviors invisible to archaeologists that are deep in our past and have to do with tending the earth to get more food. Things like weeding, clearing, peeing at the base of a tree, ripping down branches for shelters,...who knows how long our kind of ape has been doing these things? (Maybe longer than we consciously did anything to make food grow; corn is not the only plant that evolved to trick humans into giving it an unfair edge.)

So, the blackberries can depend on tender-hearted me.

Fire Comes in

October rolls around, and fire moves inside. Maybe the weather gives it a few more weeks outside, heat and drought overcome rain for a while. Maybe flickers its arrival, oscillates between forest and hearth before making the jump for the long winter ahead. But rarely does November blow in to find fire still cavorting under the lowering sky.

This summer, wildfires were not so bad as expected (and in some quarters, desired, for where there’s smoke, there’s work). Climate change has induced drought, let forest-ravaging bugs move north, and spawned severe lightning storms at whose fulgerite-toed feet blame is laid for many a wildland blaze. Especially on the western Cascadian slopes, swaths of dead and weakened conifers stand brownly, needley tinder tempting sparks. 

I work with people who fight forest fires, and when they talk of the next summer, their eyes smoke over and their jaws clench, knowing that the Northwest will not be immune to conflagrations forever. They grant that this year’s acreage burnt may not have been so bad, but grimly acknowledge the colossal and growing fuel load, the budget cuts that have decimated thinning of that load, the fact that fires kept emerging for weeks this year after the usual close of the season. They worry that their job security will come at the cost of an inferno. They know that it ain’t just the lightning, it’ the people who start fires, who build stick homes in forests that have burnt since time immemorial.

After summer’s blazing heat, but before the blanket of wet settles completely, people here have long had burning seasons. Today it may be timber slash piles, and for millennia before it was the dried grass of the prairie, the clean-picked and exhausted berry patch. Ecosystems exist here that would not have been born without anthropyro-sparked mosaics of regeneration; mile after mile of black prairie soil sequesters this carbon truth. Not an escapee or a mistake, but fire the ally: clearer of underbrush, landscaper of game parks, feeder of berries. Under the knowing hand and at the right time—autumn cool, February sunbreak, spring flush—this not-so-wild outdoor fire helped humans prosper.

It is the Northwest, after all, and at some point the lows in the Gulf of Alaska and the Pineapple Express bring in the moisture, outdoor fires wild and feral retreat for another winter. Their tamed cousin builds a glow inside as it has for millennia, drying soaked boots and warming chilled toes, cooking savory meals, lighting the dancers and crackling along with the drumbeats, embers shimmering reticulose like an octopus’s skin as tales unwind. We welcome and nurture this fire as part of our family.

NRB

The Natural Resource Building in Olympia was built recently enough that the landscaping is rife with native species, many with edible fruits. Pretty good set on the berries this year (more salal than anything, but no complaints here), and it looks like there could be a decent amount of huckleberries (evergreen) once the frost makes 'em, tasty.

There's some kind of small tree that pumped out blueberry-ish fruit earlier in the summer. Not quite as tasty as regular blueberries, but good for fistfuls of sustenance as I walked to work. And of course the Himalayan blackberry is invading the plantings with its alien deliciousness. Although the NRB contains numerous experts on resource management, restoration ecology, and native plants, they're not the ones maintaining the landscape, and inevitably it has degraded from a native species perspective.

Still, not bad for a place where the 'pristine' native flora was wiped out more than a century ago, and I really appreciate that there are edible species to be had in the concrete jungle.

And I think I may be the only one, other than that hippie girl I saw gorging on salal berries last summer. She looked guilty for a second when she saw that I saw, then broke into a bluetoothed (finally, the word used as it should be) smile when she figured out that I was not The Man. Otherwise, I seem to be the only one feasting on the landscape bounty, and I make only the smallest dent. Most of the berries drop to the ground or even dry up on the plant.

Why? Maybe because people think berries from the market are good, or even those picked in the woods, but not if they come from a city. But I've watched for long enough to know there's no spray, and the plants are safe. Could be that food in unexpected places is invisible. Or maybe my shamelessness outpaces that of the other bipeds roaming around, who wouldn't want to be seen stooping and picking, risking the scorn of the smokers perched 25.1 feet from every door. Especially for salal or plain old blackberries. Only a newcomer would get excited about that.