All posts by Jessica McDonald

Hero

On my bedside table, I have a well-thumbed copy of Brent Walth’s biography of Thomas Lawson McCall, “Fire at Eden’s Gate”.   March 22nd, 2013 was the centennial anniversary of McCall’s birth in Egypt, Massachusetts.  The grandson of a copper king and a congressman and former governor of Massachusetts, he grew up on a ranch bordering the rugged Crooked River near Prineville, Oregon and in New England.   McCall attended the University of Oregon and graduated with a degree in journalism and worked for the Oregonian newspaper and as a radio news announcer.  His concerns went beyond the daily news, as he ventured into promoting fair treatment for migrant workers and the protection of the rich natural resource legacy in Oregon.  As a reporter in 1962 for KGW Television in Portland he presented the documentary “Pollution in Paradise”, a chronicle of the impacts of unregulated toxins disgorging into Oregon’s air and flowing into Oregon’s waters.  McCall served two terms as Governor of Oregon and was responsible for an astonishing array of achievements that made the State an innovator in statewide land use planning, farmland protections, recycling, the clean-up of a major river system (Willamette River), and a landmark bill to allow public access to coastal beaches.

I often walk on Neptune Beach south of Yachats.  The beach is not long but at the south end you encounter rocky outcrops that contain innumerable tide pools filled with echinoderms such as deep purple sea urchins and brownish-red Pisaster starfish, or colonies of California mussels, brilliant orange anemones, coralline red algae illuminating the pools, and the occasional crab and sculpin hiding in the among the tidepool crevices.  If the tide is out and you don’t mind dodging the waves, you can venture into lower tide zones and touch the leathery backs of molluscs such as black chitons or the peaked-helmet shaped shells of numerous limpets, or witness the slow carnivory of sea stars pulling apart mussel shells, or examine the craggy structure of their numerous neighbors, the ivory-colored pelagic goose barnacles.  Traveling further south and scrambling over ledges, you encounter a cave carved out of the rocky shores by waves crashing ashore during winter storms.  Near the overlook, and covered by layers of sand there are mounds of mollusk shells, Coastal tribal middens, remnants of countless feasts scattered over the centuries.  Just off-shore in April, I have occasionally watched the backs of giant migrating gray whales as they surfaced while feeding between strands of bull kelp.  For some years, I walked the beach with my golden retriever who loved to swim among the waves, climb the rocks, and eat shells, an occasional small crab, seaweed and numerous washed-up sticks of various sizes, shapes and conditions.  If the wind is strong, you could wade up Cummins Creek which flows into the north end of the beach, and soon be in the quiet of a Coastal mountain stream with giant spruces towering along its banks and mergansers diving in peaceful shallow pools.

Oregonians are blessed because our beaches are available to all.  Such is not the case in most coastal areas where high rise hotels and private residences fence off beaches and keep most citizens away.  Oregon’s Beach Law passed in 1967 provides the public with free and uninterrupted use of the beaches along our 362 miles of shoreline.  It also directed that the ocean shores be administered as a state recreation area.  Without Tom McCall’s force of will and ability to rally overwhelming public support, with a dramatic media event that included two helicopters filled with surveyors and scientists landing on the beaches accompanied by reporters, the Bill may have died in the legislature.

“Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community, and it is my responsibility to make it better.”  ~ Tom McCall

One thing we could use around here …

Earth Day! And we take in the glory of spring in the mid-Willamette Valley. Glory indeed unless you have allergies, in which case this is the time to stock up on antihistamines against the clouds of pollen that waft unseen (that is, until July when all-too-visible mists rise off the grass fields) as the days clear. It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad.

But one thing we could use around here—not that there are many, mind you; the Grand Artificer gave us an abundance of gorgeous: the way the clouds pour over Mary’s Peak on a spring evening, the wild iris punctuating the hillsides—is a few fireflies to blip their greetings as the weather warms.

They are the icons of early summer for those of us who have not forgotten that we herald from the Midwest where every rural kid has fallen asleep to their blinking in a bedside jar after chasing them through the already dewy grass in the hours between dinner and bedtime. Later in high-school we learned about bioluminescence (something fireflies share with plankton, jelly fish and glow-worms) and only much later could we spell it. But every kid recognized it for what it was—pure magic, way better even than lightning (which shattered trees and cancelled parades). And they were nearly as awesome as tornadoes, heralded by the flat-bottomed wall clouds that turn the sky the mottled yellow of a four-day bruise, the kind you got when the demonic Shetland pony your parents thought you’d like stepped on your bare foot when all you were trying to do was push it into a stall as a storm approached. I was that barefoot kid one spring day, pushing our disaster of a pony into a shed on an April afternoon as the tornado siren in town (the same siren that summoned the volunteer fire department, the same siren that told us it was noon) announced not just a tornado watch (we had those all the time) but an actual warning: something nasty and nearby had been sighted.  The horses were skittish—so were we since in the space of a few minutes the wind dropped, the sky went yellow, and everything fell still. And that afternoon, as you have probably twigged already, I got my foot stepped on.  I think that’s the reason I don’t particularly like horses, but there are others, equally personal and some that involve winter chores which I won’t go into now.  In any case, that particular afternoon, after the horses were shedded, my grandparents picked us up despite the tornado warning and drove us down to a restaurant (called, oddly, the Colonial Inn but was neither colonial, having been built in the 60’s nor an inn, being just a place to eat, not stay) on the east bank of the Mississippi just opposite Hannibal (Mo.) that served pretty good catfish, which is where we were when this particular tornado rolled through.

We fared better than the horses in the barn, I think.  The staff cleared us away from the wobbling windows as a huge sign crashed down on someone’s car (not ours); big stuff was flying about outside for a long time.  On the drive back through the floodplain up into the bluffs there was a lot of exciting debris, and we came home to see that our big barn was fine but the tornado had erased the horse shed—we found it later in a field, spatchcocked like a chicken ready for the grill.  And the horses, which we had sheltered in that shed, seemed decidedly not amused at having their structure plucked (we could only imagine the noise!) away, and ever after were decidedly leery about entering the replacement we built.  For the first time, I sensed that horses were not all that dumb, even if they crushed your feet and you had to lug hay to them through the snow before school.

Only a few years later—lightning bugs already doing their thing across the darkening lawn—the sirens again sang their warning and we all ran around scanning the sky (we had a storm cellar we knew we could hide in) — I had been reluctantly mowing the lawn (does anyone do it otherwise?) and stood amazed as a thin dark finger with a messy end touch down again and again along the near horizon. I knew exactly whose farms it dropped in on—but we were clear since it was nearly a mile from us, moving away.

 

So, fireflies, yes but Wizard-of OZ tornadoes, maybe no. I think we’re better as we are. And who knows what species will come as the climate changes? Already certain beetles have infiltrated from more southerly climes into the ranges I grew up among, decimating white pines and other species.  I suppose Earth Day is all about the earth, not us, so we take what she gives— whether on the vast and rapidly- changing canvas of a storm, or more gently, in the scene we see when we kneel, as that most dissolute of all dissolute Irish poets – Patrick Kavanagh– remarked when he left the streets of Dublin for a visit to his rural roots. . .

“But here! A small blue flower creeping over
On a trailing stem across an inch-wide chasm.
Even here the wild gods have set a net for sanity.
Where can I look and not become a lover. . . “

I’ll try to remember this when weeding the raspberry patch, opening myself up to the beauty of our smaller world: a scattering of spiders, the little golden leaf that soon turns green, the network of grass.

I Know It’s Spring …

I know it’s spring, or near enough, and spring’s a time when “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love” but I am not a young man, nor was Tennyson when he wrote those words in Locksley Hall; and in any case, young men do not stay young forever. Whatever springs we have seen, however often we feel or felt that “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ drives my green age” (Thomas), sooner or later we come to see spring as the Recycler, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land” –a bit of magic Eliot thought cruel but one surely we grow to embrace as we embrace all cycles given to us as the terms of our existence. Not so much dust to dust as it is dust to lilacs –  a process Thomas also captures (if somewhat obliquely):

I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn. . .

This is, largely, the way things go and have gone for centuries. We die and are returned to the earth. Yet fairly recently, and in the West (particularly), most everything about our way of death aims to prevent or at least impede this cosmic recycling. We infuse our dead with formaldehyde or formalin (at least since the 19th century—prior to that it was arsenic, or alcohol), seal them away in stone or metal, and cache them underground in vaults of concrete. Once such drastic and ultimately futile measures to preserve our remains from the erosion of time were reserved for the very rich who lavished such attention on their dead that we trek in our millions to see the results—think of the pyramids of Giza, Tamerlaine’s tomb in Samarkand, the Taj Mahal. Yet these monuments don’t so much defy death as enshrine its effects. And clearly we’d run out of space if everyone had the means to erect such memorials; the Great Pyramid of Giza is roughly two and a half million cubic metres. Even so, we now routinely construct miniature versions of these mausolea and tuck them beneath the sod.

Several years ago when our boys were young we took them through the Catacombs of Paris—vast underground limestone quarries whose galleries have been partially filled with remains—mostly just the larger bones—dug from the city’s overcrowded cemeteries in the 18th and 19th centuries to make room for new arrivals. Miles of aisles lined with bones of the unmemorialized, chapels (yes, you can be married, or even baptised in front of thousands of silent witnesses) in 30-foot high vaults walled floor to ceiling with slowly mouldering skulls. Naturally it’s a little gloomy at first walking along dripping and dimly lit tunnels, and the motto at the entrance isn’t particularly inviting:  ‘ARRETE! C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT’  [literally, Stop! Here is the Empire of  Death—but on you go—you can’t turn around here anymore than you can in life. We’ve now entered the metaphor. . .] and things don’t improve much, at least so far as the words of encouragement—Horace makes an appearance with his ‘ OMNE CREDE DIEM TIBI DILUXISSE SUPREMUM’ [‘Believe every day to be your last’  but of course we may not heed his advice—and certainly not with that other inevitable eventuality approaching on 15 April].  Yet somehow things do lighten up—we are, after all, only looking at the future.  Our sons slowly warmed to this meeting and soon were showing postcards of the Eiffel Tower to the eyeless heads, explaining that because these Parisians had died long before their city’s most famous icon had been built, revealing what was once the future to what is still the past was a form of enlightenment. In any case, there was an engagement with these bones that would not have been possible had they been cached away in steel or  stone.  It’s the same sense of engagement with the dead we see in  George Herbert’s brilliant poem “Church-Monuments” where the speaker tours a country church, absorbing the lessons of impermanence from its tombs:

I gladly trust
My body to this school, that it may learn
To spell his elements, and find his birth
Written in dusty heraldry and lines:
Which dissolution sure doth best discern,
Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.
These laugh at Jet and Marble put for signs,
To sever the good fellowship of dust. . . .

Maybe it’s time to let dust return to dust, as it will, more easily. Let the earth be monument enough. Recently I’ve been approached by members of our community to explore the idea of Green Burial on Greenbelt land. You can find the general information about this practice on-line [greenburialcouncil.org  for example] but the general idea is to honour the process of returning the body as easily as possible to the elements it will, assuredly, become. And leaving as little as possible of the steel, stone, concrete and synthetics underground as mute witness to the life they never really contained.  We’re all fans of the Taj Mahal, but what we bury, while unseen, is not unnoticed by the ground around it. Especially for those of us who cherish this earth, our parting gift should resonate with the lives we led upon it.

If you have thoughts on the idea of green burial, I would be grateful to hear them. You can contact me at the Greenbelt Land Trust or leave a comment on this blog.

Flying Footballs…

Just before dawn one day in early May, 1989 I struggled out of my tent, grabbed my headlight and walked to the first listening point of a survey line in a valley of the Coast Range near Fall City.  I could make out the trilling notes of a Swainson’s Thrush and the emerging sounds of many other birds as they responded to the  coming dawn.  As the sky brightened, I could hear, faintly to the west, a series of faint “keer” calls and peered expectantly up at the towering canopy of ancient 400-500 year-old  Douglas-fir trees.   Soon the keer calls increased in number and volume and a pair of black bullet-shaped birds sped through openings in the upper canopy accompanied by “whirr”  sounds from their rapid wing-beats.  The pair of Marbled Murrelets was soon followed by others and I counted 30 distinct keer calls during the morning survey.  This morning was my first in the Valley of the Giants, a small stand of old growth conifers in heart of the Oregon Coast Range.  The Valley of the Giants is a remnant of an era of ancient and giant Douglas fir trees that historically covered many valleys in the Coast Range and survived periodic seasonal fires because the forests were protected within a geographic gradient of rain and more rain that often exceeded 180 inches a year.   The previous evening I had left Corvallis in my 1980s vintage ford sedan borrowed from the Oregon State University Motor Pool, and followed sketchy directions and  topographic  maps down a maze of rutted dirt logging roads south of Fall City, motored cautiously through the abandoned mill town of Valsetz with its many broken and blacken tree stumps in the drained town lake and turned right on a one lane, more- rutted road that bordered the Siletz river until I reached an area where bent over alder saplings covered the road like green leafy umbrellas.  I continued on, holding my breath that the road was still passable, and eventually emerged into the Valley of the Giants.  This survey was the first for this elusive sea bird in the Valley of the Giants.  I spent many more mornings in this remote, rain-drenched valley during the spring and summers of 1989 and 1990.

There were a number of research technicians combing the Coast Range and surveying forests to detect the presence of Marbled Murrelets in 1989 and 1990.  We worked for Kim Nelson, a pioneer in the study of this amazing bird, and an ornithologist at Oregon State University.  In 1989, Kim coordinated the first formal surveys of Marbled Murrelets in Oregon.  No nests of this elusive bird had been located in Oregon so one objective of her study was to locate nests if possible.  A nest tree was finally located in the Five Rivers areas near Alsea.  The nest was found by happenstance with one of Kim’s assistants observing the silent nest exchange where one of the adults entered the canopy of the nest tree at dawn after a night of foraging on the ocean and switched places with the other incubating adult who returned to forage for their ocean food.  Marbled Murrelets locate their nests often in the thick moss of large limbs of old growth conifers high in the forest canopy.  These sites may be considerable distances from their ocean foraging habitats.  With their football-shaped bodies and long narrow, pointed wings they fly at awesome speeds that exceed 60 mph.  Unfortunately the large Douglas fir with the nest site was located adjacent to an active timber harvest so the U.S. Forest Service was informed of the nest location and agreed to temporarily suspend the logging work, and they had some of the upper management of the Siuslaw National Forest observe the nest exchange.  I remember the research assistants lying on their backs on the ground comfortably staring up at the nest limb from their prone positions. An adult did fly into the nest that morning and the exchange was over in seconds.

The next year another nest was located in the Valley of the Giants and a rotating shift of field assistants camped out in the Valley to observe the progress of the nest.  Kim hired a tree climber, Paul, to scale a nearby (to the nest) tree to take photos of the incubating bird.  We swam in the Siletz during hot summer afternoons, occasionally foraged for blackberries, and roamed through stands of 500 year old giants.  One late night, I was awakened by the snorting, heavy breathing and rustling of a band of elk as they slowly passed close by my tent in the dark forest.

All That Remains

“Take courage, the earth is all that remains.” [Lakota Noon: The Indian Narratives of Custer’s Defeat, Gregory Michno, 266]

Iron Hawk spoke these words to Little Bear who was saddling up to join the last minutes of fighting at Little Big Horn around 6 in the evening of 25 June, 1876. Almost immediately his horse was shot from under him and he took a bullet in the leg. As for what happened that day, you know.  And you know too what lay in store for the Lakota Sioux and their lands. So Iron Hawk’s encouraging phrase—‘the earth is all that remains’ seems curious if not outright ironic. Did he mean that we should take heart that this very earth that nourishes us and all life will endure despite our deaths, despite our brutality [the context of those words flashes up—men shooting, running, dying under a clear blue sky; and miners pouring into the basin to claim its minerals] or even what brutality we have yet to commit? The earth perdures, inviolable, beyond our reach. He did not know that this fecund, sovereign earth has hosted roughly 50 billion species since life began, more than 99% of which have disappeared– “Life today is little more than a rounding error.”  Nor was he aware that after 5 major mass-extinctions, we are currently in the 6th, and by the end of the 21st century, half the known species of our age will be gone.  But he did sense that the earth has endured much. Lean forward over the balcony of time and look ahead. We’re left with the root vegetables, the genetically modified soy beans, the termites and the roses? Mighty quiet out there.

It’s easy to see Iron Hawk’s problem; he needed to get out more. He lived at the inception of the Age of Machines, although the western United States was on its margin. As he spoke, trains were crossing Russian plains (Anna Karenina is but their best-known victim), English oak forests crafted into ships of the line had been blown to bits in the waters off Cape Trafalgar, coal mines were collapsing in Cornwall and French ladies were drinking tea from monoculture plantations high up Assam hillsides sweetened with cane sugar from Haiti whose landscape was likewise shaped for that crop alone. Iron Hawk seems a little out of the loop. The earth as he knew it was already fading, and fading at an accelerating rate. Today, his particular battlefield (and others like it from Montana to Flanders) is more or less preserved, but a few hundred miles east of where he spoke, another struggle rages; fracking in the Williston Basin extends our touch miles below the surface, deeper into the earth’s past and just as surely further into her future.  The historic promise of the earth as well as its potential to nourish and even shelter its denizens are bound up with human activity to a degree Iron Hawk could not have fathomed. And that binding does not bode well for either party, it seems.

Nothing new here.   The 19th century English poets saw this clearly—they lived at ground-zero of the Industrial Age.  Take Gerard Manley Hopkins. Writing the year after Little Big Horn (which, of course, went unnoticed at his religious house in Wales) in 1877:

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

Now our smudge is plastic, our smell is carbon monoxide—then it was iron and coal. Unlike Thoreau, Hopkins didn’t feel we could escape the conditions we were laying down for ourselves. He doubted we could evade the legacy of our tenure on this land,  unlike that quintessential American Huck Finn who, perhaps a little prematurely, felt we could always start anew, a little further west:

“But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

I’m sure Huck had Montana in mind. . .  or maybe Idaho.

But let’s go back to poor doomed Iron Hawk and his notion of the resilient earth. A concrete walkway snakes around the battlefield, fenced in a sea of grass, looking but for the monuments much as it looked that day. Whatever disaster occurred there fell not to the earth but to the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapahoe whose way of life is but a memory. The earth carried out its regeneration. As it does elsewhere, apparently. Iron Hawk spoke from religious conviction, but probably not mere speculation. The prairies were managed by fire, and the grass came back time after time following conflagrations that must have been epic.  Dylan Thomas puts it this way: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ drives my green age” – there is a vitality we share but neither control nor fully fathom; the earth wants to remain. And to remain doing what it does and has done forever—sponsor life.  Weeds sprout through cracks in the sidewalk. Bull-doze a strip in a grassfield around here—bull-doze it right down to the hard clay—and popcorn flowers will leap up on cue. Blade a bit deeper so that water collects and you’ll have choruses of frogs in February.

Hopkins’ poem about our smudge and smell explains, perhaps, why this is: Picking up from where he left off, with the bare soil and the unfeeling foot, he continues:

“And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs—“

That ‘and’ at the beginning of the line is no mere conjunction, nor is it a softer way of saying “despite’, as if nature continues to do what it does despite our depredations. That’s true up to a point. But Hopkins was closer to Iron Hawk, I think.  His ‘and’  means ‘and it is for this reason that nature is never spent’: nature lights her green fuse because she knows much depends on her. It’s what she does—we can count on it. And that should give us courage.

Consider this—one April day in 1986 a power surge precipitated an accident of apocalyptic proportions at  the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Pripyat, resulting in the evacuation of 350,000 people and ultimately costing over 3000 lives. Fallout compromised lakes, forests, and grasslands across the Northern Hemisphere; dairy cows were slaughtered in Scotland, fish died in Swedish fjiords. Today, the permanent exclusion zone around the site is roughly 19 miles in diameter, and is expected to remain too highly contaminated for human occupation for tens of thousands of years. Seems like a fairly permanent insult to the earth—yet already the trees creep back, bears roam through empty houses chasing generations of feral cats, wild boar fossick in the tangled and untended gardens—even elk see the zone as a wilderness preserve. Which, in effect, it has become. Remove human activity, and the earth, according to a particularly regional calculus, does her work.  “And, for all this, nature is never spent. . .” For al this, indeed. It’s hard to imagine a more grievous test of Iron Elk’s words—blow up a reactor, scatter inconceivable amounts of radiation throughout the region, and run away leaving footprints that glow in the dark. But almost instantly, the grass goes to work.

Whatever challenges we face enhancing riparian zones or restoring upland savanna are slight in comparison. Because we have a singularly potent ally.