All posts by Jessica McDonald

Oak Witnesses

Blog, Outreach, Properties, ,

A few weeks ago we toured the gorgeous property of long-time Greenbelt supporters Cliff and Gay Hall who have granted GLT a conservation easement on sections of their land along the Luckiamute in the Kings Valley.  It is a site of special interest in more ways than one. The Halls live in a pioneer dwelling, surrounded by the earliest evidence of settlers in the valley on a homestead between two streams that flow west into the Luckiamute—the sort of Eden migrants from the Midwest prized. But they were not the first people sheltering beneath the oaks. Led by archaeologist  Dave Brauner, we wandered through what was perhaps one of the most densely populated areas of indigenous settlements in North America. Centuries of human lives, of human activity lie just beneath the surface.  Incomers built persisting structures, cleared land, established sawmills and farms—this much is still evident. But the soil here is conducive neither to excavation nor the preservation of organic remains, plus it’s terribly hard to work with thick clay, so not much has been done to develop ancient sites for systematic exploration. Scant evidence of those centuries of human occupation has yet to emerge into the light again.  The oaks above are silent on what transpired in their shadow a century or two ago. Nearby Ft. Hoskins, established only 150 years ago to monitor the newly created reservation on the coast, has recently been restored—much of the feel of the place comes from the fact that many of the trees that once shaded soldiers still shade today’s visitors. And the same is true for the riparian areas of the Hall property—the oaks are the only remaining witnesses to its earliest inhabitants. Everything else lies beneath the green veil. “I am the grass”, Sandburg writes: “Let me work.” And work it does.

Oaks seem impervious to time: impervious, solitary sentinels, as in Whitman’s paean to a Louisiana live-oak—“All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,/ Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green.”  For him, oaks might grow joyously even without companions, without community, and because of that they cannot be like us. Thinking of Whitman’s oak in Louisiana with its collection of Spanish moss (not a true moss but rather an epiphyte. Whitman’s prodigious beard, on the other hand, may well be moss. . . .) we bring to mind an emblem of endurance, outlasting generations of those who marvel at its sheer presence. Yet when you look long, you see that even oaks must fade to grass. And entire forests, one way or another;  these days I’m beavering away on a massive Oregon white oak that came down in last winter’s storms—its trunk is easily 3 feet thick, and will yield a full season’s firewood or more. That’s its lone and humble destiny. Not so some of its 19th century European cousins that perished en masse. The battle of Trafalgar, six hours on a late October afternoon in 1805, destroyed hundreds and hundreds of acres of oaks that had been refashioned into French and Spanish ships of the line. English losses were lighter, but their ships too were gone by mid-century: broken up and sold, or left to rot after serving as floating storehouses, gun platforms, or prisons.  Dickens’ Magwitch, to Pip’s horror, crawls ashore in the fens after escaping from just such a ship.

Napoleonic–era frigates consumed entire forests. England’s two most famous—the HMS Temeraire and Nelson’s HMS Victory—between them gobbled up nearly eleven thousand English oaks (Quercus robur), drawn mainly from the open forests of Dean in Gloucestershire and Hainault in Essex and harvested at maximum age to strength ratio of around 150 years old. Lumber from trees grown in unfettered forests has natural twists and curves that make it stronger than straight-grained wood and less likely to splinter when hit, and lends itself easily to being fashioned into the distinctive wine-glass shaped hulls—thick branches for the frame’s futtocks– and the bent knees that support the gundecks. For the Temeraire’s hull alone, English shipwrights cut 288,000 cubic feet of oak from Hainault Forest. That’s about 5000 trees, each the size of the one I’m cutting away at for firewood. The stern post, from which the rudder hangs, was 40 feet long and more than two feet thick: pure heartwood.  It must have been an impressive tree, well over two centuries old.

A word about Hainault Forest, besides the killing irony of a French name dating back to the Normans for a forest whose legacy is that it supplied lumber for an English navy fighting the French. In Henry VIII’s day, its royal hunting preserve alone covered over 3000 acres. Oak, hornbeam, chestnut—this was a brilliant mature climax hardwood forest. Far better (as the shipwrights tell us) for producing trees than the cramped light-starved royal forests of France, whose density made for long straight trees lacking the compression wood vital to curved supports.  Naturally, because Hainault Forest had such fine oak, it was cut to pieces, and never recovered; a Royal Forest for centuries,  it was declared ‘wasteland’ by Parliament in 1851, stripped of its remaining old growth, and engulfed by the City of London as thoroughly as the seas off Trafalgar had consumed those doomed French. Only a few hundred acres remain, now preserved by a land trust. In another incandescent irony, the amount of land that trust now guards is roughly the same as the size as the shipyard where HMS Temeraire’s keel was laid and where most of Hainault’s oak lumber ended up. Hainault Forest was not replanted–  England’s next navies would be made of iron and in the interim there were other forests: in Canada and New Zealand, for example. Turner’s famous painting of the Temeraire’s last voyage tells all—a squat steam tug belching smoke like a floating furnace towing the de-rigged frigate to the mudflats of Rotherhithe, up the Thames, where she will be broken up. And where some of Temeraire’s Hainault oak futtocks ended as beams in parlours and inns. If you are ever in the presence of a piece of HMS Temeraire’s wood, those around you will point it out. Do your duty, as Nelson famously signalled, and bend a knee.

Nelson’s Trafalgar flagship, the HMS Victory (now a museum), was even larger, and we needn’t go into detail here (roughly 6000 oaks, 27 miles of rope rigging, 4 acres of canvas)—but think of this: at Trafalgar, a few hours conflict involved 60 ships of the line (and many smaller vessels) from the combined navies of France, England and Spain. Each ship was actually a small forest, and together, the floating oak on that October afternoon came to at least 330,000 trees, each over a century old. Not to mention the thousands of trees for masts, spars, sprits and decking.

Some of the trees around the Hall property were shading the banks of the Luckiamute even as the Temeraire bore down off Cape Trafalgar on that fateful late October afternoon in 1805.

Wooden Boats, Ravens, and Brown Bears

Blog, Outreach, wildlife, ,

 

I sat on the boards holding a wooden caulking mallet trying to pound strands of cotton into the seams of the planks of the boat. The cotton came in long continuous strands from a bundle that lay next to me.  I looped the cotton with the iron at the edge of the seam before setting it into the plank seams with a wedged-shaped caulking iron (called a “making iron”) in a series of rhythmic strokes from my mallet.  For larger boats, the cotton would be topped by strands of fibrous oakum (composed of hemp soaked in linseed oil and pine tar) that also was pounded into the seams with another, more blunt-edged, wedging iron (called a “hardening iron”). When the boat was returned to the water, the wooden planks swelled and the cotton sealed the seams. The oakum prevented the cotton from rotting and helped keep it in place.  It would have been a fine day because I was alone on a beach in Alaska that overlooked the vast Gulf of Alaska on a clear cold mid-May morning, except a blustery wind kept grabbing the loose cotton strands, pulling them out of the seams before I could end my full caulking run.  Also my head hurt. The day before, while drilling a 3 inch hole in the side of another boat, a chunk of my shoulder- length hair became entangled in the drill chuck and was ripped out leaving a small, but embarrassing bald patch on the back of my head.

The 1982 season was my first of four in Alaska.  I loved working by myself on 40 year-old wooden fishing boats that had pulled many thousands of salmon from the rich Alaskan waters.  A few days before, an Arctic fox had been trotting between the boats, foraging for snacks and briefly glanced up at me while I fitted a new plank into the side of a boat.  Sea otters occasionally swam by looking for shellfish and once a pod of killer whales swam into the bay of the cannery and lazily careened around the dock pilings as the cannery workers piled out of the buildings rushing to get a glimpse of these beautiful predators.  The canneries still had small fleets of old wooden fishing boats that they lent to fisherman as long as they sold their catch to the cannery at a price perhaps lower than offered by others.  As a shipwright, my responsibility was to repair the boats if needed.  We (the shipwrights) were occasionally called out in the middle of the night for emergency repairs because the fishing seasons were very short.  I remember one stormy night we pulled a boat onto the ways.  It was a very short opening, perhaps no more than three days allowed for fishing, and the skipper of the boat was frantic to get his boat back into the water.  As the boat rested on the ways, water erupted out of the plank seams.  I stuffed cotton as quickly and thickly as possible into the seams with my mallet and iron, but could feel that the fastenings holding the planks were weak, and the seams would not likely stay sealed because of the movement of the loose planks.  I promised nothing to the fisherman as he peered down from the boat railing with a look of desperation.  This boat was his third, the other two having foundered during other stormy nights in the Gulf of Alaska.

My third season, I worked at a cannery on the mouth of the Naknek River in Bristol Bay and spent part of the time repairing the planks on an 80 foot slab-sided fishing scow.  I also repaired some of the brightly painted purple, red and garish blue fishing boats owned by first and second generation Italian fishermen who immigrated to southern California and were under contract to fish for the cannery. They arrived with great fanfare every year cooking pasta and canned tuna in their bunkhouse rooms on hot plates and offering bribes of fish to the shipwrights so their boats would get repaired first.  They often gathered in groups intently watching us work and argue loudly among themselves about how we should be doing our jobs.  Back to the fishing scow- the original planks were 6 inches thick and 12 inches wide with some over 50 feet in length.  The wood was cut in sawmills from old growth fir trees harvested and milled somewhere near Astoria during the 1940s when the city still hummed with 35 or so canneries processing thousands of salmon pulled from the Pacific,  the Columbia River and its tributaries.  We were replacing the planks with wood also milled in Astoria and harvested from the few remaining old growth stands in the Coast Range.  The foreman kept shaking his head mumbling that “using clear, tight- grained fir meant for furniture showrooms as planking for a 50 year old fish scow was shameful waste”.  To cut them to fit, three shipwrights held the long planks as I guided them through a massive 9 foot tall ship’s band-saw that contained a three inch wide blade.  The bearings in this giant saw were recently replaced and the motor rebuilt.  However, the RPMs, for some reason, were set for 2- times their normal speed so when we first turned on the saw the huge wheels and blade started rotating at an impossible speed with the bearings emitting a jet engine-like roar.  The shipwrights and millwrights in the shop stopped their work and stared briefly with open mouths at the saw and then everyone scrambled for the doors fearing that the room would soon fill with dozens of lethal bearings thrown from the wheels of the saw.  Some of the older shipwrights had worked in their youth on the majestic “windjammer” ships that still occasionally made sailing runs carrying lumber and grain between the Americas and other ports of call in the 1930s.  They mentioned massive planks carved out of huge timbers, steamed to fit and jacked into the hull of the ship.  After cutting and fitting, the heavy planks were steamed for hours to make them more malleable and rushed to the sides of the ship carried by 8 men running in tandem.

Looking down the beach one mid-spring afternoon while working on the ways, I noticed a pair of ravens flying parallel to each other and the rim of 30 foot high cliffs that bordered the beach.  The male would periodically fold his wings against his body, turn belly up and drop like a stone for a few feet before recovering to continue his steady flight.  This mating ritual was repeated most of the late afternoon, until a rustling of some alder branches along the edge of the cliff drew my attention.   A young and apparently very hungry brown bear erupted out of the bushes, slapping branches and frantically slashing at the ravens with his paws.  I wasn’t sure if his futile attempts at catching these very smart birds were out of a desperate hunger or an aggressive, in-your-face exuberance from a young bear just out of his long winter hibernation.  On Kodiak Island after work, I would often walk in the tundra and hills surrounding these desolate canneries.  Small lakes dotted the landscape surrounded by wild iris.  I never came face-to-face with these largest of bears, but my friend Dan seemed to stumble upon angry sows with cubs throughout the summer.  He vowed not to venture more than a few yards from the cannery after a particularly close visit with an aggressive female on a narrow ocean-spit near Akhiok .  His mis-fortune continued when he spooked two young bear cubs near his bunkhouse and heard their mother bark a sharp warning somewhere nearby.  At Naknek, one night some bears broke into the salmon egg-processing house and, like a band of thirsty sailors in a fully-stocked bar,   consumed a fortune in salmon roe.  During one evening walk, I pushed my way through some thick alders to the beautiful shoreline of a lake a few miles from Port Bailey and almost stepped on a large 8 inch- high by 20 inch-wide pile of steaming brown bear dung.  Most of us that spend our free time roaming through nature, rarely think about encounters with large predators, but for once, my heart started racing and the hairs on the back of my neck rose and I probably experienced a sensation that pre-historic hunter/gatherers had every day as they roamed the forests and valleys in search of food.  I decided to leave the lake and head home to the safety of old wooden boats and a warm bunkhouse.

A Gotham Perspective …

Blog, Outreach, Restoration, wildlife, , , ,

We recently spent a few gorgeous days in New York City, replete with its inimical street scenes, restaurants, and museums. Among other invaluable lessons, I learned that if you know ahead of time the price of a NYC latté, you will not enjoy sipping one. When we left, our camas were just beginning to send up their flower stalks. The flash-in-the-pan interlopers– tulips and daffodils— had already coloured the margins of our perennial beds and were in decline. Now was the time of the undisputed queen of the western Cascades. Early settler’s descriptions of the Willamette Valley vibrate with accounts of deep purple vistas—hundreds of acres of camas. That was then, this is now, and we have so few in our field that I know them individually, and each year flag their locations so I can return in August to harvest the seeds. So far I’ve had mixed success propagating them but this spring when I complained to Frank Morton, one of the valley’s liveliest seed gurus, he told me about stratification and temperature gradients and all manner of scientific stuff. Next year’s plantings should be a resounding success; think of Yeats’ Innisfree  where noon is a purple glow (it only works if you substitute our frog-loud field for his bee-loud glade).

So away we flew to Gotham with camas in mind. Early one morning our son Martin and I took the fast and pricey elevator to the Top of the Rock—70 floors on the Rockefeller Center’s GE building. There are, I learned, elevator junkies (and not just in New York) and this ride in particular—with its glass ceiling and little blue lights dotting the track—is iconic. The announcement that this Schindler High Speed Elevator moves upwards at a whopping 18 mph draws gasps (that’s only a little faster than my old tractor, which never draws gasps)—but the trip is nonetheless eye-catching: falling up the rabbit hole. Apparently the same elevator in the Sears Tower in Chicago goes 20mph. I don’t know if it has little blue lights and a glass ceiling. Someone can check, I’m sure.

Looking north from the outside observation deck you see spread out before you all of Central Park—a brilliant vista (no fields of camas, naturally). Glass and steel all around, rivers bordering in the distance, the park is the heart of Manhattan. And it’s big, even where scale is skewed by buildings 800 feet tall and higher. Helicopters buzzed below like dragonflies. All the little lakes, baseball diamonds, rocky outcrops, winding paths—layed out like a map.  From our perspective we couldn’t  see the snapping turtles or the catfish or the insect larvae just emerging into phase two of their unobserved lives at the edges of the pools. And we couldn’t hear the busking bands—high-school a capella choirs, flamenco guitarists, tuba quartets (probably elevator junkies at night) but the park, even from our perspective, was definitely and unmistakably alive. After breakfast we took a bus to the north end and walked through its 843 acres down to Columbus Circle. That’s a pretty good-sized chunk of land, about a third again the size of Bald Hill Farm (my standard reference point these days for acreage). And I learned more facts.  Central Park’s 24,000 trees, while not actually numbered individually, are routinely surveyed (which must take a considerable bite out of the annual $42 million budget), its waterways are monitored for algal blooms (little signs crop up like daisies here and there telling you things like this), and the 9000 benches are serviced according to a fairly tight schedule by what appears to be a tribe of park employees ranging from teenaged offenders working off their public service sentences to elderly repositories of lore gleaned from decades of handling tricky questions –“Are worms wild animals?” (I think the answer was ‘yes but they are not fierce’ but I may have misheard). This tribe also totes away the five million pounds of rubbish each year, fishes pennies, cigarette butts and Coke cans from the four dozen fountains, and leads daily ornithological tours. It’s an urban space, after all. Twenty five million people visit the park every year, not all of them treading lightly. Soil compaction is an issue.

And yet it is still the natural home (however temporary) to flocks of migrating songbirds so large they show up on the radar screens at JFK airport. We caught a glimpse of Pale Male, the celebrated red-tailed hawk that nests high up on a window ledge outside the president of New York University’s office and whose nearly fledged offspring have their own web-cam. Bedrock scraped clean by the Wisconsin Ice Sheet pokes through the grass in dozens of outcrops (“No, Park Officials do not arrange the rocks—they come this way”. . . .  it seems the park has to remind its visitors that not all environments are man-made) and sparrows watch for picnic leavings from an enormous Robert Burns  erected along the Literary Walk (an equally imposing Shakespeare is not far away—he recently underwent a hot-waxing to remove what sparrows leave behind). The park itself is, in many ways, a living memorial for the poet William Cullen Bryant, one of its most significant supporters and the only one who actually died there; he’s officially memorialized by a monument in a nearby park that bears his name beside the New York Public Library. Early in the city’s development Bryant saw the connection between our mortal destiny and the quickly disappearing open spaces— “TO HIM who in the love of Nature holds communion with her visible forms, she speaks a various language. . .” and lobbied hard for the preservation of a generous parcel in the city’s core.

Burns, for various reasons, would have preferred the pub to either park or library.

The effect of this blend is both inspiring and unsettling—after all, there’s a good deal of somewhat unregulated ‘nature’ happening in the margins—in the ponds, along the walkways, in those places allowed it  (no nesting on the monuments, please). Yet the park is not and cannot be, after all, authentically natural, no more than a zoo can provide natural habitat for its residents. It illustrates the bare fact that ultimately we’re given a choice. Here along the Willamette we still have, within reach nearly everywhere we look, an opportunity to avoid reducing our natural lands to mere parks. If we allow a wiser and less invasive dynamic to dictate the terms of engagement with our environment, we may be able to honour Yeats’ closing observation in Innisfree: “ I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;/ While I stand on the roadway, or on pavements grey,/ I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”   If we fail to bring this about, if we decline this option and relegate natural rhythms to memory, one by one the species depending on our answer will vanish, taking their music with them. For 42 million dollars annually, Manhattanites don’t get nearly as much for their money as it first appears (tuba quartets and fountains notwithstanding). And not nearly as much, dollar for dollar, as we can reap along the Willamette.

 

Pink Hair & Sage Grouse

Blog, Outreach, wildlife, ,

In 2005, Becca and I were invited to participate in a celebration of Holi, a Hindu festival celebrated in a number of southeast Asian countries.  Becca worked with a number of Indian software analysts and one of them held a little Holi celebration in his backyard on Vineyard Mountain.  We arrived to a table laden with wonderful spicy curries, pakoras, samosas and other festival foods.  A small pavilion was set up in the backyard to protect the guests from the rain that fell heavily that day.  The festival has been described as a time when “participants hold a bonfire, throw colored perfumed powders at each other and celebrate wildly.”  I cannot remember the bonfire but I do remember people throwing the colored powder and running about waving their arms in the rain.  After we got home, I dumped my cloths in the washing machine, scrubbed the powder off in the shower, and went to bed.  The next morning while starting to brush my teeth, I noticed that my hair was bright pink.  Not to worry, another shower and multiple shampooing should work.  No luck.  My gray hair was still bright pink.  I am now concerned because three events were on my calendar for the week.  I was leaving for northern Nevada to meet with the leadership of the Nevada Chukar Foundation (an organization not known for its pink-headed members) and was stopping beforehand to assist some USFWS wildlife biologists (an agency not know for very many pink-headed male biologists) trap greater sage-grouse.  After my return, I was also starting a new position with Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (a state agency that likely did not have too many pink-headed male staff members).  Becca called her hair stylist who promised quick results from strong chemicals so off I go for an hour of hard head washing with professional quality shampoos.  No luck.  My hair was still bright pink but now with some strange blond streaks.

I left Corvallis the next day, drove across Willamette Pass and through the beautiful Sprague River Basin until I nearly reached Lakeview where I turned southeast for a long drive across a vast high desert landscape to the Nevada border.  My first stop was the Sheldon National Antelope Refuge.  I was spending 3 days trapping greater sage-grouse on the Refuge to take blood samples and continue a banding study that began in the late 1980s.  Wildlife research, the previous year, had found some alarming problems in greater sage-grouse populations in areas in Montana and Wyoming.  A number of birds were testing positive (from blood samples) for markers that suggested they were exposed to West Nile virus and populations of greater sage- grouse seemed to be plummeting in parts of their range because of mortalities linked to this mosquito-borne pathogen.  So the USFWS biologists were testing birds across their range to determine if they contained these markers.  Historically the basin and range of Washington and Oregon contained vast numbers greater sage-grouse.  This keystone sagebrush/steppe obligate was being considered for federal listing because their populations had fallen by 90% since the days when Meriwether Lewis described them as the “Cock of the Plains” during his journey through the Columbia Basin.

I met with Mike and other volunteers at one of the Sheldon bunkhouses.   Mike is a USFWS biologist who has studied greater sage-grouse for 18 years and was an expert trapper of these magnificent creatures.  Sage grouse are a lek-forming species.  In other words, during breeding season (March-April) males gather at traditional breeding sites (leks) and compete for females by elaborate displays.  The higher ranking or alpha males breed with the most females.   Displays occur during a short 2-4 week period and occur mostly during the day, but occasionally you can hear strutting males during moonless nights.  The strutting displays by individual males last about 2 seconds but are very complex.  Paul Johnsgaard described the sequence: “the start of strutting is marked by a rapid wing-swish and vertical upward jerk of the head that lasts about .2 second.  There is then a pause, as the esophageal pouch is inflated and two bare, breast-like areas of the frontal, olive-colored skin are partly and briefly exposed.  Simultaneously with the wing-swish noise is a low-pitched growl, apparently produced by feather noise.  After a slight pause there is a second wing-swish, accompanied by a second vertical head jerk and greater esophageal expansion, that produces a second brief but silent exposure of the bare skin patches.  At this point the male utters a quick series of three low-pitched cooing or hooting notes.  There is then a hollow plopping sound as the now fully expanded and orange-shaped air-sacs are deflated….and followed by a sharp whistle and second extremely rapid air sac inflation and deflation plop.”   As the males display, the females are outside the circle appraising their performances.  The displays at night are the best time to capture the birds because both sexes are aggregated in one area.  Spotlights are used to transfix the birds until a pole net can be dropped over them.  Many lek sites have been occupied by multiple generations of sage grouse and have been monitored by biologists for decades.  Scientist are not all that clear on what constitutes a good lek site over a not-so-good site but generally they are knolls or exposed areas that are free from snow.

We left the bunkhouse at 9:00 pm and started our walk through the sage brush.  We had divided into two teams of three with each team having a spot-lighter in the center between two netters. The spotlights are powered by backpack generators that emit a steady loud hum and thin clouds of gas exhaust.  Mike with his spotlight has the ability to pick out the eye shine or head shapes of sage grouse without hesitation several hundred feet away.  I am focused mostly on not tripping over sage brush or stepping into holes.  It is still mostly winter in the high desert.  The temperature hovers near 19 degrees and I have many layers of cloths and a bright headlamp.  Snow falls intermittently but does not seem to detract from Mike’s amazing ability to find birds.   When he spots a grouse he immediately picks up his pace keeping the strong spotlight on the bird as he hustles towards it.  As he nears the bird he makes the light flutter rapidly on the grouse and motions one of the netters to approach.  I stumble forward and drop the pole net quickly on the bird and then immediately leap forward to grasp it under the net scraping my knees.  Lewis’s “Cock of the Plain” is a large and powerful bird with males exceeding 6 lbs and having a wing span of 3 feet or more.  The bird in my net is a male in full breeding plumage with erect filoplumes (display feathers) arising from the back of his head, a deep black throat, pure white breast, and beautiful black underbelly.  I reach under the net and grasp the back of the struggling grouse with both hands holding the wings against his sides and turn him over on his back in my lap.   Sage grouse become very passive on their backs and are easily handled in that posture.  I check his legs for any previous leg bands.  Mike continues after another bird.  I sit quietly with the grouse who occasionally emits a deep canine-like growl.  It is good to be away from the noise of the generator.  I gently speak in a low voice to reassure it or me and glance up at a clearing sky that is covered with vast numbers of stars.  Mike returns and he draws blood from a wing vein and inserts a band on its right leg.  We also examine its primary and secondary feathers to determine if it is a full adult or juvenile.  I turn the bird over and carefully released it into a clump of nearby sage brush. The trapping continues until the sun begins to emerge in the eastern sky.  We have two more nights to get as many blood samples as possible for the West Nile tests. On the last night, Mike steps into a kit fox hole and breaks his right leg.

Now back to the pink hair.  I did not mention my hair color during the trapping or subsequent meeting with the Chukar Foundation.  I thought, that unless asked, I would not volunteer that I had been throwing perfumed powders on people in a rain storm while celebrating a Hindu festival in Corvallis.  Sometime later, I asked Mike if he remembered the trapping excursion and my pink hair.  He said that some of the folks had winked and nodded but otherwise they thought it best not to mention the hair.  The American West is known for its eccentricities and most folks deeply respect the privacy of others including those with pink hair.  I will forever remember sitting in the high desert on a cold early spring day under a nighttime galaxy of stars cradling growling sage grouse forgetting pink hair and sore knees.

The Fate of the Land

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A few weeks ago we flew back to the Midwest for a short family get-together. Late winter is always the best time for the drive along the river. Landing in St. Louis, we drove north up the Missouri side of the Mississippi, through little one stop-sign towns like Old Monroe, Elsberry, Annada. . . . At Clarksville, tucked under the limestone bluffs, the famous ice-cream parlour is newly shuttered, and the cement works is silent. But you get a brilliant view of Lock and Dam No. 24 and the bald eagles perched in the bare trees looking for fish. We crossed over at Louisiana and drove up the broad flood plain on the Illinois side—fields still showing frozen corn or soy bean stubble—no one tills heavily anymore—the old deep plows are rusting or scrapped.  At times we were six or seven miles from the river, again hugging the limestone bluffs, crossing half dozen wide creeks and washes that drain the uplands before turning up one wooded draw that led to my home town. The entire route—with the exception of the area around I-70 as it exits St. Louis and crosses the Missouri River before the confluence with the Mississippi—was virtually unchanged from the days of my childhood: ninety miles of familiar drainages and outcrops.  I know it’s not always the case—but there, the fate of the land is largely entrusted to those who live on it—both literally and figuratively. No corporate board in Miami or Dallas plunks down retirement homes, assembly plants,  RV parks, or golf courses.  Its very obscurity has spared it the often fatal attentions that befall areas blessed with more obvious natural beauty; no Herculean efforts are needed to preserve what isn’t under direct threat. Along our stretch of the Mississippi, locals manage the Sny drainage system that ensures access to the flood plain’s astonishing fertility—and they are men and women who cherish morels in the spring and ducks in November.  As Wendell Berry notes, “You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog.” Carl Sandburg is western Illinois’ presiding poet—here’s his full take on the landscape we drove through ( posted a line from this on a earlier blog—here’s the full version):

“There was a tall slough grass
Too tough for the farmers to feed the cattle,
And the wind was sifting through, shaking the grass;
Each spear of grass interfered a little with the wind
And the interference sent up a soft hiss,
A mysterious little fiddler’s and whistler’s hiss,
And it happened all the spears together
Made a soft music in the slough grass
Too tough for the farmers to cut for fodder.
”This is a proud place to come to
On a winter morning, early in winter,”
Said a hungry man, speaking to his dog,
Speaking to himself and the passing wind,
“This is a proud place to come to.”

The mid-Willamette Valley—our proud place—is not blessed with inattention from the whirling world, from those who live elsewhere but want this where to augment their bank accounts. Ten years here can render once familiar sights unrecognizable, relegating them to the preserve of memory. Once converted, such lands rarely return to their former states.  Yet we have just as many natural allies as we do threats—we’re rich in farmers, ranchers and orchardists, men and women who know first hand that the true test of a land’s vitality is its ability to regenerate itself and who live on the land whose fate they control. Their support—just as much as those who live along paved and lighted streets—will make or break our efforts at ensuring that our rivers and streams, our uplands and savannas, remain capable of self-renewal. Over a decade ago the Catholic bishops of the Columbia watershed wrote in their pastoral letter that “[t]he means are now available to use regional resources more efficiently while doing much less harm to regional ecologies.”  They also pointed out that the courage and resilience necessary to cultivate this watershed over a century ago are now required to navigate the challenges of living in closer harmony with it.

How does that work, exactly? There isn’t a one size fits all model —each property, each landowner, each dialogue is different. While the broader goal remains the same—to enhance and, where necessary, restore the network of waterways  and adjacent lands to the point where they are self-regenerating in a meaningful way– the solutions will require finesse, time and trust. Courtney White (from Quivira) lays out in “The Working Wilderness: A call for a Land Health Movement” one prospect—but one drawn from high-range grazing on semi-arid land. Definitely, not us—especially the semi-arid part; I’m looking at frog-ponds in my lawn as I write and I suspect our lambs are evolving into a semi-aquatic subspecies.  But the salient features of the dialogue he recounts ring true: landowners are our natural partners because they understand stewardship—our interests coincide or can easily be adjusted to overlap. Stewardship is polyvalent–everyone knows you can’t take care of the land without taking care of those who live on it. In one sense, we all live on the land—let’s make sure this is true in every sense. Once upon a time we didn’t need to ask whether the land also lives off us. A glance at the state of the Willamette and its tributaries confirms that those days are demonstrably past.  Our fates are now intimately intertwined– in this dance, the music will play only as long as we dance together.