Slough, Decay, and the Odor of Soil

Log decomposition research site, Blue River drainage, Oregon Cascades

By Bill Yake

Trunks, once poised and upright, collapse toward

a two-century graduation into beetle and vapor,

moss, conk, and seed bed -- their boles intermittently

chiseled by woodpeckers uncoiling their barbed tongues

and probing grub-etched galleries within. Hibernacula.

Loosened bark. Sap and heartwood riddled with crawlways

where ants stalk wood-mining fungi, where inexorable

ant-infesting mycelia reciprocate. The odor of must,

cedar disintegrating through pungency to pulp and oil.

The plush, ripe scent of continuous integration.

What seemed solid, stains and softens decade by decade,

to be torn apart by bears after ants: the flavor

on their tongues that of dull sparks. All is relentlessly

hollowed, grain by grain, cell by cell, into sponge and grub

dust, salamander refuge, slug haven, frog shelter, and moss

-- all deepening to opulent, pre-ultimate, humus and duff.

From Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, Spring 2011.

Moral Ground

Kathleen Dean Moore’s ethical response to climate change

Reviewed by Christian Martin

Because of humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, we are warming our planet beneath a cloak of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

Here in Washington State, rising temperatures and a warmer climate are causing our glaciers to melt faster than they can replenish themselves. This is leading us towards a future with less fresh water for agriculture and drinking and less resources for inexpensive hydroelectric generation. Over 40 of our coastal communities are threatened by rising sea levels. Sagebrush-steppe and alpine ecosystems will disappear as the tree line shifts, and growing seasons are changing in unpredictable ways. The loss of several amphibian species, alterations in bird and butterfly migratory patterns and invasions of unchecked, voracious insect infestations are already underway. Ocean acidification is choking the abundant life in Puget Sound and bays of the outer coast. Eastside forests are drying up and wildland fires will become more prevalent. We humans will face a deadly spike in infectious, respiratory and heat-related illnesses as the natural world around us smolders.

Heard this laundry list of doom before? Most likely you have, and it’s because scientists have done an impressive job of both studying the phenomenon of global climate change and communicating the causes and effects to the public. The effort has be so heroic that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.”

While the data, interpretations and subsequent warnings from the scientific community are essential pieces of this puzzle, Kathleen Dean Moore, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, recognized that something was missing. Moore, the author of personal essay/nature writing books like Riverwalking, Holdfast and Wild Comfort, teaches environmental ethics and moral reasoning to students and she soon realized that the scientists’ arguments, no matter how comprehensive, were not going to inspire us to act to save our world.

“Clearly, information is not enough,” she writes. “A piece is largely missing from the public discourse about climate change: namely an affirmation of our moral responsibilities in the world that the scientists describe. No amount of factual information will tell us what we ought to do. For that, we need moral convictions.”

In Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, Moore and co-editor Michael Nelson assemble 80 of the world’s leading visionaries, leaders and writers to create a compelling call to action. The goal of the anthology is to confront the challenges of climate change based on moral and ethical grounds. It is a chorus featuring the sterling voices of the Dalai Lama, Barack Obama, Desmond Tutu, John Paul II, Barbara Kingsolver, Paul Hawken, Thich Naht Hanh, E.O. Wilson, Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Snyder, bell hooks and many others from cultures and countries around the globe.

“Do we have a moral obligation to take action to protect the future of a planet in peril?” the editors asked of their contributors, “and if so, why?”

The answers – inspiring, creative, sobering and grounded in reason – are presented in thematic clusters, including “Yes, for the survival of humankind,” “Yes, to honor our duties of gratitude and reciprocity, “Yes, for the stewardship of God’s creation, “Yes, because justice demands it,” “Yes, because the world is beautiful.”

Moral Ground strives to start the conversation about “who we are when we are at out best, what we must do to be worthy of our gifts” and how we might live on Earth “respectfully, responsibly and joyously.” These are essential questions to ponder here at the most crucial turning point our planet has ever faced.

Road Trip: The Olympic Peninsula

My first 2010 trip away from the Salish Sea occured in May when I caught the Keystone Ferry for Port Townsend and spent a solo week in Olympic National Park, hiking, paddling and observing the emerging lushness of spring. My first destination was Lake Ozette in the far northwestern corner of the state. I posted up at a nearly-empty campground on the northshore, dropped my sea kayak on to the lake and paddled a couple of hours south to a remote backcountry campsite at Erickson’s Bay. I was lucky to have decent, stable weather, no wind and Ozette — the third largest lake in the state — all to myself. Trails from the bay, as well as from the northshore campground, wind 3 miles through coastal forests, prairies and the remains of homesteads to the wild Pacific coast, where one can explore tidepools, view sea stacks, observe seabirds and seals and search for migrating grey whales and the famous Wedding Rocks pictographs.

At Ozette, with long agenda-less days stretching out before me, I started reading Tim McNulty’s wonderful book, Olympic National Park: A Natural History, recently updated and reissued by University of Washington Press. Tim’s amiable guide helped me to know the stories behind the nature I was so enjoying, like what the flourescent blobs in the tidepool were, or how sea anenomes and starfish interact, or where the whales were coming from and where they were going. I greatly appreciated not only the wealth of authoratative natural history information in the book, but also the friendly tone and poetic descriptions that Tim employs to make the unique “island” ecosystem of the peninsula come to life.

Sitting next to a campfire reading the chapter on the cultural history of the peninsula — and the amazing story of the Ozette Village archaeological discovery and recovery — inspired me to make my next stop at the Makah Museum in Neah Bay to witness the tribal artifacts that were discovered in the 1970s beneath a slumping mudbank facing the ocean.



Having the museum all to myself, I spent several hours marveling over all the different essential items of life that the Makah created from natural materials at hand : waterproof cedar bark hats, mussel-shell harpoon tips, halibut hooks made of bone, fishing nets woven from stinging nettle fibers — all well preserved from being encased in mud for hundreds of years. I was especially taken by the technologies that the Makah developed to stalk, kill and process whales that migrated past their villages every spring — the massive sea-going cedar canoe on display was amazing for its marriage of form and function — and could hardly imagine the fortitude and skill that was required to hunt these behemoths of the sea. I was also drawn to the displays of masks, rattles and other talismans that the tribe used to interact with the spirit world, especially in the long, wet, dark days of winter when families had retired to their shared cedar longhouses.


Leaving the northwestern corner of the park, I drove south, spent a night at Rialto Beach for more beachcombing, and then traveled on to the Quinault Valley. I was hoping to paddle around this lake too, but had a hard time finding a boat launch, and the afternoon wind was making the lake choppy, so I motored up the dirt road following the North Fork of the Quinault River until it dead-ended at another empty campground and trailhead.


The rainforest is a riot of green growth fed by 10 to 15 feet of rain every year. Within its verdant cathedrals lies a very deep and profound silence. After spending several days in the presence of this silence — interrupted only by the whirrrrr of divebombing hummingbirds, the kaw of ravens and the clacking of river stones being washed down to sea by the milky, glacial-fed river — everything slows down and you have more space to notice and appreciate what’s around you. In an age of information traveling at light-speed and the constant din of digital infotainment, a languid break in the Quinault was just what I needed. At the end of my week, I was very sad to leave this sanctuary, but made a vow to keep in touch with the tempo I had rediscovered there.


May is a superb time of the year to visit the Olympic Peninsula: no mosquitoes, no tourists, endless places to camp, low elevation (and therefore snow-free) trails and the full green goodness of spring. The national park facilities like visitor centers and ranger stations were not yet opened, but I knew what I was doing and so didn’t miss them. It’ll get quite a bit more busy for the summer once school is out, and then slow down again in September as the big leaf and vine maple leaves change colors and fall to carpet the forest floor.

Wandering the Olympic Peninsula * May 2010 from moontroll on Vimeo.

Spring Equinox 2010 : Samish Island to Mt. Baker

Spring Equinox 2010 : From Samish to Baker from moontroll on Vimeo.

Welcome Home : Getting to know your neighbors through natural history

Editor's Note: I wrote this article for the Cascadia Weekly in early August 2009 in part to promote North Cascades Institute's Northwest Naturalists Weekend at the Learning Center on Diablo Lake.

Two weekends ago, I ventured up the Mt. Baker Highway with undefined plans to make my first sojourn of the season in to the high country. It was a spur-of-the-moment adventure and, winding my way eastward and alone, I found myself wishing I had a hiking partner to share the sunny day with – a longing that was soon satisfied when I crossed paths with an old friend at the ranger station in Glacier. Having explored Washington's wilds together for nearly two decades, neither of us were surprised to see the other. He jumped in to my truck and we drove to road's end at Artist's Point, where we struck out towards the fearsome glaciers of Komo Kulshan.



The day was blindingly bright and relentlessly hot. We strode along the trail, across lingering patches of snow and up onto an exposed high ridge that offered the hint of a breeze -- a blessing that kept the bugs at bay. The path wound through fields of lupine and valerian and rock gardens festooned with stonecrop, monkeyflower and heather in full-bloom. Below us yawned barren, boulder-filled valleys only recently released from the great pressures of scouring ice. A ptarmigan rustled in the shade of contorted spruce trees and ravens croaked overhead, swirling and diving against the flawless blue sky. We walked slow, absorbing these varied details and intoning the names of species, landmarks and processes that dovetail to shape this alpine Elysium.



All of this investigating -- our burrowing in to the layers of stories that landscape offers to the curious -- reminded me of how much more rewarding spending time in nature is when one knows a bit about where one is. Accessing this knowledge, and having a few simple tools to learn more along the way – a topo map, compass, wildflower field guide and hand lens – provided my friend and I an intimacy with our surroundings. This intimacy enriched our day by deepening our experience. It allowed us to bear grateful witness to the intertwined narratives of the landscape and, most importantly, provided us countless entry points in to the impersonal drama and beauty of the wild.

Rapport with nature fosters connection, and connection enhances our sense of belonging. This is no small comfort, to feel ensconced on a planet of rock, water and ice hurtling through the dark void of space at 67,000 miles per hour.

I once asked Northwest naturalist Robert Michael Pyle, rambler *par excellence* and award-winning author of Wintergreen, Sky Time in Gray's River and several volumes on butterflies, about the benefits of studying natural history.

"We always care more about our neighbors, and our neighborhood, when we know their names and something about their ways of life," Pyle responded. "This is just good manners for any resident of a particular place."

Knowing that, in our society, many people want to know what they'll "get" before exerting any effort, I asked Pyle what an individual gains from possessing such knowledge.

"A window on the world everywhere," he replied, "for what is local knowledge *here* is always applicable *there*: one sees patterns of relationship and connection, once one is used to looking at the real physical details of any given place. Local natural history provides a lingua franca for feeling at home anywhere. "



Lupine, raven, "glaciated andesitic stratovolcano." It was good to be home.

To Salish Sea or not to Salish Sea

I received this interesting email through a local kayaking listserv and it seemed appropriate for this blog -- maybe next they'll look in to making "Ish River Country" an official designation? Awesome map too -- click on it to get a larger version.

Greetings – You are likely aware that the Washington State Board on Geographic Names and the British Columbia Geographical Names Office received a proposal to adopt the name “Salish Sea” to describe the inland waters adjacent to Washington State and southwest British Columbia. The proposal is to add the name “Salish Sea” as a collective or umbrella-name to encompass Puget Sound, Strait of Georgia, Juan de Fuca Strait (Canada)/Strait of Juan de Fuca (USA), and their connecting channels, straits and passages, rather than remove or replace any existing place names.

These waters form a portion of the international boundary between Canada and the United States, hence federal naming authorities will also deliberate on whether to approve, deny, or defer the decision to adopt the name “Salish Sea” for national and international purposes. To avoid any confusion that would result from overlapping consultation processes, and to reduce the administrative burden on all parties, the four jurisdictions have agreed to share a single questionnaire, and use the British Columbia Geographical Names Office in Victoria as the single distribution and receiving point for all results.

We request your comments to help us gauge public support for the proposal to adopt the name “Salish Sea” and to determine the extent to which the name is already established and used by communities in the region. A map and information about the proposal has been included, to assist you in providing comments. Your reply is requested by July 31, 2009. Between August and late autumn, each Board and naming authority will meet and review the responses received from you or the group you represent. Any resulting decisions to adopt, deny or defer approval of the name “Salish Sea” will be based on conformance with established geographical naming principles, including comments received through this consultation process.

I've been using the term Salish Sea for a long time and find it to be a combination of usefulness and poetry. Send your comments to Meredith.Westington@noaa.gov by July 28th!

Jim Lynch's "Border Songs"

Tides vs. Borders
Jim Lynch’s novels explore back corners of Washington State

by Christian Martin

Jim Lynch hit on something sweet and surprising with his 2005 debut novel The Highest Tide. Readers fell in love with it in a big way, first here in the Pacific Northwest, then across the country and eventually around the world. Awarded the Pacific Northwest Booksellers', translated in to eight different languages in 20 different countries and adapted for the stage in a successful run at Seattle's Book-It theater, The Highest Tide proved to be quirky and smart. Lynch's prose is rich with natural detail that brings the ecology of southern Puget Sound to vivid, squirming life and his plot peopled with believable characters and interactions.

Not since David Guterson and the Snow Falling on Cedars phenomenon have Pacific Northwest readers' hopes been so high for a local author's sophomore follow-up. With the release of *Border Songs*, Lynch's literary strategy seems to be based on the mantra, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." His new novel is built on the familiar foundation of his first, employing a very similar storyline, pace, tone and intention.

In The Highest Tide, the protagonist Miles O’Malley is a shy, sensitive 13-year old boy, a good-natured innocent that doesn't fit in with others around him but finds solace (and highly unusual discoveries) in wild places.

In Border Songs, the protagonist Brandon is a shy, sensitive 23-year old young man, a good-natured innocent that doesn’t fit in with others around him but finds solace (and highly unusual discoveries) in wild places.

Differences exist, to be sure: Miles has a unique bond with the sea life found on the beaches of his home near Olympia; Brandon finds connection with the bird life in his home in northern Whatcom County. Much of Miles’ introspective withdrawal comes from escaping his parent’s bitter marriage, while Brandon’s awkwardness arises from a condition that resembles Asperger Syndrome. Miles becomes a sensation in the media and with a religious cult; Brandon becomes an unlikely hero for the Border Patrol.

There are many pleasures to be had in reading Border Songs, and I expect that our corner of the country will be especially receptive owing to the novel's aforementioned setting. The story takes place on and around the US-Canadian border, and pivotal scenes take place in the unlikely settings of Blaine, Ferndale, White Rock and Semiahmoo. The story examines the overlapping tropes of homeland security, marijuana smuggling, terrorism and political posturing, surveying these contemporary border issues through the eyes of a wide cast of eccentric characters. From dope growers to federal officers, illegal immigrants to dairy farmers, truck drivers to casino boosters, these pages are full of true-to-life northern Whatcomites living along the 49th parallel.

Many of the local details are spot-on too -- the character of the Nooksack River, the smell of manure on the wind, the high demand for BC bud, even the seasonal bird life -- all demonstrating Lynch’s affinity for northwestern Washington State. The sense of place that the author creates is only possible through humility, a slowed-down attentiveness and sensitivity to nature.

Is the new novel too much like the earlier one, too predictable, to be enjoyable? Or did The Highest Tide hit upon such a winning formula with enough rich possibility that it begs to be explored in shifting scenarios? Readers will decide for themselves.

All in all, Lynch has delivered the finest literary treatment of our region since Annie Dillard's The Living. But whereas The Living is often seen as stern, morbid and uncompromising, Border Songs is whimsical, sensitive and full of heart.

The jester is loose...

Tom Robbins in Bellingham * May 5, 2009 from moontroll on Vimeo.

Tom Robbins Incognito

I've done gone and uploaded the debut issue of my new magazine "moontrolling" to MagCloud. It features a story I wrote some time ago called "Tom Robbins Incognito: Tracking the Pacific Northwest's Elusive Literary Outlaw," a topic that I think will hold special interest for all Ish River denizens & admirers. Visit MagCloud to purchase a copy today -- they'll print one out for you and send it in the mail, just like a regular 'ole fancy-pants magazine!

The Phone Call

With most of the thrill from the other night’s search worn off, I’m back at home relaxing on a Sunday morning with my second or third cup of coffee. Listening to the syncopated patter of rain on the roof, I’m nearly hypnotized, until the ringing phone breaks the spell.

“Christian? This is your long-lost childhood friend!”

I don’t immediately respond.

“You remember, back from the pineapple plantation up in Nova Scotia!”

“Uh, yeah, who is this?” I sense a trickster.

“Hey, this is Tom Robbins. I’m calling you from Denver. My wife slipped your number into my briefcase and I found it this morning. I just read your letter, and think I can find some time to do something with you next week.”

I jerk out of my drowsy state and begin taking notes immediately. This telephonic surprise awakens me more than all the caffeine in the world ever could.

The author has little time, perhaps little patience, for long-distance small talk. We immediately get down to the logistics of fitting an interview into his busy book tour schedule, and end up agreeing that within the week I’ll fax some questions to his home in La Conner. “That way I’ll have some time to ponder my answers,” he says. The mind of Tom Robbins pondering my questions? Sounds great to me. He rattles off the seven digits of his fax number.

“So,” I say, writing them down carefully, “this is the direct link to Tom Robbins, huh?”

“Yeah, well, the direct link to me, as well as to Villa de Jungle Girl. It’s also the link to Jiffy Squid. And to the House of Thrills. Sometimes it gets confusing with so many faxes coming in for us all.”

“Hmm. So you’re all at this same number?”

“Yep. You know the nice thing about being schizophrenic? You’re never alone.”

Time Flows By...

Bellingham Ski Tour

Skiing the Lettered Streets * Bellingham 12/21/08 from moontroll on Vimeo.

FLYAWAY

(Winter in town)
October 13, 1976

(1)
Before the bar closes
I stumble up the hill alone.
The whole town is asleep.

Geese crying in the night sky
wake me out of my drunkenness
into the ancient pathway
given to us
before we had minds.

I am the brother of geese
On my bare arms
long ago
there were feathers.

(2)
Fly at night,
dark sky under your wings.
Sing with your brothers
and
fear no hunter.

Let me hear
over the sea of feathers
that song
carried on in the night,

wave after wave
rising out of the silence, going on--

same song
same silence
as I rise into the sky,
this white feather glowing in my mouth.

-- Robert Sund, La Conner