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

Darius Kinsey, Photographer

Ansel Adams of the Pacific Northwest

You have to wonder what drove Darius Kinsey to sojourn away from the comforts of his stately 12-room Seattle home to enter the dripping, dark primeval forests of the Pacific Northwest so incessantly. Over the course of two decades, he was frequently finding excuses to jump a train or motor coach north out of the city to return to the logging camps, shantytowns, deep groves and snowy summits of the Cascadian back-of-beyond. Of course, he always packed along his large-format camera and crates of negatives with him. The tools of his art lent purpose to his wanderings.

Traveling through the untamed Northwest undergrowth, with its thickets of devil's club, vine maples and salal and ankle-twisting maze of downed and decomposing old-growth trees, was seldom an easy affair, and Kinsey didn't travel light. His 11x14 Eastman View camera weighed around 15 pounds and the large 20x24 inch glass negative plates were both fragile and unwieldy. The Skagit Courier reports in 1902 that Kinsey traveled with over 250 pounds of photographic gear to shoot one remarkable Doug Fir.

Even though his Eastman View was advertised as "an excellent camera of strong and substantial construction," it is doubtful that many Kodak customers pushed their equipment to the extremes that Kinsey did: shooting in all vagrancies of weather, crawling up and down fern-choked gorges, teetering across the goat trails of hard rock miners.

"For Kinsey," explains the Whatcom Museum of History and Art website, "finding the perfect shot sometimes meant dodging avalanches, crossing crevasses and jumping over rattlesnakes."

If he wasn't lugging around his camera, which occasionally was an even-heavier 20x24 model, he could be found next to waterfalls or a cedar shake cabin experimenting in the improvised arts of taking stereo-camera shots, making glass lantern slide images and capturing panoramic perspectives with his "Cirkut" camera, a self-revolving 50-pound behemoth that spooled out negatives 10 inches wide and 20 feet long.

The breadth of Kinsey's work gives off a sense of restlessness matched by an insatiable curiosity. I imagine a man who, so in awe of the raw landscape around him, couldn't sit still. The Whatcom Museum notes that even on family trips to the wood, Kinsey "was known to jump out of the car on a moment’s notice, set up his equipment on the shoulder of the road or disappear up a trail."



Kinsey is most well known for the record he created of the Pacific Northwest logging culture. His photos immortalize tableaus of mustachioed men in tin pants and suspenders, buckers crosscutting fallen cedars, horses slipping down skid roads, shake-splitters retiring to their smoldering stump huts and steam engines traversing massive trestles.

"Through a fifty-year career in photography," museum archivist Jeff Jewell recently explained to me, "Kinsey captured the monumental interaction between men, machinery and mammoth trees that defined early logging in northwest Washington."

Though he created a visual history of our corner of the continent majestic in scope, Kinsey's work isn’t simply about quantity or the dry assemblage of a historical record. There is a majestic, bold and original artistic quality to the prints he produced that calls to mind the similarly stunning work of Ansel Adams. Both share the same palette of rich inky blackness and the thousand subtle shades of grey, the shockingly sharp detail and eye for dramatic composition. Much like Adams and his beloved Yosemite Valley, Kinsey’s work presents the Northwest woods as a cathedral. There is a sense of architecture, space and depth, and a somber, serious light in many of his prints of the forest.

The Whatcom Museum, which holds and tends the world's largest Kinsey archive, has recently put on display 38 Kinsey prints, 21 of which have never been displayed in public before. Many of the “new” images are donations from locals who have found Kinsey pieces among their family possessions – large format negatives, photographs and an extremely rare custom album of 11x14 original prints.

“The real star of the exhibit is a four piece panoramic of a lumber mill with workers and their families, circa 1910,” says Jewell. “It's from four original photographs that revealed how Kinsey shot a series of 11" x 14" negatives that, once printed, (his wife) Tabitha could match and glue together as a panoramic image. It was an aspect of the Kinseys' work that was unknown until the donation of these photographs to the Whatcom Museum in 2003.”



“Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit,” Adams once remarked. “Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.” Kinsey, as revealed in his sensitive body of work, falls in the later camp. Those of us fascinated by the history of the Pacific Northwest – and in love with the forest -- are all the more fortunate for it.

photos copyright Whatcom Museum of History and Art.

"And it still surprises me the number of longtime Northwesterners who have never heard of this plant."

Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory
By Laurie Ricou
Reviewed by Christian Martin


Human beings have evolved in concert with the natural world for tens of thousands of years. Our complex relationships with the plant world have been particularly crucial in the development of our cultures. These interconnections between people and the varied green world are rich places for examination and mediation; one can learn more about ourselves by studying the plant life that surrounds us. Gary Paul Nabhan comes to mind as a leading thinker in these thickets, and Michael Pollan was fruitful in this realm of exploration with his best-selling book The Botany of Desire.

Laurie Ricou, a literature professor at the University of British Columbia, is the latest writer to look at the human-plant alliance, and his exploration is especially rewarding for local readers because he has chosen to take a deep, long look at salal and the corresponding cultures, both indigenous and modern, of the Pacific Northwest.

His new book Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory is a sustained cogitation on this one common native species. It brings together a wide variety of disciplines including natural history, sociology, global economics, poetry, botany, biogeography and forest ecology. The multi-layered prose features a rich panoply of voices that Ricou gathers together from field interviews, excerpts from other authors and poets, native myths, historical archives and elsewhere, so that Ricou serves as a conductor of voices from across the ages, everybody with their own take on this ubiquitous, glossy-green shrub.

Ricou is a playful writer not afraid to bend the rules of writing, to take risks with language and look for illumination in surprising juxtapositions. He has an exhaustive sense of curiosity as well, and a voluminous familiarity with the literature of our region. All of these gifts were on display in his last book The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest, a thought-provoking survey of Pacific Northwest literature from both sides of the border.

I recently had a chance to converse with Ricou about his interest in all-things-salal and what he learned in the process of writing this book.

Q: Why write a book about salal?

Laurie Ricou: The book began with my asking my literature students to do little projects on the region's flora and fauna. They loved the discoveries they were making. Then, one of my students told me I should really contemplate salal--because it was a gorgeous plant, with an important connection to the female economy--women could make a modest independent living harvesting it.

Q: How is your book different from a botanic field guide?

LR: Well, it is maybe a very ample field guide, but to just one species, and the "fields" are much wider, more varied, than in the usual guide--extending from gardens and nurseries to painting and poetry and symphonic music.

Q: What surprised you in your salal research?

LR: The most surprising thing is the sheer volume and dollar value of salal that is "harvested" entirely in the wild and shipped around the world (for use in floral displays). And it still surprises me the number of longtime Northwesterners who have never heard of this plant.

Q: What can one learn about a culture by studying a plant?

LR: That it is continually growing and endlessly interconnecting.

Q: You write, "What if I tried to listen to 'the animate earth'? To the ways in which salal speaks? What would I hear?" Well, what did you hear?

LR: I held my breath and heard small creatures rustle under the salal. I think it speaks sea rhythms.

Q: What larger truths are possible to discover by focusing in and drilling down on the often-mundane particulars?

LR: I suppose that we need to pay attention to what we don't pay attention to....

Q: Does salal serve as a metaphor for the Pacific Northwest?

LR: By the time you finish my book, you will be tempted to think so.

© 2008 roadside cafe productions