Road Trip to Yellowstone & the Grand Tetons

Around the summer solstice in June 2010, Hekter McElliott, Orbit and myself met up in Wyoming for a 10-day tour of Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons and Jackson Hole.

Hek and I had lived in the area before and done much exploring together, so we used this time to revisit many of our favorite places like Huckleberry Hotsprings, Leigh Lake, the Gros Ventres and the brewpub. We also discovered new amazing places like Druid Peak in the Lamar Valley, a great nap spot on Yellowstone Lake and the new and powerful visitor's center on the recently restored Rockefeller property near Phelps Lake.

Anyways, here's some of what we saw and experienced...

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.

OlyPenn Road Trip

A trip around the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State in early spring. Destinations include Ozette Lake, Rialto Beach and the Quinault Rainforest.

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.

Welcome Home : Getting to know your neighbors through natural history

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.

Spring Equinox 2010 : Samish Island to Mt. Baker

I bought a Flip MinoHD video camera in mid-March and was looking for a way to play around with it, see what it could do, so I decided to document "a day in my life." On the vernal equinox, I woke up on Samish Island in lower Skagit county and proceeded to wind my way up back roads to Mt. Baker Ski Area. The video depicts the adventures of the day.

A couple of things I learned: it is much harder to deal with "filming" while snowboarding than I expected. I had to limit recording to very easy runs, cat tracks, etc. Also, I learned after reviewing the footage that one needs to keep the Flip as steady and unmoving as possible to get quality footage -- better yet, having it stationary on a tripod delivers the best quality. Finally, the processing and editing of the footage took much, much more time than the actual recording, which makes me want to be sure I really, really want to do a project before I start capturing video.

(Update: I noticed a sound glitch about 2/3 of the way through, after I come off the mountain and start driving away. It's too much trouble/time to go back and fix it so I'm gonna let it ride.)

All in all, lots of fun and a quirky take on a typical weekend day in northwestern Washington.

The soundtrack is provided by the Grateful Dead, Quantic, An-ten-ae and the Cinematic Orchestra.

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.

Tom Robbins live from the Boundary Bay Brewery Beer Garden!

Video & photos by S. Glackman. Editing by me. If you like this, check out my Tom Robbins interview 'zine at http://magcloud.com/browse/Issue/14846 !

Northwest Bookshelf

A survey of recent titles that explore native art and culture, local birds and resident whales, mountaineering and the mycorrhizosphere, and other topics both relevant and esoteric.

Reviews by Christian Martin

In the pages of Douglas H. Chadwick's The Grandest of Lives: Eye to Eye with Whales (Sierra Club Books), the Whitefish, MT-based author of *True Grizz* turns his attention to the coast and delivers an insightful and impassioned exploration of humpback, northern bottlenose, orca, minke and blue whales. A mixture of natural history, personal travels and the latest scientific information, Chadwick writes clearly and convincingly, his enthusiasm for cetaceans keeping the narrative aloft. Journeying through the Puget Sound, the author describes an afternoon spent with orcas as providing "…a few hours that raise enough questions to last months or years, partial glimpses of a thousand possibilities, notes penciled on to data sheets, and, almost always, a glimmer of magic in between the lines."

Natural history comes alive in Birdsongs of the Pacific Northwest (The Mountaineers Books), which combines field guide information with a CD of recorded birdsong. Stephen R. Whitney and Elizabeth Briars Hart created the detailed drawings and assembled the identification data, while Martyn Stewart did the admirable work of producing excellent field recordings of dozens of birds found in the Northwest. Stewart's was daunting task: he collected birdsongs for four years to produce this CD, battling the ambient noise pollution of everyday clatter like leaf blowers and auto traffic, often recording for twelve hours in order to capture a quality 20-second recording. Whereas previous offerings of the sounds of birds found in our area were actually recordings from the eastern United States, Stewart is proud to have recorded Pacific Northwest birds singing in their unique Pacific Northwest dialects.

There is also a wealth of natural history in Jon R. Luoma's The Hidden Forest: The Biography of an Ecosystem (Oregon State University Press). As the title suggests, this is a deep profile of a forest, from the mycorrhizosphere to the crown and all points in between. The place is called the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest – 16,000 acres of old-growth in Central Oregon's Cascade mountains – and serves as a living laboratory from which countless discoveries about the ecology of Pacific Northwest primeval forest have been uncovered. Legendary University of Washington forestry professor Jerry Franklin is the main dramatic character here, and *Audubon* magazine editor Luoma does an excellent job serving as interpreter of science and nature.

Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (Trinity Press) is a volume that likewise seeks to better interpret and understand the landscape, and it revels in the diversity of the lexicon with which Americans have used to describe the physical features of our country. Edited by Oregonians Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, *Homeground* is an unusual reference book that collects and presents distinctively American vocabulary that have grown out of distinctive American land- and water forms. Do you know what a bogmat, desire path, cowbelly or nunatak are? How about a pingo, viewshed, riprap, oxbow lake or hueco? Each term is an indigenous expression for a particular natural feature, and in order to preserve these homegrown linguistics, Lopez and Gwartney assigned 45 different writers from all around the country 20 terms to research and define, resulting in 850 unique definitions. So, the reader gets Robert Michael Pyle on "stream sink," Barbara Kingsolver on "karst," Patiann Rogers on "panhandle," Jon Krakauer on "gendarme," Terry Tempest Williams on "chaco," plus contributions from Gretel Ehrlich, Charles Frazier, Bill McKibben, Linda Hogan, Kim Stafford, Robert Hass and many other gifted wordsmiths. The resulting text is oddly fascinating, hypnotic even, thanks to the wide range of writing styles and voices.

While not the kind of book you'll want to curl up with for a relaxing winter evening of pleasure reading, Haida Gwaii: Human History and the Environment from the Time of the Loon to the Time of the Iron People (University of British Columbia Press/University of Washington Press) does seem to me to be an indispensable book for those interested in the lifeways and culture of local native peoples. Reading the book itself is dense and humorless – I much prefer scientific writing that is "literary" while remaining factual – but regardless of the monotone prose, there is a wealth of new information in these pages of the old ways of the civilization in what are now called the Queen Charlotte Islands: the evolution of black bear, three-spined stickleback, caribou, cedar and ferns in relationship to Haida Gwaii people, ice age impacts and a trove of traditional stories, like young boys turning in to ducks, Foam Woman creating floods and the arrangement of all beings by Raven. "Science is coming of age," writes Haida elder Guujaaq in the Foreword," and while there is a convergence and a reconciliation of science with our histories, scientists may have to take our word on certain facts."

Oregon State University also published a book that illuminates the dimmer corners of ancient Pacific Northwest History, and Katherine Barber's Death of Cellilo Falls (UW Press) is a fine biography of the Dalles area of the Columbia River, a place that attracted indigenous people for 11,000 years. At the height of the Cellilo era, over 10,000 Indians gathered there for the spring and fall salmon runs, arriving from all corners of the Northwest to fish, harvest, socialize and trade. Pipestone, buffalo meat and horses arrived from the east, blankets and beads from the north, obsidian and slaves from the south and wappato from the west – and everybody left with tons of salmon jerky. Barber's book travels from these times of plenty through to the building of the Dalles dam and the irreplaceable loss of this hub of native Northwest civilization.

But far the most intriguing way to absorb local native history would be Gerta Moray's Uncommon Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (UBC Press/UW Press), a coffee table-sized book that leavens academic essays with archival photographs, sketch book drawings and watercolors, maps and dozens of color plates – a kaleidoscope of artistic outpourings from Emily Carr, one of the premier painters of the west coast of North America. Moray's scholarship explores the interactions between early British Columbian settlers and the First Nation people of the Vancouver Island region, and finds in Carr's life and work a complex attempt at interracial contact that was respectful, sensitive and gifted, though still obviously colored. Her paintings of longhouses, totem poles, village scenes, portraits and environment tell their own fascinating stories about coastal native life, and Moray helps by teasing out the cultural and imperial history embedded in Carr's expressive art.

On the topic of intercultural interactions, the photographs of Edward Curtis are artistic artifacts that are routinely praised and criticized. His vast thirty-year documentation of Native Americans, in distinctive and somber sepia tones, contains both accuracies and exaggerations, and his critics charge that his work was culturally exploitative. But the editors of The Many Faces of Edward Sherriff Curtis: Portraits and Stories from Native North America (Gilcrease Museum/UW Press) believe the "richness and texture as well as its beauty and its flaws" of his record outweigh the controversies, and they put forth 80 of his finest portraits to prove their point. One truth becomes the obvious: the dignity, hope and deep emotional affect emanating from the faces of these original people are moving beyond words and across time.

Combining many of the topics that arise in the previous titles – native traditions, natural history, art criticism, interracial encounters – Aldona Jonaitis's Art of the Northwest Coast (Douglas & McIntyre/UW Press) serves as a highly accessible survey of the big picture of indigenous art of Cascadia, a panoramic view that stands on the shoulders of pioneering scholars Bill Holm, Robin Wright and Steve Brown. Jonaitis attempts to answer the question of how "so much art, so finely made, developed here, in this strop of land from Puget Sound to Yakutat in Alaska," and she does so with an engaging storyteller's voice and a sumptuous wealth of illustrations of everything from a wooden shaman's rattle to red cedar bark hats and baskets to argillite pipes to a gallery of supernatural masks.

Offering one more perspective on Northwest native art, Raven Traveling (Douglas & McIntyre/UW Press) hones in on the art of Haida Gwaii, including over 100 vivid photographs of masks, sculpture, screens, paintings, jewelry and an array of useful everyday tools. Produced to coincide with the 75-year anniversary of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Raven Traveling" exhibition, these pages are laden with poems and myths, prayers and interviews, all of which help to create a living portrait of a living culture that has survived for untold centuries.

Galen Rowell was an archetypal American adventure photographer, the kind of artist who traveled to remote spots, scaled sheer mountain walls and plunged down raging rivers in order to capture the high energy and excitement of mountaineering and other backcountry pursuits. Though he died in a plane wreck in 2002, his legacy has been preserved in Galen Rowell: A Retrospective (Sierra Club Books), which showcases 175 of his iconic images from California's Sierra Nevadas, Tibet's Himalayas, Chile's Patagonia and beyond. Unlike much of the mountaineering culture, Rowell's output was never the typical adrenaline-fueled fare of "extreme sports." Intimacy and reverence animate his photographs, and he frequently turned his lens to wildlife, foreign culture and the textured details of the planet's landscapes. This book is an awe-inspiring celebration of the diversity of life and land on earth, created by a man who went the extra distance to pursue his passions.

Passion for the wild likewise guided the life and work of Edward Abbey, the legendary author who is routinely marginalized as a "nature writer." In reality, Abbey was novelist, philosophizer, polemicist, essayist, poet, part-time misanthrope and world-class crank. What unites his diverse bibliography is an unceasing and vehement concern for America's wilderness and the values that wild places bestow upon our fledgling culture, as well as a love of argument and debate, a gift for clever usage of the English language, a politically-incorrect sense of humor and a heartfelt dedication to the deserts of the Southwest. All of these qualities can be found in raging abundance in Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast (Milkweed Editions), a collection of his correspondences to Annie Dillard, Jim Harrison, Barry Lopez, Cormac McCarthy and a wide range of periodicals, government agencies and book publishers. At turns wrathful, sarcastic, generous, hilarious, moving and angry, the sheer brilliance and entertainment to be found in Abbey's prodigious output of letters makes me rue the loss of handwritten letters and postcards in our digital age.

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...