Equinox

Salmon, Bear Creek, Redmond, Washington

Carnation, Washington
September 2011

September in the Snoqualmie Valley and all is stasis: the woods dry, the rivers low, mountains empty of snow. The word “fall” connotes decline; a lowering of pitch, an involuntary descent. The fecund whirlwind of summer over, nature holds its collective breath while waiting for winter. Nothing happens, so we think. Against the foothills behind Remlinger Farm in Carnation, the alder trunks wear sweaters of emerald green moss. The woods quiet, birdsong near absent. In this forest of western cedar and Douglas fir, Pacific tree frogs quack at odd intervals, as if they too, are left hanging in the equipoise between seasons.
Creek side on a Saturday morning, eleven of us, all women, follow the fat impressions left by possum hands. Coyote and bobcat footprints litter the stony wet ground, leaving stories for us to decipher. The prior night while we were gathered around various campfires at our annual Washington Outdoor Women’s weekend, this was their watering hole, their bar where they jostled for position, the prey waiting for predators to leave before taking their spot. The prints overlap, leaving a hieroglyphic timetable: who came when, and from where? Further down the logging trail, we find sign of elk, a yearling on the move, its thick-hooved impression larger than a mule deer but smaller than a cow or bull elk. Nearby, the very human-like left hind track of a black bear, walking—just last night? —while we slept. Perhaps he smelled our campfires through the woods. If we try to decipher the story of bear and elk, they have come from the Tolt River at different times, heading at cross purposes: one to fatten before hibernation, one for winter pastures of tall grass outside North Bend. As we stand on the banks of the Tolt among the black cottonwood saplings, the breeze smells of the leaves’ sweet oils, reminiscent of baby powder.

Fish leave no tracks, but they, too, are on the move. Coho embroil the waters in the fish hatchery in Gold Bar, waylaid on their upstream push. Their fins cleave the air in sharp lines, like miniature eleven pound sharks circling. Fins slice the air at panicked intervals, the frenzy of fish smelling their birthplace in Wallace Creek and eager to push upstream, their journey as mythic as any Odysseus took. No one told them what Emerson said, that “travel is a fool’s paradise.” Entrapped by hatchery devices, they will be emptied of sperm and eggs, sacrificed after having swum hundreds of miles through the Straits of Juan de Fuca from the Pacific.  In the Sammamish, the Snoqualmie, and the Tolt, fish push north and east, pulsing up the broad rivers, branching off into coldwater tributaries overhung with willow and thick with Indian Plum. Sockeye and Chinook swim through creeks and past backyards, motor home parks, and upscale houses, their migration opposite what is happening above them as birds push south and west.

In suburban Redmond: disturbed by a rhythmic insistent sound, I open the front door. In the sky is an elongated V, actually a W, of geese headed south, the long line wavering and changing, seeming to stretch for half a mile. Their overlapping honks are grace notes falling on a day of worldly concerns. Fruit falls from the backyard apple tree, bouncing off the roof at midnight like prehistoric hail. The apples are bass notes, startling us from dreams of winter. Several weeks ago the migration of Swainsons Thrushes occurred. Thousands of them passed over Puget Sound over our heads at night, for several weeks. At my cabin in the Cascades, I stepped outside during the 9:30 to 10:00 pm observation period wondering if I might hear any “contact” calls. Songbirds migrate at night to avoid hawks and other predators. To stay in touch they make “thrip” calls to say: I’m over here, where are you?” their simple notes lining the dark canyons of the sky, bouncing off the rooftops.

Snakes slither out each dawn to sit in the weakening sun, slinking back into dens at night, until one morning they will give in to torpor and hit the snooze button on their internal alarm. In daylight eagles begin their muscled flight across the border into British Columbia for the mother lode of salmon runs. The ospreys have fled for Central America: no more suspended black and white forms hovering in the wind as we drive across the Lake Washington floating bridge. Above us each morning the stars will turn alongside the sun in the light sky and for those who notice on their commutes into Seattle, a hawk will settle onto a light pole and begin shredding a small bird.

Back in Carnation we pour plaster into the bear and elk and bobcat impressions left behind, hoping to study but also preserve—what? What is it we are trying to relearn as it hardens into a reverse palimpsest of the creature that made it? The knowledge of our ancient selves, the selves who used to live in open spaces? We are here to sharpen our fishing, kayaking, navigating skills, our survival skills, native food gathering skills, and our hunting skills, but elementally we are here to remember when we used to know the woods, foothills, and mountains as intimately as our own bodies, as our source of life. As E.O. Wilson wrote: “Humanity did not descend as angelic beings into this world. Nor are we aliens who colonized earth. We evolved here, one among many species, across millions of years, and exist as one organic miracle linked to others. The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness was our cradle and nursery, our school, and remains our one and only home.” If we are lucky, the plaster casts will remind us that despite our modern ways—our electronic devices, an industrial food system, our climate controlled boxes we call home—we belong here and nowhere else, and our very lives, indeed our future, depends on it.

Cows

Dolly the Cow

Cows

I came home one day and the cows were gone—their russet bodies and white heads no longer dotting the field like chess pieces. Their owner, Tractor Bob, had been threatening to sell them for months. I had come to depend on them, their abundant irregularities, their intractable legs and square heads. Each darklit morning en route to work, I drove down the blue shadowed foothill, passing Bob’s tiny trailer. After my drive home from Seattle every day, when I dropped down into the river valley, I felt the day’s irregularities solidify into something dependable, faultless. The cows were a part of that.

Every afternoon, Bob, who was old and deaf, drove his decrepit truck along the road, trailing hay. His herd calved early that winter. His fences barely kept the cattle in, and often at night, coming around a corner, one of the bulls stood in the middle of the road, stoic, still chewing on the day’s memory. Now, only one cow remained.

Studies of cows reveal they have remarkable cognitive and emotional abilities; they form small social groups within a herd, and can hold grudges against other cows for years. They can suffer anxiety, fear, and worry about the future. Bob knew none of this, I’d bet; but he knew how to raise the best cattle in the valley.

The day after he sold the herd, Bob died. I had only known him for several months. His mind by then resembled an old typewriter with keys missing, but he knew my car, and always waved. His passing affected me in strange ways; my patience for change had been squandered by a cross-country move, a divorce, a new job. I held onto the temperate constants in my life: the tall western cedars, cottonwoods lined with eagle’s nests, a barred owl calling up the dawn, the Pinteresque tableau of morning cows. The Sunday I drove to his memorial service at the senior center, it began to hail, the kind of hail that drove decades of past grievances down your collar. My neighbors were there: the shepherdess who worked for the FAA, the social worker, the retired landscape painter. We swapped pleasantries over Styrofoam-cupped coffee. I learned that the remaining cow was there because she had refused to get on the truck to be sold.

The sun came out when I left, and driving up to my place, I paused and looked at his land, the place he refused to leave to go to the hospital. His ancient green and blue John Deere sat parked where his trailer had been, the grill covered with a small bouquet of flowers, his black rubber boots posed in front. The sun lit up the grass, the stagnant brook, the copse out of which the ravens flew. Several large brown vultures worried something near the ditch. Bob’s wild-haired caretaker Alison, said I could walk out and have a look. There, in four parts, lay the flayed white sections of a calf: a flank with a curvilinear piece of spine, a hoof, a scapula, a front leg. Alison joined me, and we slowly walked over to where Dolly, the remaining cow stood. She squatted down in front of Dolly, who was chewing grass and eyeing us with a weary stare, her full udder dangling between her legs. “That’s why she wouldn’t get on the truck,” Alison said. “I remember that calf, I had to help it up the bank sometimes.”  We walked back to the road, Alison’s two brown horses trailing me. Back east, in my old life, death felt hostile. But here, close up, I felt its integrity. Fingering the dead calf’s jawbone in my hand, we climbed back through the fence.

–(Notes from: In the Valley of the Moon, A Year of Sundays in the Snoqualmie Valley)

Of Memory and Mozambique

Blending In

I spent eight days in Africa this past November. Just reading “Africa” conjures the quintessential (and clichéd) images of loden elephants, restive lions and muscled zebras, bushveld and scrub.  Or war and poverty, disease, and children dying of dehydration. Clichés persist because they often hold a slice of truth. Mozambique, which runs along eastern Africa and whose monsoon rains come from the Indian Ocean, encompasses all of the above, having suffered a vicious civil war that ended a mere sixteen years ago. My assumptions about Mozambique were colored by my reading, my western white-girl do-gooder assumptions, and all those Wild Kingdom episodes I watched as a girl. With a compromised infrastructure, and reminders of the war all around (walls strafed with AK47 ammo), Mozambique also harbors the jewel of Africa, Gorongosa Park, once called the place where Noah left his ark. Ravaged during the hand-to-hand combat and air strikes that occurred there, the park has rebounded since the peace accord was signed.  Blood and bones replaced by flourishing herds of antelope grazing against a backdrop of  mahogany, rain, and lime-colored fever trees; riverbanks striped with Nile crocodiles; giant nocturnal Cape porcupines wandering on the dusk-lit roads. At Chitengo Safari Camp where we stayed, warthogs and baboons criss-crossed the grounds at leisure, within the safety of the lion fence and a country now at peace.

Traveling is like the oft-told story of the four blind men feeling an elephant: the man feeling the leg has a different idea of “elephant” than the man touching the elephant’s trunk. While traveling with my former teacher, war correspondent and novelist Bob Shacochis,  I was taking copious notes, and reading Bill Finnegan’s excellent A Complicated War about the gruesome conflict that Mozambique endured from the 1970’s until 1994.  Shacochis was interviewing former soldiers and poachers and diplomats and dignitaries for a planned museum and interpretive center at the park; hearing his anecdotes over dinner and vodka gave me chills.

 In the park itself, with the wide bowl of the sky above us, the floodplain opened up, the edges of the horizon blending with a hazy sky. I expected to see my first elephant easily. Elephants don’t just blend in, they almost vaporize with the slanting afternoon sunlight, their gray bulk melting with the blues and greens of the palm forest. Our guide Simba, with one hand on the wheel, pointed in vain as I stared at clumps of elephantine vegetation. The acacias, the slanting sun, the bluish gray palm forest dissolved together. We didn’t have the ability to hear their low rumbles, and their footfalls were surprisingly silent, due to a padding of fatty tissue. It was easier to smell them, a musky urine scent that blew hard on the wind. Then suddenly their forms appeared and multiplied in the forest around us, surrounding our vehicle with their gentle movements. 

It was easy to fall under their spell as they foraged. Until one charged us. Baby at her side, ears spread wide, trunk raised, she wanted us to know who ruled the bushveld, and that she sure as hell remembered the slaughter and poaching of her brothers and fathers, brought to her by the same diesel engine our vehicle used. It was a mock charge intended to scare us away, and she stopped short, the elephant grass brushing her shoulders as she stood there, swaying.  

Mozambique is the proverbial elephant, formed of contradictions, full of beauty and terror. And beginning, slowly, to lose its memory of the long war.

–Chitengo Safari Camp, Gorongosa National Park, November, 2009

The Good Medicine of Horses

Krissy, aka Cut Crystal

I spent my first summer here learning to read horses. Pressing my heels into the flanks of a white Arab named Krissy paralleled what I needed to grasp in my life. How much pressure to apply, when to demand and when to let up. How to get her to drop her head into the right position so I could ease up on the reins. Learning to recognize the moment at which to do that felt impossible: the spot seemed to move all the time. Learn this one thing, my teacher said. It will make everything else easier. 

Krissy, aka Cut Crystal, belonged to Sharon, my unofficial riding coach. Sharon became much more than that; our friendship distilled from the hardship and longing which followed my simultaneous cross country move and divorce. And Cut Crystal became much more than that, too. Her huge white form, muscled, mysterious, drew me into a different world. Her keen sense of touch made me feel the inadequacy of my human abilities. Her sense of spatial discrimination was better than mine, and she made me feel awkward, lumbering, next to her graceful limbs and arched neck. I became painfully aware of my failings: she’d plod around the arena until I matched her own subtleties in the way I articulated my leg pressure or held her reins. She taught me to be in synch with her animal spirit. Last month her vet, reluctant for her to endure another wet winter of standing on hocks lame with age, recommended that Cut Crystal be put down. She was 26, and I hadn’t ridden her in over a year. After work I drove through the Snoqualmie Valley farmlands to visit her.

As Sharon and I walked Krissy from pasture to barn, the horse’s left rear hock made a cracking sound with every footfall.  She didn’t mind. Blissed out on dosages of the anti inflammatories that might ruin her organs should she not be scheduled to be put to death the following day, she plodded along much the same way she did when I rode her, except now this was as fast as she could go. In rhythm with her steps, her white mane tossed back and forth, revealing a glossy sheen from a gel called Cowboy Magic. Horses learn you through scent, holding their nostrils towards your face and blowing out in great chuffs of air. I had missed Cut Crystal’s amiable horse-stink: a blend of rancid sweat, horsehair, and sweet hay-breath.

            I stayed in her stall as dusk descended over the valley. Krissy had been good medicine to a lot of people: foster kids up the road, a neighbor girl, me during my first exhilarating yet distraught year here. Of my torn up life, Krissy cared naught, but she had let me cry on her neck, lowering her head and nuzzling my breath.

That last night she nudged my hands with her mouth. She wanted more of the carrots I had brought her, and the scent remained on my palms. She shied her head when I tried to hug her goodbye, so I ran my hands down the curves of each haunch, making sure I touched all of her ripe body. As if her shape could remain in my memory, as if that shape could recreate the salve her living had been. Sharon watched us through the bars of her stall, blinking away tears. Already standing in the future, I remembered Krissy even as I stood next to the heat of her, her terrifying bulk, her quizzical eyes, the leaf-sized ears that swiveled towards strange sounds and things I could not possibly hear or understand. The following morning she would join forty-five million years of ancestors, going all the way back to the mesohippus: a striped horse- like beast. I imagined her cavorting with all of them on some primordial green grassland. As I pushed her stall door shut and stood looking at her through the bars, I whispered my last words to her, my gift for her next life: Run like the wind, Krissy.

Last Night at the Hatchery

Last Night at the Hatchery

 Evening at the hatchery, Gold Bar, Washington. Mountains in sharp relief, the folds of their ridges turning purple in the dusk. In dim light our eyes shift towards the blue end of the spectrum, making red appear blue, making colors disappear. The Purkinje effect: discovered in 1819 by Czech anatomist Jan Purkyne, who noticed during his walking meditations at dawn that the red flowers he walked past appeared blue. He determined the eye had two systems; one adapted to bright intensity, and one useful in dimmer intensity. He discovered, in effect, why we become colorblind in moonlight.

 

At the hatchery, only a thousand feet below the mountains, a school of steelhead turn in slow circles in the creek, the water’s dark surface a skin their fins cut through like soft knives. They live in the dusk, underwater, all their lives. Part of the summer run of steelhead, now that the long summer nights come to a close, the fish are aware—of what? What compulsive joy  propels them to leap in what look like giddy circles, over and over? An apparent ancient compulsion: round and round they go, leap after leap. They wait for the gates to open, for freedom, for their release, not knowing they are half empty already, of sperm, of eggs. Fed by fish food and ancient desire, they want to go.

 The Purkinje shift, or dark adaptation. Soon I will drive to work in the dark, and come home in the dark. The Pacific Northwest winter is long. I can feel myself preparing to live in the dark shadows and moonlight, preparing my own dark adaptation. The bags of pellets for my stove stacked twelve-deep in the shed, towels stuffed under the doors of the pumphouse to keep it from freezing. Come winter, I can stand among my trees in the moonlight, color drained from the landscape, and marvel that unlike fish, we can navigate both worlds: the light, and the dark. And, like them, feel an ancient compulsion that propels us, leaping, even though we are half empty.