Another Look

"What is a course of history or philosophy or poetry no matter how well selected...compared to the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen," says Thoreau. (Walden p. 105) I tried to exercise some of that discipline this morning. Instead of going Christmas shopping I returned to the raceme of pink-flowered currant that I had looked at earlier in the week, now again illuminated by a horizon-hugging sun.


I noticed that the five petals of each blossom split into two layers, a longer outside one arching back and curling at its edges, and a shorter inside one that remained erect. The splaying outside layers gave the blossom its star shape. The inside layers combined into an open tube surrounding its golden pistil and stamens. I also noticed some changes since the last look:

seven of the blossoms were open instead of four. Five pink closed blossoms cupped a cluster of immature green buds at the raceme's tip. As each blossom opened, it diverged from the central axis on its own outward stretching stem. The higher on the raceme, the more mature the blossom and the the more shrunken and curled the sepal which had enclosed it as a bud.

My revisited raceme seemed to be the oldest one on the shrub, its location best placed to gather the sparse sunlight and attract me with my camera. On other twigs I found younger growing tips. They revealed that flowers and leaves are originally enclosed in a single germinal container springing from the battered remnants of last year's growth.

The subtle fragrance of Ribes sanguineum glutinosum, more leathery than sweet, occasionally wafted past but dissipated before I could satisfy my hungry nostrils. I wanted to be smaller, faster and more sensitive--like the bug that buzzed by me and dove into one of the blossoms. Then I understood that they had evolved to entice it into spreading their red and sticky seed.

I've often discussed with students the lines of Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned" that inspired Thoreau's preference of Nature over Culture:

Come forth into the light of things
Let Nature be your teacher.
...
Enough of Science and of Art
Close up those barren leaves
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

I'm still trying to figure out how to do that. Returning to the same flower after a few days and noticing some changes, spending enough time to really look at it and allow the bugs to show up, taking as long as I need to find the right words--that's a start.

On the way to the back door to clean the mud off my shoes, I noticed a patch of sunlight on the wall of my excavation.


While digging I find the life of the seasons in the mineral as well as in the vegetable and animal. A few weeks ago, this same ground broke the tip off the steel pickaxe. Now my spade sinks into the damp earth like a scoop into ice cream.

Waves

I read this yesterday in the SLO Tribune

"The ingredients are now in place to produce a huge wave event," said John Lindsey, Diablo Canyon weather forecaster.

...Wednesday's waves are generated by a storm 1,100 miles to the west and will hit the coast more directly.

The first waves are expected to arrive this afternoon and will build rapidly. They will peak Wednesday morning, Lindsey said.

After attending the Christmas pajama parade at Ian's nursery school with Claire this morning, I celebrated the winter solstice by driving to Morro Bay to look at the waves.

During a stop in town I took in a deep breath of sea-smell--much further ashore than usual. Driving down the hill, I saw a crowd of cars at the foot of the Rock. I wondered if people were there for the Salinen Indian Winter Solstice ceremony announced in this morning's paper or like me, to welcome the waves at the end of their long journey. Then I saw the blasts of spray above the breakwater.


The heavy camera and tripod made me self-conscious among the dozens of people there with palm-sized digitals, but they added to my sense of purpose. As I rounded the corner toward the open ocean, I heard the crashes echoing from the hollow stone bowl overhead and felt the ground shake. I was reminded of those disaster movies, when the thunk of a landslide or a mortar round makes your pelvic bones rather than your ear drums vibrate. The atmosphere was a mixture of church and amusement park, reverence and sensation-seeking. It may be like this for the solstice ceremony too, as it might have been during the parting of the Red Sea.


I couldnt tell how much of the water's angry turbulence was natural surf and how much was due to meeting the artificial impediment of piled boulders.


The slight offshore breeze lifted scarves of spray from the tops of the breakers, and the wild air they pushed before them made a playground for the gulls.



I could feel it blow as the explosions of water on rock grew more intense.




After one of them brought a shower down over the camera, I packed up and left.

Spring in December

The rains have been slow this year, only two since June. But the native garden I've been cultivating since 2001 has matured. Last spring I removed the drip irrigation system I'd used to get it established, and except for one ground soak, I refrained from watering during summer and fall. All 68 varieties survived and most have remained green, proving their adaptation to arid conditions, subsisting on fog, dew, and bits of moisture their roots capture deep in the parched clay soil. Buds were fattening on a buckeye I'd planted a couple of years ago and another had started to leaf.


But this made me nervous. With so little water in the ground, would they deplete their energy with premature growth? I checked my authority on California Natives, the website of Bert Wilson, proprietor of Las Pilitas nursery, and found that Aesculus californica is "tolerant to drought but needs regular water for the first few years." Remembering Bert's general abhorrence of watering, this warning seemed urgent. I hooked up the hose and gave the two little saplings a normal season's worth of precipitation.

The next morning, Sunday, I was gently awakened by the gurgle of rain in the downspout on the wall by my bed. I put on a wool sweater and hat and went out to enjoy it. I climbed the ladder to the roof and cleared the gutters of curled Eugenia leaves and spikey liquidambar seedpods. I rooted up dandelions that had sprouted in the front yard. I transplanted ten bunches of Idaho fescue stored in pots after I'd cleared them off the hillside I've been excavating with pick and shovel to make room for an extension of Jan's office. I cut huge clumps of deergrass straw and spread the leaves and seed stalks on the muddy paths. I filled the wheelbarrow with raked leaves and sprinkled the crackling residue on the spoil I'd been dumping alongside the house to raise the ground level. The porous mixture absorbed the water puddled on the dense clay, protected my shoes, and made a deep-textured carpet of autumnal tweed.

I knew that the thirsty plants would respond quickly to the rain, and next morning I went out to look at the new growth. This is Ribes sanguineum glutinosum, or pink flowered currant. The specimen between the neighbors' towering second story and our roof has grown 10 feet, as fast and as tall as the Redwood next to it. Another in total shade under the fence, which I planted to replace a vigorous non-native tree I cut down, has only reached two feet, but is also showing new leaves. The two in back, on the steep north facing slope where there's very little soil, have reached about four feet. Bert says "This Ribes is more drought tolerant than most of the drought resistant plants of the trade, but in a native garden plant towards the wettest section... ."

Plants for a Future, a British permaculture site reminds me that sanguineum and glutinosum stem from the latin words for "bloody," and "sticky," and informs me that its fruits are edible though not tasty. From Native Plants of Montara Mountain I learn that this Ribes belongs to the Grossulariceae family, which contains currants and gooseberries. The vivid language invites a bit of rearrangement

Leaves: alternate, palmately-lobed, hand-like, soft, veined, with edges curving under.
Flowers: pink, five-petaled and stamened, funnel and star shaped, racemes in hanging cascades at ends of branches. Calyx fused to the pistil.
Fruit: Fleshy, red berries ripening to dark blue; developing below the calyx lobes in clusters, with tan seeds inside.

It includes two beautiful words I pursue in the Dictionary:

Raceme:

An inflorescence having stalked flowers arranged singly along an elongated unbranched axis, as in the lily of the valley...from Latin racmus, a bunch of grapes.

Calyx:

the whorl of sepals...collectively forming the outer floral envelope...enclosing...the developing bud

Compared to these technical descriptions, how little of this plant have I described or perceived, even with the assistance of the camera. I need another look.

Holding Water

In the fourth paragraph of "The Ponds"--chapter 9 of Walden--Thoreau elaborates on the experience of sitting in his boat at midnight fishing under the moon. "It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook."

He does something like that in the paragraph that follows, by attempting to describe the colors of the pond's water:

Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hill-top it reflects the color of the sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond... . When much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself...

This passage reminded me of the surface of the water when I've been on it in B.C. It would be impossible for me to describe from memory, but I'll try with the help of some photos.


Late one afternoon this summer, Jan and I were paddling back to the government dock in Okeover Arm after exploring Freke Anchorage at the head of the inlet. The sinking sun sillouetted the Gwendolyn Hills to the west. There was hardly a breeze.

The water's surface was smooth as oil but irregular, unbroken but rippling, a mirror of melted quicksilver covered in sharply outlined shifting patches of color. Blue for sky, white for cloud, black for shadow, grey--for who knows what, perhaps the transparency of its own depths. As they emerged and dissolved, the patches nested within one another and took on nameable shapes: a chain of islands, a duck, a seal, flukes. It hit us both at once--this surface, these colors and living embedded shapes: a Tsimshian blanket.

The ruins of time builds mansions in Eternity.

[click pics for larger versions]

This is a quote from a letter about the death of a friend by William Blake. Since the last entry, I've been engaged in such demolition-construction. A week ago, Peter emailed me from British Columbia with news of the death of Kenneth Law, a man who lived with us on the farm in 1973 whom I hadnt heard from for the last 25 years. Peter said there was to be a memorial for him in Lund on Saturday and another in Vancouver on Tuesday. Kenneth's presence came back to me with a shock. I groped through the old albums and journals strewn on the floor around my desk and found pictures and stories, some in his hand. I decided to collect them in a new weblog and see about making a quick trip north.

Now I sit typing by a window at the edge of the ocean with a view of Harwood Island floating in a flat grey expanse of water and sky emitting a horizontal spearpoint of brilliant white light. This is the home of Peter and his wife Margaret, a cabin with a woodstove, an outhouse and crumbly foundations where they have lived since Jan and I moved back to California in 1979. While they both are at work in town massaging patients, I 've been reading poems about aging, death and childbirth by Margaret and two poets she introduced me to: Susan Cohen and Mary Tilberg, who lives up the coast.

My shoulders and thighs still ache after yesterday's excursion in the snow through the Smith Range. The plan was for Peter, Steve Ervington and me to go cross country skiing on logging roads and the Sunshine Coast Trail, but for most of the way either the trail was too steep or the snow was too shallow, and we ended up carrying the skis and slogging in the cold for most of the day. Rediscovering the trail after having lost it just before dark reduced the impulse to complain during the last grueling two and a half hours.

The closeness of the sky, the brevity of day, the muffled silence of the woods, the floating ash-sized snow flakes, the fir boughs drooping with their loads, the longing for the stove recalled the long winters that gave character to our sojourn in the wilderness during the 1970's. We've come back every year, but only in the summertime.

The day before fulfilled the purpose of the trip and more. The sky was a rare December blue. After Margaret's biscuits and Turkish coffee, Peter and I drove to Knoll House, the present family vacation home, and walked the new trails I cut last August. They felt seasoned and permanent, opening parts of the bush I had never ventured into before. The tree trail took us to

a grove of conky old-growth firs on the edge of the bluff overlooking Savary Island and the Straight of Georgia. The large clearing that Joe and I had hacked out over the past few years to open the view from the house felt like a spacious arena. Arbutus trees were fruiting in huge clumps of fat flourescent red berries, perhaps a response to an alarming decline and die-off the past

couple of years. Drunk on the fruit, the birds lost their shyness: ravens croaked, towhees flocked, a large unidentified yellow-bellied fellow watched from high in a fir. We skirted the house and took the moss trail down the north slope past the huge old-growth firs that I'd cleared and climbed around with Ethan, my grandson.






















Next we drove for an early lunch to Nancy's Bakery in Lund, the village silent and pristine, a contrast to the hubbub of summer, the restored waterwheelhouse and boardwalk thick with frost.

Back up the road, with permission of the present owners, we roamed around the "Marx Farm." During the time we lived there it was called the Bleiler farm, for the owners prior to us. I hadn't revisted in ten years. The lower field was almost grown in with alders, the rest of the 20 acres covered with oystering paraphernalia, old trucks and boats, commercial signs and other detritus.


The folks who had bought the place still lived in the old house, keeping chickens and a horse, doing some gardening, staying close to the land and its past.


Though the lawn, the sandbox, the beautiful cedar fence in the back yard were completely overgrown with brambles and brush, the apple trees that were ancient when we lived there still thrived--even the one that Paul and I and Raymond had split the winter of 1971-2 by falling a huge alder on it and closely missing the house. I remembered our exertions to jack up the half of the trunk that remained connected only by a bit of bark and cambium and to wire it back to the main stem.

I remembered how I considered that effort unlikely to repair what little remained of our blasted marriage.


But it has held.

Missing from the yard was the gate built the following year by Kenneth, when he lived on the farm and helped bring us through yet another marriage and family crisis. He made it out of cedar staves with a heart-shaped peephole to keep the goats out and welcome friends. Peter remembered it and remembered living in the loft of the barn together with a different Margaret and planting a huge garden between the Winter of Raymond and Paul and the winter of Kenneth.

We made our way across the pasture to the barn which probably got its last coat of red paint in 1978, patted the stately horse, looked into the ruin of the cabin that Kenneth had turned into an exquisite shrine, and saw the ladder-staircase to the loft he'd built nearly covered with trash.


We also admired the tall fir whose lowest 150 feet of trunk I'd driven spikes into to get to the top for a view of the farm below and the ocean beyond.


It had always been the tallest tree on the property, but part of the surrounding forest. Saved by those spikes, it remained the lone survivor of the logging done just after we sold in 1988.

We walked out of the woods and drove to Rosemary's house on Ralph Road, the location for the Lund memorial.

Peter had informed me last week of another event taking place this afternoon: a community meeting in the Lund Hotel to organize opposition to plans for logging the Rasmussen Forest, a large parcel containing several rare patches of old growth timber just north of Heinz's former place, recently purchased by the poet whose work Margaret had showed me.

By the time we arrived, the meeting had been in progress for more than an hour and the small hotel conference room was packed with 70 people. Jack was chairing. Pam was telling an approving audience about the growth of the local Canadian Sierra Club chapter in the last year, so successful that it had received an award from the National. The representative of the local Provincial legislator provided information on Ministries to engage. Heinz gave an eloquent speech on the value of the few old growth trees remaining in this area--who would it hurt to leave them standing, he asked. All the issues that we hopelessly tried to confront in the 70'scame up, but now there was a sense of determination and confidence that I never expected to find. The people attending were between 3 months (Sage) and 93 years (Effie) old, there was a good representation of young people who had grown up here in my son's generation, of local oldtimers, and of new residents with energy and ability--retirees from the outside world who have settled in the area not for jobs but for its natural beauty. No one demanded a cessation of logging, just the use of selective and sustainable forestry answerable to the community.

Eagle Walz, creator of the Sunshine Coast trail and tireless negotiator with government and logging company officials, framed a resolution declaring a moratorium on old-growth logging until an adequate forest plan for the peninsula is developed. It passed unanimously except for two nay votes by Percy and Neal, ex-fishermen and loggers. The meeting ended with a flurry of financial contributions and signings of petitions and mailing lists.

After the meeting, Eagle invited Steve and me to the pub for a beer and a report on more grim news about the rescinding of agreements he had secured to protect the Sunshine Coast trail. He also had news about support of the plan for protecting Milennium Park between Cranberry and Willingdon Beach from logging by Weyerhauser.

After the sunset, we went to Steve and Juliet's house for a dinner of lamb and greek salad. The discussion of new demographics and prospects for political change left me encouraged. Perhaps the renewal that I had prayed for in 1971 was coming to pass.
_____
Solstice

Sap down.
Morning dark.
Rooster sleeps, infant coughs, wife groans.
Stove cold, pipes froze, truck stuck.
Uncoffied and late to work.

Screen Tender empties sewer samples:
"Groundwood down for cleanup
Pollution controls suspended
Today we flush the system out."

Thousands of gallons of woodpulp and bleach
Zinc hydrosulfite, sodium sulphate
Slosh through the flume into the saltchuck
Pablum for fish, heavily spiced.

In the Town Crier photo the Forestry Superintendant
Stands proud on the butt of a thousand-year-old fir.
They've finished logging the old growth grove at Goat Lake
It was one of the last virgin stands on the coast of B. C.

Cruised, felled, limbed, bucked
Skidded, yarded, loaded, trucked
Dumped, boomed, sorted, tugged
Towed, spiked, barked, lugged
Ripped, slashed, cross-cut.

Pulped, shredded, screened
Bleached, tested, cleaned
Blended, thickened, died
Rolled, pressed, dried
Wound, rewound, finished.

The Times is all that's left
For breakfast.

When darkness holds dominion here tonight
We'll find and cut a sapling hemlock tree
To celebrate renewal of the light
And hope for rebirth of the land and sea.