First summer rain
mountain of alpengold found
at rainbow’s end.
Too Close for Comfort
Opening the back door it immediately felt as if something was off. I was late putting the chickens in their coop. In the dark, if not for the moon, I wouldn’t have seen that the gate to their pen was already closed. They had been roaming the backyard freely and the gate was always held open with a bungee cord, but the cord dangled uselessly from the chicken wire. How could the gate have shut on it’s own? Then I remembered my husband had mowed the lawn. He must have forgotten to reopen it after he passed. I knew the chickens wouldn’t have been able to get into the coop to roost, but I headed toward it anyway, hoping to find them milling around outside.
No sign of the chickens. I called to them, rustling the bag of scratch feed, but the yard was eerily still. I searched the grove of ponderosas in the back corner where the chickens liked to browse in tall grass, but that too was empty. Still calling chick, chick, chick I turned toward the bush where they took their dust baths.
A ferocious snarling erupted from the dark cover of the snowberry bushes crowding the back fence–a deep guttural snarling, as if the creature were tearing something apart. My eyes scanned the woods, looking for any sign of movement or even the glow of eyes, but a cloud had crossed the moon and the bushes disappeared into black shadow. I waited, heard the snarl again–close, much too loud to be a raccoon. Definitely not the canine sound of a fox or coyote. Too cat like.
We have never seen a mountain lion in our backwoods, nor any tell- tale prints in the mud or snow, but I have seen dead deer down by the river with their hair shaved off, the way a cat will do. Could a cougar have gotten all three of my chickens? I went to get a flashlight and when I returned I searched every nook and cranny of the yard. At last I heard a very plaintive clucking from behind the garbage can in a corner of the garage and gate. Pulling the can away, I found two of my chickens huddled, one on top of the other, clearly terrified of something. They would not budge and finally I grabbed them, one under each arm, carrying the trembling birds back to the coop and locking them securely inside. Then I went in search of Big Red.
The flashlight beam caught the white shine of fluff, a scattering of tail feathers on the grass. I looked to the snarling bushes, but all was silent and still. Clearly something had been in the yard and chased the terrified chickens. That something must have gotten Big Red.
I love living on the edge of the wild. The sound of coyotes in the backwoods lulls me to sleep and I thrill to see tracks in the forest that tell of my wild neighbors comings and goings. But tonight a line had been crossed. The fence, though it keeps out the deer and protects my fruit trees from their hunger, is not of course enough to keep out a mountain lion. But there was something about the wild coming so close into my home space that discomfited me. Though I knew it was irrational, a primal sort of fear crept into my body and made me toss and turn all night.
The next morning I went out to feed the chickens and there, under the apple tree, Big Red, completely tailless, scratched at the ground for worms. Last night I must have opened the back door just in time for her to escape the cat’s jaws. What then, had the cat been tearing apart? Or was it simply letting me know it’s displeasure in my interruption?
Kuan Yin
Edge of summer pond
reflected compassion in
calm water, still mind.
Picking Memories
I am eight years old, hiking through the meadow, slogging along behind my mother’s long strides. We stop at a clump of columbine, their sky blue petals offset the crisp white centers folded into elaborate origami shapes. It is the flower that means home to me—the Colorado mountains and their secrets enfolded its form like the magic phrases of the cooty catchers we make in school. I reach out to pick one, a columbine of my own to place in a rusty tin can and set in my room, a way to bring the mountains home with me. But my mother’s hand stays my own.
“Don’t pick the flowers,” she says. “We have to leave them for others to enjoy.”
I look across the acres of meadow around me. We have not seen another soul since we camped here a week ago. The meadow is blue speckled with clumps of columbine as far as the eye can see. I don’t understand. Why can’t I take just one? Why can’t I hold onto this symbol of the perfect week for awhile anyway?
I don’t want to go home, back to the city and my friends and school and all the little dramas that play out among a group of preteen girls. I want to hold on to this week of sleeping in the silent woods, listening for the stirrings of a world beyond the human one. I want to run across the meadow and feel the freedom of it, not go back to the playground where I never run for freedom, but in competition against the others, trying to prove myself. I want to stay here where I do adult tasks, where I saw logs and chop wood and build fires. I want to live in clothes saturated in woodsmoke and let my long hair tangle and mat, my tennis shoes get crusted in fine red dust. I don’t want to go home where I have to wash the earth from my body and put on stiff clean clothes and skirts that restrict what I can do and try to make my flyaway hair conform to some style from a teen magazine.
I defy my mother’s prohibition. I pick the flower, soak a kleenex in the cold little creek and wrap it around the stem. My mother says nothing. When we get back to camp she gives me a water bottle to prop it up in.
But by the time we home, the columbine has wilted, tucking all the mountain’s secrets into its crushed petals.
Spring Beauty
Amidst autumn’s sheds
pine needles, leaves and antlers
spring beauties blossom.
The Woods are Coming Back to Life
You emerge from your house like a butterfly released from its chrysalis. The woods are coming back to life. Spring is in the air.
This morning you smell the sweet tang of leaf burst, the ground littered with the sticky bud casings of cottonwood trees, now shimmering lime green with new leaves. The casings cover the ground, cling to the dangling catkins of the mountain ash, leave resin scented with sunshine on your clothes. And too, they stick on the new green shoots of the leafy spurge, promise of a scourge of yellow weeds soon spread through the forest floor.
Pterodactyl shapes weave in and out among the treetop rookeries perched high in the cottonwood grove. Looking overhead you see the stretch of long necks, the spread of grey blue wings as the brooding herons shift, rearrange cramped legs, turn the eggs with saber beaks and settle once again. Head raised, you nearly stumble over scraps of longhaired hide scattered in the grass. You find yourself standing in a deer shaped bed of sheared hair and red-specked bones.
Eurasian collared doves coo from their perches in the Ponderosas. “Who-who, who-who, who-who will be my mate?” The flash of their white tipped tails remind you of the flags of startled deer as they bolt for cover. You work your way around the massive root ball and clamber over the trunk of a newly downed cottonwood. The shallow rooted trees are no match for the spring storms that race through this valley.
In the muddy bottom of a channel where spring run-off seeps into remembered pathways through the river bottom, you see the prints of coyote. Last night you heard the wild cacophony, exuberant howling and the high-pitched yips of rambunctious pups. Searching for more prints you find instead a great scatter of feathers under a small tree. No flesh, no bones, only the discards of a hawk’s feast. There, amidst the fluffy down and dove grey wings are the long tail feathers tipped in white.
Beneath the heron nests, fertilized by the white splatters from above you find a vibrant patch of yellow where, first flowers of spring, the buttercups bloom, sending out their runners in all directions. And there, in the dappled sunshine of blossoms, a patch of sky blue, broken eggshells of herons that will never hatch, a careless scatter from the rearranging of the incubating eggs above.
A raven explodes from it’s nest, haranguing the hawk who has flown too close, cawing relentlessly as it chases the raptor through the treetops, even as the redtail circles back around toward the unprotected chicks. The raven slices across the sky, heads off the hawk, who circles back the other way. Around and around they go until at last the hawk perches in the top of a cottonwood snag across the meadow, watching, waiting. And the raven returns warily to its nest, watching, waiting.
The woods are coming back to life, back to death, endlessly cycling through the lengthening days.
Hauntings
A chill in my bones
ghost of winter passes by
snow squall in April.
Silent No More
“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one ‘less traveled by’—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.
The choice, after all, is ours to make. If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our ‘right to know,’ and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accpt the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.” Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
I have just finished re-reading Silent Spring, a book I have not picked up since I read it in college nearly 40 years ago. At that time it was very controversial and I remember the way she was vilified for even suggesting that the brave new world—“better living through chemistry”—was not turning out to be the Eden the chemical and oil companies touted. Re-reading it now I am horrified by how little has changed. True, the book and Carson’s subsequent testimony before congress did have some positive impacts. DDT was eventually banned in this country, though we still sell it overseas. And she was one of the instigators of the broader environmental movement that was spawned at that time. I have always looked to Carson as an inspiration, a shining example of what powerful writing can accomplish. And yet…
And yet, fifty years later “only 200 of the more than 80,000 synthetic chemicals used in the US have been tested under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. And exactly none of them are regulated on the basis of their potential to affect infant or child development.” Sandra Steingraber, Raising Elijah. Coincidentally, just as I was finishing Silent Spring, Bill Moyers had Sandra Steingraber on and her book is the natural sequel to Carson’s. Steingraber says, “(In Silent Spring Carson) posited that ‘future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.’ Since then, the scientific evidence for its disintegration has become irrefutable, and members of the future generations to which Carson was referring are now occupying our homes. They are our kids.”
Steingraber speaks of the moral crisis of our day being two-fold—the pollution of our bodies by toxic chemicals and the alteration of our climate through the accumulation of heat-trapping gasses. Both of these crises are attributable to our economic dependence on fossil fuels.
After outlining the scientific evidence for her arguments, Steingraber presents a compelling case that it is the moral responsibility of all of us to not give in to “well-informed-futility-syndrome”, whereby knowledge about the enormity of a problem becomes incapacitating. Instead we must scale up our actions to match the size of the problem.
I would love to sit back and focus all my time and attention to being a naturalist, to bearing witness to the incredible complexities of nature that abound in my backwoods and beyond. I still believe, as I wrote last year in “New Language, New Way of Thinking” that observing and writing about nature in an effort to restore its sacredness as Jack Turner in The Abstract Wild, “If we find we live in a moral vacuum, and if we believe this is due in part to economic language, then we are obligated to create alternatives to economic language…Emerson started the tradition by dumping his Unitarian vocabulary and writing “Nature” in language that restored nature’s sacredness. Thoreau altered that vocabulary further and captured our imagination. The process continues with the labor of poets, deep ecologists, and naturalists,” is a worthy enterprise, I am beginning to feel that it really isn’t enough. Neither is changing out my light bulbs, driving less, or even growing and canning my own food.
I can’t just throw up my hands in despair, even if any action I take will be insignificant in the face of the power of the economic interests of the corporations. I have to be able to look my children in the eye and not feel shame for my cynicism and cowardice. And so, when I was asked to sign a petition stating that I was willing to be arrested to protest the Keystone Pipeline, I did. You have to make a stand somewhere. And stopping the pipeline and fighting the expansion of fracking in my own state is a place to start. Faced with peak oil, the answer is not to find new and dirtier oil. It is to begin to build an alternative to our fossil fuel economy.
I will still be exploring the backwoods and beyond. But I will also be looking for ways I can keep myself from despair over the state of the world. Reading both Silent Spring and Raising Elijah is good place to start. I don’t want to leave my children a world with a silent spring, and so I can’t be silent any longer.
Scavenge
Snow melted, plow churns
prepares for the first harvest
hawks and ravens feast.
The Lowly Buttercup
First sign of spring in the forests and meadows, it blossoms even before the last patches of snow have pulled back. It’s creamy yellow petals flash in the gray brown tangle of dried grasses, fallen pine needles and melt-soggy soil. They are so small they would probably go unnoticed but for their neon color.
When I was a child we would pluck the blossoms and hold them under our chins. If the bright saffron hue reflected on our skin, childhood folklore said we were fiends for butter. Invariably mine would glow, for there is nothing I love more than thick pats of butter melting into crispy warm bread, or a scoop of melted butter pooled on the end of an artichoke leaf.
One common name for a species of buttercup is “ugly buttercup,” but it is hardly ugly. It may not have the flash of the shooting star, or the elegant swoop of yellow bells, or the exotic glamor of the glacier lily. But those flowers come weeks later, allowing the buttercup to answer our eagerness for spring. Their five shiny petals are created by an underlying layer of white starch which reflects light back through the yellow pigment, making them look like drops of liquid sunlight. The Navajo are said to make a tea from the leaves to protect hunters against dangerous animals, which reminds us when we see the buttercup bloom, the bears are leaving their dens.
We might, later in the season overlook them altogether amongst the abundance and rainbow colors of the summer wildflowers. But it is because they are first, because they grow in great spreading clumps that splash the hillsides with gold, because they are such a welcome contrast on gray cloudy, gumbo mud days in late March, that we so avidly seek them out. Proving, I suppose, that even the most ordinary and unremarkable can be something extraordinary if it finds a way to stand out from the crowd.