All posts by pchristian

The Backwoods

Reflections

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January 1, 2025

2024-It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  It was a year consumed by trying to repair and restore things that fell apart or were destroyed, balanced out by the daily wonder of our new grandson River Henry. 

I swore I would never be one of “those” grandmothers—but I find myself plying everyone with pictures of this amazing child and the two or three days a week I get to babysit are the highlight of my life. He has reignited my sense of curiosity, where something as ordinary as a pine needle suddenly becomes a thing of fascination and surprise.

He reminds me to use all my senses.  As a photographer I have become too habituated to focusing on the visual.  He prompts me to explore the tastes, sounds, smells and textures of everything we encounter, deepening my experience a hundredfold.  And the best part—I don’t have to deal with the lack of sleep his poor parents do. He has been the thing that keeps me looking forward to the future and reiterates my commitment to being a good ancestor, not just for him, but for the planet.


It comes at a time when the effects of our changing climate could not be denied as we dealt with a nearly snowless winter—the first year since I was 2 years old I did not ski; a summer of long stretches of heat over 100 degrees and draught; a fire that threatened the homestead cabin; and then, in July a catastrophic derecho—hurricane force winds that tore through the Missoula valley and decimated the backwoods.  A hundred trees, uprooted or broken, the treehouse smashed, the pond covered by fallen cottonwoods, four trees on one of our outbuildings, the chicken coop crushed, and a massive cleanup job that continues into the new year.  

The backwoods are forever changed.  The four elder ponderosas that greeted me each morning on my walk are uprooted, the pond is inaccessible, the heron rookery destroyed. The osprey nest was blown off the the platform just days before the chicks would have fledged and they were killed.  The mother osprey stood perched on the platform for weeks, as if unable to process what had happened. For months afterwards the woods were quiet, it was if everything fled the tangled downfall and broken branches.  A slew of lights now penetrate the refuge of the woods and I feel newly exposed and unable to ignore the influx of new housing developments as the city spreads out consuming the rural ranch and farmlands around Missoula. 

Right now I feel the loss and destruction. The backwoods feel ruined.  But I remember when the Red Bench fire ripped through Glacier’s North Fork valley in 1988.  How I watched as the place that was so sacred to me burned and cut us off from Kintla Lake where we were spending summers as backcountry rangers. It too felt ruined.  But then I marveled as the fireweed flamed up from the burnt earth and the woodpeckers flocked to the blackened snags The serotinous cones burst and spread their seeds in the ash and soon there were bright green saplings covering the forest floor. The rusted pine beetle killed trees that clogged the landscape before the fire were replaced by a vibrant healthy forest.

I know when River and I begin exploring the backwoods again I will find new things I have overlooked before, that familiarity has blinded me to in the past. The backwoods will once again become a place of refuge and discovery. Grandmother cottonwood, who proudly presided over both of my sons’ weddings still stands.  And the broken snags will provide nest sites for flickers and chickadees and many others.  The deadfall cottonwoods will sprout with mushrooms and rabbits will find refuge from the hawks in the tangled branches.  I don’t know if the herons or osprey will return, but the great horned owls are calling to each other every night, and with luck there will be another generation born in the woods. It will still be a place to explore, to discover plants and tracks and feathers and bones, to build forts in the bushes and to collect worry rocks and wishing rocks.

Field Notes, Photography, Wanderlusting, Yellowstone book project

Real Naturalists

Shrewd Naturalists

It was still morning twilight, before the blue hour when we started laying the trap. I was part of John Marzluff’s class on ravens in Yellowstone, and we hoped to capture one to band and fit with a transmitter as part of his study.

As we were scattering the bait, two coyotes began yipping and howling just beyond us in the woods, though it was still too dark for us to see them. A third joined in behind us and we paused to listen as the morning conversation went on for several minutes. Then…the very different howl of a wolf from across the valley and the coyotes instantly were silenced.

Getting out the spotting scopes we set them up in the direction of the howls, though the sky was just beginning to lighten. When it was finally bright enough we focused in a pack of wolves on the nearby ridge. Some were lying down, some wrestling and playing and it was clear they had just feasted on a kill and were in a state of postprandial lassitude. Searching the hillside further, we found the large red stain in the snow where the ravens were gathered and a coyote was cautiously approaching. This was the kind of viewing opportunity hoards of visitors seek and for awhile we had it all to ourselves.

Eventually the guided vans appeared and disgorged the long lensers (photographers) and people crowded around the spotting scopes. I have always assiduously avoided these kinds of wolf jams–it feels like being in a zoo to me. There is a real difference between being shown something and discovering something on your own.

As a couple of us turned away from the spotting scopes, we saw a tiny creature scamper from beneath the bus and scurry across the road. One of the men in the group ran after it and managed to capture it, letting it crawl up the arm of his jacket. Abandoning the scopes and the growing crowd, we all came over to view the little shrew until it jumped and headed off for the safety of a nearby tree. The group followed, taking photos of the little creature and watching its behavior. The wolf people thought we were certainly crazy, but…

“Naturalist have been known to measure their experiences by comparing their wildlife encounters with other naturalists of similar interests. When speaking of the Rockies, they often joust their encounters with such animals as Mountain Lions and Grizzly Bears to validate their experience. A true measure of a naturalist’s character, however, may not lie with such sightings as these, but instead with appreciating the under-appreciated. (A shrew) is so rarely seen that any naturalist who does come across it can count him-or herself exceptionally lucky.” From Mammals of the Rocky Mountains

Field Notes, Reading Nature, Wanderlusting, Yellowstone book project

Kinship and Ravens

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In January I spent two weeks in Yellowstone, taking classes from Yellowstone Forever, exploring the park, and skiing around photographing , in spite of the worrying paucity of snow. The first week’s workshop was on Kinship where we explored the ideas of Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, and the rich and varied essays found in the collection Kinship: Belonging In A World of Relations. Changing our relationship with the more than human world and our place in it is a transformative process, and one that is vital if we are to confront our current situation.

Yellowstone is a perfect place to study the many different ways of knowing that have shaped cultures throughout history. From indigenous perspectives, to the western settler’s influence, to the birth of the national park idea and the beginnings of the conservation movement, up to the practice of rewilding and the current crisis of climate change.

Kinship is a process. It is working to repair our severed ties with all our relations in the more- than- human world. It is reconnecting with our bodies, minds and spirits to the interdependent community we are all a part of. It isn’t easy changing a world view. But I see great hope as we recognize our disconnection and look to the wisdom of cultures who have not severed their ties.

“Without knowing our place in nature, we are bound to tamper with nature’s design in a manner that might not always be in its best interest. The objective is to create a deeper understanding within us to help us realize our place in nature, so that instead of tampering, we complement its design by applying our imagination, intuition, and intellect for mutual benefit.” Sunil Chauhan from the Kinship Series/ vol. 5: Practice.

I didn’t leave with any answers, but I think I’m beginning to ask the right questions. And I realize that the place to start on this journey toward kinship is through listening–not to the pundits or policy makers, but to the land itself. It has a great deal to teach us if only we will have the humility to listen.

The second week I spent with John and Colleen Marzluff, preeminent raven researchers. This course was a wonderful compliment to the course I took several years ago on raven and coyote mythology. Ravens are birds who have had a relationship with humans for millennia. And we got an opportunity to study their behaviors and life stories in the field. Whether you think of them as a conspiracy, a storytelling or an unkindness of ravens, they have a great deal to teach us about how we view another creature and they offer us crucial lessons on adaptation and finding your place within an ecosystem.

Untangling all that I learned and experienced last month will take a lot of thought and study. But I have some fascinating, intertwined tracks to follow to see where they might lead me.

Wolf, coyote and raven tracks.
Book Arts, Field Notes, Haiku, Photography, Reading Nature

READING NATURE

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Three months since I last posted! So much for keeping me accountable. And yet, I have been working on my book nonetheless, in between all the fall chores and the resumption of opportunities and events that the autumn brings. I have been busy researching for the book and thinking more and more deeply about the idea of listening to the landscape, which is alive with stories if only we take the time to read them.

“Books , like landscapes, leave their marks in us. (…) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks

Reading Nature

written on blank page

story driven by hunger

fear of winged shadow

an ancient forest

pressed between pages of rock

memory preserved

beneath flaking bark

pine beetle grafitti tags

the tree they killed

bark inscribed by claw marks

in the imagination

spector of a bear

from winter brown grass

written with a brush of wind

nature’s own kanji

forgotten summer

an unexpected flower

blooms in frozen pond

Photography, Yellowstone book project

Something’s Missing

In June, at the writing workshop with Gary Ferguson and Mary Clare I had felt hopelessly out of practice–the blank page intimidated me–it was like I was trying to run a marathon after being completely sedentary for years. My writing muscles had atrophied and words dragged across the page. The ease with which I used to be able to make connections and find metaphors eluded me and reaching for meaning was so effortful.

After days of working with other writers, putting in the miles of words and immersing myself in language I began to feel more capable, but that feeling of a writers’ high, where words flow effortlessly, never came. My writing felt pedestrian. I was still struggling to express the way my worldview has evolved as I explore my relationship with the more than human world.

I took that frustration to the Fishtrap Writer’s Conference the following month. There, I continued to exercise in Craig Child’s workshop, and still, there was such a disconnect between my writing and the feeling I sought to convey. And then, at a reading with Debra Magpie Earling for her new book, The Lost Diaries of Sacajawea I began to understand what was missing. When I’d read her book I was enchanted by the language, how it had transported me to a different time and culture. It was written in English, but it didn’t feel like English.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in Braiding Sweetgrass, “The english language is noun based, which feels somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things.” Its grammar –subject/object– makes us think of the more than human world as objects. Kimmerer advocates for a language of animacy, akin to many indigenous languages. “A grammar of animacy could lead us to completely new ways of living in the world. A world of equality of species, not a domination of one.

Part of my frustration arose from the fact that what I am trying to do in my Yellowstone project is to listen to what the land has to say. To get out of my western mindset of separation–self/other–and begin to see everything in relation to everything else.

So how does one utilize a grammar of animacy in their writing? Towards the end of the workshop I got my first clue. Craig Childs challenged me to write a piece without using “I”. It felt like an overwhelming challenge at first, but it also was very freeing–one step closer to getting out of the way and letting the landscape speak. The other issue was pronouns. How do you speak of the more than human world without objectifying– using “it.” I began to experiment with Kimmerers’ idea of ˆki”

*****

There are trees that separate themselves from the forest and call out for your attention. They become special friends and each time you visit they tell you a bit more about their lives and lives of those who live around and within them. They are quiet storytellers, but if you are patient they will let you a little deeper into their world each time.

In the middle of the Lamar there was a tree–a particular cottonwood that stood in the snowy valley on two legs. The Walking Tree. Long ago ki had sprouted and grown upon the back of a fallen elder. The downed tree gave up all the nutrients still stored in kis body to feed this next generation. As the sapling got bigger kis roots, hugging the old one now, grew thicker until they could support the weight of the young tree on their own, and the elder slowly faded back into the earth from which ki had arisen.

But this year, The Walking Tree was not there. Ki had disappeared into the landscape and the tracks of kis leaving had been swept away by the flood.

Kiowa author N. Scott Momady writes of their creation story, coming one by one into the world through a hollow log. “I would like to see that place,” his grandfather says, “I would like to see that log. I wonder if it is still there. Probably it has crumbled into the ground. All things are taken back by the earth, for all things belong to it. And all things can be contained in a story.”

The Walking Tree held the story of that elder in kis body. And now that place in the Lamar holds the story of a tree who walked away into a different state of being.

*****

The pronoun problem is awkward. But what I realized from this piece was not that I couldn’t write anymore, but that the way I have always written no longer expresses my new understanding of the world. That I am going to have to , like Deborah Magpie Earling, find a new way to use language.

Perhaps that is the ultimate challenge of our time. “For each generation the truths, archetypes and mythic images that flow through us, through this lineage we carry, must be renewed by emerging generations, in a new language for a new time.” Ensouling Language

Photography, Reading Nature, Wanderlusting, Yellowstone book project

It’s Just Reflections

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I step carefully to the shore of the lake, avoiding the muddy seeps in the tall grasses. It looks as if the sky has fallen into the water, clouds floating like lily pads on the surface. Behind me, the rumble of cars crossing the bridge over Pelican Creek in Yellowstone is an ever-present reminder of the summer crowds. I raise my camera to my eye and frame the reeds growing through reflections of pines.

A car stops behind me. “What do you got? Bears?” shouts the driver. Clouds cover the sun, extinguishing the the sparkles that had danced across the water’s surface. “No, not bears. Reflections,” I answer, pointing with my camera. The driver turns to his passengers, “It’s just reflections!” and ducks back into the shell of his car, spraying gravel in their retreat.

I feel water soaking my shoes as I sink into the soft bank. Stepping back, a tiny frog leaps from beneath my foot, splashing the water and sending a cascade of ripples across the surface. The reflections refract into a kaleidoscope of color, settle and the clouds suddenly come to life–four white pelicans swim into view and I gasp.

Ignoring the mucky smell that rises with every step, I make my way a bit closer. A fallen log provides the perfect bench to sit and watch the great white birds that swim in unison like a water ballet team. What if I hadn’t stopped to take pictures? I ask myself. What else have I missed, like that car full of tourists, in my rush through the park?

The camera lies idle in my hands as I sit and watch the pelicans feed, diving beneath the surface and rising, water streaming from the great ladles of their beaks.

I think about the connections between the bears and the pelicans. How, after lake trout appeared 30 years ago, the cutthroat began to disappear. Both bears and pelicans as well as eagles, ospreys, and numerous other species depended on the cutthroat and they too began to disappear from the lake. Now, after decades of work, the lake trout numbers have been reduced significantly, the cutthroat have rebounded and so too, the pelicans and bears.

Pull one small thread and whole fabric unravels. But I whisper gratitude to all those who worked so long to darn this small piece of the world back together.

***

June was a time of travel for me. I spent one week based in Yellowstone visiting the places that I can’t get to in winter–over Beartooth Pass, out the Northeast entrance to the Cody museum, a tour of the Heritage Center in Gardiner and a trip to Dubois in Wyoming where I went to learn about the Sheepeater Shoshone who lived in Yellowstone before the park was established.

Following that, I went to the Centennial Valley to attend a Full Ecology writing workshop put on by Gary Ferguson and Mary Clare. There I reignited my writing practice which had fallen by the wayside these last few years.

It was easy to become cynical after my time in Yellowstone in the summer. Bear jams miles long, people crowding the boardwalks, barely looking at the scenery that was nothing more than a backdrop for their selfies and overcrowded campgrounds with TV’s blaring. So the Full Ecology workshop was a wonderful antidote to all that.

Not only was the Centennial Valley peaceful and unpeopled, but Gary and Mary reminded me that “There’s more truth and energy to be found in awe than in cynicism. In our culture, being cynical is often associated with being cool; but it’s really the intellect playing separation games, finding cheap ways to reassure you that you’re the clever one, that you’re ‘above all that.’ Cynicism pushes aside wonder, and with great bluster demands to lead. But it has no vision, no humility, no curiosity. And so over and over, it lands us in the same dark corner of the same small room.” from Full Ecology

My first thought after encountering the carload of tourists looking to see a bear and ignoring all else, was cynicism–something I’ve been more and more guilty of these last few years with the way the culture wars are dividing us. But I have to believe that carload of tourists had come all the way to Yellowstone to reconnect in some way with the wild. To experience that wonder and awe that has been lost to so many. That is what I hope to achieve in some small way with this book–to reignite my reader’s curiosity and wonder.

(The prose piece above was written to the Building a Scene prompt from Craig Child’s workshop at Fishtrap Summer Conference this year.)

Book Arts, Photography, Wanderlusting, Yellowstone book project

A New Project

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Welcome, or welcome back to Backwoods and Beyond. For the past few years I haven’t been posting as I got overwhelmed by the news, social media, the pandemic and life in general. But I am about to embark on a new book and I wanted to share the process of its creation.

There is a photo project I have working off and on for the last 6 years or so. It started out as a portfolio of images taken in Yellowstone each winter. At the same time I have been journaling about my experiences skiing in the park and also studying the natural and cultural histories. In 2018 I created a show incorporating images printed with gum dicromate-the first color printing process that produces prints echoing the early paintings and hand-colored photos of Yellowstone. (To see how this process works click the Exploritorium tab in the menu) This past year I have been experimenting with using natural pigments made from rocks in the process. This has sparked an idea for putting together a handmade book incorporating those images and a series of micro–essays that explore the complicated questions arising from our relationship to wilderness, to the more-than-human world and the profound impacts of our disconnect from nature. If we have any hope of responding to climate change, it will require us to reimagine our world view and reintegrate our way of living to be part of rather than apart from the rest of the ecosystems we depend on for our survival.

The book will be a chronicle of my personal journey toward that new vision. As a way of keeping myself accountable and focused, I will be posting periodic updates here of the process of creating the book, both the photographic and writing, as I develop it. If you are interested in following along on my journey please subscribe to the blog–or simply check in here at Backwoods and Beyond whenever you like.

Field Notes, The Backwoods

Hatching a New Year

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As the pandemic kept me close to home last year I had to forgo my usual distractions and activities.  Not having my day broken up with meetings, errands, classes or socializing with friends opened up the day to sustained opportunities to read some of the dozens of unopened books that have piled up.  And I made a very disturbing discovery.  I couldn’t sit and read anything but the most page-turning mystery for more than 10 minutes without my mind wandering away from the page.  

My concentration had been hijacked by the internet’s endless click bait.  I realized how much of my time was taken up doom scrolling and “catching  up” on social media.  And that I was being prostituted by the big media companies, selling my personal information—my attention to their advertisers.  For these and many other reasons I decided to delete my social media accounts.

It has had the benefit of shielding me from a lot of the ugliness, anger, despair and just plain silliness that went on during the election.  But it also meant that I wasn’t able to get a daily dose of news from my friends and family.

Instead, it pushed me to be much more present in my own immediate world.  And to get to know, on a daily basis what my avian neighbors were up to.  I watched the snow geese on their migration through the spring.  I kept up with what was happening in the heron rookery.  I watched the drama of the osprey who returned only to find their nest occupied by Canadian Geese squatters who would not be evicted.  Eventually the goslings fledged and the osprey managed to bring a single chick to adulthood.  I frequently caught a glimpse of the sandhill cranes that nested in the field across the river parading  around with a string of chicks trailing behind them.  And I monitored two different red tail hawk nests, learning where the line was, when crossed, would send them into a protective screeching swoop.  

But my favorite was the common Robin who nested in the aspen tree just outside my window.  Every morning I could watch as she wove the nest into the branches twig by twig, then sat vigil for weeks, leaving only briefly to snatch a worm from my garden and return.  

Then one morning she was gone and the nest quivered with a faint mewling and four tiny gold beaks gaped just above the lip. The mother robin’s weeks of sitting still, patiently waiting had abruptly ended with the hatching and she was back and forth, dozens of times a day trying to keep up with the plaintive cries from her chicks who soon crowded the small nest, jostling and pushing until it seemed they would burst it with their size.

Then one by one they fledged, first hopping from the nest edge to a nearby branch, fluffed their wings and glided/flopped to the ground where they made stuttering attempts at take-offs.  The last one to leave the nest had to be coaxed by the mother who scolded from the branches relentlessly as the chick teetered on the edge, tentatively at last, taking that fateful leap into its new life.

I feel as if, through the long year past, I too have been sitting on my nest, waiting for some new way of life to hatch.  I can feel the stirrings beneath me, ideas are chipping away at their shells, ready to break out into the world.   When they do, will I have the stamina and determination to feed them and nurture them until they are ready to fly?  We will have to see.  This has been a strange and tragic year.  But it has also given us the space and time for reflection and the chance to respond thoughtfully, rather than just react to how we want to live our “one wild and precious life.” 

Field Notes, Reading Nature, The Exploritorium

a sequester project

“Plants were here first and have had a long time to figure things out.  They live both above and below ground and hold the earth in place.  Plants know how to make food from light and water.  Not only do they feed themselves, but they make enough to sustain the lives of all the rest of us.  Plants are providers for the rest of the community, and exemplify the virtues of generosity, always offering food.  What if Western scientists saw plants as their teachers rather than their subjects?  What if they told stories with that lens?” Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerman

Last December, before Covid, I applied for theartist-in-residence program at Glacier National Park.  I had hoped to create an artist’s book using some of the herbarium specimens (a collection of dried and pressed plants and is a cumulative resource for botanical and historical information) that V.V. Shay collected in the Belly River during the 1980’s.  I wanted to present them as cyanotypes and include information on the habitats and plant communities where these plants live, as well as traditional Native American, specifically Blackfeet, uses.

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, Ted and I will not be able to return to the park this year as volunteers.  Hopefully, the following summer we will again be in the Belly River and I will be able to work on my project.

But I didn’t want to let go of the idea for an artist’s book created from an herbarium and so, for the spring luncheon (virtual) fundraiser for the Montana Natural History Center, I decided to create a mini-version of my original project using the University of Montana Herbarium and the plants chosen in a poll conducted in March by The Montana Native Plant Society as Montana’s favorite wildflowers.

Using photographs of the 16 specimens, I made digital negatives and then printed them in cyanotype. Cyanotype was invented in 1842 and was the first photographic process that, like plants, uses nothing but UV light, minerals and water, to produce an image.  

The prints reveal the flower’s biomorphology and echo back to Anna Atkins work—one of the earliest female photographers.  She created the first photographic book in 1843.  Using the cyanotype process, she documented her vast collection of seaweeds, successfully combining “botanical accuracy and formal beauty in a harmony of delicacy and boldness.” Like Japanese sumi paintings, these cyanotype prints result in an impressionistic image where the spirit of the plant is fully expressed.

I pressed some of our early spring wildflowers (lupine and paintbrush) and displayed them under the plexiglass book cover.  I included the flower’s unique story and made an accordion style book. It was a fun project and really showcases the beauty of these specimens—some collected a hundred years ago.