Category Archives: Reading Nature

Book reviews of guidebooks, natural history books and great wild writing.

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

sector 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, 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.)

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.  

Reading Nature, The Backwoods

Learning to Stand in the stillness

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The stay at home order has been lifted, bars and restaurants opening up, retail and soon the farmer’s market, though all with restrictions. Life is slowly getting back to some form of “normal”. But I am not eager to get back into the flow of things, to end this quiet time of introspection and solitude. The first few weeks I could not focus on anything, kept scrolling social media, and the newsfeed. But I could not bear the way everything is flung out–anger and outrage and that terrible need to find someone to blame for what is happening. At first I felt the need to “stay informed” but then I realized it didn’t really matter if I knew what so-and-so said, how someone reacted–what I really needed was some perspective.

Finally, I learned to put down the phone, turn off the computer and stand still and listen. Taking me out of the human community encouraged me to connect to the natural community. I had the time and space to really feel spring awakening the woods, to go barefoot in the greening grass, to make a daily trip to the pond instead of to town, to listen to the gossip of the ducks and geese, the raucous chatter of the redwing blackbirds and flickers, to watch the drama of the osprey’s return and discovery of a goose in their nest. I looked forward to the daily visit of Woody the Woodpecker and his silly laugh. And was awed when a sharp shined hawk took down a dove just outside my kitchen window.

This has also been a time for reading–my favorite kind of reading–quiet, introspective books that encourage deep thought. Because that is what seems to be lacking in this crisis. Deep thought rather than instantaneous reaction. Reading writers like Wendell Berry. Scott Russell Sanders and Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, gave me chance to put all of this into a social context. I could see someone’s deep, considered thought processes, analyzing a problem and understanding all the intricacies and issues that are involved, then filtering all of it through direct experience and feeling.

Of late I have returned to Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Written more than 50 years ago, it has much to say about this time of isolation. It’s the story of her weeks alone at the beach and how the solitude and time out of time gave her the opportunity to reflect on all the different seasons and responsibilities of a woman’ life. Though times have changed, her deep insights and perspectives still have resonance. And near the end she echoes my fears for how I will respond as this stay-at-home order expires:

“When I go back will I be submerged again, not only by centrifugal activities, but by too many centripetal ones? Not only by distraction, but by too many opportunities? Not only by dull people but by too many interesting ones? The multiplicity of the world will crowd in on me again with its false sense of values. Values weighed in quantity, not quality, in speed, not stillness, in noise, not silence, in words, not in thoughts, in acquisitiveness, not beauty. How shall I resist the onslaught?”

How indeed.

Field Notes, Reading Nature, The Backwoods

River Walk

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Walking through the nearly snow-bare backwoods, I follow a dried overflow channel that snakes its way through the forest, from pond to the main river. In high spring runoff this channel is full, but now it provides an easy access to the river bank. Deer have created a way through the willows and soon I’m standing on the rocky spit. The end of January and there is no ice–the days have been in the high 30’s and 40’s, the nights staying too warm to freeze.

It is hard to believe that 24 years ago, nearly to the day, an ice jam on the Blackfoot river caused the scouring of the mine and smelter tailings that had accumulated behind the Milltown dam for the preceding 88 years and their release into the Clark Fork River. This was the pivotal event that lead to the Superfund removal of the dam and the 6.6 million cubic yards of toxic sediment behind it.

1996 was also the year of the flood when record amounts of snow melted and sent the water spilling over the banks, not only filling the old channels, but creating a virtual lake of the backwoods. Across the river was a newly built expensive house, right on a bend where another overflow channel used to be. The flood ate away a goodly portion of their front yard. Afterwards they got permission from the county to build a bend-away weir in the river bed, forcing the flood waters away from their house and into the backwoods. Then, over the years they have piled up a long wall of rip-rap so that now it appears the house sits on the edge of a small rocky cliff.

The river has seen many engineered changes, from the dam to irrigation projects, levies in the downtown to riverfront development that tries to control the water and force it into a designated and constricted course. But rivers are capricious as well as powerful and the last couple of flood years have nearly destroyed a small neighborhood where the river has changed course and created a new channel.

Now another engineer has moved into the neighborhood and begun work on the river. As I make my way back through the willows to where a small stand of new cottonwoods have taken root, my way is block by several toppled trees. The ground is littered with wood chips and the trunks riddled with tooth marks, The lack of snow and ice this winter has meant an extended season for their work. These engineers, however are more than welcome.

A few months ago I read a wonderful new book by Ben Goldfarb–Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. I then had the privilege of hearing him give a presentation at the Montana Natural History Center and I am now a confirmed “Beaver Believer.”

Goldfarb says, “Beavers are environmental Swiss Army knives, capable of tackling just about any ecological dilemma. Trying to slow down floods or filter out pollution? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about erosion, salmon runs, or wildfire? Take two beaver families, and check back in a year.” I can hardly wait to see what the beavers do to my short stretch of the river, and what they can teach me about engineering a future where, instead of dominating and trying to control nature, we humans can collaborate with other species to restore our natural ecosystems.

Reading Nature, The Cabinet of Curiosities

Cabinets of Curiosity

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Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Wonders)

Modern day museums evolved from the Cabinets of Curiosity that originated as far back as the 1500’s and reached their peak of popularity in the Victorian Era. They were collections of extraordinary objects that categorized and told stories about the wonders and oddities of the natural world.

I have always been a collector. As Georgia O’Keefe said, “ I have picked flowers where I found them—have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood …When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too…I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.”

Working in the Morton J. Elrod Collection at the University of Montana I had the rare opportunity to work with specimens that dated back to Elrod’s original collections.  At the same time I was reading George Dennison’s biography of Elrod and his scientific curiosity and sense of wonder in nature became a part of my own vision.  I hope the three curiosity cabinets I created from my experiences as Artist in Residence at the Montana Natural History Center inspire that same sense of wonder in you.

 

Articulating a Story

Leslie Marmon Silko’s story Skeleton Fixer has been the guiding myth through my career as a writer, photographer and book artist. Gathering ideas, experiences and insights I strive to fit them all together to tell a story, a story that may intrigue, inspire and resonate with my “readers.”

 

Haunted by Owls

Last January I came across an owl that had just been hit by a car. I brought it to the museum at the University and was thrilled when Libby Beckman, the curator allowed me to be present as she prepared it as a speciman. Before she began she carefully checked it for molting, then separated the feathers on its abdomen to find the patch of bare skin where birds use their body heat to incubate their eggs. Opening up the owl’s stomach we discovered the half digested remains of a dove, whose own stomach contained the seeds it had just eaten. Removing the eye, I was amazed to see the long bony tube that encased it which protects the long rods they use to see in the dark.

Swan Song

The articulation of bones to create a skeleton has always held a fascination for me, so I was very excited when I had the opportunity to watch Larry DePute work on the trumpeter swan. The first time I met Larry he was making a magic wand from a bone for a baby shower, and I knew I had found a soul mate. Seeing the hollow structure of the bones that allows these birds such grace in flight and looking into the elliptical curve of it’s windpipe that gives it it’s distinctive call was a revelation.

All are on view at the Montana Natural History Center, along with my Bone Spirit series through the end of March.

Field Notes, Ground Truthing, Reading Nature, The Backwoods, The Commonplace Book

Reflections on the Election

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reflections-1The morning after the election was a heartbreaking, confusing time for me.  It was not just that my candidate had lost–that had happened before–or that the president elect would not agree with me on the issues that I consider most important.  It was not even the possibility that this man might lead the country into another catastrophic war.  That too had happened before.  No–what devastated me was the fact that I could not understand how the electorate could vote for someone who so clearly had no moral or ethical center.  Did that mean that half the country also lacks a moral and ethical center?

Needing some way to wrap my mind around this post-truth, post-values world, I turned to one of my favorite poems–one that has given me solace in the past during troubled times. 

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

© Wendell Berry. This poem is excerpted from “The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry”

I headed out to the pond in the backwoods.  Seating myself under the great cottonwood, I stared up into its now bare branches.  The red-tail hawk, who had raised a chick in the massive nest over my head was circling high in the sky , scanning the world below.  His shrieking kee-ree sounded like the cry my heart was making.  Because this time, I didn’t feel the peace of wild things.  I felt fear.  Fear for the wild things of which I am an integral part.

It was an unseasonably warm November day, after an unseasonably warm October, after the warmest year on record–again.  The mountains were still bare of snow.  The aspen trees, just weeks after loosing their autumn leaves were beginning to bud out, the furry white tips of the catkins emerging from their brown winter casings.  What would happen when the frost finally did come?  The pond was shrunk down, leaving a bathtub ring of decaying leaves on its shore.  Through the silvery trunks of the cottonwoods I could see the reddened pine needles of another beetle-killed ponderosa,  Our warmer winters are a boon for the pine bark beetles who are decimating our western forests and have created a fifth season–fire season, when massive forest fires eat millions of acres every year.

I thought about our next president for whom reality is a TV show, thought about him sitting in his gilded Trump tower and wondered if he was so cut off from the natural world that he couldn’t see what was happening–that he could really believe that Climate Change was a Chinese hoax, not the gravest threat to our future and the most pressing and dangerous issue.  This was not a problem you could wall out.

I thought about the people who voted for him.  I knew several people who were “unfriending” anyone who had supported Trump.  But I realized that reacting from fear, anger and hate was exactly what his supporters had done.  They saw the problems in the world–terrorism and an economy that was all about the bottom line and not about the workers, where everyone was nothing more than a consumer and their way of life was threatened by so many global issues too complex to understand–they saw those problems as overwhelming and unsolvable.  And it made the them afraid. Trump told them that he could solve those problems.  And they wanted so badly for someone to step up and do just that that they gave him their votes–and their futures.

What I realized was that they weren’t that much different from me.  I too saw the problems in the world–most particularly Climate Change as overwhelming and unsolvable and I felt defenseless in the face of global powers who were refusing to confront the reality of the situation.  I have let myself get distracted by other things, I have stopped paying the deep attention that is necessary for any relationship, and that includes my relationship with the natural world. And so I have sat back and waited for someone else to fix it.  I need to react, not out of fear, but out of my own moral center.

From Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril: page 469

“The times call for integrity, which is the consistency of belief and action.  The times call for the courage to refute our own bad arguments and call ourselves on our own bad faith.  We are called to live lives we believe in–even if a life of integrity is very different, let us suppose radically different from how we live now.  Knowledge imposes responsibility.  Knowledge of a coming threat requires action to avert it.  There is no way around it, if our lives are to be worthy of our view of ourselves as moral beings.  How to begin?  Maybe with four lists.  List 1: These are the things I value most in my life…List 2: These are the things I do that are supportive of those values.  List 3: These are the things I do that are destructive of those values.  List 4: These are the things I am going to do differently.  From now on. No matter what.”

List 1: A healthy, life affirming relationship with the natural world.  

List 2: I can begin by paying attention.  By speaking out in defense of what I love. Recommitting to this blog is part of that.  Supporting those who are working to change the way we relate to the natural world is another.

List 3: Waiting for someone else to solve the problems while I remain quiet and afraid is destructive to my values and ultimately to my spirit.

List 4: This is a start.  I will recommit to the things I already do, like trying my best to eat locally, to be conscious of how my decisions affect the rest of my community and the world, to an ethical relationship to money and how my spending and my investments support or hurt the natural world.  But this is only a start.  One person may not make a difference in the bigger picture, but “each of us, right now, at this exact moment in time, has the power to choose to live the moral life, to live a life that is indeed worth living.” Michael P. Nelson

 

Field Notes, Reading Nature, The Herbarium

Gathering Moss

moss 2There is a place in the backwoods, down near the river where the trees open into a clearing and the clearing is carpeted in moss.  I refer to it as the dying place because often when I go back there a new deer carcass has appeared, hide and bones scattered here and there.  It feels like a sacred place, but not a sad place.  In spite of the death that happens here, it is such a beautiful, gently quiet place.  It’s the perfect place to sit on the soft cushion of moss and listen to the river and watch the herons going back and forth from the rookery, sometimes with gleaming fish in their needle long beaks.

It is also an ideal place to get lost in the miniature world of the moss forest. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Gathering Moss has opened my eyes to the complex ecosystem under my feet and opened my mind to a new way of relating to the natural world.  Her book is a combination of science and personal reflection, born out of her life as both a scientist and as a Native American writer who experiences the world within the framework of indigenous ways of knowing.

She writes: “In indigenous ways of knowing, we say that a thing cannot be understood until it is know by all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit.  The scientific way of knowing relies only on empirical information from the world, gathered by body and interpreted by mind.  In order to tell the mosses’ story I need both approaches, objective and subjective.  These essays intentionally give voice to both ways of knowing, letting matter and spirit walk companionably side by side.  And sometimes even dance.”

With her encouragement I have taken small samples of the moss back to the house and placed them under the microscope, which allows me to wander at will through the stems, branches and leaves of the moss.  There I have an ant’s eye perspective and I’m able to wander in this intimate forest, not in search of answers to any specific questions, but as an explorer open to whatever discoveries I might stumble upon.  This is the joy of being an amateur naturalist and not a professional scientist.  I am not trying to probe and prod data from the moss, I am simply listening to whatever it has to tell me.  I love what Kimmerer says about learning in traditional indigenous communities.

“Learning takes a form very different from that in the American public education system.  Children learn by watching, by listening, and by experience.  They are expected to learn from all members of the community, human and non.  To ask a direct question is often considered rude.  Knowledge cannot be taken; it must be given…Much learning takes place by patient observation, discerning pattern and its meaning by experience.”

As I peered into the world revealed under the microscope’s lens, I found a different way of learning,  “to let the mosses tell their story, rather than wring it from them.”  It is way of learning I hope to carry out into my other explorations of the backwoods and beyond.