Category Archives: The Backwoods

Field Notes, The Backwoods

Meditation

I have come to river’s edge to spend a few moments letting go of the day’s busyness, to try to quiet my scattered thoughts and worries. I sit on the wind swept trunk of an uprooted tree. An overnight freeze has sent hundreds of small rafts of ice into the river and I watch as they flow down the current, pass under the bridge and disappear around the snow-crusted sandbar.  Slowly my thoughts drift away with them and I’m not aware of the cold seeping into my clothes as I sit entranced by the flotilla that appears like clouds scuttling through the reflected sky of water. 

But the gathering of ice in an eddy near the shore draws me back.  One by one frozen chunks are pulled out of the main current and swirl together, beginning to spin as they are sucked into the scour hole. As one after another attaches itself to the outer edges they coalesce and I am caught up in the growing crystalline spiral. It feels like magic, the way all the pieces are coming together, as if I am on the verge of a marvelous discovery. 

But then the revolving circle begins to scrape along the rocks in the shallower water. The grinding sound gets louder as the blue water between the ice and the bank gets thinner and thinner until the ice sheet suddenly catches up on the shore and begins to shudder.  The spinning slows, then stops as the ice distends and distorts, frozen in place and all that is left is a frigid spit. The free floating rafts of ice slip past to continue their journey downriver and I try to loose myself and drift downstream again with them, but now I am distracted by the cold and the spell is broken.

Field Notes, The Backwoods

Haunted by Owls

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The great horned owls have begun their seasonal call and response—from cottonwoods to ponderosas, their haunting echoes through the backwoods just as the daylight is fading and darkness falls.  The owls have been a constant throughout the last few years—their nesting sites down towards the river.  I have watched as they roosted in the branches near the house.  I awoke one morning to see two piercing yellow eyes staring at me from the tree outside my bedroom window.  I have scavenged the ground for their pellets and pulled them apart to find skulls and pelvic bones and reconstructed the skeletons of whatever they had feasted on the last few days.  

I even found a dead great horned that had been hit by a car.  I took it to the natural history museum at the university and helped the curator prepare it as a teaching specimen.  I parted the chest feathers to reveal the patch of soft bare skin where it nestled down on its eggs to warm them, I opened its stomach to reveal the partially digested dove it had consumed just before dying.  And inside the dove, the seeds of its last meal.

I watched as an owl dove into the berry garden after a small bird that had wriggled its way into the sweet fruit through a gap in the fence.  The owl glided in on silent wings, talons extended, but hit the netting over the garden, tumbled and rolled across the top and finally came to rest on a cross beam, feathers all askew and a confused look on its usually wise face.  The little bird quietly hunkered under the blueberry bush, probably wondering at its brush with death.

I found one of my chickens decapitated in the yard—the victim of a great horned owl who is known to crave the brains of its prey.  Many  Native American cultures consider the owl an omen of death and I was uneasy when they became such an ever-present part of my life.  And this year their calls do seem to echo with death.  So many deaths of good friends and relations these last few years—my mother, my mother-in-law and my brother-in-law, a couple of Ted’s childhood friends.  This fall our neighbor, a surrogate grandfather to my sons who never knew their grandfathers who passed many decades ago.  And then, on New Year’s, the sudden death of our friend and the drummer in Ted’s band, Micki Singer, killed in a head-on accident on his way home from a gig. In spite of suffering for years from health problems, he was always eager to share his passion for music and never passed up an opportunity to play.

With no parents still alive and on social security, death seems so much closer than it ever has before.  Our future no longer stretches in front of us, full of endless possibility.  And yet, I don’t feel like the owls that are haunting me presage death.  For I have also seen a pair of owls courting each other, watched as the male fluffed his white chest feathers, cocked his tail and bobbed and nodded, uttering “come hither” calls.  I watched as the female spread her wings and bowed, snapping her bill.  And then the male flew to her and they clacked beaks.  Their calls were quick and urgent, he mounted her and it was over in just seconds.

Later that summer I found their nests and watched day after day as the awkward balls of fluff feathered out and finally fledged, learning to hunt on their own.  Great horned owls are among the earliest species of birds to nest and their courting calls begin just as the solstice brings its promise of lengthening daylight and renewal.  To hear them calling now reminds me that life and death are intertwined. But I learned from Micki that every day is a chance to do what you love and to not waste a moment of the life we have left.

Field Notes, The Backwoods

Icescapes

The last two weeks in Missoula have been unrelentingly cold with inversions trapping the valleys under a veil of dismal grey.  For many people this has been trying–particularly since we are all breathlessly waiting for snow and the beginning of ski season.  But the photographer in me has been rejoicing because the fact that the daytime temperatures never rise above the mid-20s means that the pond and riverbank have been an ever-changing landscape of ice.  The fascinating forms captured by the freezing water are artworks far surpassing what my own imagination could ever conjure up.  

In a workshop at the Photographer’s Formulary with Dan Burkholder, I learned how to use precious metal leafing techniques with prints made on translucent velum.  This creates a modern take on the famous orotones done by Edward S. Curtis in the 19th century west.  

This technique is wonderfully suited to my series of icescapes. A selection of these silver leafed prints are in the current show at the Dana Gallery in Missoula, MT.

 

Field Notes, The Backwoods, The Commonplace Book

The Call of the Wild

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“Talk of mysteries—Think of our life in nature,–daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?                                                                                                                           H.D. Thoreau

The day after Thanksgiving. Sitting amidst my family last night, I had a sudden realization. I am no longer the center of anyone else’s life. My children grown, my parents gone, and Ted and I both, freed from the focus of raising kids have spun out from the center of family and are each pursuing our own questions and passions. What does this mean, to be freed from that kind of responsibility?The day after Thanksgiving. Sitting amidst my family last night, I had a sudden realization. I am no longer the center of anyone else’s life. My children grown, my parents gone, and Ted and I both, freed from the focus of raising kids have spun out from the center of family and are each pursuing our own questions and passions. What does this mean, to be freed from that kind of responsibility?

I look up from my list of have tos and must dos and watch what’s happening out the window. The antics of a squirrel as it leaps from the bouncing wand of the thinnest branch tips to the birdfeeder. Then a doe, unexpected in my garden, chewing the remains of the cabbage. A glance out the kitchen window reveals the two rabbits that have taken up residence in our mower shed, grazing on the still green grass. One is a deer brown, streaked and splotched with black, giving it a certain derelict air. The other a russet beauty with black tipped ears. With the relentless chores pulling at me to get something accomplished, I almost turn my back on these calls from the wild—but no—not this time.

I don boots and jacket and head to the backwoods. Rather than take my usual circuit, starting with the pond, I wind around the other way, following the rusty, tawny path of leaf litter. A red-tail circles overhead, checking me out. I watch his loops and dives and something flutters to my feet—a long thin feather striped cream and umber.

I make my way into the cushiony moss meadow, which I sometimes refer to as the dying place, since there have been several deer carcasses, and mounds of dove feathers from the hawk’s successful hunts. And yes, gleaming white against the incongruously spring green moss is the jawbone of faun.

Looking toward the river my eye is caught by the sun gold light shimmering on the hills through the cottonwood trunks, pressed between the steely blue of the far mountains and the river. With my eyes fixed on those two colors that speak November, I don’t notice the tips of the antlers sticking above the dry grass not 20’ in front of me. Not until the buck jerks awake, clearly as startled by my presence as I am by his. He rises, stands for just a moment before gracefully leaping the fence. He looks back at me as if to say, “Don’t you wish you could do that?” and then saunters away, secure in the knowledge I can’t.

The hawk circles overhead again. By the time I push my way through the willows to the water, the buck is nowhere to be seen. A heron startles off the bank across the water, it’s pterodactyl form outlined against the pinkening clouds

I find a perfect oval wishing rock, bigger than my palm, with a wide white band of quartz encircling it. As I am contemplating what to wish for, a splash erupts from the river right in front of me. Confused, I glance up to see the ring of water spreading from the center toward the spit where I stand. I look back down at my hand, which still holds the wishing rock. I scan the riverbank looking for someone else, but I am alone.

And then, downstream a small dark brown nose pops out of the water, then a little round head, a V of wake streaming behind. It must hear my delighted gasp, because its body humps up out current and its tail whacks the water , making another resounding splash as it dives below the surface. Walking downriver I watch as it rises and slaps, each time getting more distant until I can no longer see or hear it.

I could however hear the cacophonous sound of a huge flock of geese, doing their calligraphic flight formations, long stings of them flying back and forth, as if stitching the clouds together into a story.

This. This is what I want. This time to “daily be shown matter, to come in contact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!” Time to answer the call of the wild, and to stitch my experiences together with writing and photography.

I grasp the wishing rock in my hand, but instead of a wish, I whisper a commitment to myself. To take the freedom I now have from being the center of other people’s lives, and to become the center of my own life. To make my art, not something I do only in stolen moments, but the real focus of everything.

I throw the wishing rock far out to the center of the current and watch as it creates silvery rings which spread in all directions.

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

 

The Backwoods

Too Close for Comfort

 

chicken feathers       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?

 

Field Notes, The Backwoods

The Woods are Coming Back to Life

dove feathersYou 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.