I was not prepared for the end.
I had passed from San Francisco Bay, thru the eucalyptus of the headlands and the fir of Point Reyes, to the oak woodlands of the Sonoma Valley, along the Eel River to the redwood parks. And then, Oregon, and the crest trail to Crater Lake, forest service roads to the Willamette Valley, Eugene, Corvallis, Portland, and another river, the Columbia. Mt. St Helens, Mt. Rainier, Olympia, Olympics, the straight of Juan de Fuca, and that was it.
At dusk on October 7th, I crested a hill from the south side of Clallam Bay. It was sometime just before 7 PM, and the sky had gone purple. The water of the straight quietly lapped in the most modest of waves, more like a lakeshore than a part of the raging Pacific, and across the water, in a fading band of green, Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
Was this the end now? Could I say I had done what I set out to do? Yes, I could, and I had. But no, it was not yet done. As I had walked the destination I gave people had been refined from the great to the specific. When I was first stopped and asked where I was going and what I was doing, I had barely even begun the trip. It was on Stage Coach Rd, Duarte’s Tavern still in sight. Two old ladies in too bright clothing and too big sunglasses listened patiently as I told them I was walking to the Olympic Peninsula, and they said “Where’s that?” It was an encouraging response. (I would feel a similar thrill when people would react the same way when I told where I had started)
I modified my answers. At San Francisco I had simply said ‘North,’ by the redwoods I said ‘Washington,’ at Eugene ‘the Olympic Peninsula,’ and now, on the peninsula, I had settled at Cape Flattery, the western-most tip. From Clallam Bay I could make the walk in two days, so I went into town to ask where I might camp out and was pleasantly answered with an invitation to be a guest at the house of a woman in town. The plan was modified, slightly, and I stayed instead at the house of her daughter and her son-in-law, across the road from her.
The weather worsened the next day, and the day after, so that by the time I left I had spent two full days in Clallam Bay before the weather cleared and I could walk again. They all of them invited me to stay with them again on the way back, which I would. It had been a very pleasant time spent, going for walks at the straight during the short spells when the weather cleared, collecting beach glass, throwing sticks for their dog to chase.
This last walk I followed the beach for much of the way. There, at the northern edge of the peninsula, the beaches are flat and brief and littered with stones and kelp. Walking along them means staying close to the trees since tides can be extreme and sections of mud treacherous. But soon, too, I had come to the Makah reservation, camped a night, and then walked to the town of Neah Bay and out, up some small hills, and over, till I heard once more the roar of the Pacific. One, last grove of cedars, and there it was.
There is a parking lot, and then a trail, and at the end of that an observation deck, on the cape, the most Northwest point of the contiguous states. This last knuckle on a fist of land, the cape juts out over water and drops to fluted sea caves and howling waves, barnacles, oyster catchers, limpets, puffins, sea lions, and medusa kelp fronds that roll with the swells. I saw all this from this last measure of land, the cornice of a continent rising.
I leaned on the edge of the railing while a couple of elderly bird watchers mounted the stairs to join me, looking out at Tatoosh island. Even if they were not there, I would not have reacted differently. I was done with shouting. I did not feel the need. All I wanted then, at journey’s end, was to sit quietly for awhile. And so I did. Then, when I was ready, I started back.
In the parking lot, I dropped my pack, put down my walking sticks, and sat myself on the pavement. Now, the first chapter of my journey, had ended. I had fulfilled the guidelines of the experiment, of which there had been two for this portion.
1. To never ride in any motorized vehicle.
2. To accept what I am offered with gratitude.
And I had refined my ending till there was nothing more to whittle off. There was nowhere else to walk to. Now was the uncertainty of a new journey before me. Am I to go east? To the Atlantic? To Maine? To Florida? Or Canada? Or south again home? And how long will that take? What if I reach my thirties and still I walk? Or forties? Would that still be alright? Even if it were alone? Even if my most intense experiences are unshared? Even if I am not sure they ever were?
Around me, more cars had come, and the passengers went about, indifferent to my quiet existential crisis.
I sat there a long time, leaving only when the daylight hastened out and I could not stay crouched on the tar. The last cars left the cape, and I put on my pack and walked.
Three days later I was in Port Angeles, where I bought a ferry ticket for Victoria, British Columbia, and then another from there to Seattle, where I will pass the winter. There is much to think about, and figure, for what will come with the spring.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Untitled Poem
Where the firs grew in circles by Saranac Lake
A scarlet-eyed loon howled over its mate.
I felt its rage swell and swallow the sky,
Knock down the stars, the fire, and I.
The lap of the lake, the loon's song, my breath,
The sound of all life holds the promise of death.
To stand shod on those shores felt ignorant sin.
Let me go back to that place again.
The tap-drip of rain on the forest's green eaves,
Come cover and cloak me in pine and oak leaves,
To cut thru the gold poplars as a crow to its nest,
But Uncas is dead. Hawkeye is gone to the west.
Even October branches feel sacred and haunted,
To sway with their sway is not more than I've wanted.
Now in my mind it is winter, and the colors grow dim.
Let me go back to that place again.
At a farm in the fields where two rivers crossed,
And the swallows swooped low and were gone with the frost,
My thoughts held the shape of a lone whip-poor-will.
Did I dream it all then? Could I dream it still?
A lion had stepped from the ranks of the corn
And shattered the moon with the boom of his roar.
The blue of his eye burned thru me like flame.
Let me go back to that place again.
The roll of the prairie's striated loom,
The smell of the sweet grass and Indian perfume,
Old boots and a horse and and feathers and grains
And ride with the buffalo over the plains,
The drum of the sage grouse, the coyote choir,
Joseph went cold and dead with his fire,
Solace and silence, without and within,
Let me go back to that place again.
Is the world - or I - who has changed?
That the sounds are all harsh and the words have come strange?
That we've mapped out the stars, found the secrets therein,
And we've been to the wizard, though our hearts remain tin?
The fields are all burned. The river's gone dry.
A body of crows has eaten the sky.
I remember the way that it was before then.
Let me go back to that place again.
A scarlet-eyed loon howled over its mate.
I felt its rage swell and swallow the sky,
Knock down the stars, the fire, and I.
The lap of the lake, the loon's song, my breath,
The sound of all life holds the promise of death.
To stand shod on those shores felt ignorant sin.
Let me go back to that place again.
The tap-drip of rain on the forest's green eaves,
Come cover and cloak me in pine and oak leaves,
To cut thru the gold poplars as a crow to its nest,
But Uncas is dead. Hawkeye is gone to the west.
Even October branches feel sacred and haunted,
To sway with their sway is not more than I've wanted.
Now in my mind it is winter, and the colors grow dim.
Let me go back to that place again.
At a farm in the fields where two rivers crossed,
And the swallows swooped low and were gone with the frost,
My thoughts held the shape of a lone whip-poor-will.
Did I dream it all then? Could I dream it still?
A lion had stepped from the ranks of the corn
And shattered the moon with the boom of his roar.
The blue of his eye burned thru me like flame.
Let me go back to that place again.
The roll of the prairie's striated loom,
The smell of the sweet grass and Indian perfume,
Old boots and a horse and and feathers and grains
And ride with the buffalo over the plains,
The drum of the sage grouse, the coyote choir,
Joseph went cold and dead with his fire,
Solace and silence, without and within,
Let me go back to that place again.
Is the world - or I - who has changed?
That the sounds are all harsh and the words have come strange?
That we've mapped out the stars, found the secrets therein,
And we've been to the wizard, though our hearts remain tin?
The fields are all burned. The river's gone dry.
A body of crows has eaten the sky.
I remember the way that it was before then.
Let me go back to that place again.
Crossing the Olympics in Silence
I had written earlier that Olympic National Park is one of the quietest places on the planet. Go there, and you will understand. A fist of rock thrust up from the ocean and joined North America, then sent glaciers down to carve out Puget Sound, cutting a moat from where there would one day be people. Then when the people came, in boats and on foot and later by car, geography and climate played against settlement. East-blowing, moisture-laden air knocks against the mountains and sheds its load, resulting in the wettest place in North America. (The island of Kauai receives more, but is only politically, not geographically, North American) Rainfall is more commonly measured in feet than by inches. Up to 12 feet in parts. A goldfish could spend summers free range with weather like that.
The mountains that allow this spectacular rainfall are not especially high – Mt. Olympus does not even rise to 8,000 feet. Rainier, by contrast, is over 14,000 feet high. But these same mountains still hold glaciers from the Pleistocene, thanks to cool ocean air. They rise in a jumble of teeth. There is no easy ridgeline and only one low pass, and so no road thru the Olympics, which means a drive from the coastal section of the park to the city of Bremerton, on the sound, will take about 3 hours, though they are not even 60 miles apart.
Then there is the vegetation, so much of it that an 1889 expedition assembled for the purpose of crossing the Olympic peninsula took 6 months. It was unknown what they would find within the wilderness – 90% of which is still there – as the natives of the area seldom ventured within the mountains. It was not, presumably, because of superstition, rival tribes, or grizzly bear – none of which were known to ever have been within what is now the park – but for the shear difficulty of navigation. Every pint of rain has been converted to wood, moss, and leaves that the place is a dense tangle of chin-high sword fern, salal, spruce, alder, maple, and fir. The air itself is green. This is the highest concentration of biomass per acre on Earth - including the Amazon and the Congo - since when a tree falls, it does not rot, but sprouts moss and fungus and trees in turn that a century old spruce can be growing suspended from a hanging snag and it seems there are two forests, the vertical and the horizontal.
Still, six months seemed outrageous. I was sure that I could do better. And I did. It took me five days to cross the park from east to west, but I had a distinct advantage over those earlier folks. I had trails and a map to follow. That’s cheating I suppose. I let someone else do the exploring for me. That’s not the way it was for them.
Alright then, let’s try it the way they did.
At Ruby Beach, north of Kalaloch, on the coast-side of the park, my walk along the beach was blocked by a cliff sticking its foot out into the Pacific. If I wanted to get all the way to Cape Flattery – the end of the Olympic Peninsula, and of the US too, I suppose – I was going to have to get off the beach. So instead of taking the path up to Highway 101, which I had passed a quarter mile back, I made sure my hip-belt was tight, stashed my hiking poles, and started to climb.
I am not sure if any members of the Press Expedition – as the 1889 foray was called – ever had to climb a cliff with a backpack, but surely had they encountered such an obstacle, they would not have shied away. So, my fingers in the cracks of sandstones and hollows left by borer clams, I crept spider-like up the cliff till I could sink my fingers into some sedges sprouting at the top. Then I gripped onto a salal bush and swung myself up. There was a deer path that I followed, ducking a low branch, straying wide where the cliff had eroded under a mat of roots, going between two stunted spruces. My pack gets stuck as I try to pass, so I take it off and shift it around one of the trees and over a log. I take a step and fall thru some rotted leaves covering a sinkhole, though only about 6 inches deep. I pull out, and put my other foot forward, breaking a weft of branches, cracking and scratching thru the next few steps.
A swale in the land drops me down to where a tree blew over and tore a chunk of earth with it that I stand in a hollow, salal branches and ferns closing over my head. I begin to walk one way out and get my glasses knocked off my a bush. I spend a minute groping for them, not moving my feet, then try another way thru the sword ferns, but the fallen tree tore up its roots like great links in a chain that bar me from that way. The only way then is to climb up the root ball and onto the trunk, a more difficult task than the cliff as I’m being jabbed, scratched, and grimed all over as I rise, mud falling out beneath my feet, sweating like a horse with no ocean breeze to cool me off. I walk along the trunk, the only clear path, till the remaining branches block me, and I descend, looking for the next fallen tree. And that’s how I move thru, going trunk to trunk, navigating the lattice of fallen wood.
All the earlier elements of the first part are repeated, minus losing my glasses, plus a few more falls. Each passage of the labyrinth comes blocked with salal that I must either force my way thru, or scrambled onto an adjacent log sheathed in velvet moss, till I stumble onto the highway. Sitting down, I shake out my clothes, unlace my boots and empty the twigs from my socks. I pull the leaves from my underwear and change my hat. I look back thru the forest to the open air where the cliff falls to the ocean, maybe about 80 meters away. It has taken me 40 minutes to get this far.
The same factors that kept the Indians out still seem to keep folks away that despite being within easy commute distance of 6 million people, the park is virtually uninhabited. During my five days within the mountain section, I would see one person more than a mile from a road. I would enjoy an external quiet that I had been lacking since Rainier.
However, it was only an external quiet. Internal quiet is something different. My mind is an active one. I won’t say keen or productive, but certainly buzzing.
It’s no wonder, given the amount of stimuli available to it, it should be so. I don’t know about a century, or a millennium, ago, but in my time it’s as though silence has come to be feared, and despite the hundred of precious proverbs extolling its worth we’re bent on its extinction. In public, even in places that I had hoped would have quiet – libraries, coffee shops, cathedrals – I find whirring machinery, conversation, or piped in music. I don’t particularly want to be listening to the Jackson Five as I write this, but the coffee shop I’m in insists on having it.
I talked about this incident with a park employee I met. I felt that a hundred years ago things were quieter not due to lack of machinery – or rather, not solely from lack of machinery – but lack of intruding sound. Most sound that was out there was put there by or for the listener – for work, for pleasure, for transportation, for thought. How much more meditative it would have been to be out in the woods without a song in my
“In John Muir’s time,” he said, and with park employees it always comes back to Muir, “people read more, sang more, and there were more musicians. People had stuff in their heads all the time.”
I don’t doubt that a century ago people were thinking, but I do suspect they had much less in their heads. Their brain activity wasn’t clogged with radio jingles and theme songs to cancelled television programs and the Jackson Five. The thoughts that were there were thoughts that they wanted to have. They were not intrusions coming to them via well-meaning, banal restaurateurs and civic centers. One could still walk thru a city park, say, and listen to the wind and not the piped-in marches of Sousa.
I became frustrated with myself that sitting at an alpine meadow, or watching bears enjoy a huckleberry bush, my mind was still chattering on, that in even such a charged natural environment I could have a Zeppelin song in my head, or think about a sentence I wanted to write. It was as if the accretion of outside sound had built up in a reservoir of noise that now leaked back to fill a vacuum. I couldn’t have silence even if I wanted it, even if I got there – and I had – for lack of having a quiet mind. All those sounds, conversations, jam sessions, questioning thoughts would come back that I may as well be listening to an audio player.
This is troubling. It means that I am doing something I always admonished my students never to do. I am just passing thru. I am distracted.
I think, come spring, I may again cross the park, this time from south to north, and perhaps then, in silence. From when I enter to when I leave, I will make neither words nor songs, but let the memory of noise fade and let sound enter me. To contribute towards me and to who I am becoming, and not project myself so much.
The mountains that allow this spectacular rainfall are not especially high – Mt. Olympus does not even rise to 8,000 feet. Rainier, by contrast, is over 14,000 feet high. But these same mountains still hold glaciers from the Pleistocene, thanks to cool ocean air. They rise in a jumble of teeth. There is no easy ridgeline and only one low pass, and so no road thru the Olympics, which means a drive from the coastal section of the park to the city of Bremerton, on the sound, will take about 3 hours, though they are not even 60 miles apart.
Then there is the vegetation, so much of it that an 1889 expedition assembled for the purpose of crossing the Olympic peninsula took 6 months. It was unknown what they would find within the wilderness – 90% of which is still there – as the natives of the area seldom ventured within the mountains. It was not, presumably, because of superstition, rival tribes, or grizzly bear – none of which were known to ever have been within what is now the park – but for the shear difficulty of navigation. Every pint of rain has been converted to wood, moss, and leaves that the place is a dense tangle of chin-high sword fern, salal, spruce, alder, maple, and fir. The air itself is green. This is the highest concentration of biomass per acre on Earth - including the Amazon and the Congo - since when a tree falls, it does not rot, but sprouts moss and fungus and trees in turn that a century old spruce can be growing suspended from a hanging snag and it seems there are two forests, the vertical and the horizontal.
Still, six months seemed outrageous. I was sure that I could do better. And I did. It took me five days to cross the park from east to west, but I had a distinct advantage over those earlier folks. I had trails and a map to follow. That’s cheating I suppose. I let someone else do the exploring for me. That’s not the way it was for them.
Alright then, let’s try it the way they did.
At Ruby Beach, north of Kalaloch, on the coast-side of the park, my walk along the beach was blocked by a cliff sticking its foot out into the Pacific. If I wanted to get all the way to Cape Flattery – the end of the Olympic Peninsula, and of the US too, I suppose – I was going to have to get off the beach. So instead of taking the path up to Highway 101, which I had passed a quarter mile back, I made sure my hip-belt was tight, stashed my hiking poles, and started to climb.
I am not sure if any members of the Press Expedition – as the 1889 foray was called – ever had to climb a cliff with a backpack, but surely had they encountered such an obstacle, they would not have shied away. So, my fingers in the cracks of sandstones and hollows left by borer clams, I crept spider-like up the cliff till I could sink my fingers into some sedges sprouting at the top. Then I gripped onto a salal bush and swung myself up. There was a deer path that I followed, ducking a low branch, straying wide where the cliff had eroded under a mat of roots, going between two stunted spruces. My pack gets stuck as I try to pass, so I take it off and shift it around one of the trees and over a log. I take a step and fall thru some rotted leaves covering a sinkhole, though only about 6 inches deep. I pull out, and put my other foot forward, breaking a weft of branches, cracking and scratching thru the next few steps.
A swale in the land drops me down to where a tree blew over and tore a chunk of earth with it that I stand in a hollow, salal branches and ferns closing over my head. I begin to walk one way out and get my glasses knocked off my a bush. I spend a minute groping for them, not moving my feet, then try another way thru the sword ferns, but the fallen tree tore up its roots like great links in a chain that bar me from that way. The only way then is to climb up the root ball and onto the trunk, a more difficult task than the cliff as I’m being jabbed, scratched, and grimed all over as I rise, mud falling out beneath my feet, sweating like a horse with no ocean breeze to cool me off. I walk along the trunk, the only clear path, till the remaining branches block me, and I descend, looking for the next fallen tree. And that’s how I move thru, going trunk to trunk, navigating the lattice of fallen wood.
All the earlier elements of the first part are repeated, minus losing my glasses, plus a few more falls. Each passage of the labyrinth comes blocked with salal that I must either force my way thru, or scrambled onto an adjacent log sheathed in velvet moss, till I stumble onto the highway. Sitting down, I shake out my clothes, unlace my boots and empty the twigs from my socks. I pull the leaves from my underwear and change my hat. I look back thru the forest to the open air where the cliff falls to the ocean, maybe about 80 meters away. It has taken me 40 minutes to get this far.
The same factors that kept the Indians out still seem to keep folks away that despite being within easy commute distance of 6 million people, the park is virtually uninhabited. During my five days within the mountain section, I would see one person more than a mile from a road. I would enjoy an external quiet that I had been lacking since Rainier.
However, it was only an external quiet. Internal quiet is something different. My mind is an active one. I won’t say keen or productive, but certainly buzzing.
It’s no wonder, given the amount of stimuli available to it, it should be so. I don’t know about a century, or a millennium, ago, but in my time it’s as though silence has come to be feared, and despite the hundred of precious proverbs extolling its worth we’re bent on its extinction. In public, even in places that I had hoped would have quiet – libraries, coffee shops, cathedrals – I find whirring machinery, conversation, or piped in music. I don’t particularly want to be listening to the Jackson Five as I write this, but the coffee shop I’m in insists on having it.
I talked about this incident with a park employee I met. I felt that a hundred years ago things were quieter not due to lack of machinery – or rather, not solely from lack of machinery – but lack of intruding sound. Most sound that was out there was put there by or for the listener – for work, for pleasure, for transportation, for thought. How much more meditative it would have been to be out in the woods without a song in my
“In John Muir’s time,” he said, and with park employees it always comes back to Muir, “people read more, sang more, and there were more musicians. People had stuff in their heads all the time.”
I don’t doubt that a century ago people were thinking, but I do suspect they had much less in their heads. Their brain activity wasn’t clogged with radio jingles and theme songs to cancelled television programs and the Jackson Five. The thoughts that were there were thoughts that they wanted to have. They were not intrusions coming to them via well-meaning, banal restaurateurs and civic centers. One could still walk thru a city park, say, and listen to the wind and not the piped-in marches of Sousa.
I became frustrated with myself that sitting at an alpine meadow, or watching bears enjoy a huckleberry bush, my mind was still chattering on, that in even such a charged natural environment I could have a Zeppelin song in my head, or think about a sentence I wanted to write. It was as if the accretion of outside sound had built up in a reservoir of noise that now leaked back to fill a vacuum. I couldn’t have silence even if I wanted it, even if I got there – and I had – for lack of having a quiet mind. All those sounds, conversations, jam sessions, questioning thoughts would come back that I may as well be listening to an audio player.
This is troubling. It means that I am doing something I always admonished my students never to do. I am just passing thru. I am distracted.
I think, come spring, I may again cross the park, this time from south to north, and perhaps then, in silence. From when I enter to when I leave, I will make neither words nor songs, but let the memory of noise fade and let sound enter me. To contribute towards me and to who I am becoming, and not project myself so much.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
The Enchanted Valley
There are so many things about Olympic National Park that I find particularly endearing. As it turns out, it is one of the quietest places in North America. The weather keeps the sunshine crowd away while limiting how far outside sound can travel, the trees grow more pounds of moss than foliage – damping vibration – and the tourists stick to Hurricane Ridge and the Sol Duck hot springs on the northern fringe of the park. No chance of driving across. In the Olympic mountains, there’s no thru road.
I wasn’t in what was considered the more scenic section of the park. I know this by the following: there was no road leading to the trail head, and my hike consisted of more bear than people sightings (four to one). One was so close I could have hit him with a spoonful of apple sauce. That would be the bear, I mean. The human I could have gauged a chunk out of with said spoon. Around Marmot Lake, I came around the bend of the trail, and there was the furry, black behind towards me, the attached face in a berry bush. This was a good thing, as it gave me the advantage of time enough to back around the bend and give my approach a second try. Yet on the repeat, when I came back, both behind and bear were gone. I stood there, lost-looking, confused how an animal that weighs more than a refrigerator could disappear without making noise enough for me to notice. Then he reappeared 60 meters distant, about 20 seconds later, and looked back at me, as though to say ‘well, you might as well help yourself now that you’ve ruined my appetite.’
I stayed at that campsite only a night, since I chose to make use of the unusually clear weather to keep hiking the following day. Looking back on it, I ought to have stayed on so long as the weather allowed. I was above four thousand feet, in a bowl of a cirque, peaks all around, and small alpine lakes where a herd of elk drank each morning and dusk. But clear weather being an unusual resource on the peninsula, I crested over the pass from where one river flows, to another, the Quinault. From O’Neill Pass I could look out the mouth of the Enchanted Valley, below the peaks of the Adams range, to a band of blue, the Pacific. My first sight of the ocean since leaving Crescent City, California on July 11th.
The Enchanted Valley, when you enter it, is well worthy of its name. The Quinault River has scraped out a flood plain of smooth grass and maple groves gone gold in the autumn, sunk down at the bottom of two ridges of evergreen ramparts rising to rock above the ribbon of jade. Waves of alder trees grow like bamboo by the shores, and dead stands of them within the water where the river sucked in its gut and swung it over a hundred meters. As the last light cast fire to the peaks, I had a small blaze of my own, and boiled my dinner in the popcorn can I’ve kept since walking out Duarte’s Tavern. (I do not think I would be overestimating it if I called it the most crucial piece of equipment I own.) The campsite at the Enchanted Valley I have to myself, and bears number three and four. They seem to stay on their side and I stay on mine. Nothing but the glowering beams of the ranger station to mess with the evening’s program: sunset fade to starlight accompanied by rushing water and occasional salmon.
The ranger station within the Enchanted Valley is a beautiful monstrosity. It had been built in 1930 when the land was national forest and not yet park. It is a pretty enough, 2 ½ storey structure of hewn logs and cedar shingles that had at first been an inn, then an Air Force station during the war, then open to hikers again until 1980, when it was closed for repairs till 1985. By then, for having lasted five decades it was deemed ‘historic’ and worthy of restoration. A private group took up the cause.
Here is a direct quotation from a poster on the side of the building explaining some of the history of the chalet:
"By 1931, the two and a half story [sic] Chalet was completed. For the next several years, the Enchanted Valley and its Chalet were a featured stopping point for hikers and horse caravans. It provided shelter, a bath, cooks, good beds, and guides for anyone willing to pay the small fees. The following were the typical rates charged at the time: meals $1.00, single beds $1.50, double beds $2.00."
[there follows history of its appropriation by the park, closing to the public, and then reopening in 1985]
"Thanks to the hard work of the Olympians [the hiking club that funded restoration] the Chalet is at least for now, in stable condition and able to be used as a seasonal ranger quarters and ranger station. In addition, one corner of the first floor is open to the public as an emergency shelter."
I am sure there are plenty of people in their fifties and beyond who would prefer the adjective ‘historic’ to ‘old’ but I think the thing should have been left to rot. It’s a big wooden box, with a tilted porch (no good to sleep on, I mutter), and shuttered windows, about as inviting to laze around as a house warming party at a storage unit. Of course, the park service feels otherwise. Ironically, postcards of the Enchanted Valley show the ‘historic Chalet’ and not a bit of river or mountain, both there long before anyone thought of sticking in a tourist trap.
What really sticks my craw is that the building still stands, but went from being thoroughly open to the public, to mostly open, to marginally open, and the park service makes it very clear what a grand favor they are doing in leaving a plywood cell on the first floor available ‘for emergency use only,’ as has been papered everywhere. The frequency with which these words are used for a fifteen by fifteen foot unfurnished shoebox of a room is about as endearing as being given a nickel by a man in a Bentley and cautioned on all the ways it can be miss-spent.
However, the park service has no way to enforce what happens at the station since it is only seasonally operated, and if I wanted I could have had a right toasty orgy. Of course it would have had limited attendance, what with scarcity of available invitees (by my tally, one), and the backdrop outside the door was far preferable for anything I could conceive of doing save developing negatives.
Ideally, it should never have been restored. Or rather, not for the use to which it has been put. Were it restored to its original purpose, well then that would be something else. The chalet is not on a road. It lies about 13 miles from the nearest access by anything wheeled. Which means to reach it you need feet of some kind, your own or a horse’s. (something else I like immensely about the park: you cannot thru-drive, but you can thru ride) The traffic to reach it would remain of the same kind, but would probably increase in number if it were reopened. That doesn’t need to be tested. Consider that the chalet opened during the Depression and didn’t close because of lack of funds, but because the air force commandeered the place in 1943. When it returned to park hands, though they did not build it, nor pay for reparations after closing it, the park is the party to have benefited from all the hoopla.
So why not reopen the place? I would gladly pay $1.50 for a bed. I might reconsider when that figure is adjusted for inflation ($19.30 in today’s dollars) but I’m stingy. There are plenty of individuals who would gladly spend that for not having the ground under their back for a night. Even more so when they just rode 13 miles on horse to get to the place. The idea has a rugged charm most Americans would find irresistible. We long for the romance of a frontier setting, and I guess that’s why the postcards show frontstage the chalet than the more deserving and photogenic landscape.
And considering those mountains, there would be city folks and college students, foreign tourists and widows alike dying to get jobs cooking meals or filling bathtubs in a place too far for even the noise of engines to reach. They would of course be fit and worthy folk, as there is no way in nor out but by the forest paths, that the chalet could never turn into anything like Yosemite Valley. There would be only non electric entertainment in the form of river, grass, bear, light, elk, and rain. There would be conversations about what is truly important – how far away the stars are, how big a fire is too big a fire, why trees talk so quietly, why didn’t the Indians get giairdia? There would perhaps be more kindness – and more listening – in all those to visit. If it were a house of people, talking, sleeping, living, breathing, laughing, sharing and honoring silence and place, then I would celebrate such a house. That is the sort of house that could be in a valley like this.
And for emergency purposes, a single room on the first floor can be left open to park rangers.
I wasn’t in what was considered the more scenic section of the park. I know this by the following: there was no road leading to the trail head, and my hike consisted of more bear than people sightings (four to one). One was so close I could have hit him with a spoonful of apple sauce. That would be the bear, I mean. The human I could have gauged a chunk out of with said spoon. Around Marmot Lake, I came around the bend of the trail, and there was the furry, black behind towards me, the attached face in a berry bush. This was a good thing, as it gave me the advantage of time enough to back around the bend and give my approach a second try. Yet on the repeat, when I came back, both behind and bear were gone. I stood there, lost-looking, confused how an animal that weighs more than a refrigerator could disappear without making noise enough for me to notice. Then he reappeared 60 meters distant, about 20 seconds later, and looked back at me, as though to say ‘well, you might as well help yourself now that you’ve ruined my appetite.’
I stayed at that campsite only a night, since I chose to make use of the unusually clear weather to keep hiking the following day. Looking back on it, I ought to have stayed on so long as the weather allowed. I was above four thousand feet, in a bowl of a cirque, peaks all around, and small alpine lakes where a herd of elk drank each morning and dusk. But clear weather being an unusual resource on the peninsula, I crested over the pass from where one river flows, to another, the Quinault. From O’Neill Pass I could look out the mouth of the Enchanted Valley, below the peaks of the Adams range, to a band of blue, the Pacific. My first sight of the ocean since leaving Crescent City, California on July 11th.
The Enchanted Valley, when you enter it, is well worthy of its name. The Quinault River has scraped out a flood plain of smooth grass and maple groves gone gold in the autumn, sunk down at the bottom of two ridges of evergreen ramparts rising to rock above the ribbon of jade. Waves of alder trees grow like bamboo by the shores, and dead stands of them within the water where the river sucked in its gut and swung it over a hundred meters. As the last light cast fire to the peaks, I had a small blaze of my own, and boiled my dinner in the popcorn can I’ve kept since walking out Duarte’s Tavern. (I do not think I would be overestimating it if I called it the most crucial piece of equipment I own.) The campsite at the Enchanted Valley I have to myself, and bears number three and four. They seem to stay on their side and I stay on mine. Nothing but the glowering beams of the ranger station to mess with the evening’s program: sunset fade to starlight accompanied by rushing water and occasional salmon.
The ranger station within the Enchanted Valley is a beautiful monstrosity. It had been built in 1930 when the land was national forest and not yet park. It is a pretty enough, 2 ½ storey structure of hewn logs and cedar shingles that had at first been an inn, then an Air Force station during the war, then open to hikers again until 1980, when it was closed for repairs till 1985. By then, for having lasted five decades it was deemed ‘historic’ and worthy of restoration. A private group took up the cause.
Here is a direct quotation from a poster on the side of the building explaining some of the history of the chalet:
"By 1931, the two and a half story [sic] Chalet was completed. For the next several years, the Enchanted Valley and its Chalet were a featured stopping point for hikers and horse caravans. It provided shelter, a bath, cooks, good beds, and guides for anyone willing to pay the small fees. The following were the typical rates charged at the time: meals $1.00, single beds $1.50, double beds $2.00."
[there follows history of its appropriation by the park, closing to the public, and then reopening in 1985]
"Thanks to the hard work of the Olympians [the hiking club that funded restoration] the Chalet is at least for now, in stable condition and able to be used as a seasonal ranger quarters and ranger station. In addition, one corner of the first floor is open to the public as an emergency shelter."
I am sure there are plenty of people in their fifties and beyond who would prefer the adjective ‘historic’ to ‘old’ but I think the thing should have been left to rot. It’s a big wooden box, with a tilted porch (no good to sleep on, I mutter), and shuttered windows, about as inviting to laze around as a house warming party at a storage unit. Of course, the park service feels otherwise. Ironically, postcards of the Enchanted Valley show the ‘historic Chalet’ and not a bit of river or mountain, both there long before anyone thought of sticking in a tourist trap.
What really sticks my craw is that the building still stands, but went from being thoroughly open to the public, to mostly open, to marginally open, and the park service makes it very clear what a grand favor they are doing in leaving a plywood cell on the first floor available ‘for emergency use only,’ as has been papered everywhere. The frequency with which these words are used for a fifteen by fifteen foot unfurnished shoebox of a room is about as endearing as being given a nickel by a man in a Bentley and cautioned on all the ways it can be miss-spent.
However, the park service has no way to enforce what happens at the station since it is only seasonally operated, and if I wanted I could have had a right toasty orgy. Of course it would have had limited attendance, what with scarcity of available invitees (by my tally, one), and the backdrop outside the door was far preferable for anything I could conceive of doing save developing negatives.
Ideally, it should never have been restored. Or rather, not for the use to which it has been put. Were it restored to its original purpose, well then that would be something else. The chalet is not on a road. It lies about 13 miles from the nearest access by anything wheeled. Which means to reach it you need feet of some kind, your own or a horse’s. (something else I like immensely about the park: you cannot thru-drive, but you can thru ride) The traffic to reach it would remain of the same kind, but would probably increase in number if it were reopened. That doesn’t need to be tested. Consider that the chalet opened during the Depression and didn’t close because of lack of funds, but because the air force commandeered the place in 1943. When it returned to park hands, though they did not build it, nor pay for reparations after closing it, the park is the party to have benefited from all the hoopla.
So why not reopen the place? I would gladly pay $1.50 for a bed. I might reconsider when that figure is adjusted for inflation ($19.30 in today’s dollars) but I’m stingy. There are plenty of individuals who would gladly spend that for not having the ground under their back for a night. Even more so when they just rode 13 miles on horse to get to the place. The idea has a rugged charm most Americans would find irresistible. We long for the romance of a frontier setting, and I guess that’s why the postcards show frontstage the chalet than the more deserving and photogenic landscape.
And considering those mountains, there would be city folks and college students, foreign tourists and widows alike dying to get jobs cooking meals or filling bathtubs in a place too far for even the noise of engines to reach. They would of course be fit and worthy folk, as there is no way in nor out but by the forest paths, that the chalet could never turn into anything like Yosemite Valley. There would be only non electric entertainment in the form of river, grass, bear, light, elk, and rain. There would be conversations about what is truly important – how far away the stars are, how big a fire is too big a fire, why trees talk so quietly, why didn’t the Indians get giairdia? There would perhaps be more kindness – and more listening – in all those to visit. If it were a house of people, talking, sleeping, living, breathing, laughing, sharing and honoring silence and place, then I would celebrate such a house. That is the sort of house that could be in a valley like this.
And for emergency purposes, a single room on the first floor can be left open to park rangers.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
A word on salmon
That word is delicious. Another good one would be tenacious. Resilient too might fit. And depending on your viewpoint, moribund. There is no single word that I could apply to best sum my thoughts, other than mandalic, which I don’t believe is an entry to be found in the Webster’s dictionary. What I mean though, is an object that is not thoughtful or inspiring in itself but enkindles those things in the beholder, to make the witness pause in thought, to be inspired not that the item exists, but how. Perhaps even to make seers inspiring themselves, as the lines, colors, and brevity of a sand mandala transcend the painted body to become together an item of wonder. And so, mandalic I will say, though I recognize the word could be applied to all of nature, from atoms to elephants and geodes to geoducks and granite peaks and geese in flight.
A salmon swimming upstream is a dead fish. In fact, though they are spawned, hatch, and develop to fingerlings in fresh water, they will only eat as adults in salt water. Once they reenter the stream where they were hatched, there’s no return ticket. The death mechanism is so strong that they begin to decompose long before they’ve even shed their eggs, before they’ve even had a chance to starve to death.
Their bodies of course had greatly physically changed at sea for the preparation of the return, bulked up to sleeves of solid muscle before the autumn rains came to flood their home stream. An adult salmon has the diet of a body builder – pure protein – and the physique to match. They are voracious feeders. They can’t afford the slightest bit of food that was not alive and wriggling before it went into their gut. More muscle means greater ability to dodge all the obstacles of a nomadic aquatic existence - herons, ospreys, orcas, sea lions, other salmon, fishing vessels, a thousand mile migration, locating the home stream, leaping sunken logs, waterfalls, bears, spear fishers, fish ladders, dams – before breeding and dying. And of course, during those last few, they are only feeding off reserves, like cars running off fumes. Or more accurately, like steamships ripping out the railings, benches, stacks, ribbing, passengers to keep the vessel going long enough so the engine can quit and sink in home port. And yet there’s still plenty left to a dead salmon. Look at a salmon that’s had a chance to die a natural death, and it’s like looking at a prostrate athlete. Live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse.
This particular stream fed into one of the fish hatcheries run by the state of Washington. The state maintains 51 hatcheries, raising 16 species of fish – all game fish, not all native – and 5 species of salmon. They are usually set up where there is a fresh supply of clean, cold, well-oxygenated water. If the hatchery is raising any of the salmonids – that is salmon or trout – then it is always located by one, typically a stream the fish have historically frequented. The hatchery is set up with two dams bookending a large, rectangular pool. As the salmon swam up the fish ladder at the downstream dam, they enter the pool to find a gate blocking their passage at the upstream dam. They have entered the dark alleyway of the fish and wildlife service, which means if they want to reproduce, they’d better get randy here and drop their eggs. Once the fish get their funereal orgy done – and that’s honestly what it looks like, a zombie orgy – their bodies are scooped out – supposedly to prevent the spread of disease – and the eggs are vacuumed up to a holding tank to be meted out in growing beds where they will spend 6 months to a year growing big enough to get out to the ocean themselves.
It’s a clever system. Knowing the homing mechanism of an adult ensures that it will return to the same waters where it was an egg, the fish and wildlife service has exploited the drive to increase the number of successful fertilizations, hatchings, and formative stages from 10% in wild fish to better than 50%. The young, raised in tanks of water taken from this stream, when released to the wild will return to this same stream to breed and replenish the supply of salmon once more. A self-refueling, closed-loop. The benefit is obvious, more salmon.
More salmon means more food for everything that eats salmon. It means too more ocean nutrients that come to upstream ecosystems. So beneficiaries of the hatchery system include everything from orcas to ospreys and fishermen to alder trees. Too, fish and wildlife knows that fish need pure, clean water to thrive, and Washington has some impressive history regarding water purity, though not necessarily accessibility. Not bad for a porpoise and a woodland to get the big end of the stick thanks to politics and stewardship.
However, something about this particular hatchery rubbed me the wrong way. A net hung about ten feet off the water and a fence ran around the border, I suppose to detract people from gathering any, though by this point their meat is turning rank. You can even smell the stench from above water. This is the release of ocean nutrients that will feed bacteria that will feed amphipods and other freshwater invertebrates that will feed young fry. Smells about like you would expect a vat of rotting fish-water would smell. But that’s not what bothered me. That would happen anyway. Nor did the net or the fence get me in a huff. Those actually are the removal of obstacles, one less thing for salmon to worry about. What got me was the gate at the upstream end.
A barred gate separated the tank from the vacuum machine – at rest I suppose – and then about a 16 foot long run of shallow water – maybe 15 inches – to another gate of the same construction and then the stream, natural, beyond. So clean water is flowing freely from upstream, releasing all the sweet odor of water space where no fish has yet met its end in orgasm, around the raving the mouths of desperate fish. Standing by the hatchery pool, I would hear the boil of too many fish in too small a place accented by the thunk of scales on steel as they rammed from underwater to keep going, everything in the body saying ‘not here.’ Again the sound would be shot with an excited clang as an anxious, not dead-enough individual leaps to clear the gate and body slams the bars, not having jumped quite high enough.
Sometimes, though, they do. There to be confronted with a run of water too short and too shallow to clear the final gate. A dozen cadaverous fish from the thousand in the pool behind now waited to die behind the bars. These were the toughest, most resolute, most daring fish that after dealing with all the other things that mean death to the migratory on the way out and then all over again in the reverse order on the way back, plus a few new ones, were defeated in the final measure by a 4 by 6 foot section of grate, denied the final yards, or inches, to the final - and only - resting place.
I want to be clear. In this matter I am not an environmentalist. I am a sentimentalist. Fish and wildlife insists that hatcheries are a necessity to maintain the salmon population, and they have certainly done good things. Clean water, healthy marine mammal populations in the sound, seals as far south as Olympia, orcas off Seattle’s warves, and Washington, unlike California, still has both a commercial and a sport fishing industry. (Though I would point out that the position of supposed need is only due to the recklessness at which fish have been harvested in the past and how they have traditionally had their habitat treated – a telling point, more than 40% of historical salmon habitat in Washington is still inaccessible due to dams lacking fish ladders.) And yes, if the goal of the species is to procreate, then the hatcheries are the best ally the salmon ever had as fertility and juvenile mortality rates go.
But dammit, a fish that can swim thru thousands of miles of ocean and then as far as thru 900 miles of freshwater while climbing as high as 7000 feet up to the creeks of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho has a greater ration of my respect. I took my boots off and waded into the hatchery creek, took out the gate, and lay it on the grass. The last dozen fish could find their graves further upstream. I am not being thrifty here, or civic minded, or even "green." A fish that determined deserves to die where it wants.
A salmon swimming upstream is a dead fish. In fact, though they are spawned, hatch, and develop to fingerlings in fresh water, they will only eat as adults in salt water. Once they reenter the stream where they were hatched, there’s no return ticket. The death mechanism is so strong that they begin to decompose long before they’ve even shed their eggs, before they’ve even had a chance to starve to death.
Their bodies of course had greatly physically changed at sea for the preparation of the return, bulked up to sleeves of solid muscle before the autumn rains came to flood their home stream. An adult salmon has the diet of a body builder – pure protein – and the physique to match. They are voracious feeders. They can’t afford the slightest bit of food that was not alive and wriggling before it went into their gut. More muscle means greater ability to dodge all the obstacles of a nomadic aquatic existence - herons, ospreys, orcas, sea lions, other salmon, fishing vessels, a thousand mile migration, locating the home stream, leaping sunken logs, waterfalls, bears, spear fishers, fish ladders, dams – before breeding and dying. And of course, during those last few, they are only feeding off reserves, like cars running off fumes. Or more accurately, like steamships ripping out the railings, benches, stacks, ribbing, passengers to keep the vessel going long enough so the engine can quit and sink in home port. And yet there’s still plenty left to a dead salmon. Look at a salmon that’s had a chance to die a natural death, and it’s like looking at a prostrate athlete. Live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse.
This particular stream fed into one of the fish hatcheries run by the state of Washington. The state maintains 51 hatcheries, raising 16 species of fish – all game fish, not all native – and 5 species of salmon. They are usually set up where there is a fresh supply of clean, cold, well-oxygenated water. If the hatchery is raising any of the salmonids – that is salmon or trout – then it is always located by one, typically a stream the fish have historically frequented. The hatchery is set up with two dams bookending a large, rectangular pool. As the salmon swam up the fish ladder at the downstream dam, they enter the pool to find a gate blocking their passage at the upstream dam. They have entered the dark alleyway of the fish and wildlife service, which means if they want to reproduce, they’d better get randy here and drop their eggs. Once the fish get their funereal orgy done – and that’s honestly what it looks like, a zombie orgy – their bodies are scooped out – supposedly to prevent the spread of disease – and the eggs are vacuumed up to a holding tank to be meted out in growing beds where they will spend 6 months to a year growing big enough to get out to the ocean themselves.
It’s a clever system. Knowing the homing mechanism of an adult ensures that it will return to the same waters where it was an egg, the fish and wildlife service has exploited the drive to increase the number of successful fertilizations, hatchings, and formative stages from 10% in wild fish to better than 50%. The young, raised in tanks of water taken from this stream, when released to the wild will return to this same stream to breed and replenish the supply of salmon once more. A self-refueling, closed-loop. The benefit is obvious, more salmon.
More salmon means more food for everything that eats salmon. It means too more ocean nutrients that come to upstream ecosystems. So beneficiaries of the hatchery system include everything from orcas to ospreys and fishermen to alder trees. Too, fish and wildlife knows that fish need pure, clean water to thrive, and Washington has some impressive history regarding water purity, though not necessarily accessibility. Not bad for a porpoise and a woodland to get the big end of the stick thanks to politics and stewardship.
However, something about this particular hatchery rubbed me the wrong way. A net hung about ten feet off the water and a fence ran around the border, I suppose to detract people from gathering any, though by this point their meat is turning rank. You can even smell the stench from above water. This is the release of ocean nutrients that will feed bacteria that will feed amphipods and other freshwater invertebrates that will feed young fry. Smells about like you would expect a vat of rotting fish-water would smell. But that’s not what bothered me. That would happen anyway. Nor did the net or the fence get me in a huff. Those actually are the removal of obstacles, one less thing for salmon to worry about. What got me was the gate at the upstream end.
A barred gate separated the tank from the vacuum machine – at rest I suppose – and then about a 16 foot long run of shallow water – maybe 15 inches – to another gate of the same construction and then the stream, natural, beyond. So clean water is flowing freely from upstream, releasing all the sweet odor of water space where no fish has yet met its end in orgasm, around the raving the mouths of desperate fish. Standing by the hatchery pool, I would hear the boil of too many fish in too small a place accented by the thunk of scales on steel as they rammed from underwater to keep going, everything in the body saying ‘not here.’ Again the sound would be shot with an excited clang as an anxious, not dead-enough individual leaps to clear the gate and body slams the bars, not having jumped quite high enough.
Sometimes, though, they do. There to be confronted with a run of water too short and too shallow to clear the final gate. A dozen cadaverous fish from the thousand in the pool behind now waited to die behind the bars. These were the toughest, most resolute, most daring fish that after dealing with all the other things that mean death to the migratory on the way out and then all over again in the reverse order on the way back, plus a few new ones, were defeated in the final measure by a 4 by 6 foot section of grate, denied the final yards, or inches, to the final - and only - resting place.
I want to be clear. In this matter I am not an environmentalist. I am a sentimentalist. Fish and wildlife insists that hatcheries are a necessity to maintain the salmon population, and they have certainly done good things. Clean water, healthy marine mammal populations in the sound, seals as far south as Olympia, orcas off Seattle’s warves, and Washington, unlike California, still has both a commercial and a sport fishing industry. (Though I would point out that the position of supposed need is only due to the recklessness at which fish have been harvested in the past and how they have traditionally had their habitat treated – a telling point, more than 40% of historical salmon habitat in Washington is still inaccessible due to dams lacking fish ladders.) And yes, if the goal of the species is to procreate, then the hatcheries are the best ally the salmon ever had as fertility and juvenile mortality rates go.
But dammit, a fish that can swim thru thousands of miles of ocean and then as far as thru 900 miles of freshwater while climbing as high as 7000 feet up to the creeks of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho has a greater ration of my respect. I took my boots off and waded into the hatchery creek, took out the gate, and lay it on the grass. The last dozen fish could find their graves further upstream. I am not being thrifty here, or civic minded, or even "green." A fish that determined deserves to die where it wants.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Interaction
I never told about what happened between Portland and my gut issues. Here I will.
Portland is a fine city, a good place to be young and progressive and without a car. I remember being struck the first time I was there that not only were thete bicycle lanes available, but people used them. When I borrowed a bicycle myself, I would often be stopped at a traffic light with five other cyclists. I rolled for a few days, instead of walking, going to Powell's, Washington Park - the rose garden, the Shakespeare garden - farmer's market, Pioneer Square, and the Willamette, where I swam daily, though not across this time. Nice as it was, however, I wanted to be drinking water that had come running off a glacier and picking wild plants to make my tea.
A week was just enough city time to stock up for the three weeks it would take me to get to Olympia. On the way I would climb Mt St Helens and gaze into the crater, counting still smoking fumaroles. I would spend five days in the park, much of which would be spent on the Lewin trail around the mountain and the Mt Margaret backcountry. Views of Mt Hood which had loured over my path since Silverton gave over to Adams and then Rainier as St Helens came between. It was all alpine passes over boulders burnt black, deep ravines of glacial rivers, and raked gorges where the bear grass was only starting to grow back three decades after the eruption. The fantastic country felt strange and great, open and obvious in a land otherwise soaked in timber. The pummice desert of the plains of Abraham was more Nevada than Washington, only some scarce lupines among the bleached trunks of blasted spruce.
I took the trail to Spirit Lake. The slide down is choked in thimbleberry and salmonberry and alder, but the shores are mostly open, save for the logs that still float on it after an 800 foot high wave came off the lake as a result of the blast and washed the hills bare. From there, I went up and around to the Mt Margaret backcountry. The ledges are narrow and the paths long, but the scenery makes one question the aesthetics of modern choices, from architecture to recreation. That is to say, when there exists something so beautiful so abundant and so free - a backcountry pass costs exactly nothing - you would think people would be scrambling all over it. Yet in 23 miles of trail I saw 18 people. 2 of those were further than a mile from the road. I saw more elk than that.
In a way this pleased me. I had the mountains and lakes mostly to myself. I'm sure it made the elk happy too. However, it just got me thinking on how nature is experienced here - via postcards and documentaries and scenic highways. This isn't news to anyone. 93% of the 3.7 million people who visit Yosemite National Park never leave the valley floor, an area of 18 square kilometers in a park 3,080 km square. And even then, they're mainly on the thin ribband of road and the giftshop at Curry Village. So much less is the traffic at St Helens, and so much less the people who leave the roads. Those who do are ones like myself, determined to get some wilderness experience - spiritual food, if you will - or like the two mountain biking women in their 60s, who had abs you could bust walnuts on. That is to say it seems the trend of folks in the woods are of two groups, those who read Whitman and Carson and those who have subscriptions to Outside magazine and have the Patagonia outlet on speed dial.
I don't mean to offend the adrenaline community. I am glad for them. We have good times, albeit frustrating when I ask them about the flora growing from the cracks of a rockface they're climbing and they try talking to me about v5.7 climbs, whatever those are. But what I want to point out is that there used to be a lot more folks in the woods. There used to be families going on camping trips, and birdwatchers, and berry pickers, and kids smoking dope and building fires and doing stuff in the bushes. I don't see most of those anymore, and from what I understand, even when I started getting more and more into the outdoors, the trend was already on the decline. Nature is often seen as too hostile to family friendly activities, or too far away, though kids love the wonder of crawling thru leaves, gazing at stars, setting marshmallows afire, the possibility of getting eaten by bears miles away from home. The distance, both physically and mentally, becomes the treasure. Most birdwatchers I understand watch their backyard feeders and keep their fingers crossed for the life bird they've been waiting for. The berry pickers go to safeway. My one hope is the dope smoking, fornicating, pyromaniac teenagers have gotten far more clever than I ever was and they're still out there, having visions and being shameless as is their right. "Nature is so amazing," one such youth once confided to me, "when you're stoned."
For someone who enjoys solitude, this may seem a paradox, but I am for more people in the woods. Or the desert. Or the ocean. Or volcano. Or whatever wild space is available to them. Nature is completely democratic, ever present, open every day, one of the best ideas the US never came up with. It is meant to be shared. Let there be land where one can walk as the ancestors did, and may you go there.
Notice I wrote walk. Edward Abbey came up with many fine suggestions to the national park service, which you are welcome to find for yourself in his book Desert Solitaire, not least among them was his suggestion to make all parks roadless. I would agree that folks should be outside of a vehicle more. Driving thru a park does not count as a nature experience despite the scenery come thru the windows any more than going thru a drive thru take-out counts as dining. This is part of a disturbing trend I have heard called encapsulation. The idea is that modern humans live essentially on lock down - inside one box, then rolling on a wheeled box to enter another box to look at a box for most of the day and order boxes. We live and transport ourselves as though we were hazardous waste, sensitive to daylight, fearful of the destruction we could wreak upon the countryside if we leaked out.
To be fair, our track record is not great on this count. Recent events in the gulf of Mexico are sober reminder indeed. But unlike the national park service reminds - leave no trace, stay on trail, camp only in designated sites - for most of human history we've had good interaction with nature. Like any relationship, one based upon respect and reverence lasts longer than one of lazy reliance, or worse, indifference. I have seen many people treat their cars as space stations and they astronauts reluctant to leave the assured safety of it's fragrant interior. When they go on their hikes they leave as outfitted for a space walk, all water, food, clothing, entertainment brought along. The sole demands on the world to provide pleasant backdrop and oxygen.
The national park service definitely encourages this so as to present what a world might be like without human intervention. If such was the stated goal, I might be all in favor for the gradual phasing out of humans in all ecosystems. However, seeing as that is likely to be unpopular with the less radical, I think such an approach treats nature as a fragile butterfly in a bell jar that we must protect lest it shatter. That's a load oh hokum, but some - frightfully, I fear, most - consider it so. The truth is that nature is never so precious. Despite the number of trees that have been cut since I wrote this, the number of beaches polluted, and the number of endangered species eaten, nature is in crouch, bemusedly waiting for the moment to beat us senseless, or more likely let us do it ourselves. The approach of being completely handsoff I find just as ludicrous as complete conquest. Should I not gather twigs for cook wood but use a liquid fuel that came from a process that fouls the air and incites wars and if it leaks can poison groundwater for decades? Should I not pick a plant and eat it as the deer do but pack in a salad that came from labor exploitation and had to be trucked a thousand miles?
I am for more interaction with nature not just as background or gymnasium or trophy but as pharmacy and market and church. There are of course limitations. I do not wish to be a hunter gatherer. Or rather, not solely a hunter gatherer. I like pie. And pineapples too, come to that. And asking everyone to go out and gather significant portions of their groceries from the woods and the ocean would place far too great a strain. But having portions from time to time - eating locally, no? - destroys the fallacy that food comes from the grocers, medecine from the doctor as well as giving the small dose of machismo that it is possible to live off the land that so many Americans crave. But namely, it let's one participate in the ecosystem and not just pass thru it, or regard it as pretty, or untouchable.
There are some easy ways of doing this. Get a guide book, get lost, drink the water, get dyssentery, feed mosquitoes, eat some berries, catch a salmon, chew on a twig, brew wild tea, lap up dew, lick tree sap. Get eaten by a bear, if need be. It will prove you are not immune to the rhythms of this world but get you again in fliw with them. Otherwise, handsoff, you might as well be an observant scientist of an alien civilization.
Portland is a fine city, a good place to be young and progressive and without a car. I remember being struck the first time I was there that not only were thete bicycle lanes available, but people used them. When I borrowed a bicycle myself, I would often be stopped at a traffic light with five other cyclists. I rolled for a few days, instead of walking, going to Powell's, Washington Park - the rose garden, the Shakespeare garden - farmer's market, Pioneer Square, and the Willamette, where I swam daily, though not across this time. Nice as it was, however, I wanted to be drinking water that had come running off a glacier and picking wild plants to make my tea.
A week was just enough city time to stock up for the three weeks it would take me to get to Olympia. On the way I would climb Mt St Helens and gaze into the crater, counting still smoking fumaroles. I would spend five days in the park, much of which would be spent on the Lewin trail around the mountain and the Mt Margaret backcountry. Views of Mt Hood which had loured over my path since Silverton gave over to Adams and then Rainier as St Helens came between. It was all alpine passes over boulders burnt black, deep ravines of glacial rivers, and raked gorges where the bear grass was only starting to grow back three decades after the eruption. The fantastic country felt strange and great, open and obvious in a land otherwise soaked in timber. The pummice desert of the plains of Abraham was more Nevada than Washington, only some scarce lupines among the bleached trunks of blasted spruce.
I took the trail to Spirit Lake. The slide down is choked in thimbleberry and salmonberry and alder, but the shores are mostly open, save for the logs that still float on it after an 800 foot high wave came off the lake as a result of the blast and washed the hills bare. From there, I went up and around to the Mt Margaret backcountry. The ledges are narrow and the paths long, but the scenery makes one question the aesthetics of modern choices, from architecture to recreation. That is to say, when there exists something so beautiful so abundant and so free - a backcountry pass costs exactly nothing - you would think people would be scrambling all over it. Yet in 23 miles of trail I saw 18 people. 2 of those were further than a mile from the road. I saw more elk than that.
In a way this pleased me. I had the mountains and lakes mostly to myself. I'm sure it made the elk happy too. However, it just got me thinking on how nature is experienced here - via postcards and documentaries and scenic highways. This isn't news to anyone. 93% of the 3.7 million people who visit Yosemite National Park never leave the valley floor, an area of 18 square kilometers in a park 3,080 km square. And even then, they're mainly on the thin ribband of road and the giftshop at Curry Village. So much less is the traffic at St Helens, and so much less the people who leave the roads. Those who do are ones like myself, determined to get some wilderness experience - spiritual food, if you will - or like the two mountain biking women in their 60s, who had abs you could bust walnuts on. That is to say it seems the trend of folks in the woods are of two groups, those who read Whitman and Carson and those who have subscriptions to Outside magazine and have the Patagonia outlet on speed dial.
I don't mean to offend the adrenaline community. I am glad for them. We have good times, albeit frustrating when I ask them about the flora growing from the cracks of a rockface they're climbing and they try talking to me about v5.7 climbs, whatever those are. But what I want to point out is that there used to be a lot more folks in the woods. There used to be families going on camping trips, and birdwatchers, and berry pickers, and kids smoking dope and building fires and doing stuff in the bushes. I don't see most of those anymore, and from what I understand, even when I started getting more and more into the outdoors, the trend was already on the decline. Nature is often seen as too hostile to family friendly activities, or too far away, though kids love the wonder of crawling thru leaves, gazing at stars, setting marshmallows afire, the possibility of getting eaten by bears miles away from home. The distance, both physically and mentally, becomes the treasure. Most birdwatchers I understand watch their backyard feeders and keep their fingers crossed for the life bird they've been waiting for. The berry pickers go to safeway. My one hope is the dope smoking, fornicating, pyromaniac teenagers have gotten far more clever than I ever was and they're still out there, having visions and being shameless as is their right. "Nature is so amazing," one such youth once confided to me, "when you're stoned."
For someone who enjoys solitude, this may seem a paradox, but I am for more people in the woods. Or the desert. Or the ocean. Or volcano. Or whatever wild space is available to them. Nature is completely democratic, ever present, open every day, one of the best ideas the US never came up with. It is meant to be shared. Let there be land where one can walk as the ancestors did, and may you go there.
Notice I wrote walk. Edward Abbey came up with many fine suggestions to the national park service, which you are welcome to find for yourself in his book Desert Solitaire, not least among them was his suggestion to make all parks roadless. I would agree that folks should be outside of a vehicle more. Driving thru a park does not count as a nature experience despite the scenery come thru the windows any more than going thru a drive thru take-out counts as dining. This is part of a disturbing trend I have heard called encapsulation. The idea is that modern humans live essentially on lock down - inside one box, then rolling on a wheeled box to enter another box to look at a box for most of the day and order boxes. We live and transport ourselves as though we were hazardous waste, sensitive to daylight, fearful of the destruction we could wreak upon the countryside if we leaked out.
To be fair, our track record is not great on this count. Recent events in the gulf of Mexico are sober reminder indeed. But unlike the national park service reminds - leave no trace, stay on trail, camp only in designated sites - for most of human history we've had good interaction with nature. Like any relationship, one based upon respect and reverence lasts longer than one of lazy reliance, or worse, indifference. I have seen many people treat their cars as space stations and they astronauts reluctant to leave the assured safety of it's fragrant interior. When they go on their hikes they leave as outfitted for a space walk, all water, food, clothing, entertainment brought along. The sole demands on the world to provide pleasant backdrop and oxygen.
The national park service definitely encourages this so as to present what a world might be like without human intervention. If such was the stated goal, I might be all in favor for the gradual phasing out of humans in all ecosystems. However, seeing as that is likely to be unpopular with the less radical, I think such an approach treats nature as a fragile butterfly in a bell jar that we must protect lest it shatter. That's a load oh hokum, but some - frightfully, I fear, most - consider it so. The truth is that nature is never so precious. Despite the number of trees that have been cut since I wrote this, the number of beaches polluted, and the number of endangered species eaten, nature is in crouch, bemusedly waiting for the moment to beat us senseless, or more likely let us do it ourselves. The approach of being completely handsoff I find just as ludicrous as complete conquest. Should I not gather twigs for cook wood but use a liquid fuel that came from a process that fouls the air and incites wars and if it leaks can poison groundwater for decades? Should I not pick a plant and eat it as the deer do but pack in a salad that came from labor exploitation and had to be trucked a thousand miles?
I am for more interaction with nature not just as background or gymnasium or trophy but as pharmacy and market and church. There are of course limitations. I do not wish to be a hunter gatherer. Or rather, not solely a hunter gatherer. I like pie. And pineapples too, come to that. And asking everyone to go out and gather significant portions of their groceries from the woods and the ocean would place far too great a strain. But having portions from time to time - eating locally, no? - destroys the fallacy that food comes from the grocers, medecine from the doctor as well as giving the small dose of machismo that it is possible to live off the land that so many Americans crave. But namely, it let's one participate in the ecosystem and not just pass thru it, or regard it as pretty, or untouchable.
There are some easy ways of doing this. Get a guide book, get lost, drink the water, get dyssentery, feed mosquitoes, eat some berries, catch a salmon, chew on a twig, brew wild tea, lap up dew, lick tree sap. Get eaten by a bear, if need be. It will prove you are not immune to the rhythms of this world but get you again in fliw with them. Otherwise, handsoff, you might as well be an observant scientist of an alien civilization.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
The ecosystem within
After Mt St Helens and Rainier, I'm dry docked in Olympia with what is likely the result of drinking untreated water. I think it was Euell Gibbons who had written that he never bothered to treat backcountry water since it was man and not nature that made things impure. I figured to follow the same advice - the Indians didn't get giardia, afterall - and drank deeply and fully from glacial melt streams, springs, and rain fed rills. Always treat backcountry sources I had been told, but why if, as Euell said, there was no industry or settlement to fear? I wasn't going to get cholera, unless some particularly bad-off climber had expired on the snowpack and rotted down. I was more worried about stubbing toes or getting bitten by a mouse.
Now three days into stomach pains and nausea I'm thinking over which source, if any, was the culprit. Of them all - and there have been many since I started walking in May - the most likely are the most recent. Single-celled intestinal parasites typically have an incubation period of a week. Though in some cases cysts have lain dormant for months or even years in their hosts.
For those most celebrated single cell invaders - amoebic dyssentery, giardia - the commonly prescribed treatment in the US is several weeks of a powerful antibiotic typically given to patients in the advanced stages of syphilis. That is to say that it cleans out anything nonhuman in you, such as all those helpful bacteria in your small intestine that enable you to properly digest your food, have regular bowel movements, and fart. Patients during treatment typically get diarhea, in addition to intense stomach cramps, and loss of appetite, though no longer from the microorganism but the medications. Though presently I do have what some would call a crook stomach and I'm not very hungry and have had to use a bathroom with rather greater frequency and rather less enthusiasm than I should like, the symptoms I have at present aren't nearly as bad as the cure. And in retrospect, not very different from other post-backcountry excursion states of being. I had plenty of pains when I worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club and hiking in California and in Europe. And a fair number of people recover from such infections without medical intervention, typically in a week to two weeks.
But what's really fascinating is that when the little guys now colonizing a fresh digestive system feel like they're ready for a break, they just burrow into the intestinal lining and encyst themselves into dormancy. Which means that during their hibernation, you can feel perfectly healthy, indeed, BE healthy, while they sleep. Then, when they feel it is right, months or even years later, they reactivate. So if I've had waterborne sickness in the past and gotten over it, it either means I've got a good enough gut to kill those suckers after a few days, or, the buggers never left and like unwelcome relations like to drop in every now and again, typically after vacations.
I salute that kind of tenacity. But whatever is in me I still want gone. Turns out garlic is a fairly potent medecine against intestinal infection. And as my gut has encountered it before, there shouldn't be any hellish cramps or rectal fauceting brought on my this treatment. I have so far eaten four cloves today, and won't sleep till I've had four more. I'm going to be eating garlic like popcorn for the next week.
And tomorrow, I'm going to a doctor.
And then I'm going to climb Mt Olympus.
Now three days into stomach pains and nausea I'm thinking over which source, if any, was the culprit. Of them all - and there have been many since I started walking in May - the most likely are the most recent. Single-celled intestinal parasites typically have an incubation period of a week. Though in some cases cysts have lain dormant for months or even years in their hosts.
For those most celebrated single cell invaders - amoebic dyssentery, giardia - the commonly prescribed treatment in the US is several weeks of a powerful antibiotic typically given to patients in the advanced stages of syphilis. That is to say that it cleans out anything nonhuman in you, such as all those helpful bacteria in your small intestine that enable you to properly digest your food, have regular bowel movements, and fart. Patients during treatment typically get diarhea, in addition to intense stomach cramps, and loss of appetite, though no longer from the microorganism but the medications. Though presently I do have what some would call a crook stomach and I'm not very hungry and have had to use a bathroom with rather greater frequency and rather less enthusiasm than I should like, the symptoms I have at present aren't nearly as bad as the cure. And in retrospect, not very different from other post-backcountry excursion states of being. I had plenty of pains when I worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club and hiking in California and in Europe. And a fair number of people recover from such infections without medical intervention, typically in a week to two weeks.
But what's really fascinating is that when the little guys now colonizing a fresh digestive system feel like they're ready for a break, they just burrow into the intestinal lining and encyst themselves into dormancy. Which means that during their hibernation, you can feel perfectly healthy, indeed, BE healthy, while they sleep. Then, when they feel it is right, months or even years later, they reactivate. So if I've had waterborne sickness in the past and gotten over it, it either means I've got a good enough gut to kill those suckers after a few days, or, the buggers never left and like unwelcome relations like to drop in every now and again, typically after vacations.
I salute that kind of tenacity. But whatever is in me I still want gone. Turns out garlic is a fairly potent medecine against intestinal infection. And as my gut has encountered it before, there shouldn't be any hellish cramps or rectal fauceting brought on my this treatment. I have so far eaten four cloves today, and won't sleep till I've had four more. I'm going to be eating garlic like popcorn for the next week.
And tomorrow, I'm going to a doctor.
And then I'm going to climb Mt Olympus.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)