Desert home

    Photo Credit: Tom Talbott, Jr.

The swarm of bees is still there this morning, hanging pendulous from the branches of the mesquite like a giant oriole’s nest, each bee perfectly still and in alignment with its neighbor, wings all pointing down like the hair on a sleeping cat.

Judging by its diameter around the branches, the mass must be layered five or ten bees deep. I wonder what the ones at the bottom feel like, with the weight of their hive-mates pressing down on them. And what would it take to disturb them? As the sun touches the cluster—dappled light filtered through the mesquite leaves—they do not seem to be in any hurry to move. Though the surface bees are awake and stretching now, only scattered bees are leaving and just as many returning; the whole bee-mass seems to be steaming slightly, like a pot just starting to come to a simmer.

The whole thing looks more like some kind of organism than a collection of single insects. A very small furry sloth perhaps, hanging two-legged from a forked “V” in the mesquite. As the day-breezes pick up, the solid blob sways a little—it’s loose, but has weight to it, like a wadded-up piece of cloth that might unfurl to stream out in the wind at any moment.

They arrived late yesterday afternoon, all at once, the swarm a diffuse blur overhead, more sound than substance. It circled, then descended into the bush on the other side of the truck, collecting itself somehow into this compact cluster, hundreds of bees compressed into a ball, a foot-and-a-half long and maybe eight-inches in diameter at its thickest. Though we had seen the swarm arrive—and stepped into the screen room just to make sure it knew we would give it room to pass—we only discovered the bee-ball later, at bedtime, when they had already gathered in for the night.

I go back in the trailer for an hour to do food prep for the day while it is still cool—keeping our tiny fridge closed during the hot part of the day is essential to it actually doing its job—but when I come back out the bees are in pretty much the same state. I don’t know why I expected them to be up-and-at-‘em at first light. Maybe I am taking that whole “busy as a bee” thing too literally. But here they are, with the sun well above the horizon on its fast-track up to the very tip-top of the blue sky, still clinging to their branch like teenagers in bed on a school day.

I take another break from bee-watching and finish the food prep and find duct tape to help Tom tape some popsicle sticks where the latch for the cargo door on the trailer catches so the latch will make a tighter seal and keep the bugs out. This ingenious use of the materials-at-hand works, though we think we will have an even tighter seal if we buy another box of popsicles. Perhaps two boxes…

After all this, it is getting on toward 9:30 and now it is definitely hot, but the bee-blob hasn’t budged. The whole outer layer is doing a slow churn, and the ball looks a little expanded with the bees moving about, but I am starting to think that this pot may not boil while I am watching it. Here and there all over the cluster, a few solitary bees are vibrating wildly, their whole bodies shaking furiously as though possessed by the spirit of God. For a moment, that one bee is all soul, fur flying, lungs flapping in the wind, wings and legs and stripes a dizzy blur. Then it disappears into the slow-moving mass and the day snaps into normal mode again.

I leave once more to put the lentils and rice in the solar oven (which already registers 400 degrees inside) and when I come back the spirit has spread; now there are bees vibrating in multiple places at once, and the whole bee-ball is awake and moving restlessly; individual bees look like they are searching for something, the slower ones nudging and nosing their neighbors, the vibrating ones trampling over the others in their hurry. On the underside of the ball, the lowest bees hang loosely—some just by their front legs.

Lunch comes and goes, and while Tom is doing the dishes, I check back again. Still there! Though now the mass is drooping seriously, dripping like a softened candle under the weight of the clinging insects. They are still moving on the surface, but there don’t seem to be as many coming and going. The whole thing looks heavy and tired under the hot noon sun—which may be mostly a projection on my part. How long are they going to stay? I wonder, thinking of the Far Side cartoon in which the Joneses feign death to get their houseguests to leave. These bees don't seem like they would notice if I was alive or dead, so I resort to knowledge as my offensive strategy, and go to find one of the few books I brought with me, which just happens to be Hoyt's The World of Bees.

According to Hoyt, when a bee colony decides to swarm, they fly in tighter and tighter circles, and usually settle somewhere on a tree limb. If the queen is with the cluster, the cluster will hold and grow. It will be a huge, seething, dripping, shapechanging mass of bees, wonderful to see…and may remain for anything from fifteen minutes to several days. During this time, scouts are sent out…on the lookout for the perfect home.

These scouts do their ‘wagging’ dance when they return…the same dance they do inside the hive to tell their sisters where a new source of nectar is to be found. When the scouts return they dance for whatever discovery they have made. And their excitement is in direct proportion to the mental misgivings they have in regard to their find. It if is adequate and that is all, the dance is done pretty listlessly. If it is perfect…the dance will be done with great enthusiasm.

And here’s the really amazing part. Other bees go to check out the places being danced for most vigorously. Half-hearted dancers stop and go to see what the more enthusiastic bees are so delighted about. Pretty soon the dancing for the one becomes nearly unanimous. This is when the swarm takes flight.

2:45. I check again. The sun is a big hot hand over the whole sky, pressing relentlessly. It is too bright, too exposed, even in the shade. The swarm has continued to sag, and it now looks disturbingly like a dead animal—perhaps a tiny goat hung by its hind feet for butchering. I can’t get the image out of my mind and the squirming insects now look like maggots on a rotten carcass rather than the beautiful gold-furred divinities of the dawn. Bees are coming and going regularly, a handful at a time, and there are several bees “dancing” at once. I try to see if the direction of their dances coincides—maybe several point in the same direction? When I turn to look in that direction the first thing I see is our nearby yurt and screen room. Huh....... Surely they aren't thinking about staying......here! 

The wind has really picked up, and the lengthening strands of bees flap with an elastic weight like the sagging flesh on the back of an arm. The tarps on our trailer that shade its sides are threatening to set sail in the strong gusts, so we decide to take them down for the day. Just as we have removed the tent poles, at 2:59 pm, we hear a sudden roar, and peer out from under the partly-dismantled awning to see the whole swarm up in the air again, swirling in a fast circle over the cluster-site. Once every bee is off the branch, the circle widens and lifts and then slowly gyres toward us; then slowly spins over us as we huddle under the fabric; then slowly drives off toward the yurt (Keep going! Tom mutters); then slowly surrounds the top of the yurt (Keeeep Going…..!); then finally—to our immense relief—heads slowly on up the slope. The last we see, they are circling in a slow bee-funnel toward the top, disappearing over the ridge in a whirl of unseen sound. 

The driveway seems suddenly very quiet and very still. We breath a sigh of relief at their decision, and continue to tie up our awning and think about supper. I hope they like their new home as much as we like ours.

Hoyt, M. (1965) The World of Bees. New York: Bonanza Books.

WHAT IF? (Part 2: What if we remembered our relations?)

    Pine Marten

While everything that humans make and do is "nature expressing itself," our “making and doing” has isolated us from many of the rest of the world’s inhabitants. We have forgotten our relations.

This seems at least partly due to the “human” and “nature” split that I talked about in the last post. When we use the terms “human” and “nature” we begin to think of them as somehow equivalent: as though “human” were on one end of a see saw and “nature” was on the other. We forget that we are just one species—ONE—among millions. One current estimate is 8.7 million. That looks like this:

1    (That’s us.)

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111………

That is only 352, but you get the point. 8,700,000 is a lot.

It is easy to forget that those zeros stand for more than the space they take up on the screen. Imagine 8,700,000 written out fully rather than symbolically. If we continued with the hatch marks, each page in a typical book would hold 2860 of them. A book with a hatch mark for every other species on the earth would be 3042 pages long. That is a very, very, VERY large book.

    American Red Squirrel

So to recognize that there is us.

AND there are 8,699,999 OTHER kinds of life that we share the world with.

This would be the place in this post where it would make sense to talk about extinction rates. Where I might mention how the usual background extinction rate is something like 5 species a year, and about how the extinction rate at this point is 1000 times that, more on the scale of the extinction of the dinosaurs. But one of the reasons I am writing these posts is that I am looking for a different route through this material. We have all heard about habitat loss and climate change, but this doesn't change how we live. I know when I hear things like that it is not really motivating; I just feel discouraged.

I get glimpses every now and then—mostly when I am still and silent—that there is a subtle but profound shift in my awareness in which I get a sense, for lack of a better word, of "okay-ness." I can't yet fully identify this shift and I certainly can't yet reliably live it. But I know that it exists, and every now and then I find it for a few minutes. Perhaps it is a sudden recognition of myself in the eyes of another creature. Perhaps it is really wondering what it means to do something as radically ridiculous as turning the other cheek. Perhaps it is actually letting in the idea that I am a light in the world.

What I do know is that motivating people to change through fear and shame doesn't seem to be working. Though it may galvanize short-term action, it also creates divisions—both in our hearts and in our communities. We can only care for what we love. And in order to love our relations, we first have to love ourselves.

    Western Screech-owl

So instead, I will start by saying that forgetting our relations is pretty normal. I don’t believe that ants pay much attention to the well-being of plants that can’t grow around their ant mound. Or that the cougar worries about the rabbit. Or that deer are concerned about grass. For the most part, this kind of worry would not be very helpful to that animal—it would simply create a creature that could not survive. This is not adaptation; it is neurosis.

Most species pretty much take care of themselves. And up until now it has mostly worked. Different species came and went, populations increased and decreased, but in the long run life on earth has become increasingly more complex and specialized and interwoven, mostly as a result of the collective effect of individuals going about their individual business.

    Metalmark Butterfly

But we find ourselves in a different situation now than the mountain lion and the ant. We find ourselves in a situation where our ability to problem solve and our communal reach has extended our impact in a way never before seen. We have not only developed more efficient ways to find food and shelter, allowing us to expand where we can live and in what numbers, we are also managing to reduce many of the factors that would have previously limited our population growth.

Human population estimates as of June 2019 (according to the US Census Bureau) list the current number of people at around 7.57 billion. If you thought the number of species is a lot, try wrapping your head around these numbers.

7,577,000,000

If it took a book 3042 pages long to hold a hatch mark for every species on earth, how long would that book be to hold a hatch mark for every human being on earth? Ready?

2,649,301 pages.

    Green Shore Crab

So this is another reason why it is easy to focus on ourselves. There are a lot of us. And we are big and noisy and interesting. We take up a lot of space. We make race cars and operas and World Cups and best sellers and satellites and movies. We wage wars and claim water rights and drill for oil. We can talk to someone from any country in the world by tapping our fingers in a magical pattern on a little glass screen. We can see pictures of ourselves (maybe even videos) from the time that we are born to the time that we die. 

There is so much about nature expressing itself as humans that is fascinating and beautiful and dizzyingly awe inspiring. And also terrifying and terrible. I do not understand a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the things that we are capable of as a species—physically, mentally, or spiritually. And I can turn on a screen that will show me pictures of human beings doing fascinating and courageous and stupid and inspiring and horrifying things from all corners of the planet at any hour of the day or night.

Where is there the time or the inclination to think about bobolinks or blister beetles?

    Blister Beetle

And this is not even taking into account the effect of wars, natural disasters, scarce resources, or just the daily effort of making a living and raising children on our ability to take the time to think about other creatures, or the systems of the earth as a whole—the air, waters, forests, fields, and lands that sustain all of life. There are many reasons why we have forgotten our relations.

I believe our relations are worth remembering. That having empathy and understanding for other creatures is part of knowing ourselves. That when we see the connections between things—can see the systems rather than just things in isolation—that we can find our place in the world. That what we do to the least of them we do to ourselves.

    White-tailed Deer Fawn

Wise men and women of all peoples throughout the ages who have known these things. Have known that life depends on other life. Have known that our well-being is tied to the well-being of the web. Have known that our nest is our nurture.

What would it take for us as a culture to remember our relations? Would it take nature developing a new mind—one that has more consciousness of the whole? Is this mind already in us and just needs practice and discipline to access? Are there indigenous cultures that know more about this? Is there a spiritual force in the universe that connects us to a larger reality?

And what would we have to give up? What would we have to face in our own hearts? What would we have to feel?

What if we were to remember our relations?

These are enough questions for a lifetime. But when I think about what it would look like to remember our relations right now, right here, today, I think of this:

“From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.” 

                       --Ursula K. Le Guin

    Coyote Pup

All photography by Tom Talbott, Jr., licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Ravens

photo credit: Tom Talbott, Jr.

April 22: We are camped at a primitive campground north of Redmond, in the volcanic high desert of eastern Oregon. Surrounded by sagebrush and juniper-covered hills, we look out on fields in the valleys below us greened by irrigation from the Deschutes River and its tributaries. It is sunny today, weather that is not uncommon for a place that gets 12 inches of rain a year, though the liquid calls of the meadowlarks from the tops of the junipers all around us flow like streams over the dry landscape.

Yesterday, Tom and I went for a long hike over the hills between us and the dramatic rock formations of Smith Rock. The pleasures of a landscape like this are often small, but somehow all the more deeply rewarding. We meet some black cows with bright-eyed calves. We find three tiny, tender-green ferns tucked between two rocks where a little patch of damp earth reveals a seep from the basalt above. We watch an orange-carapaced scarab beetle with white fur on its body clamber through some dead stems. We pass a great horned owl guarding a nest of sticks on a cliff face, two white, fuzzy chicks tucked below her. As the day warms, butterflies flutter in bright circles through the air—orange tips, whites, the vivid painted ladies.

Midday we arrive on a ridge above the spectacular formations of Smith Rock—the remnant of much more ancient volcanic activity than what we see all around us. As we pause to drink in the line of snow-capped Cascade volcanoes on the horizon, we notice a red-tailed hawk diving at a group of ravens below us. The red-tail folds its wide wings into impossibly daring stoops on the raven clan, then emerges into the sky with red feathers flared out in the sun. Its dives don’t faze the ravens, who still squawk noisily in the trees below us, and the hawk eventually gives up on chasing them from this part of its mountain and circles off over the valley.

The ravens stay, soaring higher now, and we notice two of them flying in unison. They loop up and over the ridge, then down into the valley, then back up high again in the blue sky, then dive and shoot past us unexpectedly from behind with a sudden tearing roar of wings through air. All the while, they are locked in a tandem formation: as one bird they rise, fall, turn, dive, often just a wings-breadth apart.

As I follow them with my binoculars, I can see that one bird—the larger of the two—is pursuing the other. It flies powerfully, and closes the gap between them easily, but whenever it does, the leading bird makes some slight adjustment. It slides sideways, or changes directions slightly, or stalls and pulls upwards a bit allowing the following bird to shoot past it—some small evasive maneuver to create a little gap between the two that the pursuing bird soon closes again.

This keeps going, on and on—pursue, feint, fall away, pursue again. I am mesmerized by their flight, in a kind of trance. But just when it seems as though they can keep doing this all afternoon, the bird in front rises high above the ridge, then…turns upside down and tackles the following bird with its feet! Now both birds are locked facing each other, grappling and tugging, their sudden lack of forward momentum setting them spinning in tight circles, falling fast out of the sky straight down toward the rocks below, spinning wildly in a dizzying, tumbling, impossible whirl of shimmering black; wings outstretched, feet locked tight, falling fast toward the ground…and just as they are about to enter the canyon below, seem set on crash-landing together, they pull apart, taking air again under their own wings.

I am breathless with the unexpected intensity of this fall after the long mesmerizing loops of their unison flight. Seen up close through my binoculars I feel as if I too were locked in that helpless tumble out of the sky. What was this? Play? Fighting? Mating? It all happened so fast, I am not sure. I think about looking it up online to see what answers I might find from other people's observations, but by the time I get back to camp I realize I don’t want to.

For me, this wasn't about understanding—this was a time to just experience. For those few moments I was not observing or studying; I was a witness, and even a kind of participant. I could feel the reality of this other world—could feel the hearts beating in those shiny, black-feathered bodies; could feel the power in those wings; could feel the actuality of other minds, minds that are simultaneously so different and so similar to my own.

So while I love knowledge, I also recognize that I often use it to order the world around me and keep it at a little distance. Today I got a glimpse beyond that ordering and outside myself. Today I will accept these real lives for what they are: themselves.

photo credit: Tom Talbott, Jr.

Sardine sandwiches by the seashore

Since all we have to cook on in our trailer is a propane burner, I have expanded my repertoire of things-to-make-in-a-frying-pan. One of my new creations this year is a fried pocket. I take a large tortilla, fill it with something yummy, fold it into a little package like an overstuffed envelope, and fry it on both sides. Voilà! Something hot and crispy that you can eat with your fingers and that doesn't get the frying pan dirty.

I started making these with ground beef flavored with taco seasoning—originally thinking of it as a fried burrito—but I have branched out into egg, sausage, ham, vegetables, beans, and mushrooms and cheese.

About a year ago, in my quest for variety in the meat department, I purchased a can of sardines. Whenever we were a little low on meal options the subject of the sardines would come up.

ME: We could have sardines.
TOM: Is there anything else to eat?
ME: It would be like a picnic.
TOM: Why did you buy those in the first place?
ME: Well, I thought they would make good emergency food.
TOM: Is this an emergency?

Since there has never been anything that would qualify as a real emergency, the sardines continued to languish in the back of the cupboard.

When you live in a tiny rolling house, even the space taken up by a single can of sardines is coveted. I kept thinking how that place where the sardine can was would be just the right size for a can of tuna or chicken—something we would actually use.

So finally last week, I had a brilliant idea. Sardine pockets! I laid out the tortillas, covered them with a layer of pepperjack, then the sardines, some salsa, and some sharp cheddar. You could hardly even smell the fish, and once I had folded up the tortillas, their slick little bodies were invisible. The pockets cooked up nice and toasty, brown and flakey on the outside and warm on the inside, and I laid out dinner.

We start out eating as usual. Tom eats his salad, a little bit of apple. Then he starts on his pocket. After a few bites he stops.

TOM: What's this?
ME: Fish tacos. (Said with almost a straight face.)
TOM: What KIND of fish...?
ME: There's salsa on them...

So much for that idea. Tom was not fooled for an instant. My sardine sandwiches worked about as well as trying to hide a pill in a ball of meat when we had to pill the cat. And much like the cat, he is now a little suspicious. These pockets have been a fan favorite for dinner, but now he looks at them a little sideways. I don't know if it's a good thing that you can't see what's in those, he says.

I guess that old saying about "what you don't know won't hurt you" doesn't apply to sardines. Some people ALWAYS know about sardines. But, honestly, I thought those pockets were pretty good. And if you are going to eat a sardine, it may as well be fried with cheese and salsa.

**********

Since we left Salem on September 7th, we have been rolling slowly down the coast of Oregon and California between Florence and Crescent City. When I say slowly, I mean that the bicyclists on 101 are going faster than us. In the past six weeks we have averaged about 40 miles per week of distance-moved-south. One cyclist I met in northern California had left Seattle the week before and planned to be in San Diego the next, for an average of 600 miles per week. At a relaxed walking speed, I could easily be traveling 75 miles per week. Anyway, we will leave speed to the bicyclists and the hikers—this is our favorite way to travel in Winky. We drive for an hour or less, find a place to set up camp and then hunker down for a week and see what we can walk to.

We have been listening to an audio recording of Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck’s account of a three-month trip around the United States in his 1960’s truck camper with his blue standard poodle, Charley. He says:

A trip … is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

What we are realizing is that we are now on a new trip, one with a whole different character than last year’s journey. You would think that where we are now would all flow smoothly out of last year’s travels, but it feels like we are starting all over, and once again there is so much that we don’t know. This time we are much more skilled at the practical parts of living this way—all of that has been seamless—but the trip has not revealed its purposes to us yet, and this can be mentally unsettling. Any effort to resolve this discomfort through planning has not been very successful. It seems that this trip is asking us to be patient, to see what it has in store for us. And to keep remembering, we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

So while we are waiting, I have been working on completing some old writing projects, and we are always on the lookout for wildlife. On the wildlife front, it has been kind of quiet, but there have been some highlights.

One morning we walked out to the sand dunes in thick fog and early light and found Snowy Plovers moving all around us, half-seen like little wraiths, looking so much like the beach itself that it was as if little balls of sand had suddenly started up and come alive.

It was also a delight to watch the seals pulled out at the mouth of the Smith River do their sleepy calisthenics, stretching their flippers and flexing their rubbery bodies into tight u’s; and at Elk Prairie, the big bull elks with their heavy antlers grazed right up next to the trailer, their bodies steaming in the early sunlight.

Living so much of the time outside leaves us with myriad sense-memories. The wind hard in the salt grass sweeping down a wide expanse of beach. The massive presences of the redwoods, each one a cathedral to itself. The huge waves breaking over the sea stacks in great white gouts of spray. Sitting on the gravel bar of the Smith River in the early darkness before dawn and feeling my adrenalin spike from a nearby loud, unseen, ker-plunk in the water. Startling a little skunk outside the restroom and watching it run away in a circle around me, its long black and white fur flying in a graceful fringe. And all the little things: rust-red salamanders, delicate tree frogs, and bright banana slugs; unexpected swarming hatches of insects after an afternoon of rain; a fast garter snake in the grass; a large black widow spider treking across an open dirt road in the middle of the day; Red-shouldered Hawks lurking on low perches; a peregrine shooting through a flock of gulls along the beach, scattering the white birds like seaspray.

And for the past six weeks, the ocean has been a constant, restless, roaring presence. Near or far, we are always oriented toward it. Its long beaches—rocky, sandy, or covered with pebbles; the knobby, grass-covered capes jutting out into the surf; the protected bays sheltered behind seastacks and jetties; sheer cliffs fronting the swells, with their narrow, secret canyons worn by streams emptying onto the beach; fog rolling off the water in a solid wall at sunset; the green flash of the sun setting on a clear horizon; the long ropes of kelp rolled up in huge, snarled tangles along the beach; all the rotting weed and shell and fish and flesh at the waterline—that crust of grime tossed up like a dare to us air-breathers; and everywhere the endless shifting patterns of waves—water and light caught up in hypnotic, eddying swirls of foam and silt and surf.

We don’t know from day to day where we are going next. We do not yet have a long-term trajectory, though we are constantly rolling ideas around. The uncertainty of this surfaces lots of inner demons for us both. But deep down, I am so grateful to be here, to see what we have seen, and to be able to learn and grow together.

Day 229: Mountain time

Imagine this.

You start by driving away from the city, into the desert. A few flat, hot hours go by. You are surrounded mostly by cactus. The only signs of water are the dry washes carved into the ground by summer storms.

Eventually, you begin to gain elevation. Cactus dwindle, replaced by grasses. There is less bare ground between plants. As you continue to climb, you begin to see more trees—short, twisted oaks and junipers that are still more shrubs than trees. Farther up, these get taller, now providing a little filtered shade. Yuuca’s outnumber the cactus. There is dry bunchgrass everywhere.

When you run out of road, you park the car and start walking. The steep trail ascends rapidly up the side of a vast, craggy mountain. You begin to see views of the valley and the city you started from in the distance. The oaks are taller, especially in the ravines, but there is still no visible water. Here there are manzanitas and little forest flowers—heuchera in the shade and paintbrush where it is sunnier. The trail is steep and dusty. The sun feels like a hot bulb suspended directly overhead. Every scrap of shade from the scattered trees on the ridges is a relief.

After over an hour of climbing you are high on the mountain. The valley below spreads away into distant haze. There are real trees here—mostly pines. The trail levels off close to the rocky ramparts of the mountain peak. You traverse a ridge then drop down into a fold in the mountainside.

As you enter the bottom of the ravine the world changes completely. For the first time in all these hot miles, a little stream gurgles up out of the ground. The air is quiet and cool. Long-needled pines and a Douglas fir tower an impossible height above you. Huge, white-trunked sycamores glow in the lighted shadows. Light-green ferns grow thick on the duffy ground. Moss covers the rocks. Even a little purple violet blooms in the stream. Sunlight slips through the leaves in sparkling patches on the water.

But most magical of all, the air above the stream is alive with wings. Hundreds of butterfly-like moths are rising up from the short stretch of flowing water in a loose flittering cloud of color and light. Each moth’s hind-wings are shiny metallic blue, their thick bodies are a soft powder-blue, and their round heads glow vivid red. At rest, with their orange-veined wings folded over their backs, they blend into the needles, but they are not often at rest, but are in constant twinkling, sparkling flight.

As I watch this swirl of colored wings, I feel like there should be music. The creek purls and trickles and crescents down over the wet rocks. The sun shines silently. I ask humble forgiveness for all the times I scoffed at fantasy movies in which the forest air was filled with fluttering, gossamer drifting stuff, as being “unreal.” This, too, feels unreal, but it is right here, moths rising and falling, tumbling and circling, landing on mud, opening and closing their wings, taking to the air again. This is also reality: as real as the long, hot walk to get here; as real as the fast, hot city in the distance.

And like most of reality it is fleeting. By the time we leave the stream late that afternoon, many of the moths have either dispersed or are stuck and drowning in deeper pools, littering the shore of the creek. Over the next weeks we see them many times in ones and twos, but never again in such numbers, even back at the same spring.

From what I can tell, these are Veined Ctenucha or Ctenucha venosa, a moth of the southwest that is active by day and whose larva feed on grasses. Why was there such a swarm of them? There must be some good reason—there always is—but I don’t know what it was. All I know is that it was memorable, as was all of Mt. Wrightson, its richness rising island-like out of the sea of desert.

One thing this trip is about, is time; and having time allows a different perspective. With this kind of time, watching a flight of moths might be the most important thing I do all day. And with time I tend toward a certain kind of watching—not observing so much for the sake of knowledge or understanding, but simply for the delight of it. The kind of watching that is a kind of homage or a prayer to what is, in all its magnificent detailed variety.

-----------

We spent a week and a half at Madera Canyon on Mt. Wrightson in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson, walking and working and writing and being amazed at the incredible variety of plants, birds, lizards, and insects who make their home on this “sky island.”

Day 178-216: Cascabel, part 1

Two years ago in April, Tom and I rented a 100-year-old stone cabin in Cascabel, Arizona, in the San Pedro River Valley, a couple hours east of Tucson. To the uninitiated this might be considered the middle of nowhere. The nearest grocery store is 45 minutes by car, the best road here is unpaved, water is scarce, and a census might have to include cows to break 300.  It didn’t take long, though, for us to realize that Cascabel is actually somewhere, and not only that, it is somewhere special. Even after just a week we knew that we wanted to come back. It took us two years to do so, but on March 1st we arrived for a seven-week stay.

Downtown Cascabel

There is so much to say about this place—both the land and the community— that I get tongue-tied just thinking about it, so I am going to come at it through the back door. Instead of painting the grand picture, I am going to start with some humble bits, sidling up to it with a little whistle, as I have seen some people here approach a cow they needed to move.

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After having been in the desert now for the last four months, we are getting used to the "don't touch that" rule, whether it is the furry-looking cholla cactus, or the cat-claws of the acacia, or the long spikes on the mesquite trees. It seems best to just assume that rule applies to all plants and, well, pretty much anything that moves. Having grown up in the soft-and-friendly Pacific Northwest, I like to touch things, and I have to be reminded to keep my hands in my "Haydn-pockets" here.

Every Wednesday there’s morning coffee at the community center, followed by a work party at the community garden. Our first Wednesday here, the guy who sits down at our table is recovering from a scorpion sting on his foot. I am talking to someone else and can’t hear the details, but the length of his story and the size of his gestures suggest that he has been in a lot of pain.

I heard about fire ants on my previous visit, so I am careful to avoid ant mounds when I am walking. When we are visiting a neighbor here, looking at the native grass plantings he is tending in his restored pasture, I stop for a closer look at some unusually large black ants swarming in and out of a hole in the ground. "Oh, those,” he says, telling me the name, which I can’t remember now. “Don't mess with those, their bite is way worse than a scorpion sting!" Move along, in other words. Maybe over by that prickly pear cactus or in that stand of velcro grass. Or in a patch of that bristly plant with the yellow flowers that someone warned me would give me hives if I touched it without gloves.

Javalinas look like small, vertically-flattened, pointy-toed pigs that wander around in packs looking for mud. Mostly they seem interested in hiding, and the few times I have seen them it was from the rear as they ran hysterically away from me. But one woman mentions that she doesn't like to walk along the river in a place where the javelinas gather, not so much because they are dangerous, really, but because "javelinas don't have a sense of humor." Woody, the ranch's herd manager, tells a story of one angry javelina waking him up from a nap in the fields and chasing him into the stock pond. His description of the smell of the sludge he stirred up from the bottom of the pond when he fell in made me think that being bitten by the javelina might have been preferable.

After moving cows one day we sit in a little house next to the corral having cookies and cheese and I notice a good-sized spider (a solid inch in diameter with all the legs pulled in) on the wall over our host. Spiders aren't a trigger for me the way snakes are, but I think she might like to know about it so I mention it. Oh yeah. That guy is just a baby. It is deadly poisonous, of course, and moves really fast, so I am waiting until I can focus on it to catch it.

Oh, and I have now seen my first rattlesnake. I should have been forewarned, as Cascabel means “rattle” in Spanish, and refers in this case to the tail-end of a rattlesnake. Sure enough, our first night here I “discovered” a good-sized rattlesnake coiled up by the end of our trailer, and get my first lesson in snake catching and moving.

A few weeks ago most of the community gathered for a memorial service for a very dear friend of theirs who recently died. After a spacious hour of silence, meditation bells, and remembrances we sit for potluck lunch. The woman next to us asks us how we are doing here, and we tell her how much we are taken by the valley, to which she responds, “Well, with the warmer weather, you will need to watch out for the Kissing Bugs." Kissing Bugs! What? No one told us about Kissing Bugs. Turns out these are stink bug look-alikes that hide behind your cushions and come out at night to bite you while you are asleep, attracted evidently by the smell of your breath. Their saliva has a little anesthetic in it so you don't even feel them when they "kiss" you and they are able to fill to exploding on your blood like a leech. Great. Bed leeches.

The next Wednesday I am back at the community garden when someone walks by the young man who is helping with our tomato transplanting team. "I hear you got hit by a burn worm," he says in the sort of somber tone you might use for someone who has had a limb amputated. Burn worm?!? What now? Turns out these are some kind of caterpillars (also known as mesquite stinger caterpillar) covered with stinging hairs, that fall out of the trees and feel, as the unfortunate young man reported, like four bee stings at once. At least now I know how to treat it, which is to apply duct tape to the burning spot and then rip it off to pull the little stinging hairs out of your skin. This is also supposed to work with cholla glochids, though my previous experiences with sports tape make me wonder if this cure might add insult to injury.

I say all this to emphasize how amazing this place is. That even though the list of poisonous, prickly, and painful things to be avoided is longer than our trailer, I still wake up every day feeling like I have landed in paradise. Perhaps the threat of harm makes me pay more attention and take less for granted. Perhaps there is a kind of awe at the lengths things go to survive in harsh environments. Perhaps there is a longing to be as at home in this wide, arid land as the creosote bush and the cactus.

All I know is that this land feels deeply, vibrantly alive—an understated aliveness mirrored by the people who choose to live here. I have experienced a profound gentleness in many of the people here, coupled with a willingness to act decisively in service to what they believe in. There is a commitment to being partners with the land, rather than the land being a possession or only a means to making a profit. These ideals seem to arise at least in part from the desert itself, which is absolutely unforgiving and absolutely itself, while also offering an intense spiritual aliveness.

Not everyone who lives here ascribes to these ideas. There are many different faces to Cascabel, and what you see depends on where you stand and who you talk to. What is clear to us, though, is that we are here to learn—about generosity, about community working together, about how to live in challenging circumstances, and most of all about the land.

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Tom and I are staying at a ranch which is the central location for Saguaro-Juniper, the cattle-raising part of this community, and have parked our trailer amidst the welter of houses, trailers, corrals, sheds, horse trailers, trucks, and the kind of equipment and raw materials that accumulates on every farm. We feel so lucky to be here. To the west we can walk to the San Pedro River and can get to an area where the riverbed has year-round water. To the east we can walk for miles out into the saguaros and creosote bush of the desert. Our hosts are some of the original founders of this community and it has been a pleasure to get to know them and hear their stories.

This is also the location of the Sweetwater Center, the organization that I am volunteering for while we are here. I am helping with some pasture improvement projects as well as caring for two new plantings of pollinator plants. What this really means is I do a lot of weeding, which is something with which I have loads of experience. I am surprised at how much I am enjoying it. I think it feels good to just do something familiar, simple, and rote after six months of so much change.

When I am not weeding or walking in the desert with Tom, I have been immersed in the busy social life of this community. Coffee gatherings, Quaker meeting, potlucks, horseback riding, folk dancing, meditation group, writing group, road cleanup, cheese making, game night, celebrations of all sorts of things, committee meetings, mesquite-pulling work parties, conservation work, and tending the community garden all somehow get squeezed into the short weeks around here. The result of that, though, is that after only six weeks here, I have met just about everyone who lives along about a ten-mile stretch of the dirt road.

There is so much more to say about this place, but it will have to wait for another post. I am still digesting the incredible vastness of the desert, the life-giving presence of the river, the principles of the people who have been drawn together in community, and the work of the organizations that have formed around the intention of tending this valley and its inhabitants.

In a week we will pack up our trailer and move on. We aren't sure where we are headed or what the next five months will hold for us. We don't know when we might come back here. But the people and the land are in our hearts now and give us strength. We feel different after being here—a little more relaxed, a little more aware, and warmed by many memories.

Day 143-148: Finding Cottonwoods

One of the hardest moments of this trip for me was when I learned about the destruction of the cottonwood-willow forests of the lower Colorado River. These unique riparian habitats, the ribbons of great trees following the river, were submerged by flooding behind dams, cleared for agriculture, and cut for wood to power steam ships. The land has undergone many changes at our hands, but somehow this felt like a direct hit to my heart. Perhaps it is the rarity of trees in this desert landscape. Perhaps it is the fact that so many creatures depend on these oases of water, shade, and food.  Perhaps it is simply that I fell in love with cottonwoods, that they seemed like friends.

So it was a great pleasure when we arrived at Cibola National Wildlife Refuge to see large tracts of planted trees and to realize that many of the southern refuges on the Colorado River have replanted cottonwood and willow stands in an effort to recreate that habitat.

Cibola NWR was established in 1964 to mitigate the effects of channelization and dam construction on the Colorado River in the 30’s and 40’s. Its 18,500 acres are home to a wide variety of wildlife, including wintering geese, ducks, and cranes; migrating songbirds; and native fish. In one portion of the refuge they have planted cottonwoods, willows, and mesquite as habitat for the endangered Southwestern Willow Flycatcher and other wildlife.

A trail follows a mile-long loop through this planting. When I walk into the trees I am reminded of something the poet W.S. Merwin said about his effort of the past 40 years to reforest 19 acres of ruined land where he lives on Maui.

I have come to recognize that no human being can plant any forest. A forest is not made by a human being planting a few trees. It evolves as a complex society of soil organisms, and other plants besides trees. Only a forest can restore a forest—a section of forest that had once grown beside it. Our human destructions are often irreparable, like the extinction of species.
(from What is a Garden)

These plots of planted trees are not yet quite a forest. I can feel the imposition of outside order: the arbitrary square border instead of the meandering line following the water; the equidistant spacing of the trees instead of the clustering in good soil; the suggestion of grid lines instead of groves and copses.

But I can also see that, like Merwin, we are doing our best. And that is a lot. In these 36 acres, the cottonwoods, willows, and mesquite are planted in loops and arcs and bunchings that tries to recreate the diversity and variety of the forest. And it works. This place is a haven for many creatures and a delight to all my senses.

These particular cottonwoods were planted in 1999 so they are not old, as trees go. Yet they are still impressively tall. Their trunks are slender, and no matter what route their limbs take, they all tend up, creating single-pointed or narrow, umbrella-shaped crowns.  The bark is white. Or at least it appears white at first glance, shining pale in the strong sunlight or silhouetted against the blue sky.  A closer look reveals many shades of silvers and soft browns.  The young trees are smooth-barked like aspens but as they age and the trunk expands, vertical splits form in the bark, eventually creating a deeply-ridged network of vertical grooves.

After the recent rains the trees are bursting with new life.  There is great variety in the timing of their spring awakening. Some trees are still covered in the hard shells of last year’s dead leaves.  Some are just breaking their flower buds open. And some are covered already with wet-looking new leaves, like a green froth kicked up where the airy white branches meet the hard blue sky.

They are so tall it requires some help for me to see what is happening at the business-end of the branches. I feel a little self-conscious watching plants grow with my binoculars (as if bird-watching wasn’t already nerdy enough!) but this feeling passes as I see all the life that this closer look affords. The new flowers push out of their sticky calyxes like mounds of yellow-green frosting from the end of a cake tube. A low hum surrounds me from the honey bees swarming the flowers, their legs weighed down with their orange pollen sacks. Ants climb up and down the trunk. A redtail hawk rests on a branch and two owls hoot from the end of the grove, making me look without success for a nest. Yellow-rumped warblers comb the blossoms for insects. Towhees scratch in the thick leaf litter underneath. The slight wind shifts, and the breeze informs me of the unmistakable presence of skunk.

If I stand quietly for long enough in a forest I can feel the silent power flowing through it—that hum of life and energy of the whole. This reminds me of William Stafford's poem, "Is This Feeling About the West Real?" Is this feeling I have about this forest real? Listen—something else hovers out here... some total feeling or other world / almost coming forward...

Whether it is or not, this place gives me hope. That people tend these trees. That enough people recognize the importance of the network of life we live in that they planned this project. Even though a few strong men with chainsaws could cut all these plantings in a week, there is hope in the simple fact that right now they exist.

As I sit among the slender white trunks, these trees feel a little like ghost trees—a kind of memorial to the felled forests that used to line the river. I can see why trees are so often depicted as at least partly human.  Cottonwoods carry male and female flowers on separate trees, so there are girl trees and boy trees. It wouldn’t take much for me to feel like I was surrounded by people—calmer people who talked less and took their time making decisions. And this company gives me strength. With all the recent political turmoil, any hope for quiet living things is balm for my spirit.

Tom sent me a review the other day of a new book by astrobiologist David Grinspoon called Earth in Human Hands: Shaping our Planet’s Future. Grinspoon argues that we are entering a new epoch called the Anthropocene: a time when human activity can and does have planet-wide impacts. Rather than being discouraged by this, Grinspoon remains optimistic.

…our obligation now is to move beyond just lamenting the job we've done as reluctant, incompetent planet-shapers. We have to face the fact that we've become a planetary force, and figure out how to be a better one.  By seeing our role clearly, we take the first step toward assuming our responsibilities.

I think I will read his book. His ideas seem a little grand, but optimism is a necessary antidote to the fear I feel when I see our capacity for destruction. In order to move forward, we need to be able to think, and it is hard to think when you feel frightened or demoralized or paralyzed by despair. Whether the specific ideas he presents are ultimately useful, this could be as good a place as any to start a conversation.

Day 93-113: Desert wonderings

Under the stars at Valley of Fire

We left Zion on December 5, spent a day at St. George trying to fit in too many chores—laundry, groceries, and cleaning out the truck bed to discourage the rodent who had moved in while we were at Zion—then moved on to Valley of Fire, Nevada for two nights; then to Topock, Arizona for a week; then to Lake Havasu State Park in Lake Havasu City for six days; then farther south on Lake Havasu for Christmas. My thoughts this week are something like our travels: wandering and not staying in one place for very long. We have touched on so many new things and my mind is still trying to make sense of it all. 

Valley of Fire in the Mohave Desert

Great Basin. Mojave Desert. Sonoran Desert. These names are beginning to mean something to me. After Zion, we left the Great Basin behind, with its high-elevation sagebrush and cold winters. From there we entered the warmer Mohave Desert, the driest of the US deserts, with its signature Joshua Trees. And now at Lake Havasu we are on the border of the Sonoran Desert, the warmest desert in the US, home of saguaros and mesquite trees. We are experiencing one of the characteristics of the Sonoran Desert this week, which is that in the winter, storms from the Pacific Ocean sometimes blow in bringing widespread rains. Though the hills around us are mostly piles of dry gravel dotted here and there with a few scraggly creosote bushes, the steady drizzle all night and the low clouds slung around the mountains this morning make it easy to pretend we are back home in Seattle.

This trip is helping me realize how profoundly we alter our environments. This is not news, and I don't know why this is more obvious to me out here than it was in Seattle. In a way, when you live in a big city for a long time it can come to seem like a kind of ecosystem of its own. The streets and buildings and people begin to organize into their own system and I sometimes forget that it is all constructed. But out here where so much is still raw land, the contrast is more obvious.

As an individual I feel pretty puny most of the time. We hike out into the Havasu Wilderness south of Topock, which has no developed roads or trails, and follow the burro paths out to the jagged barren mountains of broken rock and then down to the Colorado River in one of the few places where it still runs wild. It is a hot day, for winter, and it is clear that without planning and supplies we wouldn’t last long out here. The desert feels so much more powerful than us, something that could never be mastered or tamed.

Colorado River in the Havasu Wilderness

However, when I see the miles and miles of solar grids being installed in the valley south of Boulder City, and the great towers of the power lines marching away from Hoover Dam, and the immense amount of water dammed in Lake Mead or Lake Havasu I wonder if even the desert will survive us: if we can appreciate its beauty, or recognize its inhabitants' lives as important, or really understand that we are embedded in a matrix of life on which we depend.  

Havasu Wilderness

One of our neighbors at our campsite in Topock was trading stories with another man about favorite guns and talking about a cabin he owned and how great it was to sit inside the cabin and shoot coyotes. I got nine of ‘em last year, he exclaims with enthusiasm. Our RV Park is at the edge of a small square island of houses in the desert bordering the Havasu NWR, and every night we hear packs of coyotes yipping and yowling as they hunt the bare gravel hills around town and lope through our campground. Our first night there, something peed on the back window of our truck cab. I assume a coyote must have jumped up on the tonneau cover to investigate the tent we had stored there and decided to remind us whose home we were in.

Then there was the day we drove from Valley of Fire to Topock, through some of the most spectacularly disastrous country I have ever seen. I do not understand the geology of this area yet, but clearly there has been some serious upheaval and the mountains are great rifts of rock, broken and tossed into near-vertical ridges and crazily-tilted crags in every color of brown, red, and black imaginable. Everything here is dry, dry, dry. Very little vegetation, and mile after mile of bare rock and brown washes and the smallest plants eking out whatever moisture they can from the coarse soil. In the distance, down the long, bare slopes, we get glimpses all afternoon of the great body of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam, and see turnoffs advertising boat launches in a place where I would expect only the fossils of boats.

Then around a corner we come upon a vision so surprising I don’t even know at first what it is. Lake Las Vegas, like a little diorama of a city plunked without warning in the middle of the desert. Its brilliant blue water is surrounded by glass resorts and palatial Mediterranean villas in a tropical verdure of palms and grass and flowers. A mirage? A Hollywood set? A little research and I find that, no, it is “real” enough. A several-times-bankrupt business venture, the 320-acre “lake” and surrounding development was originally the brain child of actor J. Carlton Adair, though he was not able to see it through to construction. Other developers took it over and the lake was created by building an earthen dam on the Las Vegas Wash in 1988. The ambitious project has struggled though multiple bankruptcies, lawsuits, and economic downturns. But new investors are hopeful…

Now we are further south, camped on the shores of Lake Havasu, the lake created from the Colorado River by Parker Dam. It is beautiful, it provides water to many households and farms, and many people (including us) enjoy kayaking and fishing and boating here. However, it and the other lakes along the Colorado have drowned nearly all the cottonwood forests that used to line the whole lower Colorado. The Bill Williams NWR just south of us is one of the last stretches of original cottonwood habitat left, and it's nine-mile length is home to 11 species of butterfly that no longer live anywhere else.  

Yesterday, I spot three huge rafts of Eared Grebes in the middle of the lake in front of our campsite. The lake is so big they are tiny specks even in my spotting scope, making them difficult to count, but I decide that a conservative estimate might be something like 5000 birds. I read in a book published in 1991 that Eared Grebes don't usually number over 2000 here in the winter, but then I find a December 10, 2011 report of over 5000 birds, and a December 7, 2014 report of over 30,000 birds (yes, that is the right number of zeros) on the lake, so perhaps my numbers are low. Would these grebes be here without the dam? I don't know. But I enjoy seeing them, and if I am very quiet I can just hear their whistling calls and the far rustle of their wings and feet as they move around on the water.

The Colorado River behind Parker Dam has become Lake Havasu. This is where I saw the Eared Grebes.

What we do is just as "natural" as these grebes.  We are only doing what all animals do—living our lives, looking for food and water and shelter—only we have bigger tools and a greater reach. Many creatures alter their environments to suit them. The problem is just that we are very, very efficient at this. We can kill all the passenger pigeons. We can excavate an entire mountain for coal. And we can divert an entire river like the Colorado so it no longer reaches the ocean.

It is hard to realize as I sit on the shoreline here watching these lovely grebes and the other diving birds that feed here, that this lake is one of the reasons that water has not reached the Colorado River Delta in Mexico since 1998. (See link.) Same for the wonderful warm shower I can take for free in the campground, or the cool water in my pack, or the lettuce I bought at the store.  Everything we do takes water, and unless we treat it like the precious resource it is, it can disappear.

Finding these things out first-hand hurts. I feel grief at all the things I didn't even know existed that are already gone. Cottonwoods, butterflies, pupfish, desert tortoises, whole ecosystems. And I also feel inspired by the resilience of what is here, and by the way life is continually adapting. The pain is worth it, because in return I have a larger, more inclusive view.

It is not about trying to make things stay the same. Change is happening all the time, with or without us. When you take the really long view, much of this area was underwater during the last ice age. Do I feel grief also for the lost Lake Bonneville? For the dinosaurs? And after all, we need power, we need water. I am very appreciative of both in my little home. But how much do we need and what do we use it for? How much is enough? Who decides? And who pays the price of those decisions? These are the agonizingly difficult questions that people have been worrying over for decades here, where water is scarce, and getting more precious all the time.

Perhaps not having a permanent home for now is helping me see how we are really always visitors in this world. How short our time is here; how limited our view; how much we do not know. I am inspired to respect this place I am visiting by becoming more aware of the water I use and try to make wise choices.  And I am reminded of good traits for all visitors faced with the unknown: some humility, some patience, and a little stillness. I have been reading William Stafford—who is one of the best advocates I know for all three of these traits—and his words infuse the land around me.

Pintail Slough in Lake Havasu NWR. A manmade marsh.

The earth says have a place, be what that place

requires; hear the sound the birds imply

and see as deep as ridges go behind

each other.

Day 78: Antelope Island meditation

Blue skies this morning after last night’s wind and rain, and I sit in the sun at our campsite facing Great Salt Lake.  It is nearly perfectly quiet here. If I hold my breath I can hear the faintest echo of a car on a distant road. A slight murmer of voices rises occasionally from another camp where three women are packing a tent into a car. Now and then a magpie chatters or there is a tiny tseep from a sparrow or the small flock of campground starlings passes through. But for long stretches of time there is no sound. If the salt flats and the wide stretches of rock and grass had a voice, this would be it—silence.

This silence is a palpable presence. Once I notice it, it becomes the steady backdrop to everything else. Every sound I hear falls into it like a light rain landing on the ocean.

A magpie makes a more determined squawk and draws my eye to what he is scolding—a single red-tan coyote moving in the red-tan field past my campsite as though the grass itself had grown legs and was trotting toward the water. In the distance, on the tawny hillside is a single bison, grazing. I have been told that “bison” is the correct word for this animal whereas “buffalo” is better used for Asian water buffaloes and such, but I still prefer the name “buffalo.”  I think of Janet Frame’s novel Daughter Buffalo and how different Turnlung’s long demented poetic ramblings about death would be if she had called it Daughter Bison. Sometimes the right word is the wrong one.

I draw my attention out of my thoughts and back to the landscape. Everywhere is space and more space. The brown grass fields sloping down to the flat plane of light-blue water which stretches away and away to the thinnest serrated edge of mountains. Overhead the blue sky reaches across the whole world, as if mirroring the lake below. Even the towering flank of the Wasach Mountains, with their long line of 11,000-foot peaks covered in fresh snow, seems insubstantial next to the land and sky opening out all around.

The space around me also opens up space on the inside. The constant activity of my mind—my fears and hopes and plans—dissolves into this great stretch of sky and lake and land. It is this spaciousness that has been tugging at me since the beginning of this trip, that has been half-hidden behind all the busy days. It is what I have been trying to capture in the hundreds of photographs I have been taking with my cell phone of the horizon line, wide bodies of water, and the sky at sunrise and sunset.

As I continue to sit, the space begins to fill again with daily life. The sun rises, warming the air and the back of my fleece jacket. With the warmth, the birds grow more active. Meadowlarks send their cascade of liquid notes back and forth from the tops of the sagebrush. The starlings have convened a heated committee meeting. Behind me a flock of chukars makes an escalating burbling like a pan of water slowly coming to a simmer. Two magpies pick charred remnants of food off the campfire grill, their bills clicking on the iron bars.

I am reminded of the stereopticon in my grandmother’s cupboard when I was a kid—a frame that held a piece of paper with two nearly identical photos at just the right distance from your eyes so that when you looked through it the two photos merged into one 3-D image. I used to be fascinated with how you could shift your focus back and forth to see either the two ordinary images or just the one image with its magical experience of depth. As I sit here I can feel that same shift happening inside me: how I can see in one moment my ordinary experience of life—planning and worrying and making sandwiches and folding the trailer and watching the birds—and then shift to this other experience of the silence and spaciousness that surrounds us all.

Like stereopticans, places like Antelope Island (or meditation retreats or temples) make it easier for us to make this switch. Hopefully, with enough time spent in places like this, I can also hear that silence and feel that spaciousness wherever I am and whatever I am doing—can see that there is no difference between the two pictures and the single image other than my point of focus.

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We stayed at Antelope Island on the east side of Great Salt Lake, Utah on Nov 20 – 22 and got to hang out with pronghorn antelope, bison, coyotes, mule deer, and a porcupine. There isn’t a large variety of birds here in this season, but tens of thousands of Northern Shovelers winter on the lake near the island and spend their days puttering back and forth in great rafts with their big bills in the water, filter feeding on the lake’s brine shrimp. A large flock will often take off all at once to move to another feeding area, and the sound of thousands of wings resounding like a jet engine or a distant landslide is always a thrill! We are spending Thanksgiving in Provo, Utah. Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends and family!

Day 17: Feeding frenzy (Who says these posts need to be in order?)

At the Cape Disappointment State Park, we did not have any cell coverage at our campsite, so in order for Tom to work he had to drive to find service. On this day I stayed at the trailer while he drove a couple miles to the jetty—a long stretch of rocks extending into the ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River—and parked at a turnoff alongside the road. From there he could hear the ocean and see some weedy sand dunes and the back-side of the jetty. He worked for a couple hours before he realized that he was hearing a LOT of sea bird chatter, as well as an intermittent "whooshing" sound that he didn't recognize. Deciding to investigate, he walked over and climbed up on the jetty only to see a mob of sea birds and amongst them, whales!—at least five humpbacks circling about in the protected water just offshore, following some unfortunate school of fish. 

After taking some photos, Tom drove back to the campsite to get me and together we headed back to the jetty, parked, and ran to the top of the rocks. Just then—with splendid story-telling timing—a whale breached directly in front of us, so close we could practically step off the jetty onto its back—that is if we hadn't been paralyzed with awe.  

And what a transformation in the bay! What had been a relatively calm scene just the day before had turned into a storm of birds. Hundreds of pelicans were crash-diving into the water, each followed by a train of indelicately squawking Heermann's Gulls all converging on the pelican's pouch as it surfaced, hoping for spilled fish. Other gulls of all shapes and sizes flapped and soared about squabbling for scraps. Cormorants dove and surfaced smoothly; grebes and ducks bobbed here and there; terns shrieked overhead. Flocks of migrating Surf Scoters shot through the throngs like handfuls of fat black darts. But most impressive was a tremendous (and I don't use that word lightly) swirl of Sooty Sheerwaters out in the open water near the end of the jetty, a dark cyclone spinning over the ocean, being fed by birds streaming down the coastline. Here, right in front of us, was a river of birds, a riot of birds from all directions, all being swept into this rapidly wheeling funnel-cloud before being spun out to land in swathes of diving, snatching, squawking, flapping rafts feeding on the fish below. How many were there? It felt like millions. It had to be in the tens of thousands. There were too many to count, too many to even think about birds as individuals, only as this giant force of nature descending on this speck of ocean. And amid the frenzy, the dark bulk of the heavy whales rising unexpectedly for a glistening moment before descending again into darkness.

All evening, as the sun set over the ocean, we watched and listened to the spectacle. The light dimmed, the school of fish shifted here and there. We stayed until it was too dark for pictures, and still birds continued to collect from all directions, drawn by the shrieks and calls of the flock. The whales made a couple passes along the jetty, then moved off into more open water. The sun disappeared behind a cloud bank. The air cooled. We walked back to the truck in the failing light, full of wonder. We had a long evening ahead of us of packing everything up in prepartion to move camp tomorrow in the predicted rain, but tonight we were happy, exhilerated just to have been here. This evening all of our hard work of the past year was worth it. To be outside, close to life—our own and that of so many other creatures—was exactly where we wanted to be.

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(This happened on September 22, but I have not had a chance to sit and reflect much since we have been on the road, and there are some experiences that I don't want to miss noting, so I will have some retrospective posts. The picture is one Tom took of the whale surfacing near the jetty. This is the underside of the head with some barnacles stuck to it.)

Spring bumble bees

I was talking to my neighbor Rich the other day and he mentioned something in passing about bumble bees that I didn’t know—all of the bumble bees you see in early spring here are queens. Bumble bees live in underground colonies, consisting of a single female queen bee, female worker bees, and male drones. Most of the bees die off in the winter, but queens that have been fertilized but have not yet nested, overwinter and emerge from hibernation in the spring.

In mid- to late-March this year I had started noticing some especially big, round, furry bumble bees rattling around in the back yard. I like knowing now that they are all fat with progeny, and that they are looking for a spot to nest. I read that they sometimes nest in abandoned rodent burrows, so I have been peering into every hole I find to see if there are any bees using it. I also read that at least some bumble bees dig their own holes. Amazing to think that something the size of a piece of salt water taffy can dig a hole in the ground!

As for the bee in my backyard, I suspect now that I am seeing the same bee repeatedly. She is a yellow-faced bumble bee, with a black body and a striking yellow head. She is native, and one of the most common kinds of bumble bees in our area, so I hope to spot more like her over the coming months. Now that I am paying attention, I have also started to see some bumble bees with black heads—three of them at once were pillaging the spreading geraniums yesterday. I haven't identified what kind of bee they are yet, but now I have my eye out for them.

This all makes me realize that somehow in the last couple of years I lost sight of paying attention to the great variety of life around me. I look forward to having time on my sabbatical to remember to stop and notice. But I also don't want to wait to do this until the conditions are "just right." I think it is this kind of attitude that led to me doing less observing in the first place. So I am starting now. Today. And when I open the door to walk outside I see a stinkbug on the wall of the house. "Stinkbug" my mind says to itself. "I know what that is." But then I take a moment to actually look, and I see the angled arrowhead shape of its body, the precise black and white stripes along the edges of its back, the beautiful slate-gray of its coloring next to the purple-gray of the house. And somehow in that moment of pausing, time feels more expansive, the world feels less cramped, and the tasks of the day seem more joyful.

NOTE: To see more of Tom's loving portraits of wildlife, click here.