O My Darlings...Lost and Formed Anew

A piece in Audubon magazine's last issue of 2013, titled "Climate Change is Causing Some Mixed-up Wildlife" by writer Katherine Bagley, left me feeling especially lucky to have added thirteen bird species to my life list this year, plus the wolf to my list of mammals. The article is about animals including birds, butterflies, whales and bears cross-breeding in our times, engendering hybrid creatures better adapted to habitats that are shrinking or blending together. The animals are adapting to loss of habitat and seasonal patterns brought about by climate change, probably the most sweeping symptom of people-pressure on the earth.

Small fliers like birds and butterflies might likelier interbreed, in theory, since most at the mercy of the winds, they can blow into each others' nesting range. Habitats blending and becoming more generic through our heavy use of the land generate new incentives for birds or insects of species whose numbers are declining to settle for what they can get, including mates from species other than their own.

But some of the news was startling: grizzly bears in the Arctic are breeding with polar bears? In the midst of all the other documented hybrids in Ms. Bagley's article--assorted kinds of whales, seals and porpoises less than familiar to landlocked natural history buffs like me--the bears especially stood out. I have heard of  North American timber wolves interbreeding with coyotes. But a white female polar bear getting bred by a hump-backed brown grizzly early out of his den. Custom and part of the bedrock of my imagination are being eroded here, even if I accept the evolutionary process known as speciation and reject fundamentalist religion's creationism in which everything is sacrosanct with fixed name, form, repute and coloration.

Studying the wild plants and animals over time we realize that their taxonomy, or very identity as species, is loosely set and fluid. Extinctions occur, traditionally over long reaches of time, and new species come of cross-fertilization and of local populations, isolated from others, morphing into new sub-species and eventually, cut off from the habitat of distant cousins, becoming recognized as separate species. As per the article, when animals hybridize, results can vary from sterility in the hybrid offspring to a hastened rate of extinction in an ancestral species that's faring poorly in its ability to compete so it can eat and reproduce. The author grants that speciation has gone on as long as the  animal kingdom itself existed. The article stresses that hybridization in the wild animal kingdom today, like the escalating rate of extinctions, is driven by the take-over of earth by ourselves and by our chemical overflow into air, freshwater and oceans.

We're of course each of us free to consider the issue of cross-breeding, as well as the disappearance of species, however we like. People who are emotionally removed from wild parts of earth where they might encounter uncommon animals will ask what is the loss if one kind of creature goes away to be replaced by another that's faster, bulkier, hardier, etc.

Lately I was introduced by good friends to a fictional work, The Place of the Lion, by the British theologian, poet and novelist Charles Williams. Animal archetypes figure into that narrative in ways that must have so many parallels in the New and Old Testaments and other Judeo-Christian writing that I could search and list for weeks if I wanted examples to cite. Archetypes are defined as symbols, images of our human nature and the experiences that we share universally as human beings, in the sense of a 'collective unconsciousness.' The Place of the Lion in Biblical and pre-Biblical tradition uses animals like the lion, the serpent and the unicorn to express lofty principles and virtues.

Here is a quote from page 53: "that this world is created, and all men and women are created, by the entrance of certain great principles into aboriginal matter. We call them by cold names; wisdom and courage and beauty and strength and so on, but actually they are very great and mighty Powers. It may be they are the angels and archangels of which the Christian Church talks... And when That which is behind them intends to put a new soul into matter it disposes them as it will, and by a peculiar mingling of them a child is born; and this is their concern with us, but what is their concern and business among themselves we cannot know.... In the animals they are less mingled, for there each is shown to us in his own becoming shape; those Powers are the archetypes of the beasts, and very much more..."

That each creature stands for a principle or virtue, while each new person represents a commingled recipe of these same powers, deserves pondering. I think there will always be room in my imagination for angels in winged or other guise, personalized or vague and faceless. But if, in ancient human collective consciousness, the lion stands for strength, the lamb for innocence, the serpent for subtlety, or even if not, I'd still like to recognize the animals according to species as I've confronted them from my own beginnings with the help of the books that named and differentiated them. The books or today the apps are known to all of us who have referred to them. Each species stands for a place whose conditions gave rise to it, and the place was also recognizable as a realm of certain principles or virtues re-characterized in each animal, also in each plant. In that sense they are nature's works of art, which we can stand in front of to admire or emulate.

These distinctive creatures crossbreeding will cause varying reactions in each of us according to our values. For me any species diminished by the expedience of blending its identity with a neighboring species will represent a loss of something sacred. It was sanctified by the place it came from, that place itself likely in danger of transformation to something less. For someone else, the new hybrid form is the new species. For some other people species doesn't matter, it's all an illusion, and what matters is the energy, divine if they allow for divinity, that drives the creature across the field of vision in the dramas that figure in all our lives.

This all adds up to a myriad of creatures for the artist to conceive and work with. For me, the time I have lived within has its huge spread of fauna, named and classified, which we all ought not to dare diminishing by our actions. In my home region there are coyotes, foxes and wolves, who follow their own paths of advantage. In the spring when warblers come back to the woods maybe at long last I'll get more than a glimpse at the Connecticut, out in one of the swamps, in spring dress on nesting territory true to its kind. But any other human being may prefer, ultimately, to skip over the losses implicit in die-offs of scientifically, historically documented species, and entertain oneself with fabulous cross-bred beasts much newer conceived than the unicorn, the manticore and griffon of Europe's Middle Ages, and then, as in another dimension, chosen beasts of fantasy will come to populate a page or a screen--or a note card: 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/122474637/whimsical-bird-art-quail-mixed-media?

Echoes, Glimpsed Faces, and a Rising Wind of Transformation

Since my oldest memory, dating from maybe as far back as 1962, I have loved winter fields especially with the quiet low light of evening or of a cloudy day. The reasons connect with the secure country home my parents kept for us, and my good health all those years, a robust build of body that resisted cold, and the abundant snows of those winters when I was just starting school, having the countryside to come home to. It was cheery there, indoors and out, so the frozen lands never symbolized the dreary to me but the wondrously forsaken, where noise was stifled and drama had been erased into the crisp framework of dead and living plants, cushioned and unified by snow. Their colors were varied and subtly reminiscent, bleached versions of what had been and what in just really a few weeks would be. The shadows were blue; the highlights were now and again the hot tints found in fires. Nowhere else felt so safe or, at the same time, so invigorating. All of our small family at some time or other went enthusiastically into these places.

Now that I'm graying and stiffening a little with the years I look to the loss of these places with many questions as to what in fact was or may have been. It might have been around 1970 when I first heard, on a National Geographic TV show, about the greenhouse effect and how it would steal more and more from the experience of winter. I've never gotten over my dismay about that, though there have been many honest-to-goodness winters north of where I grew up, spectacular on ski trails, with snowdrifts, whiteouts and early blue dark. Inevitably I've broadened my view on climate change to include it as one in a cluster of symptoms that we are, in our numbers and demands on the earth, getting to be too much for it and will be forced to change the ways we do a lot of things.

While the news brings us an ever-lengthening list of weather and ocean cataclysms like ice floes as big as Singapore breaking away from the Antarctic, typhoon Haiyan, the most powerful sea storm ever recorded, smashing the Philippines and once in a lifetime November mega-tornadoes or June downpours besetting the central U.S., local and unscientific observers like me compare past seasons to more recent ones and notice tree hardihood and winter rain versus ice versus snow. Those of us living in the northern countryside still drive into whiteouts, freeze our fingertips and worry about our our engines starting on frigid mornings. But our winters trend shorter at both ends. A long cold winter now is what an average winter used to be to the generation older than us. Today's real temperatures tend to be warmer than the ones we heard in yesterday's forecast for today. Warm spells last a lot longer than the cold snaps. One of the personal questions that looms especially large for me is: if I live to be close to a hundred, what will I see of change to the places I cherish along the U.S.-Canadian border as climate change escalates? Likely I will see fires burn away huge stretches of the resinous boreal forest after it's been too hot and dry for too long. Projections are that oak savanna and grassland will grow up in its place.

An interview one recent morning on Democracy Now, with guests Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin, climate scientists from England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, affiliated with the University of Manchester, stressed the need of "radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the United States, EU and other wealthy nations." I was electrified to hear this report because the meltdown of our four-season climate and disappearance of its hallmark trees and creatures has so long been a sadness, like a known-of disease in someone I love. Just two examples given of de-growth strategies were sizing down the refrigerators used in the United States, where evidently fridges are manufactured and sold bigger than in the rest of the world, and abandoning the habit of a daily shower, or even a twice-daily shower, that requires so much hot water, using tons of fossil fuel in affluent countries. Such adaptations are called for because, per Mr. Anderson, the developed countries of the world have ill-advisedly forsaken opportunities to shift their reliance to full-scale renewable energies and the impending changeover will take place too slowly to safeguard the climate we accept as normal for purposes of keeping sea levels below coastal city street levels and harvesting food crops every year.

The urgency of the climate crisis is described among researchers like the two from the Tyndall Centre in degrees of warming. Two degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees F. are in our time thought to be the limits of further survivable global warming for civilization. But according to Alice Bows-Larkin the rate of emissions for carbon and other heat-trapping gases puts us on track for something more like four degrees Celsius; a listener/reader easily senses that she discreetly refrains from hinting that it could be even more than that. Two degrees Celsius was also the cap agreed upon by the Copenhagen Accord in 2012, and earlier, among the Group of Eight summit meeting of largest nations, in 2009. But as indicators of inhospitable climate, these measures have no real coordinates in the realm of what it would take to force civilization into some mode of living in which we release so little carbon or other heat-trapping gases that offsets come into play for what we do emit, and we become neutral in how we affect the atmosphere. What drives people to change their ways is pain, not readily measurable, which can be sub-classified into grief, bodily misery (hunger, thirst, illness, agony) and economic loss. For many people, impending pain in one or more of these categories will breed change--and by impending pain I naturally mean confronting painful conditions in a state of honest fear. Degrees of planetary heating can't be uniformly matched with degrees of the different forms of pain or fear brought to bear on people in stressful times for the purpose of broad policy-making, but segment by segment of civilization we will have to try our best.

To read any of today's spokespeople for the movement to curb climate change, such as Bill McKibben, is to see an implication of the extractive industries, chiefly the fossil fuels oil, gas and coal, and of the other industries that ally themselves around oil, gas and coal, like automotive manufacturers. The comfort-filled, fast-paced ways of life that are established courtesy of industries enabled by gasoline and diesel-powered transport are so taken for granted that any public statement that these modes of living could be the death of civilization is dismissed as doom and gloom but is most of all kept out of the mainstream news. The internet, if you google articles on climate change is full of written pieces which soothe the glancing reader that fears about global warming are overblown. The fossil fuel and auto industries have been notorious for funding coalitions that dismiss the urgency and/or the reality of what our heat-trapping gases are doing ever faster to our one and only home planet earth.

Doom and gloom scenarios have often filled and taken over people's imaginations. I've taste-tested a bit of literary doom and gloom in recent months, significantly when I read Margaret Atwood's novels Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, and most lately as I finished Stephen King's novella The Langoliers. Margaret Atwood's two late novels are futurist, revealing to her readers a world where genetic engineering is in its heyday, cloned and hybridized animals, wild or feral, forage in open country and corporations rule a world in which nations get no mention. The most secure of the citizens are the corporate work force, protected inside gigantic company-owned dorms. North America is hot year-round and tornado-prone daily, with a cool breeze perceptible as far north as, she suggests, Moose Factory in what was Canada in the remote past, no dates given.

The Stephen King story, like others of his, features time travel. The Langoliers, as it progresses, switches scenes from the cabin of a 767 passenger jet cut off from all sight and signals of life on the ground to a deserted Bangor International Airport in Maine. King's tale challenged my imagination by segregating the notion of time eroding backward from a duly consequential reversal of history on the ground. If time were to peel backward then the techno-industrial landscape should sink and crumble, the forests should flourish and shrink back under ice caps, land and sea rise, fall and intermix. In the story however the land below the jet, forced on pain of the travelers' death to take off anew from Bangor and return west, is scorched away by runaway balls of searing red and black which have no explanation, in their wake leaving nothing but a breathtaking abyss. It worked well in the story as a nightmare vision of doom. But it's not the doom that we in our materialist mania for ever more growth are likeliest to spread in a series of spin-off reactions, one health and environmental crisis or several at a time, across the breadth of the continents still holding above sea level.

Crossing St. Louis County, Minnesota daily in the little old Toyota I recognize that it's bound to be the car itself that's my number-one source of carbon output, even though it's a hybrid. It still burns gasoline and emits carbon. To the extent that we all share in the responsibility--to our offspring and to our wild warm-blooded and cold-blooded and plant kin--to stop dumping carbon into the air, won't at least some of us try to reduce the worst that we're putting out, on our commutes, errands and longer trips? And that is the question I have trouble imagining an awful lot of people asking themselves, skeptics that so many still are about the idea of winter ever being conquered (cold weather is their enemy) and earth's whole climate flip-flopped by our very selves. What will it take, leaving out some of the most agape-filled, civic-minded, devoutly spiritual ones like those who buy carbon offsets or especially those who demonstrate and go to jail, for a majority to say:  I'm tired of knowing I help upset the water cycle and the mountain glaciers, ruin the summers and the cool green forests, escalate the rash of extinctions, and endanger the very weather that feeds our food crops? Somehow, it would have to be a loss of all other choices. And it's been said that whole nations at some stage have rushed to co-ordinate schemes for wholesale safety from a crisis when leaders and public alike finally become overwhelmed by a sense of urgency.

From the 20th-century author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who lived in and wrote about interior Florida in pioneer times and the Depression era (before it was discovered by second-home developers) my sense of what we have lost in America has been heightened, as I equated her 1930s' springs and summers to my corresponding seasons experienced thirty years later, with their clamor of crickets, whippoorwills and tree toads. Here is her passage from Cross Creek, in a chapter titled 'Toady-frogs, lizards, antses and varmints;' "I have lain through a long moonlit night, with the scent of orange blossoms palpable as spilled perfume on the air. and listened to the murmur of minor chords until, just as I have wept over the Brahms waltz in A flat on a master's violin, I thought my heart would break with the beauty of it. If there is not a finished tune, there are phrases, and there is assuredly a motif, articulated, reiterated." I've never been in Florida, but reading in my own time about hordes of amphibians lost to rain-borne toxins and abrupt seasonal change, I wonder if modern people in Marjorie's Florida still get to hear frog symphonies as lavishly poured forth.

Everything wild that I can remember may be dwindling sooner or later like frogs, toads and salamanders on so many continents, or the bobwhite quail our family would hear in my youth across most of the months in a year. It's another reason to draw and paint the places just in the ways they have haunted me, because as memories they are precious as the most revered ancestors and infants all rolled in one, tender and self-renewing, strange yet still fabric of our thoughts and emotions, our muscle and nerve fibres.  Here's bait, if you like, or a friendly invitation: if you relish and buy this art or  this organic fair-trade chocolate you are helping us, in our depleted and depopulated locale, to stay there and do our work without having to start our cars to work somewhere miles off that requires day to day gasoline burning to get there.

Rolling in amid a Pack of Wolves - (They Scattered)

Timber wolves still prosper within stretches of the U.S./Canadian border region, mostly with great reluctance to show themselves to human eyes. Coming and going now daily from Duluth, Minnesota in my spry little old hybrid car I look for wolves whenever there's daylight to expose any, just as I peer before me in the night lest anything four-legged, or a rogue car with dark headlights catching the shine of my lights, cross my path or come at me. In years past, only two wolves, to my knowledge, had crossed a road ahead of my car.

On a recent Friday morning with an overcast deepening all the November drabness, I could see ahead of me two or three or more animal forms, tails flowing out behind them, brownish altogether on the grey monotone of the roadsides. Beasts the size of big dogs crossed playfully to and fro, north or south in both blank lanes. The boreal bog land spread uninterruptedly back to each side.

I braked and braked as I quickened inside with exhilaration. These canines looked at least the size of German shepherds, though some wolves stand as high in the rump and shoulders as deer. Their response to the car seemed semi-practiced, as though they had an action plan--in case of a car coming the As go north and the Bs head south--yet at the same time they looked nonchalant like teens making way for a car in a game of street hockey. I slowed to a stop. Probably the wolves could hear the electric hum of the hybrid car system.

However that was, one animal remained in sight, shoulder-high in grass and seedlings on my right. It had a picture-perfect wolf face, with blunt muzzle, head and shoulders gold-tinted on white with black tips, a bit of pink tongue forward, ears much neater to the head than a coyote's. The exchange of glances was real yet ultra-brief, a reward from out of the wild, something I had hoped for over all my remembered years. I gathered from that glimpse a fellow-animal's cautious curiosity, mixed with the same ambivalence as that of the pack-mates crossing and re-crossing the road within the past half-minute. The wolf was crouched, viewing me at a distance of twenty feet or so for one second, gone like a magician's handkerchief in the next. My foot quivered on the pedal as I got back in motion beyond that scene of deeply reactive and clannish movement.

There is a hunting season in Minnesota on wolves now, with a quota or 'target harvest' of 220 kills for the months included. Recently I heard or read an official with state government talking about wolves with what may be the stock Department of Natural Resources middle point-of-view, that yes, wolves are intelligent, sensitive creatures but that no, they don't merit the bleeding heart defense coming from people who say there should be no wolf hunts. That's just romanticism. They are legitimate game animals. But, making a stretch from out of the wild into human affairs, if you were to ask me I'd say that the point of view that abortion of human fetuses should be made illegal is romanticism of human fetuses--babies, of course, since babies is always going to be the word of choice. Comparing the meager level of sensory development of most aborted babies with the same in a full-grown adult wolf shot and killed calls into question whether the elective abortion or the wolf kill is the act of greater cruelty to the victim.

I take this viewpoint not out of hatred for babies of my own kind but out of a desperate love for the other creatures whom our endless expansion is crowding out their own territory since we always need to clear more land, dig it, farm it and build over it. We seem not to be able to shake the notion that people should multiply till the whole earth and every possible other place is taken up by our civilization, as if nature could be managed to become nothing but a grand human life support system, or as if we would really want to live in a universe completely of our own construction, with maybe a little relic forest, brush or desert like a decorative border. Taking the religious perspective about either matter will not convert me to your religious view, I have my own.

I would prefer a world that holds the values belonging mainly still, I suspect, to aboriginal peoples: that human beings have no greater importance than any other species we neighbor with, and that we live peaceably in motley forms and adaptations, sometimes learning and modelling each others' magnificent expertise to each others' greater glorification. I believe the creator God of the universe would approve. The wolf in its solo resourcefulness and social graces, with its muscular power and embrace of landscapes just as those places evolved, makes a fascinating model for creative and nurturing human interactions with our common earth.

I'm a great fan of Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf, in which the author worked as a biologist for the Canadian Wildlife Service and lived alongside a pack of Arctic wolves in the Keewatin District north of Churchill, Manitoba. His wolf neighbors gained his admiration on a whole series of levels: first of all, their resourcefulness in eating oftenest what was near at hand, especially mice, when their reputation among the white hunter constituency of Canada was that of voracious deer-slaughterers, helping denude the tundra of caribou. But also the wolves had a sense of fair play among themselves and extending to the lone researcher living at the edge of their territory in a tent. An unmated male wolf baby-sat for the mother whose litter of pups had exhausted her with their rambunctious bouncing and biting, letting them bounce all over him. The alpha male, father of the pups, immediately respected the scent boundaries that the man had made, wolf-fashion with squirts of his own urine, along a line of shrubs. The adult wolves lined up along a ridge to gape, in apparent amusement, at the man as he tumbled down the slope of crumbling sand and dislodging rock, overloaded by his own gear; they never made a move to pile onto him. He learned that the native Eskimo people had no wolf prejudices like those of European humankind, and knew each of these wolves as individuals from long acquaintance. He learned to relax and drop the idea that he'd better have his rifle or revolver at the ready when the wolves were near.

Wolves are clever, retiring and seldom seen, by comparison with many of the other creatures that share their realm and their exuberance in the atmosphere that sustains them. We all, it seems proven by people's observations time and again, have emotions of joy, curiosity, respect for others who pass by and do us no harm, bereavement, fear, foreboding, anger and vengefulness when hatred was levied against us. The northern lands that are hold-outs of today's remaining wolves have their smaller life forms that sing, whirl with unfathomed mixes of passion and enliven the people, probably the hawks and other birds, the foxes, the deer and other four-legged community members who witness them.

Along with the occasionally heard and seldom-seen wolves, I savor the sight of birds everywhere. The gaiety of birds is confused again and again with their evasiveness, a drive to save their own lives from airborne predators. In the northern U.S. and Canada one intensively social bird, full of bounding travel-zest and pale wintery tints of white, dawn-pink and dark, is the redpoll, which sorts into at least two distinct species, the common and the hoary. The animus of wolves romping, galloping, lurking and howling is echoed by the redpolls foraging along the paths we travel and swirling into flight, diverging and converging as they leave the scene to re-group somewhere else.

Here is a link to the redpoll note card, a frameable item at 5x7 inches or 12.7 x 17.7 cm. Like most of my others, the card is blank inside with a little descriptive text on the outer back flap. A Redpoll Explosion on a Winter's Morn

Real Chocolate and Other Gifts of the Trees

In the northern latitudes extending onto the belt of Arctic tundra you enter a realm of birches, various species giving way to each other as longitudes, soil types and land masses change. The northernmost in the family are shrubs, and there is a yellow birch, a black or sweet birch, a silver birch, and American paper birch, best-known of the clan to Americans, with its white bark curling loose to expose salmon-pink inner patches. The peelable bark has provided generations of craftsworkers with material for canoes, rafts, baskets, cookpots, shelter, footwear, writing paper, toys and fire starter.

A co-worker recently posted that as a child he was afraid of birch trees. I can imagine the child-version of myself, hypothetically, getting the creeps from a crooked white trunk in a night-time woods. Once, long ago there was a contest on the radio with a cash prize for the person who dared the strangest stunt. The winner was a man who ate a whole birch tree, leaves, twigs and all, I can only presume. Size of the tree didn't enter into the story when my sister first told me of it.

A birch was her choice when an art client commissioned me to design a family tree as an anniversary gift for her parents, who live here in birch country where they raised her and two siblings. The project was illuminating on many fronts, triggering a sense of how a tree's form and physics can resonate metaphorically with a family's traits. The listing in my Etsy shop for a family tree made to order asks that the customer choose a favorite variety of tree along with any of the other specifications to depict their family. Trees after all are vital fellow-beings, as individuals and as functioning types on this earth. Moving into abstract realms there are family trees, phone trees, coat trees; they are all symbols of an organization having a common root.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/166374294/custom-family-tree-made-to-order-use

 

Here is homage to the birches from my own writing of 1988, titled The Education of Trees (in Memory of Scott Starling:)
               "Seeds of the birch tree chose rockfield, pocked with bog;
                 Betula lutea (Yellow Birch) peeled a gold rind;
                 Betula papyrifera (Paper Birch) traced cold humus to the Arctic, wrapping its trunks
                 in white lapels, its badges darkening it as its descendants eked from dells on
                 the tundra, recommending reclining postures, which Betula minor (Dwarf Tundra Birch)
                 mastered."
The aesthetics or poetics of these graceful white-barked, orange-barked, silver-and-gold or black-barked trees have been outstanding to generations of people.

Moving to a still larger perspective, where would civilization be without tree-fiber, tree fruit and flavoring, medicinal extracts, shade and of course oxygen, from the full complement of trees ever found on earth?

The tree that bears cacao beans (for chocolate) is described as small, especially in its cultivated state, with white wood and frail branches. The leaves are large, glossy, red at immaturity before changing to green. Picking the pods requires long-handled knives to reach high in the tree, machetes well suited for harvest among the lower branches. Fragile branches and shallow roots typical of the trees used for commercial chocolate prevent climbing to get at the crop by any means. Though most of today's chocolate harvest comes from African countries, another third or so comes out of South America where cacao originated and appears to have been first enjoyed by the Mayans and the Aztecs, its human history going back more than two millennia. Theobroma cacao, the tree's Latin name, means food of the gods.

This household's Meadowlands Chocolate Company offers bean-to-bar chocolate in four varieties, each from a distinct part of South America--Belize, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Each variety has a sub-flavor of its own, in contrast with the chocolate of major brands offered in vending machines and convenience stores or the luxury chocolate offered for Valentine's Day and its equivalents. Meadowlands Chocolate is not candified by dollops of added sugar, or by milk or emulsifiers; instead the unadulterated terroir or unique regional flavor can be discovered and recognized, the taste of the very soil that fed the beans, much the same as with fine wines. My own favorite is the Venezuelan Amazonas, with a warm drawn-out quality that seems a perfect blend of chocolate, sweetness and subtle forest mould. Beans for this product are brought by canoe from within the Amazon region where harvest by hand takes place using the patient methods described above.

Organic cane sugar and organic cocoa beans are the only two ingredients in Meadowlands Chocolate. The bean supplier carries only certified Fair Trade and other certified organic products. Organic certification, in its quest to promise ongoing harmony between the crop plant and its retinue of harvesters, pollinators and land supervisors, clarifies the connection between the artisans and the tree that is their source.

From another perspective, there is a whole jungle of motley crops and beauties and supportive strengths for endless art, music and feasting once you step to the threshold where the tame confronts the wild.

In Fall, Singing Two Heroic Herbs of Summer

In September it was time to start a move, and when apartment-cleaning, daily work, a commissioned art work and then the move itself began to overwhelm me I began acknowledging the warning tickles of  a cold. In my midlife I've grown susceptible to bronchial congestion that would bloom into pneumonia if left untreated. Prescription antibiotics in the years I'd been insured would squelch those symptoms within hours, but the leftover cough and residue linger way deep. All in all I find I'm vulnerable to bronchitis after more and more of the colds I catch, though I've never smoked. In fall 2013, doing without health insurance and facing the move and my usual Canadian travels in the month to come, I felt the clampdown of familiar challenge in sore throat and fatigue. My house-mates (not the first but the second set of friends to make the same claim) urged that raw garlic would kill the infection and sent me away to Duluth with two whole bulbs of garlic, suggesting I eat it like pills.

So I gulped the cloves one at a time or broke them over the midday meal, while the infection developed because I couldn't afford to spend days lying down to sleep it off. I must have breathed garlic scent on my nearest co-workers, since whenever I burped I burnt the end of my nose with garlic gas. But the usual congestion never caught hold inside me. This cold instead remained the gentle kind I remember having as a schoolkid, a day or more of sneezes, then a three-days' cough toward the end. I ate up one whole bulb of garlic, then let up when the cough had run its course, and skipped that build-up of bronchial residue that reinforces warnings not to rely on antibiotic pills whenever infection strikes. Now I'm a convert to garlic in no matter what formulas it might be prescribed by practiced healers. What seems true is that the benefit may all be in the timing of when you load your system with it.

A friend and peer in Indiana years ago gave me The Herb Book by John Lust, Benedict Lust Publications ©1974. In this book garlic is ascribed a range of healing properties with beautifully arcane names: anthelmintic (a worm-purge,) carminative (a fart-starter to relieve belly gas,) cholagogue (a bile promoter,) antispasmodic (a spasm and cramp-dampener,) and expectorant (hastening the expulsion of mucous from the breathing passages.)

Part of the mystique that this past summer held for me included my first-ever acquaintance with another much scarcer herb, in some locales considered threatened unless propagated, the native North American queen of the prairie or Filipendula rubra. Nothing I've read so far connects it with any medicinal or salad-making properties, though  it's hard to believe that for all the eons of human foot-travel our ancestral gatherers never collected queen of the prairie or tried it out for whatever health-boosting it might be worth.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/165825104/pink-meadow-wildflower-queen-of-the?

I wanted the painting to honor not just the plant in its wind-swayed weirdness--a rose with a foam-like or plume-like floral structure, its leaves subdividing like the fingers of a spread-open hand but saw-toothed along all edges--but also the day on which I sat before it, with the wind ushering a complex of clouds from west to east into ever new sprawls and pile-ups. Wisps of rain cloud would complement plumes of pink flower. The day was of a distinct cool summer type, and the mixture of plants deepened and wove itself into green and greenish black fibrous shadow. The mixture forced me into abstraction. The queen's precisely developed leaves might only bare glimpses of themselves through ever-differing green-shadow, losing itself into scratchy black-green.

A great share of my joy on that scene came of knowing I would soon be living just down this road from this plant colony of chilly-water fens, within a mile of the middle reaches of the St. Louis River. I would come home there as I did today into the impending autumn, which would yield to the first spurts of winter, the vanguard of cold weather with its walls of drear against the horizons. In these ramparts of dark cloud overhead just now I sensed no menace, but a wink of old tomorrows and yesterdays, gold-trim along edges revealing jolly blue. High, low, openings here, there, and beyond them streaks of rain, smears of snow held way aloft. There was nowhere else I would prefer to be. 

The queen of the prairie painting on the featured card is about earth's profusion of waters, sky-borne and ground-channeled, engendering a profusion of plants and moving lives. Along these very roadsides  caraway, a member of the parsley family escaping into the wild from long-forgotten herb gardens, can also be untangled. Though in a separate family, as a garden escape it seems akin to the garlic, wild or domestic. Every plant I remember finding along this roadside with the queen of the prairie figures in, from the standpoint of art, to the living thatch-work of green through the power of visual suggestion.

A Memorial Testament to a Fellow Forager - Gisela - Who Set an Ageless Example as to What Matters

Here's my tribute to an older girl buddy who was my mentor, friend Gisela Schlueter Terrell who stunned me by dying late this spring, just a few weeks after a last e-mail passed between us. She was a librarian in the first ten years of our acquaintance, at Butler University's Irwin Library in Indianapolis, where a two-year grant had funded the opening of a Rare Books and Special Collections department in what must have been 1979. Gisela had come from the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, an hour or so's drive to the south, to stock and catalogue the new rare book room. Meanwhile I was employed as a typist and file clerk in the main cataloguing department downstairs. Apparently she saw a likely characteristic in me that suggested I needed guidance, as Gisela was a great rescuer and guide where there was any possibility of a mutual benefit. What she saw must have had to do with a colorless propriety that pervaded that bright, white library, designed with row upon row of closely set arched windows, the design of a world-famous Seattle-born architect, Minoru Yamasaki, in 1963.

The rare book room in Gisela's time was way up at the top floor of the building and was not a popular place, long and lavish as it was with ranks and ranks of stacks, ancient volumes and boxed documents behind a locking wooden door. As such it made a special refuge for a naive and impractical girl aged nineteen, full of visions of northern horizons and all manner of romance, however/wherever it happened into her grasp of a situation. The sturdy German-born librarian, with long black ponytails and teasing blue eyes, had skin as brown as ancestors from other land masses, other latitudes documented far back into time. I would talk to her of my obsessions and fears, all very abstract, and she would listen, listen and sympathize or starkly critique me in her dark European voice full of inflections and frequent snorted chuckles. Sometimes she would be swiftly harsh in her opinions, yet unfailingly discreet, as much given to scoffing as to reverence, toward me or whomever and whatever was the subject. Her judgment came of wide experience, since she had been a classroom teacher in Germany, a gymnastics instructor, an orchestra violist and music teacher, and later, in America, had been involved in 1960s political demonstrations. With two or more PhD degrees she was mentally quick in her reasoning and conclusions while gifted with strong intuition, which made her a decisive critic as well as a giver of apt suggestions where art, writing, cooking, plant propagation or a love or friendship were under discussion.

She had a little house with a quince tree, a hammock in the yard, and gardens with beans and rhubarb, root vegetables and cucumbers, strawberries and medicinal herbs such as comfrey. Off in the hardwood forest of surrounding Owen County, Indiana grew pawpaw trees and the occasional persimmon, black gum and sycamore, eastern cottonwood, black walnuts, oaks and maples and tulip trees. Ginseng and golden-seal were two scarce herbs that could be foraged there, which Gisela would harvest sparingly and sell at local marketplaces where they would be shipped off to end-users in Asia. At week-ends down at her house I tasted a green persimmon (so bitter I could taste it with imaginary taste buds seated on my teeth) and breakfasted on guinea-fowl and duck eggs from a neighboring small farm, shared in the task of making butter with a vintage glass butter churn that operated with wooden paddles inside, assisted in the hourly pressing of wild honey out of a section of tree trunk placed on the hearth to loosen the honeycomb that was hardened by December's cold, and later one June heard and saw the only Kentucky warbler I have ever encountered, a few steps away down her county gravel road.

The house, including its few acres of backwoods, was something she had just managed to buy out of earnings from the IU Lilly library half an hour's drive away. This house had only two rooms with a back bathroom, and had a root cellar which, if I remember correctly, Gisela had hand-dug under a few square feet of the main room, opening with a trap door. A rear sun porch with translucent green vinyl siding and roof was more of her own handiwork. Cats lived out on the front porch, which was open sided, but were not allowed indoors; in later years domestic geese gained residency around the entire yard and gardens, which they patrolled with shrill vigilance. In June of 1980 as a guest for my first time I spent the night in the hammock that hung from two trees, hearing no end of whippoorwill cries from the forest floor in each direction. Sultry heat, sung by cicadas with that pulsating intro and ebbing buzz that speaks to me Indiana and equivalent latitudes, a song I've yet to hear in Minnesota where by now I've lived most of my life, made up the soundstage of those summer or early-fall days. The forest's leaves, crisp and darkly green, as long and broad as shoe-soles, encircled the yard on three sides, for Gisela had left the the woods alone where ground for pathways or gardens or a bit of light and air current had not needed claiming.

Some time after I was gone away to study and live in the north, first to London, Ontario and subsequently to Minnesota, Gisela met, fell in ecstatic love with and married the son of a neighbor, Clyde Terrell, among other descriptions a pond-builder with carpentry skills, an appetite for history and back-country lore who owned a bulldozer and wanted release from an unhappy marriage. Gisela, who had known marriage, desertion and widowhood all three, destitution and hunger and a few of the personal dangers that can confront young foreigners who are obviously on their own, helped him with the process of getting a divorce, since each of the new couple had independently longed to move west to the mountains. They lived for a few years together in Owen County, then in the early 1990s left to scout Wyoming and Montana for a homestead. They found land they could buy within the Bighorn Range, in Sheridan County, Wyoming, in the village of Story, where they established a cabin and gardens and kept horses during what must have been about eleven exhilarating though financially challenging years. With the approach of 2005 Clyde, nearing the age of 70, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Gisela, as she told me last year, was 'under no illusions' as she cared for him, driving him to and from Denver for treatments, till his death on Labor Day week-end of that year.

So in this dignified aftermath of a dream pursued, met and lived, and heartbreak, and many mountain afternoons spent alone or with Clyde following trails, at trout streams and in dells below the sheerest of peaks, snow-cooled and re-baked by desert heat, and following many orchestral concerts in which Gisela played her viola for weddings, wakes or reunions, and rehearsals in donated space or lessons given in her living room, I met my old friend again after twenty-one years of irregular contact limited to phone, letter or email. This was on the third of June, 2012, as I followed her printed directions off westbound I-90, past Buffalo, nearing but not yet as far as Sheridan.

The log house where I found her was strange yet familiar, a transformation of the old clapboard shack in Indiana, having the same dark interior, jovial signs painted and hung in bathroom or kitchen, dried herbs dangling from the ceiling, and floor to ceiling book cases. Now, minimized in their midst, was also a computer. In the yard stood ponderosa pines and, out back, well-spaced aspen and narrowleaf cottonwood that provided a flickering shade.

We spent most of one week visiting, sharing evening or midday dinners that included heart of deer and bear meat pot roast (friends and neighbors had traded or given her the wild game, though she shot and dressed a deer per year on her own land for the venison as Clyde had taught her how to do) and taking car trips into the highest elevations of the Bighorn Range, seeing moose and marmot, summer snowpack, mesas, torrents within red canyons and sagebrush flatlands. All alone at the top of a Douglas fir one day I heard the song of an Audubon's warbler, the western version of our yellow-rumped warbler found east of the prairies, impossibly wistful and ringing between rock heights like the sincerest utterance of forlorn hopes.

Once as we hiked a road together I noted that Gisela, who long ago had exceeded my height by a couple of inches, but had acquired a hunch in her shoulders, now stood a tad shorter than me. But her stride made me hurry my fastest to keep up--even though she was nearly seventy years of age to my fifty-two and a smoker who'd smoked little brown cigars for as long as I'd known her. The gardens, the old sheepdog Mya and the attraction of mountain slopes not very far in the distance, a backdrop to all errands into the yard, kept her constantly stepping, striding, stooping, hauling, mixing, toting, bowing, tuning, summoning, often braving spasms of arthritis. She had grown stringy, stooped with constant busyness, on a diet centered around lean meat and her own fruit and vegetables. Her ways were the ways of our forebears on six continents.

In my mind she's a persistent survivor, to the extent that I wonder when if ever I'll accept her as a mortal human being truly dead. From most of what she ever said to me I think she believed she'd live to a ripe old age well beyond seventy, and so, had she lost the desire and outlook to attain great age, especially as a veteran tobacco user? At this stage I expect never to learn how she died, if it was sudden or long premeditated, attended by someone or in solitude, eminently influenced by Clyde's death at the same age of seventy years or coincidentally over and done with by that age.

A book I'm currently enjoying, Old Border Road by Susan Froderberg, Little, Brown and Company ©2010, has in its middle the quotable lines: "And do not the dead surely lay their claim? Perhaps more so than the living....Do as commanded or elsewise live in fear. Girl, I tell you this--death is but one less day to be afraid." And so, with the certain sense that the dead do live on inside those of us who knew them best or longest, I rest and act upon the discernments phrased by Gisela--that life is not easy, that it goes back on you just when you're lifted up by your fortunes, that mullein is safely gathered alongside highways and railway rights of way with today's pollution-control technology in cars, trucks and locomotives, that on meeting a cougar in open country you must simply stand your ground and make yourself look as big as possible.

I remember her AMC Gremlin down in Indiana, its rusting body held together by flowers and caterpillars, raindrops and other beautification painted up and down it in different colors of enamel, and the Ford Fiesta that succeeded it. I remember the days she didn't come in to the library due to car trouble, or the summer day she had to stop at every creek between Indianapolis and the town of Spencer to re-fill the radiator with a bucket. I remember the day we came upon car thieves dismantling vehicles beside a shallow pond in a pasture, and she made me stand aside while she passed them at close range to be sure they saw that she saw. (Later, they murdered her young dog Troll with a shotgun blast at close range, and were subsequently rounded up and flushed out of Owen County for good by outraged rural neighbors who showed up in a group with an ultimatum on hearing of what had happened.)

She was a person as large as all humanity, whose code of ethics and acceptance of other traditions she had pieced together from life-ways variably old and much forgotten, civilized American, native American, civilized and pre-civilized Eurasian--that is my best assessment of Gisela. But by now she's no longer in a position to argue with me...

A Sudden Obituary (a bit Late) and the Legacy in Art and Mountain Panorama

A friend of mine going back thirty-three years died, I just learned over the past week-end by accident, a year to the date that we last saw each other. Before that week in early June 2012 it had been twenty-one years since we last visited, other than over the phone. She lived in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, and was a marvelous teacher, gardener and player of stringed instruments. A music teacher and ex-librarian, she was my mentor, without ever admitting to the decided value of the hugely varied lessons she imparted to me. I'm so far left wondering what could have happened, accident or illness, to have felled this staunch person at an age, 70, that seemed too soon.

Last summer, buoyant with my old youthful joy borne of spending time in the deep countryside with this friend (our acquaintance goes back to those years in Indiana, a state then significantly more rural than it is today) I drove from Duluth out to Rapid City, South Dakota in one long day full of lofty clouds and sun, touring in the car a ways around the Oahe Reservoir outside the city of Pierre as dusk settled. Next day it was on, via the Theodore Roosevelt National Grassland, to Wyoming in that area between Buffalo and Sheridan, where immediately the same day I began to get acquainted with new birds of the Rocky Mountain valleys: the red-naped sapsucker and the calliope hummingbird. The watercolor kit had ridden with me in the car and a profusion of hound's tongue or gypsy flower on sunlit ground (per my friend locally called the beggar's fleas) challenged me to a several-days' botanical painting effort.

The hound's tongue is a weed of pastures, not a native North American herb, yet in its peculiar fuzziness and olive drab overtone, its florets the meaty pink of a dog's dripping tongue, it seems as habituated into the nearby mountain slopes as my friend, a native of Germany, was absorbed into the high elevations of the American West. I found a patch of ground with both sun and shade where I could sit, where a specimen of hound's tongue or Cynoglossum officinale made itself available, and spent four to five days finishing the details in watercolor and gouache. The card front in its photo is shown here, with a link to where it's for sale:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/103227055/blank-note-card-botanical-watercolor?


When I think about that gypsy flower in blossom alongside a sparkling rill beneath a line of cottonwood trees, with magpies' prattle over in the sun's direction and from behind me the flattened little death-knell sound, like a screech owl without the tremolo, that later proved to be the western wood pewee, I think about our car excursions up to the passes in the Bighorns near the Montana state line, where snowbanks enclosed the two paved lanes on either side. My friend, putting in her gardens for the year's food crop, never-the-less took afternoons off to drive me with her to such places as Shell Falls and Crazy Woman Canyon; we saw miles and miles of the changing topography that makes up Wyoming including sub-alpine slopes with whitebark pines, and way below them the red rock chasms, sagebrush deserts and, partway up again in elevation, meadows dampened by snow-fed springs, a-flit with mountain bluebirds the greenish blue of a twilit sky.

I remember her explanations of the sights around us: her elderly Australian sheep dog with the bald and hanging teats and one crossed eye, formerly the property of some unnamed sheep herder who had obviously used her to commercially breed pups and almost as likely had kicked her face at some point near one eye socket. This dog had entered into a new life at the grand age of ten. Her career as a companion dog must have felt to her like a paradise, one old lady rescued and given to another to ease their joint tragedies past into vaguest after-impression. 

My friend explained runaway truck lanes I had glimpsed from the highway in another tragic story out of local news: a young transport driver fell asleep in his cab somewhere high above Sheridan or Buffalo, realized on waking that he'd lost his chance to use the emergency lane and knew he was fated to crash into the town below the heights in order to make his final stop. He dialed 911 and had the local sheriffs clear the whole route ahead of him and provided his speed and location. As predicted, with the main thoroughfare into town fully emptied of cars and trucks, he hurtled into view on schedule, missed a diagonal bend and crashed to his death into a building already vacant, the walls and roof collapsing around him. The local folk took up a collection for his widow and tiny children.

There was the day I spent mostly alone, creeping along the Penrose hiking trail, further teaching myself the local flora like the clematis folk-named sugar bowls, and somewhere along the way finding my first Lazuli bunting singing to the sunny afternoon so much like the indigo bunting of the Midwest. Eventually my friend dialed my cell phone to check that I still answered and hadn't fallen prey to any cougars or armed strangers or dropped off a precipice. One night we splurged like hungry girls with the metabolism of youth, eating three platefuls apiece of Asian buffet meat and vegetables. In her dining nook I ate roast bear and heart of venison for my first time. I learned of treating old bronchial mucous with cups of mullein tea, and vowed I'd forage my own back in Minnesota, as I have now done.

So now, more than a year later, with the western expanses of America a beacon in my memory each day I make my living in the north-central U.S., I have the gypsy flower art image to help remind me of this legacy in the person of a great critic, teacher and humanitarian, who had once beguiled me into thinking she had been born a Romany gypsy, an adoptee saved from one of the orphanages the Hitler regime set up for selective breeding. The gypsy flower might, among other things, stand for the drifter and re-colonizer in people and species the world over. She told me on the last visit that the half-gypsy girl had really been her cousin by adoption.

When I envision the future with its dire impending constraints like unaffordable car ownership and withering summer droughts taking place between floods and consequent washouts along high-country roads like those in the Bighorns, I wonder what will happen to byroads between hubs of commerce and manufacturing. Will patches of old America and for that matter old Europe and other places still flourish, visitable by ordinary folk who yearn over collective memory of them? I tend to think that they will, if at great expense in money and personal safety, somehow--maybe by bus or bike, van, wagon train or foot...

Feeling like a Queen of the Prairie

I am celebrating the great, unexpected good fortune of being able to live in the country again, as I did through childhood, at the urging of good friends an hour from Duluth--and celebrating the concept of summer everlasting in our minds, summer with its weird discoveries or epiphanies from the natural world. Maybe half a mile down the road from my new shared home is this stand, just below the road bank, of a native American prairie plant classified within the giant rose family, called queen-of-the-prairie. It will be in a watercolor which I mean to develop at its own pace.

While we in our fifties or coming into our sixties feel or see our own aging process, a wild and lesser-known plant like this one, especially one this uncommon, coming into its prime just off our shoulder speaks to us of rejuvenation, whether it's individual or community. When I first saw this plant while passing in a fast walk, I knew it by name immediately, though I'd never seen it in the flesh, only in pictures in several wildflower manuals. Some plants and animals are like that, so showily distinctive that some photo in some book instills a lasting memory.

Queen-of-the-prairie is like a pink floss or a foam on top of its pale orangey green stalk. Originating, apparently, in the northern and central prairies of the United States where there's wet soil, the plant has found its way eastward into New England by way of plantings. Down in the grasses below the inflorescence are the leaves, colonial, sharply veined and toothed, deeply lobed and golden-green. What a privilege, to share habitat with things like this that nobody contrived or apparently sowed here, it just came into being by natural process through thousands of years and holds out, where nobody may for the longest time have grazed livestock or mown hay.

Watch for the 2013 watercolor, which continues my line of native North American plant note cards. I'd halfway like to have it done right now, right here to advertise the whole set of works. But every time I get down to business at one of these, trusting a folding chair will protect me from the bite of deer ticks, I have to consciously tell myself that the project can't be hurried or the whole thing suffers. Evolution takes eons; artwork meant for its glorification should take as long as the artist's whole life support system demands, as long as the inevitable mistakes take to be found and overcome, as long as the utmost patience will bear.

I am so full of gratitude, when I stop to think, of all that's been possible and may yet be possible in my time.

Away to California but Back to Mid-Continent - Refinding a Hardy Ephemeral

Better late than never--courtesy of generous friends I was recently able to visit the West Coast for my first time, spending a week in Sonoma County, California. For anyone who has never ridden Amtrak's Empire Builder westward or east along the Canadian border, skirting Glacier National Park in Montana, connecting at Portland, Oregon with the Coast Starlight which climbs up and over the Cascades to chug up or down Oregon and California, it's armchair travel worth the money and the time.

I had never been in California or any of the Pacific Northwest, and never seen a palm tree growing naturally out-of-doors. Occidental, California where we stayed, is in the thick of redwood country and nestles among the hills of the Coast Range. Taking it for granted that in our time the landscape of most inhabited places would still be recognizable to our ancestors a few centuries back, the look of north central California today, take away the grape and olive plantations, the estates and the towns with their ornamental groves of imported trees and flowers, would have been the color, texture and tree outline carried home by the European horseback travelers who first scoped it out as a paradise where they'd make their new homes. Most landscapes must remind a newcomer of places where they'd lived or traveled, but as I made my acquaintance with the definitive trees of this forest, redwood and tan oak, California laurel, interior live oak and Pacific madrone, I knew beyond a daydream that I was on the other side of mountain ramparts distinctly separating me from the Midwest, Ontario and New England, the places I've walked the most. Redwood structures and outlines do not resemble those of any other conifer in my experience.

At Powell's City of Books, the giant used-book store in Portland, Oregon I bought introductory manuals for the trees and wildflowers of California. Especially informative was the older book, Trees of California by Willis Linn Jepson, published by the University of California in 1923. The circular pattern of redwood shoots' maturation into a ring of full-size trees, the centrality of redwood lumber in the history of California's statehood, and the huge diversity of pines and firs to be found if a person traveled inland and northward from Sonoma County are all impressions I gained from that little book with its exquisite pen-and-ink illustrations of cones and foliage drawn to scale in an age before photography could adequately show the hallmarks of trees, herbs, plumage, etc. 

We passed time along the fog-drenched and wind-whipped Pacific Coast, as cold as Duluth and Two Harbors, Minnesota--counter to my biased expectations. My most vivid plant encounter along those state-owned pull-outs and beaches near Bodega Bay was with outcrops of pink and lavender blossoms, their anatomy so much like the fleabane from Midwestern brushlands but growing squat on the ground, the flowers the width of a little girl's hand. The leaves were three-cornered and fleshy like exotic desert foliage, but I wanted to think of these plants, creeping on the ground in typical adaptation to ever-recurring gales, as members of the composite family which includes the daisies, asters and sunflowers. With the other purchase from Powell's, The Wildflowers of California, Their Names, Haunts, and Habits by Mary Elizabeth Parsons (Dover Publications, Inc. of New York, 1966), but most of all with a tip from my host Barbara who called it ice-plant, and then the internet, I learned that these flowers were of a totally other family called fig-marigold, or Mesembryanthemum, most members of which strayed to America from southern Africa. Ms. Parsons, the handbook's author, speculated that the three species known along the California coast may have taken root without the direct help of human hands.

We car-traveled around the county between the towns of Occidental, Guerneville, Sebastopol, Jenner and Santa Rosa, allowing me the chance to walk and see twelve new species of birds, most of which I wouldn't reliably meet east of the Pacific seaboard. From the bus windows between Santa Rosa and Martinez, the train stop, I saw agricultural flatland, always backed by the hazy storm-cloud blue of the dry mountain chain that lends the Coastal Range its special character, the land as a whole provoking impressions not new but familiar, gathered from book- and article-reading down the years, sealed by awareness of being nearly as far west as possible in the continental U.S.

Sun, as in sunny California of course gives this land its reputation for days and days at a time, baking and cracking mud into tiles, irregular hexagons and octagons, in a wildfowl refuge nearly devoid of ducks, that we passed alongside. Fields adjoined streamside groves between dwellings fenced and tree-sheltered, the evening angle of the sun mellowing the daylight across all this semi-arid backdrop of anonymous settlers' westward dreams of space and moderate climate, lives either chosen or settled for, since the settler had run out of choices on meeting the coast. Though I didn't feel at home,  I was glad to have visited here firsthand, as a validation of so much amassed magazine-reading and almost-envisioned vista through the eyes of novelists like John Steinbeck.

In the weeks just before this two-week trek, back in northern Minnesota I had watched one of the most reluctant onsets of spring ever in my memory, snows arriving like sweepings from some overhead storage loft into the month of May. One significant Saturday hour by hour gave way to a parade of overlapping winter and spring weather drama, yielding everything but a summer thunderstorm. That day I was driving backroads north by east from the town of Aitkin--which the previous day had hosted a rare painted bunting that had blown this way from the Gulf Coast region but likely blown homeward before the night's frigid reblast from the north--to the township of Meadowlands. All this countryside is nearly as flat as river delta; much of it was prehistoric lake bed that contains peat bogs. Stopping at the home and work space of good friends I went wandering toward the St. Louis River where the prior week-end I had been startled by blue-violet petals on the woods floor like a revolt, a freakish kind of blossoming in defiance of persistent freezing. This was the native perennial hepatica or, as foretold by its Latin name hepatica americana, a woodland harbinger of spring in the American heartland, modest like so many cold-tolerant plants, the leaves lobed and purple-splotched, a little bit suggestive of a liver.

As I stood over the isolated flowers they looked mostly the blue of the ever-amassing and scattering storm clouds marking that early afternoon rather than lavender. Any effort to start a watercolor out there would take on the speckles of melting snow pellets so I just took photos and hurried back to the house, the whole mood of the day become one of hurry-hurry, gales from the north overhead roaring in the woods canopy, driving clouds, admitting sun, strewing snow that switched to rain and back to white pellets. Sometimes a deluge whitened out my view from the car between meadows but before I got back among the trees the sun would boom into clarity and raise the outside temperature on the car's readout by seven or eight degrees in scant minutes.

Austere border country of a kind shared between the U.S. and Canada, unlike the fields, gardens or redwood sanctuaries of California, has its parallels in a nation of less diverse human culture with fewer naturalized Eurasian trees and shrubs, a more raggedy, homogeneous bushland that resonates as the Canadian provinces, Minnesota and the Dakotas must with lands in Russia or Scandinavia. Inhospitable fens, cliffs and badlands beckon to some people with a fascination that might compare with the allure of moldy basements, industrial ghettos or warehouses good for the game of dungeons and dragons or photography of failing architecture in all its glory of ideals.

Accompanied on that long midday drive by a CD on the car stereo, Nordic Roots, "An ideal introduction to the vibrant traditional music scene developing across the Nordic lands: incredible playing, catchy tunes, brilliant arrangements and strange instruments playing pre-medieval as well as modern compositions", produced by the label NorthSide in Minneapolis,  I was full of themes that deserved commingling, the hepatica or liverleaf at the center because it showed itself in the vanguard of the coming season of flowers. Infinite yearly cycles, condensed into one day's crippled start at spring  felt represented in that music and in that scene of a struggling herb on the ground, carried home in that vision that became this card image.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/154636427/north-country-note-card-blank-card-with?

Spring, not to be Denied

Sun-lovers move where the sun, in an opinion like my own, overwhelms a typical daytime sky, and in temperate zones they're apt to bemoan every cloudy delay to the green season, often including the rainy spells that signal the buds to open. A few of us, who define ourselves as odd, scruffy, wolvish in our orientation to the wild and natural most of the time, but clad in a stack of shirts, knits and jackets, secretly delight in the shivering of the bare bushes even if we curse the sea-borne winds that bite our hands and make us grab gloves even in May, because a heat-baked outdoor scene to us feels loud as if light from the sun could be heard shrieking or roaring; we have to get away to where the sounds are fainter and movement slower and tentative in response to other movement, sensed or suspected. Still, we cold-weather types freeze and peer, crouched low or standing tall, awed by any number of springtime discoveries. 

Yesterday, these wild cherry buds were breaking open, tight and yellow-green.

Nearby a noise overhead stopped me in my stride--a mechanical stutter like some bygone hand-held tool with a couple of moving parts, something small and steely and something heavier with a grinding clatter. One merlin, small and extra-nimble like something shot out then retracted by an elastic cord, was besieging a crow where the road led between trees and river's mouth. The crow made the low clatter, the falcon jingled. Apart and together, apart and back together, swinging more and more to one side, the siege continued, antics and face-offs a hallmark of  the motives of spring's general awakening.

Later that day, indoors in the call center where I work, I was remembering hepaticas from last week-end, in woods an hour by car to the northwest, isolated whitish blue-violet outbursts from brown leaf litter, barely offset by any first sprigs of green anywhere on the ground or above. The leaves stood apart from from the flowering stalks, old-green with red tinges, lobe-shaped like a liver.

All these seem precursors to the leafburst and the months of summer. Late as this spring has been,  when it arrives we have a menu of items to call to mind, observe, harvest and protect. Here is a set of spring floral note cards for sending your thoughts or for using wherever you can use them.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/96314046/spring-flowers-card-set-of-6-peonies? 

Ruptures or Shutdowns are, Eventually, our Fate

What do I know now? I have lost what I feared all along I was losing, seeing plenty of warning signs, but I waited to see it through. Now I know...this much, and it feels...this bad, and it can only be true that a new period of adjustment will follow, in the knowledge that all over the whole wide world tragedies do hit so many of the most wretched souls in multiples. The earth seethes with the shock and bereavement of all manner of beings, human and non-human, even less noticed than tainted seepage oozing from hidden underground flows.

We almost never read about the evolution of the pain suffered after news stories have covered kidnappings and murders or cases of ravaging disease--how the survivors briefly escape from it and then return, the reconciliations within the mind, the stages and their triggers for fresh starts made for better or for worse. What if there were a separate news bureau devoted to victims' and families' outcomes in the years following after high-profile crises? More usually this is the stuff of private diaries, autobiographies and therapists' notes or even fiction, where it's ever recorded at all.

But in my case I'm talking about heartbreak, much more routine than murder and mayhem. 

O the love relationships that each of us may have sanctified based on rosy conclusions reached and savored like the most exquisite marbles, all in our own private minds! And the writers who have written that they knew a fellow person's thought, could just see it, knew absolutely what would come next, when the fulfillment of that knowledge owed itself instead to well-imagined guesswork. There is no science of what people will do, or how things will turn out in the end, after so many lesser, day-to-day conclusions.

If we felt sure that we read someone's heart, saw the delight in it that corresponded to our own, then noticed it recede or learned that we misread the face and the words, how are we ever to ascertain the degree to which our intuitions about the loved person or the potential for fulfillment as a couple were wrong, or how much the obstacles to a shared future lay more in ourselves or in the other person? And are we safe in trusting our intuitions about new love again?

In  July 1990, another agonizing time, I wrote this poem about the lasting power of infatuation, called  
A Panorama of Loves:

   Stars! Near, immense stars, far, far sown--
   each one, unknown jewelwork of hovering starlets--
   each a beloved, replete in its majesty.
   Forces do breach and strew them, bursting them
   from within, sometimes, off through the gape of stars.
   One star may dazzle another, but does it escape and flare,
   star of its own fate, or smother itself in strange starfire?
   Shooting-stars flee across ages of waiting space--
   breathtaking traces unfurl through their wakes, decades long.

   ©2012

Some time near that same date came this other poem, Grief: The Exile:

   The old boat rises,
   and settles, its timbers controlled by
   the waves that divide them and nails that uphold their oneness.
 
   Why hast thou left me to rupture away from thy pillar?
   Thou couldst have hefted me loose long ago, with thy hand
   unsnagging my anchor.

   The old boat straggles,
   and wallows, the stub of a rope floating
   hopeless to anchor me ever again.

   ©2012

Blessed are a long memory, and better yet a time out sharing between intimate friends, for dicing up and scattering the thoughts that humiliate us or freeze us in a place we'd best be moving beyond. Blessed every bit as much are the tricklings of well-being when we least expected them and can't account for them: thoughts of space and opportunity, or realizations that we pre-grieved for a while so this latest, really, came mostly as plain old heart-ache rather than shock.

Blessed are old, timeless things--how many can this industrializing world maintain, unwittingly or determinedly?--since they reliably gave comfort when sought. The sore thoughts may be at bay now but raw pain, its special loneliness, won't leave till sometime--I trust--we notice that it has departed the way a body ache has healed and gone; we suddenly observe that we haven't been suffering that thing lately.


 

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On the Wing...Compensating as Best we Can

It is true, just as written in a 19th-century medical encyclopedia I remember browsing many years ago in the Irwin Library's Rare Book Room at Butler University down in Indianapolis, that the best antidote for sorrow is a change of scene. Sorrow, of course, is a broad outcome of our common inability to see so many situations fully for how we got into them and can get, gradually, out again. Sadness also comes from the expectation of loss, and all the echoing loss we know will follow afterward. Eventually the person has to acknowledge being self-entrapped in circumstances not right for the long term, and must own being powerless to do anything about it other than break away with a full complement of still more painful regrets. So the answer, fully endorsed by the antique medical reference with its long-winded title and subtitle, for me was to head off to Minneapolis. An invitation to attend a concert down that way had been timely.

It felt a bit thrilling to hit the freeway and car-power my way through jurisdictions southward, after driving only streets, state roads and a few bits of semi-urban freeway all the weeks since January...to visit another friend at her art gallery in the farming outskirts of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area...then land at the rooming house called the Alamo among other sturdily decrepit houses edging up to Dinkytown, all the while beguiled away from the thoughts that had been leading me between eddying ponds of doubtfulness. Older history would catch me up once I exposed myself to it; here was this concert over at Sundin Music Hall in my former St. Paul environs (see bachsocietymn.org) with six men and six women pronouncing old Latin and Hebrew texts embedded into the musical scores of J.S. Bach, Heinrich Schutz and an Italian composer, Salamone Rossi; what an embroidery, a labor, of lives and learning, discovery and re-discovery. These ancient languages, intoned in harmony by people still sleek-faced with youth, in an age when we communicate more and more in acronym and other computer-driven code. What work, what agelessness, an exhibit of things worth keeping when so much background from their time has crumbled away and shed both its poisoning and its nourishing properties.

On the way back my Minneapolis-based friend and I came through another forecast snow squall as we traveled up two-lane Wisconsin 35. Temperatures were a degree or two above freezing; nearing the town of Siren, I felt the little car skidding even at reduced speeds and joined the few other drivers crossing up through town at a creep. Slush lay over the pavement and could be expected all the way along the seventy-some miles remaining till we reached the Twin Ports and my apartment. But highway treatment must have been applied past the town of Webster, where we abruptly left behind the slickness to continue along shining wet blacktop like a beacon the whole rest of the way, no other traffic in sight amid the white-out that swirled on all sides. Once to the right I saw the orange breast of a woodcock wheeling up-over startled, wings triangular, mission his own version of safety. In enough regards the scene out our windows could have been November or December except for the long white light of a spring evening, blizzard-beset, lingering towards its own strange dusk. Far to the sides of the roadway there were likely the season's first red-winged blackbirds and maybe a meadowlark or two nestling in the sogginess, knowing how to wait it out. This is a winter that through a sequence of big snows seems to beg to be remembered. And we've been needing that moisture.

Here at home a winter's piece of work is done, an image as much about weirdness as it is about repletion, or maybe about what happens when we take on more than our bodies or unique nerve networks can bear. But the overweight hummingbird is in his element of blossoms, baggy nectar-pouches as shown, and hasn't collapsed yet. Everything is still beautiful. Right now I strive to believe that half of all anticipated troubles are never met with, because although they lurk, we refuse to go face to face with them, and instead act so as to ease the preconditions, and so something else which might be the best of all outcomes eventually takes place. The pain of coping must relax, intensify, relax and transform into other states of mind.

Good Friday...Any Friday and An Expedition

Good Friday is traditionally a Christian day of mourning the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, though as a person like me raised amid Christian teachings loses sight of the rites celebrated in churches, a holy day is liable to take on personal meanings of the hour or day, connected loosely if at all with the sacred meaning.

On Good Friday 2013 I had decided to take advantage of thawing weather and head north into public land beyond Ely, Minnesota, the habitat of spruce grouse and source of the setting I'd been painting around a spruce grouse drawn from a photo I shot in Lake County two and a half years ago. Passing up through national forest along Highway 2 I sighted my subject bird, the spruce cock, in the roadway doing as his kind will, eating grit to help him grind up food; he has a crop, full of sand and pebbles, instead of a mouth full of teeth.

The encounter, it pleased me to think, boded well for the artwork that would continue from the top of that cliff I traveled toward, 112 miles north of Duluth, where snow would be likely trickled away to expose some of the surface I intended to paint. But by my arrival, no trails had been broken other than by deer in the campground I needed to cross, and my snowshoes sank laboriously at each stride. Sometimes a section of snow as big as a bathroom floor would cave beneath my weight and whoosh downward, releasing air with an industrial-sounding blast from hollow spots way down under. A few times the snow crust barely crushed underneath me. A beast of burden, I continued, seeking a sitting place on top of the rock dome where at last I found my necessary conditions, with roots of pines exposed on pinkish cliff.

Sorrow, mostly a private matter, accompanies me lots of places these days. There are various helps for it but one of the best, and of course not in my estimation alone, is huge country too inhospitable for alien plants or much industrialization/urbanization to expand their reach. Here is the home of the wild beasts and specialized birds still left on earth, and sorrow might well arise merely from thoughts of the earth so glutted with humankind that these very places like the rest become infested with ourselves, our roads and our mandate to develop every resource in or on the ground. 

It is natural to hate sorrow and fear everything that might give rise to it, experienced in different ways by different people. Yet sorrow persists and recurs, accompanies folks everywhere in low-grade, residual or full-blown intensity, offset with our work and contemplation. Sorrow gives rise to corrective courses, new chapters but also illness, which makes way for branching off and innovation by those personally or indirectly affected. Sorrow challenges our lives the way competition, seismic upheaval and disease challenge the trees at root level. We go into the wild and see what the trees have done by way of response.

We go back out into the streets, or, if we have the option to do so, we linger at those places deep in vegetation dead and alive, where we build something hidden, as we see it, from other people. We know ourselves sufficiently torn down by our choices and those of other people that we will make our creation manifest when the good hopes brought back in us somehow, through days and nights characterized by that forest, the heavenly bodies belonging to everyone and the drama of all events determine that the time is ripe.

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