All the Haunted, to the Farthest Edges of the Earth

It's coming to me lately that, just as older friends have said and just as written, it's probably enough to contact my dead kinfolk inside myself, where the dead live on, even if nothing happens to the person's departed soul except disintegration. It's enough, to think and say that the dead live on because, intact, the character of the departed person lingers in the memory of the fond survivor (me,) and acts upon the survivor by force of my innermost thought. What I see from my folding chair in a wooded swamp, of a would-be limitless profusion of tree-tips, clouds I first remember seeing, sunlit yellow, in the presence of my mom, is enough movement by way of my sight to animate what is left of her in me. Similarly, my sight of her hanging portrait done in pencil by an unknown friend in her community, and similarly anything I see, hear or consider that sparks my memory of her are all agents for her continuation past death. This adds up to the least deniable kind of experience, true as long as living memory retains the soul of someone who died.

The most defining traits of the dead person's character, whatever they were, could hardly help but shape that person's influence on us after death. The yearning fantasy that follows from this admission is: do those personality traits still cohere to act in one or another dimension, even right in our world which is, after all, a forest of membranes that may admit or obstruct an unknown variety of energies, whether packaged together in an incarnate soul or free-flowing. If personality, or emotion-driven force, operates in the world freed from persons who once were incarnate, charismatic agents, do components of those personalities still, with divine or evil intent, work within the living organisms today, traveling via the sensory rigging? I trust that in a widespread manner they do.

All the currents and cross-currents of sensory recognition, deliberate and subconscious action and all that goes on below our senses, vestigial or vanguard, adds up to a haunted world, or, moreover, a haunted universe. All who have ever exerted personal will in the world and their successors, all the intentions united or at cross purposes with each other, all the birth and dying across the fan of living species have a role in the formation of what clutters the earth. How the living and the once-living impact the whole universe is a matter, we all know, open for eternal speculation. In the wild, the tightly-interwoven forces of creation and destruction might be conceived of as parallels of good and evil in the realm of our own society where good and evil bring reward, enhancement, fertility, profusion or else downfall. Enough evil in the midst of our own affairs brings retribution and ultimately collapse of society. Plague, volcanic upheaval, flood, landslide, fire and typhoon or tornado are the parallels, results of imbalances, in nature. Where human evil, shaping up as excess, is imposed long enough on nature we can expect to see cataclysm, drawn out as likely as not through many human lifetimes.

If there are ghosts of our own dead undetectable for the most part to ourselves, it is easily conceived that they linger, through necessity or vast preference, outside the dimension of time and space that we the breathing occupy, any access back to our zone being freakish or exceptional. So our lives with regard to this post-experience are at best round after round of hopeful conjecture spun off of tidbits, clues from what we witness, read or hear of. If castles, old battlefields, farms, mansions, hotels and boarding houses, theaters and more of our own construction hold the ghosts of unfulfilled persons, so must forests and wetlands hold some of the same elements--even where no one is there to conceive a vision of them.

To my imagination some of our Minnesotan and Canadian peatlands, which proliferate in this large county, look haunted by what used to live there during eons of a more abundant and diverse wilderness. What I'm seeing may be the same aspect that persuaded not-so-long-ago First Nations people that the Windigo and other spirits of the dead, not necessarily human dead, prowled those dank places. These were cannibal and misleading presences. Tumbles of wrecked trees, victims of storm winds and shallow frosty soil, subside into fantastic formations. A traveler today, playfully looking out, occasionally longing for whoever and whatever she or he may never see again can hardly help ascribing them character. The imaginary transition happens easily as you drive along the county roads.

This mixed media painting, nearing completion as we lose the grey and taupe of the winter landscape, is a vision of the far north where trees hesitate to grow, though a few have made their stand only to topple in the winds of the Arctic Ocean, the Bering and Beaufort Seas and parallel waters a-brim with ice. Soils are shallow and root systems are as a consequence flat like the feet of geese, ducks and the featured red-throated loons being flushed down a spate that suggests rapid melt from unaccustomed balmy winds. A lone wolf, like a sole survivor, peers backward in a remembered direction. Root clusters and hulks of once-living trees wield clawed arms and horns and prongs full of either menace or makeshift opportunity. The title is Spookage - the Liquefying North. As much as it is about anything, the work is about the amassed influences of all who have gone before us, faces and forms that we fear and animation that we yearn to have again, plus the beckoning Beyond--which mortal life as we live it is a tangled process of reaching into.

Consolation in a View of Crumbled Left-overs

As it turns out both my parents have died in the month of March, one late in the month, one in its first few days, though nine years apart. In the wake of my mom's passing on March 3rd I find myself reaching out again, the way I used to do, to the unseen beyond what I can even imagine to ask: where is she? out there? anywhere? If someone we loved with an unsurpassed depth has died it feels at the very least like an anticlimax not to know what, even though the personality may disintegrate, the individual's escaped energy has drifted into--if it's in some degree intact. Are they somewhere else or are they a part of the whole nearby surroundings or, as some people believe, are they reduced down to an essence and recycled into someone newborn? But I find myself in no hurry to get caught up in disciplines, or organized religious teachings, in pursuit of what must be indeterminable till we die. Knowledge, if there really is any on this topic, is intermittently my hope, yet it might come at a crippling price.

Old folks in the chilly latitudes have been said to die, more than at any other time, in late winter, faced with mounting hardships of the kind that prevailed during the era of widespread fireplace heat. Now, just upon the spring solstice the whole time period we're in has the feel, not to mention the look, of an aftermath, golden snow-mashed stubble out this window blurring into abstraction, an essence of late winter's colors blending, not the way mixed paint blends into a drab splotch, but into something dark yet luminous, winking multi-hued, no tone quite lost, the very emblem of a gentle accommodation of all strangeness. This vision itself might be Ruth, my mom. She maybe turns a little to and fro, like something hanging, with glints of color as if she remembered through me, the rememberer. This might be how she'll linger in my memory for as long as I live.

So by now I am at home again in late March, the look of the land comparable with other Marches and Aprils in a soothing continuum that, in the case of so many energetic people, impels them beyond that static-seeming prospect in impatience and boredom. My mother was a continuum the way emotionally stable people are who have absorbed a lot of cultural history and acquaintance throughout a career followed by retirement. In her last weeks as I took care of her and enjoyed final conversations, I went out on the net or outdoors and brought out bits of what I found there to distract and intrigue her however it might be possible. Through the need of movement I walked many circuits via the sidewalks, once taking a neighboring state park's trails, near her building spying a flicker browsing on a staghorn sumac still crowned with berries. The flicker was a tie with the growing springtime in the Midwest and Canadian border region where I'd be returning when this momentous interlude had run its course. Several evenings, as I explored the allegorical imagery of Angels in America on paired DVDs, I absorbed the background for the scene in heaven, an imaginary place seeming to have nothing to do with my mom, peopled with souls that appeared to have lived nowhere near as long as she did. Heaven in the movie had stone ruins and the kind of hush that is common to high vaulted places including California redwood groves, cathedrals, museums or even halls of government. Heaven's people were faded, at complete ease and in no hurry wherever they walked. Children there were giggling. My mom by that point was outspokenly impatient to die.

The sun-soft and misty portrayal of heaven in the movie followed me like a comfort down to New York City where I drove a load of inherited furnishings for Lea, my daughter, and back westward through Pennsylvania and the Lower Midwest and up the varying roads northward. The ruins in the artwork below, inspired by the movie, tell of places both missed and yet to be seen, since I've never been to Europe or to the pueblos or historic Spanish missions of America. Stone ruins affirm that not everything we've either alone or jointly effected in this world goes away but stays for ages, upholding the grace a few people envisioned for it in the physical designing, that is itself a part of our heritage. Cracks, broken edges and tumbling chunks bear evidence of our limits as the world goes on, incorporating all that we were and left of our handiwork. These ruins that I drew and painted were part of what I showed my mother in her last few days, and are everyone's history; the sumac is a tree of troubled, reworked soil and the flicker signifies ever-returning opportunity.

Flicker in a Crumbling Gateway

Heart Surgery, However it Happens

Since I've been sitting in my mom's terrace-level apartment for longer than two weeks now while she starves her sturdy old body of food and most fluids I figure I should, after all, be unsurprised at how long it takes for her process to run its course. Many, many people by my age have undertaken one or more death-watch, but this is my first.

It is at a few moments horrible; as often as not it's mundane, in the sense that we're all so equally mortal, on a par with rotting tree trunks. Even the beloved. But it's been gratifying, giving me days and days of opportunity interwoven with a long, dwindling goodbye.

We were a small family headed by mature parents, my sister and I their only two children despite their previous marriages and upheavals and re-beginnings. We thrived on our folks' loving gratitude for one another set against their memories of much less harmonious households. From my mom I feel I've received a lifetime of intentional and inadvertent gifts made most valuable by the remarks and adventures that came with and followed from them. Early in our lives we girls in our sheltered, gently disciplined, freedom-filled years must have sensed that we had a degree of family contentment, along with the trips and holidays we could always anticipate, that most of the kids we met through school were all in all lacking. We certainly had affectionate parents, especially our mom, who grew up missing affection from her mom, and so my mother's unique sweetness to this day pervades the mood of this apartment half-buried in Boston-area snow, like a burrow I have largely disappeared into. Today, again, I felt myself stepping out in the sun.

The harshest parts of this age-appropriate dying that I witness in its progress have been the dunks into bereavement coming after little respites ever since before mid-February when I arrived from Minnesota. It's up till now been as if she keeps dying only to reawaken when I come to greet her in the next hour at her bedside. My mom chose this destiny months, or even years, before turning 90 because the recommended surgical reconstruction of her heart's main valve would have meant an uncertain recovery, possible death in the operating or recovery room, long and likely incomplete rehabilitation with a short future of narrowed scope afterward not to mention major expense to the family. There was too much risk for too little reward. When she told me her decision in the beginning of winter she said, "I've done everything I want to do." She denied that she had been depressed, instead summing up her recent years and months as a period of contentment. Somewhere in the late fall of last year she wrote the following to share with her community of well-educated retirees many of whom continue to enjoy lives of privilege:

DECISIONS!  DECISIONS!

Have you ever noticed how often your days are governed by your  decisions?  Simple choices, such as when you will get up to start the day, activities in which you will participate, or whom you will join for evening dinner?  Gone are the days when we were governed by job or family obligations!  Now we organize our time by which day of the week it is, what times we are due for appointments, for participation in club activities to which we are committed, or for time alone to watch favorite television programs or read interesting books.  Or, if we don’t want to do anything at all, just sit and ruminate, we can do that, too.  We are free agents.

We do, however, have one more obligation, should we decide to accept it.  We need to decide how we want to end our days -- a gloomy subject to contemplate, perhaps, but that’s where we are in life.  We’ve fulfilled our family obligations (or not, depending on the circumstances); we’ve made our financial decisions; now we look to an abbreviated future.  And this is when one item rears its insistent head:  how willing are we to die?  Call it what you will -- meeting your end; going the way of all flesh; passing away -- the fact remains that sooner or later all life ends.  Energy flags.  When a life begins, it will one day end.

So, the question remains:  How willing are we for our lives to end?  If the idea is abhorrent, then we will go to all available means to prevent or extend our lives.  No medical treatment is too extreme; no daily routine too fatiguing; no diet too restrictive.  If, however,  whatever is is, then we become more philosophical. We accept our diminished energy; we perform as best we can the duties and/or activities to which we are committed; and we carry on.  No hard feelings; no extreme life-prolonging measures.  Just acceptance.  So be it. 
                      
by Ruth Katherine Beyer

By now she's lingered in her bed several intervals beyond what everyone expected. As I seize my daily chances to hustle outside for an hour or two I rehearse, again, dwelling in the knowledge that my mom is history, only a living presence I carry inside me, not a live person any more whom I can talk to. Unlike many survivors I've been given a chance to rehearse, since the likelihood has till now remained that I would go back into her apartment to share yet another conversation, if brief and repetitive. I walk in a madcap swinging manner in lug sole boots between the walls of snow and remember the character Prior Walter in the epic movie Angels in America which I was last week watching piecemeal each evening to my mom's amusement (she was no longer able to fix her attention on a movie whether she lay in bed or sat up to see the monitor.) Prior had climbed the flaming ladder to a godless heaven in order to confront death and plead for more life even in the face of all the suffering known in the 20th century and during the AIDS epidemic, to which he had fallen victim. He says of life that for him it's never enough; he can only, despite everything, want more of it. So, looking on the death that's most painful of any yet for me to behold, and most ever feared, do I.

This particular day I am watching her leave our realm of awareness; the nurse said the inevitable transition was coming soon.

To switch to another dramatic comparison, she reminds me of Sayward Luckett, the pioneer matriarch in Conrad Richter's novel The Town, unable to die yet even though she is days beyond being able to see or speak or gesture. She is a huge leftover tree from a virgin forest in territory that's been in her lifetime mapped and named Ohio, but is lying down, breathing, taking no sustenance. Her story was set before the American Civil War. My mom's is now, with upset of our climate set in motion. Live roots of her are tugging and snapping loose in my heart, and that's the heart-ache that's set me wandering between doorways inside her apartment as my sister and I keep the vigil with our mom's prescribed morphine and Ativan. Where a root pops free of my own live nerve endings, I console myself--having prayed as I'm skeptically not given to doing--a replacement petrified root will fill the empty socket, because there's no way so long as I live but that she will linger in her own established place in my heart. Devout people are correct: praying softens grief. Something nebulous comes to fill a void and then we merge into hugeness, where we find ourselves adrift but easier in ourselves.

The gifts borne to me via the energy currents of my mom have kept coming through life and through the approach of death. Conrad Richter's trilogy in paperback, The Trees, The Fields, The Town itself was a physical gift that lives on a shelf in Minnesota--I don't recall the year she gave it to me. Since I've come to Massachusetts to see her along I've reveled in the gift of time, to expand a website and set up a marketing newsletter in email, to learn to use this Apple computer for my various purposes that are beyond the uses she had for it. I've sat here by the big window that by comic accident lost its curtain rod and drapes, exposing sky and treetops and neighboring rooftops to my mom's wandering eyes in a way that was quickly a blessing for her, and begun on my third miniature watercolor in just two weeks.

Sometimes now I am for a few seconds afraid that I'll never get over this sorrow, it's so deep and chaptered back into childhood, but after all I'm still sitting here with Ruth, my mother, who hasn't died yet. She has that matriarchal body, with a hardihood that I'm sure she's passed to me. Out these walls I know of infinite unfolding stories that would shrink our particulars all to drops of water. This newest miniature watercolor she saw and enjoyed in its early development: it was due and proper to work on, given what the wide window shows of Massachusetts snowpack and what the bed shows of a woman's body shrinking ever deeper into slumber. The birds are a reminder of what has kept making people want to come back.

http://www.epiphaniesafield.com/new-art.html

Riding Eastward to Peer through Death's Door

This is the event that I feared since little girlhood, and this is the train that's taking me there to help, I guess, to see it through. My mother aged ninety years has given up eating; all of us daughters and granddaughters and a couple other old girls are trading shifts in her apartment where she clings to her intention of 'letting nature take its course.'

A drama of hearts has been roiling, quieting and welling up again all these past two weeks or longer. The train is retracing the courses of so many historical passages, certainly my own, and inevitably more and more whose evidence keeps receding into the ground with ever more accruing human occupation. Everywhere are ruins or defunct things drawing my eyes to them, such as the ornately cast and moulded end of a stone bridge like something from centuries ago in Italy, tipped on the rim of a ravine. The territory reaching ever eastward could be the surface of a brain bringing back to mind where we have all been on one occasion or another. The wheels on the track make a pulse beat; the conductor's horn far ahead is now and again muted into a likeness to a cello, or split into a medley of horns, symphonic, a rudimentary musical theme for the day's travel. We are trailing that undertone, like a far-carrying orchestral tuning-up, the opening to a new act in a drama across the spreading breadth of the upper Mississippi River Valley.

I

Not Weeds, but a Whole Neighborhood

Even along the remote highways edging Sax Zim Bog this low-snow February, even yesterday traveling Hwy. 61 toward Grand Marais on a professional errand I've been seeing strips of mowed stubble by the berm, before the trees. Workers are taking out forest seedlings with anything else standing. There's no snow to impede the mowers and trimmers. Most of the swaths don't follow any overhead power lines. Nor do they necessarily trace along the forest cut for the road. Even if safety and visibility, especially regarding deer collisions, is the issue, where the country is wide open, it seems to me why not have a screen of saplings along the ditch to stop snow drifting over the road? I sometimes suspect this is a local or county-level version of busy work, keeping employees paid for something, where it's not private landowners following custom just as always.

Officials for the roadways would for sure tell me how I'm ignorant. Yes, I know I am, but far from their mindset I, an aging stranger to our times, would secretly like to advocate for a lot of those old modes of travel that leave extended time to dodge around deer, porcupines, grouse, etc. The department of transportation would be having none of that. The highways are maintained for speeders, the ones who crash their vehicles on the curves where trees and rocks come right to the edge of the road. But on top of that, obsessive urges to contain/control nature win out time and again, shown by the urge of so many homeowners in city or country to keep a neatly mowed yard, people of every description driving their little tractor or taking their exercise behind a push mower. We've been trained to impose neatness on whatever plant community shows a ragged edge. In another observer's words on this subject, the ancestors of so many Americans were conditioned by the adage 'cleanliness (or could it be imposed order) is next to godliness', whereby we approve of shaved lawns all across town, even at the expense of so much fuel, air pollution, noise and bulky machinery.

In the middle of last week I attended the monthly meeting of the Arrowhead Chapter of Wild Ones,  whose mission is "To educate and to share information on the benefits of preserving and landscaping with native plants in order to promote biodiversity, environmentally sound practices, and a sense of place..." per their web page. These are people who, bit by bit or all in one swoop, have lost that notion that what's outdoors is invariably, more or less, a threat unless properly and traditionally managed. I wonder what it would take for them to become a majority among suburbanites.

The presentation was a DVD of a lecture by Douglas W. Tallamy on the unsung value of sowing  acreage that's presently taken up by lawn instead with trees, shrubs and soft-stemmed plants native to the region that we're in. Dr. Tallamy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. In a warm and witty manner, he incorporates the basic drive by people to spread themselves out over a landscape. Early in his lecture he demonstrates the vital usefulness of 'corridors' connecting our specks of remaining pristine wild land--and specks they are if you consider the breadth of wilderness that once took up our common space. The corridors are best seen not as belts to channel animal travelers predictably from grove to grove, but as groves in themselves, bands of interconnecting habitat widening out into hubs ideal for feeding and breeding.

In his article titled 'Gardening for Life', published in volume 22 of the Wild Ones Journal, Doug Tallamy reminds us that population in the United States is closing in on 306 million, which is a doubling within my own lifetime (I'm in my mid-fifties) and that the U.S. population keeps growing by 8,046 per day. As a consequence we have four million miles of roads and an estimated forty million acres planted with lawn, which is monoculture, a surface cultivated merely as a porous outdoor flooring for ourselves and a few pet warm-blooded animals. Our human growth as yet has no end in sight, and probably won't till physical limits bump into us in ways that we would rather not examine.

What woods and prairie patches we have left in the eastern and central sections of the country are to a huge extent overrun with trees and flowers that got there via horticulture--the plant nurseries and the everyday public they serve. Examples given of alien trees, shrubs and vines especially familiar to me include the multiflora rose, autumn olive and Japanese honeysuckle. In our suburban expansion we have favored exotic trees and flowers at the expense of what grew here all along. In transforming the landscape to serve ourselves we've--per Dr. Tallamy--"taken ninety-five percent of nature and made it unnatural."

He runs through an accounting of glorious native birds, cherished by a growing sector of our population that pursues birds for enjoyment or maintains feeders. The birds of forest and pasture are declining at rates that lead to some despair on the part of folk who remember their relative abundance from as recently as the 1970s and '80s. As we harvest whole forests, oil fields and grasslands, leaving pavement and woody rubble behind, we've been taking away a broad range of food from these birds as we select exotic trees or bushes for our outdoor perimeters, if we even bother to plant trees and bushes for ornamentation on the wastelands that are our lawns, by contrast with restoring supportive bird habitat.

Here is where the quietly exuberant mission of Wild Ones, the various Audubon societies and local native plant societies and bird clubs fits into the picture. For survival's sake we have to remember that we need biodiversity, the diversity of living species, as our own life support not to mention that of our fellow-creatures. We need oxygen that the plants transpire. We need the clean water that their roots filter and their decayed living matter harbors in the form of river and lake beds. We also need topsoil borne of more of that decayed matter, and we need pollination, all services of nature--we need the intricacy of the whole life-support system that we've been taking apart on this American continent. And so those of us with a will to help put it back together may as well change our clothes as befits the moment; we have a lot we can be doing to make our surroundings increasingly lively again. For all the variety we will be re-creating in our spaces, it has to fit the region in terms of local climate and soils. Help is out there in the form of native plant nurseries somewhere in your area. And, says Dr. Tallamy, if you replace the native shrubs, trees, grasses and herbs, the insect species that service them and the birds that devour those insects and larva will--as long as we haven't yet driven them to extinction--come back pretty quickly, as if to a banquet extended to them over a season or more.

He attributes the trend within the past several generations to design landscapes with exotic plants as a measure to starve insects that people had lumped together in their minds as pests. The imported Eurasian trees, shrubs and flowers have been largely free of insect infestation because they did not evolve here to host the various insects that feed off our own plants. And if we don't have to sit by the window or on the deck or patio and look at insects or at the leaves they've been damaging then we are somehow...more reassured? Everything seems more under our own control, our living room extended right out into our yards. And of course, many of us have said, it's better for the farmers if we keep down the insect pests that could proliferate if we just 'let things go.'

His article hastens to explain the relationship between insects and plants in terms of specifics: eons of coexistence between whole families of plants and neighboring insects has allowed those insects the benefit of being able to eat and digest those plants, and only certain plants, depending on the species of insect and its plant host. When the plant hosts are in their prime, so are the insects that eat and lay their eggs on them, sometimes right before our fretful eyes. But the native plants supporting the native insects will in turn invite a stream of native insect predators, many of them our diminishing American birds. Quoting from the article: "one bluebird pair brings up to three hundred caterpillars back to their nest every day. You will be hard pressed to find any caterpillars in your yard if you create habitat for breeding birds." A lot of us have forgotten about the web of nature, if we were ever taught much about it; the very wording mostly a nerdy cliche left over from science class or an organized nature hike, for lack of living examples out the windows of a typical home.

When I lived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area I gardened with native prairie plants in a state of great enthusiasm since I still missed the countryside of my secure childhood, and the places I spent my week-ends and holidays. At one point in the suburb of Blaine, underlain with a light sandy soil, we had three long and billowing plantations, each on one side of our double-wide manufactured home. Even though we were surrounded by Interstate 35W, a state highway and huge parching barrens of trailer park lawn with a ball field, a few exotic acacia trees and scattered silver maples, we began attracting migrant birds who would otherwise have flown over the yard: I remember blackpoll, Nashville, yellow-rumped and Tennessee warblers and a singing Lincoln's sparrow in spring or fall as these functional gardens came into their own. When we moved out I moved with me as many of my favorite prairie plants' rootstocks as I could dig up and transfer in plastic bags. But I never saw them flourish again wherever I was able to relocate them in the city.  I sometimes wonder if a single one of them survives to this day.

Now I'm blessed to live in a depopulated farming area well to the north, with its high water table assuring plenty of swamp habitat where only a few landowners ever did much commercial agriculture. We still have forestland of native firs and spruce, cedar, tamarack and birch, maple, ash, chokecherry, juneberry, poplar and some oak and basswood. We have lesser-known native trees like the nannyberry, and native shrubs like the alder buckthorn and chokeberry. We have a reduced breeding population of warblers, vireos and sparrows in the nesting season. But even among these vestiges of the old wilderness bygone land-holders have introduced several kinds of herb from far-flung flower beds, from which they probably shared seeds and starts: common valerian, for example, from roadsides to secluded forest openings all over the region. To my surprise last summer I found a sunflower cultivar called Garden Golden Glow, fat and decoratively showy as a rubber flower on a swimmer's bathing cap, over where an unidentified landowner had maintained an apple orchard, now gone to weeds. (Many of us define weeds as anything growing in disturbed or dug-up soil by happen-so.) Along one forest-lined wild river I should not have been surprised when I discovered the invasive glossy buckthorn above a fishing nook.

For nearly twenty years I've kept painting native plants and landscapes, sometimes with a naturalized alien brought in because it seemed it had developed a profile of its own if only in my sight.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/89340939/watercolor-notecard-blank-card-harris?ref=shop_home_active_9

Note Card 4 1/4 x 5 1/2" "Startlement: Harris' Sparrow on an October Shore" features red pine, aspen, birch and a ground cover called Hudsonia--beach heather--found on sparse soils all the way north to the tundra.

               "Bluestems in the Autumn" original watercolor includes big bluestem, Indian grass and bush clover at season's end - card or print available by inquiry

As we fill up and commoditize ever more of our common land, the wildscapes of interdependent plants, insects, birds, reptiles and mammals of North America deserve all the promoting they can get, in art form, in seed stock and in the places we go home to. They can be revived right out our windows, even in an inner-ring suburb or downtown where the pavement ultimately ends.

Walking toward a Confrontation - a Rustic Perspective on Naomi Klein and Climate Change vs. Capitalism

It is agreed, except by the ones who can't bear to believe it, that we're in the decade now when humanity shows our true moral worth to the ones coming, our descendants, by recognizing that we can't go on in the fiery, consumptive way that we have for some centuries, blasting underground for more coal and petroleum so we can build more of everything, go faster and faster and sell out to an ever-larger customer base in the assumption that our biological support system won't come undone from all the plunder, leakage and reverberation.

When I heard the broadcast review of Naomi Klein's new book This Changes Everything : Capitalism vs. the Climate, Simon & Schuster, ©2014 I knew I had to buy it, read it and share it. The scope of the book is enormous; it opens in a chapter titled 'The Right Is Right - the Revolutionary Power of Climate Change,' allowing that the conservative right on the political spectrum, the ones most invested in the fossil fuel economy, are the ones who distinctly grasp that ending our extractive relationship with the earth would amount to throwing off the whole economic order that has enriched them. The tycoons of industries including oil, automotive, armaments, airlines, banking and agriculture, all so heavily wrapped in expectations of steady profit from steady growth, are the ones from whose ranks the founders of organizations like the Heartland Institute or the Competitive Enterprise Institute have come. Denying publicly that our activities could add up to anything unbalancing the climate is within the mission of these groups. They want climate catastrophe to be a hoax because only that would uphold the system in which they are experts at building wealth. Unlike the liberal other side, which has sought through various political and techno-means to impose curbs on the release of carbon--whether or not in practice obeying air quality regulations or investing in hybrid or plug-in cars or renewable energy--the right admits that relinquishing our oil, gas and coal-fired largesse would be the end of the capitalist system as we know it. The big-business liberal side has had trouble alluding to this fact in their policy statements.

Chapters further into the book take on the commonly held notion that technological innovation will not only save these same industries--in particular, commercial air travel, a notorious source of carbon emissions--but also leave room for their unlimited growth, and that all we need to do is to wait for engineering geniuses to come up with new clean fuels so we can get on with our lives. In fact, the speed at which we're overtaking the threshold of 2 degrees Celsius that has been set as the presumed safe limit to global warming does not leave time for that kind of waiting much less security through more, albeit cleaner, energy and transport.

Ms. Klein alludes repeatedly to the huge inequalities all over the world, in monetary wealth and opportunity and, as a consequence, in legal clout, engendered by affiliation with or lack of affiliation with the dominant economy. The dire imperative that we break up the consortia that profit from defacing the earth to go after petroleum, bitumen, coal, sulfides, diamonds, in sectors where they've never before been touched--corporations that would seemingly not care if their processes broke the planet into separate chunks spinning and spilling into outer space--opens paths to salvation for societies all over the world who face displacement by the giants. Redressing the crises in climate and the biosphere would also mean empowering countless individuals in all manner of storied or little-known places. This theme adds up to a current of optimism in Ms. Klein's book about climate catastrophe, a subject nearly as grim as any of the oldest tales about the destruction of the world at the hand of ogres, or justice for the sinful lot of us in the Biblical book of Revelation.

Subsequent chapters look at localized movements that have succeeded so far in stopping frack wells, for example, or transit corridors for coal and oil, because the people who were in the way had no choice but to stake their whole land-based livelihoods against the operators of the capitalist-backed ventures which collectively amount to such a force of destruction. Indigenous peoples in their longstanding respect for earth not as a mere cache of raw treasures, or just a big rock washed by treacherous seas, but as a mother and repository of ancestors may be the best examples of whose culture will survive all that we're doing (if, as I say, there will be any survivors, given everything that's self-serving and ignorant in human nature.)

Partly by reading Ms. Klein's acknowledgements crediting all her helpers in researching the topics and preparing the book's text, I was heartened to think of all the many enlightened visions being shared around the world about things that we will have to do in a new age not powered by dirty fuel. Imagine the whole world, with all its economies run by wind, sun, hydro and muscle power as of old through a  technological know-how integrating these energies on a sweeping scale that's virtually equal to our modern-day collective demand. While the movement to divest from oil and reinvest in renewable energies goes on, and deadly conflict at the frontiers represented by pipeline routes becomes an ever likelier part of history, seemingly more of us than ever continue pursuing what is happening with the birds, fish and other wildlife. I make and sell nature art to earn a living, and so I keep heading out for secretive sneak peaks at these creatures and their support system, preferring to go by foot or on skis, on a mountain bike or hybrid car.

On whatever front each of us exerts ourselves while seeing the overworked world for what it is, whether we're negotiating to increase the heating and cooling efficiencies of houses and public buildings, connecting North American First Nations tribal members with the financial resources to be their own job creators so they need not hire themselves out to coal and oil rigs, teaching children of the slums about nature and available services from nature in their home regions, teaching individuals bored to death by automated, denatured processes about the enjoyment of providing for ourselves by hand and controlling our own food and surroundings like never before---there will be newfound joy. There can be prolonged joy in discovering that what we thought was  irreparably lost is really in reach, or was never really gone.

 

 A Thawing Scene - 'March Marshland at Crex Meadows' - original watercolor matted on handmade cattail-fibre paper
 
Today I'll go out to the woods and swamp in their January hush, around saplings gnawed by deer in a shortage of the maligned four-legged predators like wolves that make deer scarcer, pathways crusted with a snow that never really gained any depth so far this winter, burning my calories on my skis and looking for the most interesting snags and stumps, ones full of suggestiveness, almost like driftwood propped up ready for a carver to animate with hand tools. Even though it's unnecessary I still photograph them as specimens for reference in my weird new swampland painting. I've got a little net bag made by somebody out of a recycled athletic jersey which I'll fill with the dried leaves of Labrador tea so these can further dry inside the house and become tea leaves for me or whoever wants to try some. The low-growing shrub of wet cold ground, Labrador tea (Ledum groenlandicum), will shoot out baby leaves in May or so and flower again, lavish and white, in the month of June unless we have a hot, advanced spring as is increasingly possible, affecting all blooming. It becomes urgent to me to get out and come back in and document what characterizes Saint Louis County, Minnesota and nearby Ontario because it will change, yet there will be witnesses who mourn the losses and replacements but go on with their own lives and old enthusiasms...I somehow trust and expect.

  Labrador tea sprouting in snowmelt

                                                                            Birch snag serves as a trail marker and food cache.

Here or There, a Vagabond

Since being back from New York City I have added to a few of my own perspectives.

Not too many weeks ago, in early fall, members of National Audubon Society and, along the way, birders alert to bird-related news received a set of sober new projections, adding up to heartache, through the Audubon Report, a huge new study sponsored by National Audubon on the best-case plight of many resident and migrant birds within North America as climate change proceeds. The study, extrapolating from a variety of statistics dealing with historic bird occurrence influenced by climate variables such as rainfall and temperature range, driven by trends drawn from climate modeling, looked at 588 species of birds, finding that 314 are due to be endangered or threatened by 2080. Habitats are expected to shift northward while they shrink at the same time, at a pace that's likely to leave a lot of bird species unable to cope in time to go on furthering their kind in some place where they're adapted to hide, forage and nest. While the commonest, most widespread bird species are generalists in terms of diet and habitat, our especially sought-after, hard-to-find species are specialists dependent on one or just a few types of plant community that are probably doomed to vanish, scorched or dried out of existence in the type of summers we can expect in a hotter world, where not built over or farmed into something those birds would not recognize.

To the extent that governing bodies around the world treat all wild habitat as dispensable or as commodities I've been eager over the years for evidence that human-only aggrandizement is ultimately mass suicide, the mindset of a renegade in the domain of business, public health and diplomacy all at the same time. Because climate change is propelled most of all by no-end-in-sight human population explosion, I wonder sometimes which hard-pressed fellow-creatures might end up multiplying because of catastrophes, or human population crashes we couldn't help but bring on ourselves. One example was cited in Audubon magazine some years ago, about an increase in European brown bears, red deer and wolves roaming the depopulated countryside following from the Bosnian War. 

Storms intensified by the heat we've been trapping in the atmosphere may, along the way, lead to arrivals of unexpected grace. In Duluth the morning before I left for New York there was a rare visitor from the U.S./Canadian Pacific coastal highlands, a golden-crowned sparrow, oftenest found in spruce groves, willow and alder scrub similar to what's in our central region. After lots of pacing around the end of the city block where the sparrow had been seen I was finally able to view it courtesy of fellow birders who stood on the sidewalk and located it on the ground below a different feeder in some other neighbor's yard. For me this made my fourth life species of 2014. Compared to prior years and whole seasons of my life, 2014 did feel like a poor year for lifers (new-found species of bird,) whether they were hardest-to-find natives or accidental newcomers. The diversity of birds like warblers and ducks in breeding season, and the numbers of them moreover, are less than they were in the heartland when I was young; over the same stretch the human population has more than doubled since 1960 when I was born.

Today as I walked out in punishing bright breezes, layered as I was with all the due and necessary kinds of shirts and coat, I saw no birds and heard almost none, but that is the way of the boreal forest in a typical cold snap. At length I did hear one of my favorites from this kind of habitat: pine grosbeak, high in distant trees. Anthropomorphic though it is, my hearing of that soft song brings a sense of instant kinship between humans and finches of the conifer zone, across all our generations and ethnicities; it is the sound of exuberant yet controlled, moderated, mellifluous conversation, dimmed by wide surroundings, the core of the message we've come a long ways, where were you, where were you?

Near where I heard the pine grosbeak, I took these pictures of an abandoned sort of camp with outdoor tavern, whacked together out of milled lumber by a former landowner for weekend partying, vaguely if at all accounted for in reminiscenses among neighbors. In some of the remotest, least hospitable places people have left behind such pitiful shells of structures connected with commerce, warfare, food gathering, worship, or recreation.

I had never walked the drastically other habitat of Brooklyn or Queens, and only a little of Manhattan before, and in the chill of  this Thanksgiving weekend found myself spellbound in Brooklyn where my daughter Lea lives and walks all her errands for lack of a car. In New York every foot of space seems built on or paved over, yet at certain points in its 250 years or so someone has remembered to install hedges or leave room for sprouting trees.  Hardy shade trees cling, die and are replaced in the narrow ground along the boulevards. There are so many warm-blooded beings, most prominently people, living on top of each other, traveling over each others' heads or below street and floor level in New York that it looks to be its own ecosystem, a prototype for how best to fit teeming masses of ourselves into a restricted area. The subway tunnels exhibit the mostly underground society of rats. Parks like Prospect Park in Brooklyn in late autumn host hermit thrushes, yellow-bellied sapsuckers and, in breeding season, a whole suite of insect-eating songbirds. Elsewhere, rooftop gardens are gaining popularity for people's food and respite, not to mention being relief stations for birds, butterflies or bats; there are bound to be record keepers on this topic. Monk parakeets, escaped from pet bird cages, have multiplied and gained citizenship in at least two of five boroughs via colonial nesting. Coyotes and feral cats are legendary hunters.

We walked, walked and walked, leaping sometimes to keep abreast of each other in the midst of other walking clusters of folks. Walking and feathered flight are the way of most creatures in New York and this is a mercy; there's more to see, hear and sense this way, even for all the automated roar. Once when I lived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metroplex and felt an over-long tension borne of commuting amid the high speed traffic jams set loose on those freeways, I dreamed at night of I-35W bare of any cars or trucks. Something had happened but the dream of course held no explanations. I walked in the right lane mostly alone, with leafy branches pawing my hair and ears as I passed under them; no one and  nothing else had come swiping through to rip away those low limbs. In some of the countless back streets of New York a little bit of this thicket-like atmosphere strangely gets a hold of a pedestrian in a state of daytime awareness.

So the jungle of stone and steel, vinyl and alloys and glass sits on a lap of traditional ground, the experience of which is enriched by the libraries and museums, their curators who ask and attempt to answer the questions of what was--what was a prairie, what was a vernal pond, what mulberries were native to the American wild, etc. I like to think of country and city people equally preserving patches of what the landscape once hosted, because it functioned so well, so broadly and with a greater diversity of living creatures than we might have ever imagined or documented. The remaining wilds deserve to be kept, sacrosanct, till something can be done to even out the numbers of people with the numbers of all else that we're out-competing unto our own impoverishment and confinement. Brooklyn, NY offered me a way to see quaintness and charm in the stacked-up, heel-to-toe juxtaposition of ourselves with at least some variety of trees and their animal tenants whose nearness has graced our home, all put together.

Somebody, wherever else, will still be recording in words, song and image whatever has made that place the way it is traditionally remembered. I myself want to give New York and world-class cities like it credit for their natural diversity, but continue to bear witness to the northern phenomena of peat bogs and rapid rivers, cliffs and the grasslands that shifted ever northward into tundra, because those are still here, and I'm here ever so gradually figuring out how best I can travel, build community and live in the best sort of balance with every living being, plant or animal, for whom I ever harbored a sentiment or several....

                      
                                    Haunted bogscape, newly-begun mixed media work as of October 2014
                            


See the video below for a demo of an Australian firm, Enginer's plug-in hybrid conversion kit used in a generation 1 Toyota Prius.  Credit for finding this goes to Bill Hane of Blue Moon Auto in St. Paul, MN, good for answers and interpretation, at:  snowdog51@comcast.net.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsP8ipr79fU