At Last One Day : Venturing to a Tropical Beacon Far out at Sea

This was my second day ever to set foot in Florida. As a person who had never been south of the Smokies in Tennessee I spent hours this afternoon in the Key West Botanical Garden, stepping slower and slower, stopping, quiet, another exotic against the background full of fighter planes, sirens and faint cries of Floridian birds I've been just getting to know. South Florida, maybe all of Florida since I've landed way down at the peninsula's tip which is the Miami area, is like another country to a person raised in the middle of our continent. In today's haven were shrubs labeled as natives of Cuba or Barbados or the West Indies, which are land masses a lot closer than anywhere I ever hailed from. According to habit and a kind of compulsion I've just begun, with a terrible potential to forget, learning the names of a few trees, shrubs and herbs that appear to grow wild here.

Walking in Florida, listening to signs of whomever shares the woods, a person soon recognizes lizards, a wildlife form that we lack in the Upper Midwestern states or north, in Canada--as yet, or for the most part, at least. Lizards of a wide, unfamiliar variety rustle and plop onto dry leaves or into living vegetation. As I'd train my listening to tell bird stirrings apart from other movement, like the scuffings of lizards in sizes up to (maybe) the length of my arm in one instance, and I feel the sweat on my upper lip and the bath of summer-like day-glare all around me I'm pulled into an awareness that my perpetual quarry, the birds, are evolutionary descendants of the lizards, and this is a place where a natural historian can feel immersed in that old connection, feeling it the way we feel and smell the chemistry of the sea when we arrive at a seashore.

                            Freshwater Pond at Key West Tropical Forest & Botanical Garden


A likely question as I stroll and peer, stop and listen, jerk short in response, at first, to the wheeling forms of magnificent frigate birds, bat-like but huge and wickedly avian with their long pointed black wings, tails like a pair of prongs that divide or come together, beaks like a spike with hooked tip--is: could I ever like living here if I had to come and stay? It is nice, in my transport of fascination and recognition from things I've read somewhere or seen pictured, to suspend thought on this question (so many aging northerners, after all, have chosen to move to this climate) to say that I don't know and won't bother to consider it. I'm swept away by all that's utterly new--that I've never even viewed in a photograph--or else new in real-life form. I missed the ferry to the Dry Tortugas this morning so I get to walk this piece of land instead, and see what I'd either glimpsed from the moving car or city sidewalk or not ever seen before: Muscovy duck:

white-crowned pigeon--erect where it hurled itself on a dead treetop--and black-whiskered vireo, which is Florida's edition of the red-eyed vireo typical of my home forests in summertime.

                          Magnificent Frigate Bird - seen swirling in squadrons above the Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas


When I'm not poised to identify a moving creature, I can think on the lifetime task I believe it would be to familiarize oneself with every leafy thing that grows here; Florida, with so far over 2,800 species of native plants described, and numerous introduced species, has the most kinds of wild plants of any state in the U.S. Since the botanical garden has, fortunately, labels on little signposts for some of their shrubs and trees, I was able to view and photograph these two:

 

               Wild Coffee (above) and the flammable Blacktorch, cut when dry, then split lengthwise                  

to make hunting torches by Caribbean native people

Next day at predawn, starting from downtown Key West's streets dense with houses, tight backyards all crowing with roosters from one yard to the next within blocks of the ferry launch, I'm able to make it aboard the Yankee Freedom III which heads out daily to the Dry Tortugas. This is a fabulous archipelago of shipwrecks, coral sea bottom, and lonely, ill-documented human toil followed by malingering deaths. Around the time of his arrival in 1513 the islands were named  by Ponce de Leon of Spain after the sea turtles that frequent those shallows and shores, laying eggs on the brilliant white beaches. These are hot desert islets, seven in all, composing a U.S. national park totaling about 100 square miles, most of that area the pale blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Fort Jefferson was built on the islet known as Garden Key, starting in the 1840s, as a defense against naval raids from the south seas but was never completed, and served most famously as a Union Army prison for Confederates captured during the Civil War. Drinking water had to be collected out of cisterns on top of the fort, and was scarce or absent enough of the time to impose deadly dehydration complicating all their other anguish among untold numbers of men. The architecture features enough ornamentation, encompassing a spectacular six-sided symmetry,  to hint of the starkly mixed purposes held all in all by designers, brick masons and occupants of that lonely place surrounded with the rookeries of terns, boobies, shearwaters and other sea birds. 

                                        Fort Jefferson from within, the long-ago parade grounds

Receding out from the fort, in its vast reach-around of arches and angles the epitome of all the superseded projects whose hulks endure over a century through hurricanes and disregard, a shrine in staunch brickwork, an arm of scrubby beach served as breeding grounds for a swirl of terns almost entirely of two species. Their cries resounded scratchily, concurrent with vocalizations from the frigate birds circling perpetually overhead, a few of the males exhibiting a hanging throat-sac of bright orange, crying out a pin-sharp note that weirdly complements the over-all jagged profile of this hunter species. They also have their nesting grounds among the other islets, called keys, making up the Tortugas.

I was luckily able to borrow a spotting scope from the park management and then stand not far from a young man, Christian Hagenlocher, who was here in the course of a Big Year.  He describes himself as an ambassador for birding within the public, seeking to better his own skills in knowing birds and to meet other birders, recording their stories and insights, including the question of how technology has enriched any aspect of birding for each interviewee. His developing website for sharing his mission and discoveries includes a map of his route so far, various intimate shots of splendid wild birds like the Lapland longspur, pictures of habitat, and the hands of sundry enthusiasts holding their binoculars. Heat-shimmer and some myopia added to my difficulties zooming in on the sooty terns, common enough in the boil of airborne terns but frustratingly distant, outnumbered too by the brown noddies, so Christian helped me distinguish between the field marks of sooty and bridled terns, a species not present in the nesting colony to our knowledge at that point. Later, broiling in cotton-poly shorts and synthetic long sleeved blouse, of the fabric supposed to wick away sweat but protect from sunburn, sore in the hips from hours of standing but not to be daunted in discovering the ultra-specialness of this place, I circled the fort on the cement-and-brick walkway that bounds the moat encircling the whole fort. Families of folks visiting from anywhere in the rest of the world snorkeled in sea shallows underlain by white sand and corals, hovered over by the odd angelfish, as I plodded, carrying the lightweight scope and glancing everywhere above me for seabirds and enjoying all the enjoyment around me.

                                 
                               Moat surrounding Fort Jefferson, built into one side of Garden Key

                             
                                          Desert vegetation along part of Garden Key

                                         Coral nodules, bird nesting debris, coconut etc. along a beach of                                                                      mixed sand and ground-up shell

Inside on the abandoned parade grounds were copses of trees surrounded in grass, where cattle egrets foraged and, in the trees, warblers taking a break from passage to breeding grounds in the North American heartland leapt, gleaned food and sang their diminutive songs of spring and northern nesting groves. They and I are down and back again, traversing a gulf that feels for lengths of time, according to our pace, boundless yet that we know has shores and limits. We consider the same distant interior places our ultimate destinations. And I know that in minutes it will be time to turn back on my own next several stops to mainland Florida, startlingly northward instead of off to my south.

                      Inner grounds of the fort are a refuge to migratory warblers and other passerine birds.
                       To visit the Dry Tortugas and Fort Jefferson follow link to the National Park Service site.

A hemisphere: heartland, sea and black tern in watercolor/gouache    --   unframed original art piece shown below, painted on 300 lb. cold-press paper, 22x30" - $495 + tax and shipping

                                 

Even Nowadays, the Revised Impact of Wilderness Art

Creating rural art that gets intimate with earthly things a long ways out of cities or suburbs is a challenge in terms of connecting with the viewing audience. The specialized wild plants known to trail hikers or wild gardeners as trademarks of a place are still, if not for all time, aliens to probably most urban folk, for whom roses, tulips, irises, daisies, pansies, orchids and other cultivated flowers will do when flowers are called for to convey symbolism or a grace note. If I'm painting puccoons on a swath of prairie or the fringed polygala on a clifftop behind Lake Superior I'm in some other emotional territory, I think, till a new urbanite gets out of a vehicle and discovers this very kingdom. A burst of wonder may have set the same soul on new paths for all time to come.

The same is true for paintings that include birds, native small reptiles or burrowing mammals--a person familiar with these must habitually venture off roads and trails, looking down, listening, eyes trained to detect slight movement. The urban majority are strangers to these little earth-dwellers, and every bit as much to the names applied to them.

And what about landscape? It's one of the best-selling genres of art, but in order to sell, it has to beckon the beholder out of everyday places and into the picture with inviting aspects that feed some kind of longing. For cityscapes no doubt the same is true.  But just as the earth has places that repel entry by the bulk of our own kind, the mind has analogous realms; compare earth's frigid and windswept, or sultriest, most entangled places with hardly a safe foothold or zero shelter and the mind's regions of poorly-illumined or outright horrifying thought. What is the appeal of landscape art (or seascape) that touches on these mental zones for many viewers? But the symbolism of landscape/seascape/cityscape also has the power to attract into those very zones.

Since abstract art depicting nightmare visions has a following and a market, I wonder how that market compares with the market for lifelike landscapes, true to a real region down to the very characteristic plant life, that reveal an interplay of loneliness or desolation between artist, subject and public.

Does landscape art that seems as if it has little allowance in it for human comforts dissuade most buyers? Maybe or maybe not. But some part of it has to be familiar; I think of the heavily-photographed wilderness of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Quetico Provincial Park or the expanses along the Trans-Canada Highway. Below are two mixed-media watercolor landscapes that speak of U.S./Canadian peat bogs or similar wetlands, areas of some economic (industrial) value and forbidding mud, winter, humidity and mosquitoes, that never-the-less address a yearning for places empty of human conflict, where nothing stops the wind or interferes with nature's regenerative cycles, where wild animal sightings tempt those who yearn to see rare animals of legend. Both works are on display this two-week run at Vine Arts Center in Minneapolis.

                               Freshet from a Ghost-marsh - watercolor, pencil, 15 x 22.5"

                               

                              God All Shape & Conduct: Shoreless - watercolor and gouache, 22 x 30"
                           

The above work is recent, the bottom one dates to the 1990s and bears, embedded within the art in small black hand-print, a lyrical chant about discerning good or cosmic creative force apart from evil, the destructive force. Both pieces speak to a type of soul, I think, that embraces the whole earth, maybe even preferring the stretches called wastelands, wilderness, barrens, desert. Since nothing much changes on a vast scale in those places they have an epic quality with soothing overtones.

Here where I'm sitting, the sun just burst out of the gloomy grandeur of horizon-to-horizon clouds and I feel pulled outside for a brisk walk along the roads which have become mud and little else.

I'm at work lately on the mixed-media watercolor, shown below, in which a city wraps around the back of a boggy foreground true to north-central Minnesota, eerie in all the browns, reds and bone coloration of the off season, traced with the ghosts of little-recorded goings-on over eons past. In the process of composing it I've considered the grip of landscape on ourselves and how to define differences, all told, between three types: the urban-rustic, the agrarian, and places still reminiscent of wilderness, which reveal little to no human impact. A day outdoors in any of these settings can offer all the same degree of engrossment and serenity. What the most open of lands offer, especially those that call up visions of the original wilderness and still harbor big carnivores like wolves and cougars, is the illusion of being singular, a favored part of nature, a lordling at the top of the whole obvious food chain. A person savoring all the privacy the intensely rural region allows may often weigh personal loneliness against a sense of enchantment by all the inhuman things that fill the senses. Evidence of the electronic surveillance that pervades our culture is out of sight, out of mind to a degree not true in built-up places. Since the remnant of other mammals we have decimated have, in their considerable intelligence, learned to avoid our awareness the person in the country is left seeking out evidence of them, and their stories cut off amid the detritus of trees and the suggestiveness of empty nests, burrows, tangles and rock piles. We begin to understand a preoccupation with ghosts as a network that shaped and still characterizes this place we live in.

But if they're looked upon in the city, these completed works of art may just send a two-fold message: of anachronism, but also of living, transferrable potential for what lives among us, if balances between  human lives and non-human, warm-blooded or cold-blooded, prove the ultimate purpose of Creation.

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Faced with the Unruly Cosmos

'Summer'--think of summer, and then 'summers', and you find yourself reaching back in memory to all-time-favorite summers from a prime time in your life. I'm given to recalling summers within my first thirty to forty years, not torrid, classically comfortable in all the ways you might imagine. Days were long and balmy, humidity readily drained off in rain overhead or somewhere nearby, sky-bursts of luminous clouds marked the evenings as in this poem, Lamp-shades--the Clouds of Dusk, that I wrote in 1996:

              Loud—limp—the wind…

              huge cold shoals of cloud left dark

              to park themselves above us…

              Linger and see what rueful governing’s

              due from their last low glowing.

Summers to come, by contrast, threaten us with a degree and longevity of heat we are unprepared for and loth to imagine.

In my 2-week exhibit coming up in later March this large work, God All Shape and Conduct: Shoreless, (watercolor & gouache, 22 x 30" unframed) is a picture not only of midsummer in Crex Meadows, a piece of western Wisconsin near Grantsburg, Burnett County, mid-continent in North America with a black tern streaking over a linkage of marshy lakes, but of youth venturing unconstrained, as much in body as in fantasy. A painting hand-lettered inconspicuously in neat black characters over the watery foreground, this work came into being over long, temperate summer weeks as a visualization of my 1988 poem of the same title: 

               

               I must remember that

               wherever we assemble, overflow,

               and with our wistful whiskers, blow alone

               into canals that disappear under

               the overpasses where today's roads veer

               with pulsing whoops, we mix--a hazy current

               full of crowding islets, blurring the flowage

               with our thoughts' corrosion. Notably--

               should this islet, floating, heave that other, 

               cleaving it, it would impair our gliding 

               clarity, that islet's death damming our stream, 

               granules in confusion teeming to

               take refuge as a platform spanning a

               scattered trickling to our river's panorama.

The panoramic painting incorporating earth's curvature is, more than anything else I've painted, a throwback to the summers of my teen-aged years and young womanhood, when I could get away to places like  Crex Meadows, wander and sit looking on as the weather formed over vast marshscapes that could be re-conceived as the make-up of the whole American interior as far as the Rocky Mountains.

Though poverty and a  scarcely-defined range of personal hardships are the proverbial bane of a solitaire who never trained into meeting the demands of a lucrative if tightly-governed public service--it was then and now my privilege to pass days in a wild setting undertaking artwork in response to visual compulsions I'd experienced in some way or other since childhood.

Much the way summer symbolizes youth blending into the prime or heyday of adult life, the solo trek in the poem describes a young individual setting forth to distinguish evil, either amid society or within dynamic unpeopled space adhering to its own biological laws. Nature "red in tooth and claw" in its everyday functions shows an observer paradoxes like predation suffered by conscious prey and terrors including volcanism, fires and floods. Since these are restorative natural phenomena that frame eternity, large-scale judgment of them trails off.  So the young idealist is left to describe evils out of definable personal experience, or second- or third-hand encounters which in societal terms and religious terms have demonstrated punishable evil. And then, in some way that art itself may best be able to reveal, evil cited as a facet of the natural order may be compared with evils dealt out and experienced by our own kind, having repercussions within the law and in political systems.

Couldn't a whole art career including the literary arts base itself upon finding the distinctions and common ground between human evil and the forces beyond our sanctioning as our whole earth evolves, devolves and transforms however it must?

             

Pelicans and Some Broadcast Omens of February

The Sax Zim Bog Festival was this past week-end, bringing birders from twenty-three U.S. states and the United Kingdom to tour among our desolate spruce bogs, the northwestern Lake Superior shore and its north-running hinterlands in search of Canadian birds, like the redpolls, the three-toed woodpeckers, boreal chickadees, pine and evening grosbeaks. Among the birders hopes lingered for boreal and great grey owls, few in number hereabouts this winter. I take part in the festival every year as a vendor, offering note cards, prints and original paintings that boast the greys, blackish-greens, browns and taupes characterizing our region for a lot of the year. Mixed in are my new cards with wild plant art from 2015, plus older botanicals and birds. Desperately, I love it  that again, this winter, after the cooking-hot, fish-inhibiting July and August last year, we're still able to sustain a snowpack lots like the winters of tradition. A typical border-region winter is dark with its brief days and the nip to your face speeds you on your pathways as you hustle to keep warm and on course meeting all objectives. In summer that warmth is a bath that slackens your pace and curbs your metabolism, making you wonder that snow and dark could annually, again, overwhelm this place.

                                                      from along Admiral Rd. in the Sax Zim Bog

                                               the Admiral Rd. feeders, a likely spot for boreal chickadees


This weekend we're below 0 F just for a day or two. In the bog and between forests a kind of steam, or wraith of snow dust, smokes forth disappearing from my peripheral view past the nose of the car which I've taken on a short tour. The hunting spooks of the bogs--fishers, wolves, martens and wild cats, not to mention the owls--are hidden as usual. But a friend's friend's cousin glimpsed a pack of four wolves near Duluth days ago; these creatures travel miles and miles in a day and show themselves to us mainly by rare coincidence.

We're in a part of the world that people abandon for greater economic opportunity, longer light and growing season, and a brasher, more diversified human history.  Summer and winter recreation are an economic mainstay. There are times when I wonder how the well-documented but downplayed U.S. population explosion will impact a marginal regional economy like ours locally. Will this nation end up with cities and suburbs in previously unimaginable places better known for marshes, mosquitoes, winter dark, desert heat, rattlesnakes, etc.? Because those local climates alter so they become popular havens?

As a consequence of my own worries for vast forests and grasslands I was glad to read the following message from NPG (Negative Population Growth) in my email, recounting a change in thought among economists including one who heads up the U.S. Federal Reserve: "Economics Might be Very Wrong about Growth."

Drastic changes confront us and no doubt are essential in shifting bitter inequalities among societies and eliminating excesses that tip chances of survival in recurring times of duress, including shortage, flood and heat wave. But it is welcome news, this evidence that vast, policy-shaping notions, sweeping errors in understanding, like many assumptions surrounding exponential economic growth, are getting recognized for the rot they are built upon. Rot or malignancy, as in rate of economic growth as the measure of our well-being. That has led to the presumption of perpetual economic growth as perpetual benefit, when honest observation shows that nothing grows forever. A cancer will kill its victim, trying to grow its cells without limit. And dominant societies as well as species in the living kingdom collapse in the flux of eternity; the flaws in the dominant party weaken and doom it.

Dominance equates roughly with privilege. As a white female raised among the well-educated, mostly white middle class I have had to learn about racial and social inequalities second- and third-hand; specifically how racist I am or ever was is a thought, like an egg of clay, to roll around in my palm and fingers, to impress and review for lost symmetry, or bias on my part. It would not cease to be true that I have racist thoughts, because difference between race is immediate, visible, for me and anyone of a different race looking at each other to see. It's rule-making and law enforcement devaluing one race in favor of another, and all the discriminatory ramifications passed along like lore from old times that call out for diagnosis and treatment, like spasms of nervous reaction. Who may I have marginalized by my words or deeds because they were a black or brown person? It's those behaviors, those reactions, I have to listen for and quell if I catch myself moved by that perception: 'you look different/talk different,' first of all because I might, on getting acquainted with this person or that person, find that I love him or her, just can't help it, they're irresistible; besides, they and I are equals in the estimation of nature and the law. When I confront a black or brown-skinned person I hope that this, my estimation of their talent or worth, is showing, and I admire them and infinite others like them for uniqueness, inner warmth, and resilience.

         Pelicanza: Two Forms Intermixing
 
With adaptation among human beings of separate ethnicity and among wild creatures in mind, I lately set aside this watercolor titled Pelicanza: Two Forms Intermixing, the original measuring 6 x 12" unmatted, on 140 lb. cotton paper. The red sun hints of havoc, as when huge forests burn and leave ash in the skies. A way that the imbalance between our human selves and the other members of creation shows in our era of rapid change on earth is through hybridizing species, foremost examples being whales and bears of the far north, but also many birds and insects. In nature, species are liable to die out utterly or leaving remnants of their kind in a still habitable range. In society, ethnic mixing grows bridges, while old notions fall away--a few, to our hazard, going into storage for re-use in times of terrible rift, when blame for deep inadmissible faults in our fabric gets cast.

    **Coming Up:  At Home in a Wide Echoing Land  - Solo exhibit of wild flora, bird and landscape paintings included among short lyric poems or essay excerpts by Tanya Beyer, opens Saturday, March 26th, 6 p.m.  at Vine Arts Center, 2637 27th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55406. Reception is free with refreshments and some background narrative by the artist.

Dawn of a World Economy not so Far Beyond Belief

Last week I was part of an audience to the best, most complete-sounding plan imaginable for steering the global economy freer and freer from those toxic fundamentals, oil, gas and coal. I thank my good friend DyAnn, member of the Izaak Walton League, for inviting me there. As a person who goes back and forth across the middle of North America by gasoline car I mostly draw a blank on what a reduced reliance on my own time-tested car would look like. Eric Enberg of Citizens Climate Lobby, who spoke to the Duluth, MN chapter of the Izaak Walton League on January 6th, may not have furnished a specific plan to those of us long-distance drivers wondering how we'd get around between all our jobs and pilgrimages without gasoline power. But he certainly, with a brisk and smiling verve, delivered a proposal that even a non-logical mind could track, a sweeping win/win that would serve everybody but people stubbornly profiteering from fossil fuels. (And even those people, in ways they may refuse to ever admit!) 

The Carbon Fee and Dividend proposal is explained here at Citizens Climate Lobby's website. Essays about large-scale risk to the atmosphere and our survival have used the term externalities for the ever-more-obvious environmental costs of business that conventional economies have failed to account for. The Carbon Fee and Dividend would build those costs in, as the central principle fostering a whole subsequent economic order that would work for everyone.

The carbon fee would apply to all sources of atmospheric carbon at the source--oil wellhead, coal mine, shipping port--would increase over time, and would be subject to adjustment at international borders so industry would be discouraged from dodging it by moving abroad. As a fee, not a tax, its revenues would be distributed to households directly, a subsidy and stimulus that would compound the benefits of state and federal tax refunds. According to Mr. Enberg, the greatest personal impact each of us has on the climate comes about not through what we drive, considerable though that may be, but through what we buy--all kinds of goods and services. Adopting a fee and dividends would recognize that. The carbon fee would force business, both manufacturing and service, to review and overhaul all their processes, including raw materials, in a way that would trim out more and more fossil-fuel-related costs, since prices in all sectors would rise in consequence of the fee assessed early on for anything brought to us by gasoline, petroleum derivative or coal. Renewable energies and non-petroleum principle materials would be phased in as affordable substitutes with the passage of time, steadily lowering carbon emissions while easing countries into the parameters endorsed by the Paris Agreement last fall.

Gaps between how economic policy is written, how it's administered under differing bodies of law and how it's put into practice by all the relevant businesses never-the-less are all too likely if we implement rules, from one national or regional governing body to the next, based on this paradigm. There have always been self-serving bodies as well as desperate planners with talents for bending rules, supplying under-the-table markets and using diversionary tactics. Cynical schemes of fee avoidance and manipulation will doubtless come to our attention, as well as price wars plus out-and-out physical competition for superior raw materials, whatever they might be, known to be in limited supply, and for water and for real estate. Conflicts and mismanagement must increasingly remind societies that everything we need proves finite if we insist on perpetually growing consumer demand, out of a fanciful belief in ever-expanding prosperity for a customer base as vast as the expanding universe.

In a trust that enough of us know we have to make way for future generations in another age, innovating as we go, I recall this 1999 watercolor that shows a coexistence briefly traced on a brown, distantly-peopled beach, with snow flurries like a kind of yearly omen of the coldest, shortest day of the year. The connection here is the prospect of winter, to those of us who thrive in cold climates with a reliably returning snowpack, being lost to the heat waves borne year-round in the advance of global warming.

                        Snow Buntings on a Wintry Beach   - original watercolor 12 x 8.25" unframed,  $95.00

I had seen the snow buntings, whose arrival from the Arctic seems to demarcate early winter from late fall, and remembered episodes of biking in wide-open air. Whose might be the wheels that made the tire marks, and what blends of musculature, mechanics--even electronics--might drive them out through a habitat for brown bird survivors? I think there always deserve to be earthly enchantments and the soft wheel marks of our passage following where the other creatures go.

I Met a Legend in the Dark

Skiing for exercise in the late, last low glow of a fair Saturday, river running open on my left, firs and oaks and ashes and aspen interwoven not so awfully high overhead, I heard a snap, not a dry wood crack but one elastic live sapling scraping against another, so I stared to my right in search of the animal. Remembering that moment, it in fact took me some weeks to refresh my memory back to the fullest possible detail. Yet I knew without a doubt, as soon as I saw what I saw, what animal had just left the scene. That faint woody click was different from the panic of a deer when spooked. Something on padded paws, with some bulk was plunging southward, opposite my own bearing. I knew that the lingering sunset gloom would give me one chance at an ID. Wolf maybe, I guessed at first, because no, it couldn't be a deer, common as they are. I knew to watch for a defining tail, since all that I'd be able to get would be a quick silhouette.  I knew, though for a few days forgot, that I had seen the tail midair, ropelike, in the shape of C, though continually recalled the front parts, the low-slung body with legs thick as the arms of an ape. The impression left was both those things, the tail, a moment's wink of silhouette, shaped like a C up above the rump, and those short stocky legs the length and thickness of a man's heavy forearms, or an ape's. Cat! I think I said, "oh!" before veering off the trace of path in a degree of shock.

Having cougar in the back of my mind since seeing a housemate's photos on Facebook of cougar tracks the day before, I still forgot to think I could meet the same animal on a skiing hike in dark nearby woods.  Yet what other kind of animal could that shape have been in unfenced private forest in the middle of North America, given those tracks he'd lately found and the momentary springing outline I saw, an animal probably bigger and longer than either of us, scared off as I flapped by on cross-country skis? As I had only seen that silhouette, I'd for better or worse just missed a fully fleshed-out sighting of another American wild animal I had never met anywhere before in the wild. Earlier that same afternoon I had, alongside Lake Superior, viewed a new species of gull from so close up I thought I recognized expression in its face--what are you all staring at??--and beheld it from angle after different angle in full flattering sun. The bird, a rare ivory gull, looked like a marble bust or an art-quality color photo brought to life. Then I had headed over to Pineapple Art Center to unveil and talk about an art proposal making use of pencil silhouettes. This continuum of images--from live and moving to flat monochromatic, to live but silhouetted black against a night-dark forest--seems artistically significant only later.

For the first couple of nights as I lay awake after that startling encounter--in the urgings of many people, dangerous owing to the nature of that kind of beast--I troubled myself with the question: did I really see a long thin tail, held up like a C or uncurling into another shape--or did the power of suggestion, the desire for this spectre to really prove to be a cougar, add an imagined tail to the back end of the bounding-away form? Looking hard, I think, was probably its own reward: I really saw, however fleetingly, what there was to see. The stumpy cat legs, the low-slung long belly. But the other part of the conviction I had had in those seconds as I stood on my skis came back to me--no bobbing white rump and tail of a deer, nor any other obvious tail of the bushy sort belonging to a wolf. The animal sprang away like a cat, or panther, or mountain lion, all of these, because it was one of these, of magnificent size. A legend of the old American wilderness.

What is a silhouette when compared with a fully-formed image? I think it takes its place as the image of all of its kind, while a three-dimensional photo or illustration is of one specimen. Just below is decorative, contemplative artwork I have taken on as an assignment, hinting of types of human, suggestions of personality, categories of motion. I plan on doing another sheet not of human figures but our four-legged, hands-free relatives like the cougar or deer on the run. If I should be so lucky as to glimpse or even gaze upon another mountain lion, or panther, or cougar in broad-enough daylight I wonder what I'll have to report beyond color pattern or perfectly supple, enviable powers of motion--attitude, say, of an animal in the way that we each saw the other and drew our conclusions. A different type of story and artwork to be sure!

In a World Responding to Climate Upheaval

This is that era now, written up in publications and on broadcast reports in all the decades I remember, when the greenhouse effect would wreak its changes noticeably, almost everywhere. Those changes have come on so subtly, but are so sweeping in their effects that many who think about it can't yet sort out any consistent response much less a forced ending to the ways we live, travel and earn a living. Every step and every sidestep, where fossil-fuel-reliance is in demand, reverberates--and which decision may be worse than which in terms of another outburst of carbon, ozone-depleting byproducts, methane, etc. here beneath the skies? If we're going to personally do anything to lower emissions it should have worth obvious at least to the doer, and, we figure, should be something we can afford. Anyway, what does it matter, up against all the wholesale stuff that keeps going on--commercial trucking and air travel, oil refining and fracking, military maneuvers and bombings and urban overgrowth, because there is still economic, military and population growth worsening climate change.

We follow our hearts, and what are better drivers than hearts informed by minds, where this matter is concerned?

There are so many compounding effects from climate change along with shortages aggravated by massive population growth; it's disconcerting to think what may be required of ourselves not to mention whole societies. Not just in death but in survival, too, there is shrinkage. What we love we will try to save, or help it to save itself. Each of us who are concerned bears a repository of lifestyle modifications or intentions in response. For those who have no cares about the whole situation, the world will do its best and worst to convert such people into different versions of themselves.

When I was still young enough to have picture books from the library, there was one book whose cover illustration bore a sun drawn in wavering, black kindergarten-grade lines on desert-gold background, a vision of skyscrapers on the sun. For a moment I may have been charmed, but mostly I remember how these pictures touched me with despair--for I could imagine living on an earth-like sun, maybe not the real gaseous devouring sun but a planet all about heat and light--all that a person could want of it. Any number of readers might be smitten with the picture but for me it felt like a vision of sterility. Who would want to live on a hot planet that had scorched itself bald?

That memory came to mind last evening as I drove in the old Prius back from my downtown day, at long last, after days and days above freezing, even many nights above freezing, in a brisk December snowfall. It was not quite blinding but enough to make the roadsides uniform and slow the motorists down. A full measure of my old childhood glee awoken by a downpour of snow awoke in me so I was exuberant again, talking to myself and the radio announcer, peering along the dark route ahead for the ever-more-remarkable glimpse of winter's splendor. Tomorrow, I said, I'll go out since the hunters are all gone and see what I find on the way to the river. Never mind that there probably won't be enough snow to ski on.

It is significant what subtle but widespread effects a climate has, probably on all of us. As realms known for snow and ice seem to transform, before the eyes of those of us in love with their beauty, to something out of a fairy tale or movie or dream memory, we're not necessarily enchanted. It is possible to feel partially stranded, ignoring the emergency of folks in other places watching the ground alongside  their neighborhood subside into the sea because of ice caps shrinking, seas rising. For the many who are grieving climate change, our personal identity, along with that of the place, is being baked away. What used to console us with a feeling of eternity is in the early stages of a transition that will move us far from a lot, if not all, of what we cherish. How our mood responds varies daily, but if we're tackling or waiting out other issues, we may seem to observers like someone waking up out of troubled dreams into a problematic Monday, the opening of a week defined by confusion.


Cottonwood in Pasture After Frost - watercolor & pencil, 8x11"