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

Relief from Botanical Painting -- Why Not Just Take a Picture?

Making art is the venting of feelings that have bundled themselves into sensory/emotional knots creating a kind of pressure in the artist, with more or less labor devoted. When I began to draw and paint native plants I had walked up against in the Indiana pastures or along the Lake Superior shores, I was so smitten with exact form, color and circumstance that I knew only to illustrate the plant on the scene, no background elements. The process entailed surrender to the conditions of that place, with the flower's ephemeral stage of development creating a sense of obligation which crowded aside everything else I needed to do. At first I'd feel a bit crazed by a sense of insurmountable disorder. At the work's completion days or weeks later I was at peace, gratified by the translation of vision to material, but each painting ended up as not much more than a documentary, a throwback to times when cameras were inadequate to record color, leaf texture and the subtler features of a flower. My results could be likened to scientific illustrations, if lacking in some of science's required standards. The more that I felt impelled to bring the weather and the background in with the botanical detail, the more the work became a documentary of a place and a day occupied by a plant. Meanwhile the botanical cards I sold at my early art fairs began as the simplest color images on a white background.

Fantasy tends to prevail over the purely documentary impulse in painting and drawing today, especially since we have the camera for the utmost capture of what meets the eye--most of all the facts, etc. Wanting to see what my own fantasy assisted by photo images would help me to do in botanical art, especially since the days and weeks of the brisk northern flowering season get ahead of me--and much as I'd like to do all botanical painting out of doors in a sweet and lonely place--I made most of my floral paintings this year supported by photos I took in the field from assorted angles around a plant at the desired peak of its blooming cycle. We sped from June to mid-August before I could start on the wild blue flag, Iris versicolor, that I had wanted to conjure on paper since the late 1990s. In this season's lateness I'd have to rely solely on photos, as many as necessary, to get the anatomy right. I decided to give form to a somewhat exaggerated notion of purple iris. The result, after a great deal of indoor hand labor, leaves me pretty disenchanted. Despite my careful attention to assorted close-up details gleaned from at least four photos, the piece fails to acclaim the essence of June in the bogs and peatlands, where wild blue flag upholds its perfection, saying scion, rebirth in its hallmark pattern of immaculate blue, purple, gold and white.

Here is the new mixed-media painting of the iris, or wild blue flag:

<a href="http://fineartamerica.com/art/paintings/nature+watercolor/all" style="font: 10pt arial; text-decoration: underline;">nature watercolor paintings</a>

Distortion and simplification in this work suggest that it would call out to a somewhat different set of tastes than the pieces done in solemn homage to the plant waving in the wild. There seems infinite middle ground between botanical illustration and jubilantly decorative floral art.

Pride, brought about through learned skill and certain inclinations to work deliberately by hand and eye, urges the belief in me that hand illustration is more profoundly artistic than any genre that begins with a photograph, with however many techniques applied to heighten certain effects in the ultimate photo image. And yet there are more and more photos, I think, that override all of an artist's instinct to lavish effort on a painting. On occasion these photos happen in our hands and cameras by accident, a moment's inspiration out of which the camera is perfectly designed and adjusted to replace all the labor.

As an example, while visiting my mom who lives in Hingham, not far south of Boston, Massachusetts, I went walking on a couple of days that proved lead-ups to soaking rain in the wake of a drought. Just past a pile of cement rubble on the trail skirting the boundaries of her retirement community I came upon the pokeweed, a robust plant with a huge tradition in the pioneer United States and no doubt over the eons before there was a U.S. Immediately the plant's bulk and flashy green and pink, familiar as it was to me from near a rusty tin barn and a fence in Indiana long ago, whispered: heirloom.

If I had nowhere else to be and nothing else to do, I would pull together the materials and paint the wonderful subject over the few weeks it would require: pokeweed! source of salad greens and pie filling and writing ink to many of our American forebears, but why bother? Look at the misty springtime aspect, even in late September, that the camera drew in around the leaves with their beads of rainwater. Far be it from me to deny photography its place as an art genre. But back in the Upper Midwest, looking out at yellowed meadows, marshes and aspen groves I am remembering May and June and the reappearance of evolved perfection. Through the winter I will be drawing and painting a lot of stumps and black spruce, its frizzy few branches adorning a wand that might otherwise be dead wood. But next spring, barring any misfortune, I had better get back to those poolsides where Iris versicolor emerges, and do careful justice to the precision of tender buds as they unfold, to the re-patterned functioning of countless ancient iris genes as I lean out of a folding chair whose legs bear down into the mud.

A Huge Tree Pressing into the Atmosphere

I've been having another nostalgia trip these weeks while painting and drawing the details of sycamore bark; the project is the illustrated family tree for the La Montagne clan of the south-central U.S. with roots in Mexico. The American sycamore, Platanus occidentalis, remains dear to me because much of my first dozen years was spent beneath a sycamore at the edge of Marion County, Indiana, where a twisted, seemingly-mile-high sycamore shaded our pretend games out by the swings, and down along the White River grew hollow sycamores on a floodplain that now hosts a block of stores. I wonder if the tree that I imagined housing a pay telephone still stands, way back behind the blacktop parking for the strip mall.

A favorite writer I remember on the topic of American trees was Rutherford Platt, whose A Pocket Guide to Trees : How to Identify and Enjoy Them I still have, my original paperback copy with pages warped and rippling from falling out from under my arm into Sugar Creek in southern Indiana while I hiked there with my family as a pre-teen. Of the sycamore Mr. Platt wrote:

     "You know it at a glance by the white, purple, and gray patchwork of its bark. Upper trunk and lower  part of limbs may be smooth, bright white all over. This dramatic bark has unforgettable splendor. On a clear winter day, when lighted by brightness from snow, it is like nothing else in treedom. ... Sycamore grows only the inner layer of its bark every year. This living bark becomes white on exposure to the sun, and the bark of previous years, not growing, and therefore not expanding to fit around the bigger trunk, is forced off the tree in patches. In effect, the tree is bursting its breeches. Varied tints are due to the number of years' exposure of the older layers before they fall off. Sunlight turns bark chemicals gold, brown and blue-gray."

According to Rutherford Platt the state of Indiana is the headquarters of the American sycamore.

Many years ago, before and after I came to live in Minnesota I used to visit Owen County, Indiana where my friend the librarian Gisela Hersch (Gisela Schluter Terrell) lived on several acres of deep hardwoods not far from the town of Spencer. As we swept along the local gravel roadways in one small car or other I became filled with imagery of riverbanks sewn in place by coiling sycamore and wrote the following poem, titled Entering a Midwestern Capital:

Indiana! Indiana! One remembers knits of twiggage,

redness drained away in sky that vanished

uphill as the road was lowering, unfocusing the eye from

how the mud broke off in gulches or exulted up in trees that grasped the sudden uplands.

Indiana curved forever supple, around

its rivers that kept beveling the knolls that stood compelling them.

The outswept seats of weed thickened into

that wickerwork of pillars and their racks of leaf

but billowed with a roar beyond, off to the evening’s droop of shade

caught in a forest resurging, flaunting

the hard holds of the beech and ironwood, tautly hefting their limbs,

and sycamore, coiling in patchwork—oak, reaching elbows rustic in fractured silver.

A landscape painting in watercolor followed, sold in Wilmar, Minnesota some years ago but reproduced on the card available here at https://www.etsy.com/listing/90794426/watercolor-notecard-entering-a?.
The original painting had the poem inscribed on it; the card image does not.

My gratitude will go with me to the end of my days for the outdoor privileges I had in my youth, spent in open spaces both in Indiana and in Ontario's Algoma District, in low thickets and climax forest, most of it regenerating from an agricultural heyday of grazing, row-cropping and lumbering. Seeing the  break-up of these expanses between new houses or other installations in support of an ever-larger network of human beings, and learning more and more about the epidemic of modern industrialism spreading itself till water depletion and climate catastrophe impose their own limits, I have turned into an oft-cynical middle-ager. I have felt that  all manner of modern societies are a curse to themselves, each other and the earth in how they assert that their control of land, resources and other people can only grow, never stabilize in contentment with what they've successfully claimed, lest they be treated as no-account backwaters. Wouldn't everyone gain, wherever they're living, by having vast surroundings of wide-open land, wild, cultivated and both, to look at and pass through? With all the varieties of creatures that also call it home? Why must such an earthly arrangement over the long term be dealt with as unrealistic?

If you spend time thinking about it all, it's obvious that having large families and no limits on fertility on this finite earth lead to resource shortage and warfare, that chemicals from mining will eke their way far out into a watershed, just as meanness begets meanness and retaliation, and orgies of fossil-fuel burning uphold the legitimacy and glory of that fossil-fuel technology (from jet skis to jet planes) and guarantee that people will go on in their dependence on it till the supporting economy for more and more of that shrinks far enough. Of course most of us don't think very long-term at all, to the extent that we think at all. Why worry about what we can't control? I sit back in my trust that what we won't resolve will sooner or later overwhelm us with our own excesses issuing from too many people taking too much out of a finite earth and infesting it with our own structures, even so that for an unfortunate many the world seems to offer no place to be true to one's best dreams; it's all become, more or less, wasteland. And some will adapt to that.

It was breathtaking a few months ago to draw some conclusions from 'Whatever Happened to "The Good Old Days"?', an NPG (Negative Population Growth) Forum Paper by Chris Clugston. This essay is about the diminishing supply of 'NNRs' or nonrenewable natural resources, the "finite and non-replenishing fossil fuels, metals and nonmetallic minerals" that make up the raw materials of all our products, the stuff of all our urban and industrial structures and the main energy sources for our industrialized way of life. The NNRs are all in some way extracted from the earth, and Clugston goes on to show that despite recycling and reuse, conservation, materials substitution, efficiency measures and all manner of invention and innovation, annual rates at which NNRs are drawn upon rise without let-up as urban civilization keeps expanding. The essay is loaded with charts, figures, graphs and statistics with two pages of bibliography for anyone wanting to do an investigation on their own.

Comparing historical prosperity with trends ever since 1960 Clugston makes his case that we are, amid the entirety of NNRs which he lists alphabetically, from bauxite to zinc, moving from an era of  'robustly increasing' to 'faltering' prosperity. Moreover in recent decades the diminishing quality of the NNRs we are able to access gradually overtakes the ingenuity called for so the supply can meet the demand in terms of price. Global demand for NNRs, of course, knows no limit. In terms of material living standards he projects four scenarios through the decades up to 2050: a decline following a temporary improvement in which 'human ingenuity prevails over continuously decreasing NNR quality', versus a temporary reprieve, his likeliest scenario, in which 'decreasing NNR quality and human ingenuity remains at a standoff.' Otherwise we face either a continued decline in which 'geopolitical and geological barriers to currently accessible NNRs...are not overcome' or accelerated decline which is mostly a matter of the same outcome happening sooner.

Could it be possible for more and more people to see past the gloom and inevitably-compounding tragedy in any of these scenarios to welcome the changing of regimes back to what worked better for longer? It may be that a person has to dwell far back somehow from the escalating risk of, as my friend Dave Heinz calls it, the four horsemen, plague, famine, war and disease, to take any kind of welcoming attitude. Again and again I recoil from any prospect of horrors, as I begin to imagine an advanced state of global decline way beyond my experience. But proceeding to what might await beyond mass societal and economic collapse, utopias come to mind. I can also imagine that forgotten societies of long ago may have paralleled forms of social organization that will arise in a future when the earth and surviving peoples are freed of control by mega-industry and its delusions about the viability of perpetual growth, even if specific to just one or several choice industries,  We can at best think large, of cycles of boom and collapse, and that everything has its heyday, decline and then, sometimes on a tiny scale, a rebirth...

Mutterings and Tributes: What Must Have Been and Next Had Better Be

In 'Jutland,' the first part of Alice Munro's story The Love of a Good Woman, a reader can re-enter the era of the North American small town as it was in the farming heartland some sixty years ago. Walking across town or out of town was more commonplace, and so were kitchen gardens, home-canned food and formal meals around a table. Town folk walked home to noon dinners that some woman who tended the kitchen had cooked and dished out. I imagine sometimes that I still catch whiffs from a few of those cook pots.

What I love about Alice Munro's characters is that they all, almost always, speak or act out of a sequence of memory and sensation, clearly put and essential to the narrative, sometimes tying back to an anecdote revealing their earlier developmental history. If a character acts on impulse, the story up to that moment has laid forth the preconditions to show how that impulse came naturally. The narrative begins to seem as braided with strands out of past consciousness, dramatic awareness, action and emotional reaction as a normal person's thought process, even so that other stories by other authors might seem to beg to be revealed with a like degree of detail, weighing of risk, surmise and defensive posturing leading to the considered outcome, ironic or rich in probability.

In 'Jutland' three school-aged boys are walking into town from near the river where they've discovered a drowned body in a sunken car, belonging to the local optometrist. Alice Munro has already outlined the boys in relation to each other: "...yet they hardly thought of each other as friends. They would never have designated someone as a best friend or a next-best friend, or joggled people around in these positions, the way girls did. Any one of at least a dozen boys could have been substituted for any one of these three, and accepted by the others in exactly the same way."

On the way downtown to the police they meet the victim's wife in her yard tending the forsythia bush.

     "Here you are," she said. "Take these home to your mothers. It's always good to see the forsythia,            it's the very first thing in the spring." She was dividing the branches among them. "Like all Gaul,"          she said. "All Gaul is divided into three parts. You must know about that if you take Latin." 

  "We aren't in high school yet," said Jimmy whose life at home had readied him, better than the       others, for talking to ladies.   

   

     "Aren't you?" she said. "Well, you've got all sorts of things to look forward to. Tell your mothers to
     put them in lukewarm water.  Oh, I'm sure they already know that. I've given you branches that aren't
     all the way out yet, so they so they should last and last." ...

     The forsythia gave them something to think about. The embarrassment of carrying it, the problem of
     getting rid of it. Otherwise, they would have to think about Mr. Willens and Mrs. Willens. How she
     could be busy in her yard and he could be drowned in his car. Did she know where he was or did she
     not? It seemed that she couldn't. Did she even know that he was gone? She had acted as if there was
     nothing wrong, nothing at all, and when they were standing in front of her this had seemed to be the
     truth. What they knew, what they had seen, seemed actually to be pushed back, to be defeated, by           her not knowing it."

In Part IV, titled 'Lies' the scene has long since shifted to a farm where Enid, a trained nurse for a dying young mother, sits up for a whole night in the breathless realization of what almost certainly had happened to Mr. Willens: "She could not lie down in Mrs. Quinn's room. She sat in the kitchen for hours. It was an effort for her to move, even to make a cup of tea or go to the bathroom. Moving her body shook up the information that she was trying to arrange in her head and get used to. She had not undressed, or unrolled her hair, and when she brushed her teeth she seemed to be doing something laborious and unfamiliar...

     'She got up stiffly and unlocked the door and sat on the porch in the beginning light. Even that move
     jammed her thoughts together. She had to sort through them again and set them on two sides...

     'The cows hadn't cropped all the weeds. Sopping wet, they brushed against her stockings. The path
     was clear, though, under the riverbank trees, those willows with the wild grape hanging on to them         like monkeys' shaggy arms. Mist was rising so that you could hardly see the river. You had to fix             your eyes, concentrate, and then a spot of water would show through, quiet as water in a pot.                   There must be a moving current, but she could not find it.

     'Then she saw a movement, and it wasn't in the water. There was a boat moving. Tied to a branch, a
     plain old rowboat was being lifted very slightly, lifted and let fall. Now that she had found it, she           kept watching it, as if it could say something to her. And it did. It said something gentle and final.

     'You know. You know."

This week-end I was crossing the meadow south of home when I saw and remembered a plant I had drawn and painted in my late teens, the fringed loosestrife. The name 'loosestrife' is full of the suggestion of peace, tensions ended, strife loosened, either by the powers of the herb or the setting where it thrives. An old source cites loosestrife as having powers to quiet oxen at their ploughing by driving away gnats and flies, and the same benefits accruing to houses if the plant is burnt within them. The notion came to rest in my mind when I saw the face-down corollas in the grass, as golden as many an evening cloud, and considered the process of Enid, the protagonist in The Love of a Good Woman, in her decision-making as to her role in the wake of a probable murder. What she has heard is all talk, just the way we often learn of things, and then we're sitting off to one side, privately or with someone else assigning probable cause. But she is the only one given the insight, via her contemplative vigil at the edge of someone's death, and though she feels intensely that so grave a crime deserves punishment she also sees around her what else goes begging, even before the onset of her patient's sickness.



There seem such obvious, large-scale solutions to huge issues verging on crimes that challenge the world community, but the solutions are impeded by politics, religious difference and other failures of cooperation. Why, I wonder as Israel and Palestine accuse each other and attack with bombs and rockets, do we hear of nobody in charge talking about the need to agree NOT TO EXPAND? This doesn't just mean territorial expansion. If immigration and birth rates were stabilized especially within Israel but outside its borders too, real security could be sought in terms of adequate land area, water, etc. But all factions blindly seem to go on in the assumption that safety lies in numbers adding up so that collectively their own side keeps amounting to an ever bigger beast. But as they grow, so will the number and complexity of their problems.

As well-told stories illustrate, a problem is a complex made up of lots of littler problems. The process of breaking down issues deserves as broad as possible a scope, even with one person like Enid sitting up through a night seeing what she in partnership with at least one other person can best do to wage justice. Help for grave injustice is offered by courts for the whole family nowadays; beyond the family, committees and task forces are formed in the wake of public disasters. Visual schemes may emerge before our eyes, revealing possible courses of remedy. Of course we have memory and precedent.

Family memory in particular comes to hand; often, we turn to what a parent or elder relative would have done or said, or even a chosen one in the younger generation. The probable reason for an unexplained event in one's lineage emerges in the face of new understanding. Family virtue and pathology determine all outcomes. But on a personal level, people are more often than not outwardly proud of certain kinfolk whom they knew or know of.

Here is where I introduce the illustrated family tree, homage in visual, decorative form to the folk each of us came from. There are their names and a flow of limbs and branches a little like a waterway, indicating who was most or least prolific, who bore a nickname and who was married to or born of whom. Extra details characterizing that clan may can be fitted in between and beyond the branchwork. Choice of a type of tree symbolic of the family is encouraged. Why not give them something to look at that spins off a whole flock of different conversations, even beyond this generation?

Kearney Family Tree from 2013

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