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"

Questing for Epiphanies Afield

On a Sunday excursion, driving faster than my usual highway speed in order not to miss the thrill and majesty of a rare visiting bird, I also felt beckoned by a sense of due reward on the heels of all my various endeavors toward protecting habitat and migratory safety for birds. Faring off to a first encounter with an archetype--a documented species--must be a familiar feeling to many birders who head out to cross county and state lines, by car, train, on foot, bike or plane in response to a sighting that would mean a life bird (lifer in the lingo) added to a private list. Birder's adventure-lust is a kind of yearning for one of nature's rarities in the long stretches when special sightings go unheard of, often as a result of monotonous weather. Stormy weather most often whips birds into local areas from far away. A lot of us can't stay forever contented with the same resident bird neighbors: Canada geese, English sparrows, coastal seafowl, wherever we may happen to live. Isn't bird-finding sort of an act of worship, going to bear witness to an itinerant life form, created into the world by way of all the staunchness, daring and discomfort wrapped up in the process called evolution!

Last week-end's quarry was a pair of vermilion flycatchers over in Becker County, in Minnesota's northwestern quadrant, and would lure me across five counties including a stretch of the Chippewa National Forest. Deer season opener was that same day, marked by an unusual number of trucks and a few modest cars at trailheads along the highway, nose to nose as if aware and conferring. For me it had been since early May that I last listed a new bird, the ruff observable at long range across a lot of warm bottomland overlooking Minnesota River mudflats beneath the thunders of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.

A sweeping National Audubon bird study released in 2014 concluded, based upon projections of temperature, rainfall, vegetative changes and other alterations in climate that by 2080 over half, or 314 out of 588 species of North American birds will lose more than fifty percent of their customary range. Out of those 314 threatened species 126 are classified as climate-endangered, and projected to lose more than fifty percent of their accustomed range as early as 2050. Abstraction from these trends serves as a reminder that powerful, prevailing conditions (climates) do, even in a lifetime, blur and blend into one another, and that a force on earth so manifold and multitudinous as people do increase a generic all-of-a-type habitat/climate regime characterized, among other things, by a growing variety of plant species in common. Then what happens when the people-force that's taken over all the landscape divides, inevitably, into sub-sectors of clashing priorities? Civil war, or rioting may break out. In the face of such tensions, conserving pieces of habitat slips to a low priority or the effort gets wiped out. How well do we cherish the wild birds, more or less of which are archetypes, treasured emblems or voices of a distinct but vanishing type of habitat, in our minds? in our actions?

Maybe one-hundred to three-hundred of our continent's bird species seem as irrevocably slated for extinction as each one of us is in a tinier time frame--each species, comparable with each life. My attitude during this road trip rode on a stream of joy, as my aging Toyota hybrid pierced a course through the lake country, slowing through farm towns that seemed to belong to other times beset with somewhat other threats than today's. Yet however vaguely a twinge of mortification presents itself at the prospect of these losses--if the Vermilion flycatcher is not on the list of 314 climate-threatened birds because it hails from a hot latitude far to our south, our loon and Bohemian waxwing, our great grey owl and sundry favorite northern-breeding birds are. A few devotees to these creatures, to pristine lands and seas with their character facing peril will keep standing up out of a welter of angry sorrow and saying: this kind still has a chance! or this place still looks how I remember it, so let's work to keep it that way. Right now we're taking a breather in a kind of temporary contentment at how, in due time and in the comradeship of recognizing an increasingly desolate future, thousands of us got our president to rule against the latest mother of all transcontinental pipelines, the Keystone XL.

Restoration of degraded places might increasingly be taken on as a local mission; I can't forget the story of Hanna Mounce, featured in the early-autumn 2015 issue of Audubon magazine. She coordinates the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project and works with a crew replanting seedlings of trees typifying the lost dry, upland forest that once supported Hawaii's rarest bird, of which only a few hundred diminishing individuals remain. A forest restored for one species holds the promise of saving any number of others. In more desolate times ahead, if all together we agree that a community's birth rates as well as death rates are best held in check to ensure abundant living for our foreseeable future, the recreation of habitat full of complementary trees, shrubs and soft-bodied plants may well become a therapy, a discipline, and a vocation, the horticulture and silviculture for collective survival.

                                Restored, protected tallgrass prairie, Becker County, Minnesota

I celebrated a distant old friend's 55th birthday and the rejection of the Keystone pipeline by observing the nearly-adult vermilion flycatcher perching on a metal pasture fence, in late morning sun and 55 degrees F. Though he wasn't close to my position looking through a window, the flycatcher was spectacularly lit, red as candy red-hots as he blurted back from nabbing insect prey midair to his perch on barbed wire; viewing conditions could not have been sharper. The few people present traded lively conversation, amid the thrill of thin, early bonds formed when folks otherwise unlikely otherwise to meet find themselves of a common mind-set. Then came time for me to hurtle back eastward, out of prairie country into what remains of wooded acreages and lakes known for ice-fishing and cracking, dry cold in most of the winters in memory.

       Vermilion Flycatcher Minds his Business  - 5x7" original watercolor on   semi-glossy Yupo polypropylene paper $50

     Life appears fair to the extent that it offers such a variety of emotional sustenance, and one category has to do with getting back to visit what means most to us in our weariness and numbness, often what never changes but presents itself as a constant, or a continuum. The vermilion flycatcher and other surviving species of birds are that, are in bird books and illustrations going way back through our generations, and though these birds are in that way a constant, some of them offset the impending era of extinctions by showing up where and when least expected, like an advertisement for some other trend that we could cooperatively set in motion.

The Feel of Having Been Someplace

Again there was no one else for distraction from a northern Ontario mood evoked along the way as I traveled in my little old Toyota, climbing in altitude from west to east. In my mind's eye right now I am around Thunder Bay, though the window views have been scrolling since morning as I came out of Minnesota over the border. Since I've been through the Districts of Thunder Bay and Algoma most years since I was barely of school age I've had half a lifetime to build up a sort of mental mulch of vistas and bush-texture, the facades of cliff, the etches of deadwood standing up that belong to this Lake Superior region, characterized by a kind of light or weather that might, even in one well-traveled soul, evoke visions of a slew of places but, in my case, still tie me to the Algoma region in memory. Compacted scenic imagery must give rise to endless landscape art, for all that I know, among artists regionwide. 

Land-mood like this has caught my notice for as long as I've been aware of my earthly surroundings; it's the feeling left when I'm away from that place but recalling time that I spent there. Maybe the abundant sense of it is a function of time spent alone in one's psyche, in the faith that these impressions are to be privately savored but are wasted if much talked about. One of the things I enjoy most about favorite movie scenes is the mood they set up, whether it's farmed countryside, wilderness or bleakest desert or a skyline along a city, set to the filmmaker's exquisite choice of music.

Mood imparted to a person by surrounding landscape is what's meant by a land's spirit, the difference from one region to the next as stark as the opposing scenery is. What's there to account for that spirit comes, I have no doubt, of the leftover character of whatever drama unfolds there, influenced by characteristics like air turbulence, heavy tree growth, profusion of other living or dead matter, humidity or aridity. What engenders the mood of the Canadian Shield, north of Lake Superior, in its peculiar sweetness emanating out of a quieter savagery--this is my theory--is inherent in the way all the big and little lives play out within that land. There is so much cover from ground level to treetop--there are cliffs full of crevices--there is a muffling expanse of forest cushy with needles in addition to paper-thin leaves, and there are sparse, ripped places bearing pockets and rivulets of water--so that living is secretive, hastily undertaken and sudden, often, in its curtailment by predator come unseen or heard. There is pain and stifling imposed by a long winter of nights that swallow up the wink of days whose sun arcs, glinting but gone again, far in the southern sky. Warmth, gleams of winter blueness, autumn red and gold, resin-scented breezes are cause for seasonal celebration until, sooner and later, the participant freezes into winter's freezing dark. So much has lived and died there with an emotional framework borne of those conditions that the prevailing mood, conferred upon all nervous systems opened to it, comes of a deep sense that summer is short and death, mild or traumatic, hovers nearby. From forested mountain regions to the west the mood is bound to be similar, though in ways that can be guessed, subtly differing.

From decades ago I remember the broad-leaved hardwoods and farm fields of the lower Midwest, and now try recalling the character of what seems to have been a louder landscape. The crown of the forest hissed with summer's downpours blasted through broad leaves, till winter changed the wind's voice to a roar, the gale in bare branches clicking or at times creaking, hinge-like. Cicada sound in summer--was it the seventeen-year locusts?---pulsed louder, then ebbed like a shut-off motor. Bird noise carried farther among the pillars of those woods than it seems to in the boreal forest.

So a prairie, often gone to agriculture, has more of a spirit of the resolute--there is much less to obscure your view but you have to stand, peer, organize your intentions, but do it with greater assurance than you'll likely feel in forestland--and on a shore, facing a sea or lesser water, you'll act similarly but pausing longer, taking shakier physics into consideration. And so the fabric of each of those places is patterned by whatever happens there, again and again and again but by assorted agents, lineages native to that place or come to visit and influenced by it. Microbial action must play its own role in the evolution of spirit, influenced by temperature and moisture.

These thoughts easily sidetrack me into recalling a bit of a memoir from my neighbor Joan Skelton, a Canadian author and playwright, who wrote of traveling into Michigan to join up with friends. Joan keeps a rock garden, which she describes as an outdoor horde of geological finds, not a flowering garden. Every stone in the garden has its far-off point of origin, someplace where Joan has been. For a long time wanting a Petoskey stone, a type of fossilized coral, she was invited into the countryside by a group member; this was in a part of Michigan near Petoskey and Little Traverse Bay where it was still possible to unearth Petoskey stones. Joan surprised herself by digging up a chunky specimen which she brought back with her to Ontario. It was rusty-toned, smudged all over by the soil it came up from, so she chose to soak it overnight in soapsuds, noting as she handled it that it looked like brain tissue. She went on to tell how the oddly colored and patterned stone refused to leave her thoughts that whole night, affecting her with sleeplessness and haunting, visceral-colored visions. At one moment she could hear wind, then a knocking at the main door, but a walk to the door revealed nobody there and no wind  moving any of the treetops. Everything that was troubling her she felt traceable to the lurking of that stone hauled out of place, so she ended up, a day or two later, scooping it up in a coffee can and taking it to a landfill, and rolling it down an embankment in front of a bulldozer in the act of burying garbage. She summarized that she had always considered all personal experience fare for rational explanation, but that the Petoskey stone proved to her that some things in the world really do lie outside of that whole conventional approach, matters tied to realms beyond our senses or understanding.

                                                                     Petoskey stone



I can go on from there with an ancient childhood memory of my own, taking place when I was about seven, on a family hike south of Indianapolis in a dry limestone ravine inside Shades, one of Indiana's state parks. We must have been walking the regular trails for a while but when my parents decided to step down into the ravine and follow it, I was perturbed to the core for no reason I could give when asked, even though we could see the trees and sky above our heads the whole way. I cried and sobbed like a forsaken little waif the whole way though in arms' reach of my annoyed parents, who did all they could to ignore me. We were a party of five, I think, including my sister and a boy, George. After we climbed out of the ravine I myself could only wonder why--what threat since none was present?--was I so upset in those surroundings. Was it the feeling of caverns, maybe, running indefinitely far back under the lip of land that came maybe as high as my parents' heads? If there were any such caves or crannies we were in no danger of getting trapped in them, nor did we deviate from following the pathway of the ravine.

I'd been reminded of that day previously, already many years back now while I stood in a bookstore and paged through something I can't so far tie to a title or an author, about phobic people--first, a little boy who loved the fireworks and fanfare of the Fourth of July, till when that eagerly-awaited holiday came around again he went into a panic and screamed inconsolably to the mystification of his elders. His parents took him to a hypnotist whose process of questioning narrowed down his fears to a specific admission that came out worded: when I was a soldier. Further questioning turned up evidence that the little boy, who was maybe six years of age, had some recall of being in a bloody battle full of cannon fire and the like, though no war that he or his elders could name--it could have been an American Civil War or revolutionary war battlefield, or European. The conclusion was that his extreme youth allowed an impression from a previous man's life, reincarnated in him, to emerge at this early stage of life amid his presently embodied consciousness.

In the same book there were other phobics; the other one I remember was an adult with a sickening fear of heights. A query put forth by the same hypnotist uncovered another linkage with a long-ago life lost, not a blood ancestor's, but just someone's specific death, and the terror of it somehow revisited on a soul from our century. What haunted this person was a nightmarish fall from the steep gabled roof of a Gothic cathedral with a sharp peak and a spire. The victim had slid, then caught on or just beneath the spire, then finished falling to his or her demise. All are tales, their validity uncertain, drawn from tales drawn from memory, but if founded in people's true experience they do hint at things we are commonly kept from knowing about who we are, what we come from, and likewise about the earth and cosmos.

Here I am trying to relate the spirit of place with sequences of animal movement (it could be human) that has typified them, with ghostly dramas that hardly anyone would probably think worth their notice much less verification of detail. The mystery common to all these categories of encounter is sensed, real, not supernatural but a current holding the universe together. (Supernatural, I think, is a term to keep for these phenomena when they're not sensed but just documented, impersonal.) But the mystery is the vitality that drives us as if beyond the material world, as far from it as we can pull ourselves, then, inevitably, back to it since we are material ourselves. Art is the momentary and recurring habitation of the mystery, moved into view in order to be shared.

Because I'm seized by mystery in the phenomena of birds, I like to paint birds in weather or sky mood conveying an energy that capitalizes on the prevailing spirit of a habitat, wherever that habitat may be.

    Watercolor :  12 x 16" tableau of finches--Redpolls--(and vole) against a wind-carved snowbank - framed, @$225

                                 Watercolor, 5x7" on glossy Yupo paper : 'At the Very End' - with Crows and Cardinal - unframed, $50

                                Watercolor : 'Wayfarers from the Arctic Night' - Long-tailed Ducks - 21x28" framed, $495

A Circulatory Slow-up drew us Face to Face

At 55 years of age now I'm advised, after a doctor's checkup, that I have high cholesterol and should follow the dietary guidelines that were supposed to be enclosed in an article sent along with the letter that came. I'm still waiting to receive that article since the sender forgot to include it. Conversation in the doctor's office and material on line say that a cholesterol score all by itself needs to be considered with other hereditary and lifestyle factors that together predict the likelihood of later-on heart trouble.

Where diet is concerned I relate to the idea of cheap junk food easily gotten from vending machines during the work-week. Fixing my diet to banish those snacks shouldn't be all that hard to do. My other risk factors beyond the dietary ones for heart attack are relatively low. A person with the means to stay home for days on end and put together delicious wholesome food high in vegetable bulk and low in the wicked fats, free of preservatives would be at a greater advantage. (Are there some eaters who will never rid themselves of cravings for favorite mass-manufactured snacks?) At any rate I'll be glad if ever that printed matter from the doctor's office gets here; I surely might learn something.

It seems likely to me that high cholesterol in my case (it's 240 so not extreme) is the result of age, heredity and having more than enough to eat out of what's promptly available and moderate in calories (I have always fought back against getting too fat.) Worsened circumstances would come from the loss of freedom to move, maintain muscle and reliably use the bulk that's my body and heritage. Hardship would follow, but not devastation, from no longer having a car to make my basic rounds, but I could, if survival required it, take up the ancestral way of life driven fully by calories and what muscle, joints and discipline are strong enough to accomplish. One goes along in the habits of life that promise predictability and security, but a lot of the time I think I'm watching and waiting for enforced forms of outer and inner change. Any of us does what we have to do and changes mainly when we're scared out of old habits. Nature around and within us threatens to rid us of corrosive but comfortable habits.

As the natural world changes through the pressures imposed by human usage, I watch from all my vantage points, including a trusted variety of printed news sources. Old scenes, lost and faded glories of nature help to remind me of what tomorrow would be without that color palette of seasonal wildflowers, that summery array of explosive rain clouds, those migratory species of warbler or breeding duck. Other people's descriptions of a rare sight--like the lynx that spurted across the Trans-Canada highway in front of my sister's car, eluding my niece's camera by running straight up a rock wall--give me hope of a world in which there will indefinitely be some of these creatures and a few appreciative souls to report on them. We can't indefinitely, willfully act on the world to assuage our limitless hungers without it reacting to stifle those hungers. What's coming is corrective, whatever it may do us out of.

October is coming soon with Octoberous looks that are familiar yet worth rediscovery. With the frosts of autumn this homeland will likely again see the young of big northern-nesting sparrows--the white-throated and white-crowned and the Harris' sparrows, scratching in old leaf carpets by our pathways-- and will hear the soft, solemn, drawn-out 'chee-ee-eep' that identifies them. Wild songbirds along American back-roads are to me as spellbinding as the English author J.A. Baker must have found the peregrine falcons in his book The Peregrine, Harper & Row Publishers, 1967. I lately read a gift copy from my Aunt Mary Jo, from cover to cover despite my unfamiliarity with the birds of Europe, where I have never gone. But the earth is in so many ways small; what's ever repeatedly traveled over the relatively short stretch of ocean between North America and western Europe has kindred on both shores.

Speaking of being fit to travel under power of heart and lungs, Mr. Baker some fifty years ago found himself so needing communion with the migratory falcons of the British Isles that he flung himself in search of them by bicycle along rural roads near the eastern coast. His book is almost entirely word-pictures of his region, its weather, tides and bird movement as seen by a person impelled by the same energies as falcons:
     "...Head to wind, like a compass needle cleaving to the north, he drifted, steadied, and hung still. His wings closed and curved back, then opened and reached forward, splaying out wide like an owl's. His tail tapered like a dart, then opened in a broad spreading fan.... When he banked in the sun, he flashed from blackness to fire and shone like white steel. Poised on two thousand feet of sunlit air, he commanded the birds of the valley, and none flew beneath him. He sank forward into the wind, and passed slowly down the sun. I had to let him go. When I looked back, through green and violet nebulae of whirling light, I could just see a tiny speck of dusk falling to earth from the sun, flashing and turning and falling through an immense silence that crashed open in a tumult of shrilling, wing-beating birds....

'At three o'clock I had a pricking sensation at the back of the neck that meant I was being looked at from behind. It is a feeling that must have been very intense to primitive man.... Two hundred yards away, the hawk was perched on the low horizontal branch of an oak.... For more than a minute we both stayed still, each puzzled and intrigued by the other, sharing the curious bond that comes with identity of position. When I moved towards him, he flew at once, going quickly down through the north orchard. He was hunting, and the hunter trusts no one."

The book ends with the author and a peregrine tensely at rest five yards from him: "I know he will not fly now. I climb over the wall and stand before him. And he sleeps."

Over a length of time the author had accustomed the wild peregrine to his slow approach and even his usefulness in scaring up small birds good for preying upon.

A comparably taut encounter--all about remembering the eternal in a moment--with one of our American heartland sparrows is exhibited here, hand-illustrated in watercolor and pencil, as inspired by autumn conditions in the arboretum of Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. The original 12 x9"  watercolor has now sold, but prints at 10 x 8" or smaller can be ordered. The title is "Startlement: Harris' Sparrow on an October Shore." 

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