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

Speeding Summer Days, Bound in Tradition, and Noted, Illustrated, and Sung

I ask myself every day if I will ever enjoy regular sales of my paintings, prints, cards and stationery sets through the kind of full-time promotion that art marketing advocates urge for success in the business of art. But especially in the flowering and bird nesting season I'm spread too unevenly around the countryside to be self-supporting with my sales. I'm coming and going from a call center, seeing what's out the windows on the weekdays as I stick to a schedule that more and more often exhausts me. Maybe, as well, I fish too much, though I love fishing. But my priorities have taken shape based on the full package of zest and insecurities, day-to-day caution and a German sort of compulsion to meet my own standards of thoroughness; I figure I can at best do what I am doing till, bit by bit or all at once, my body and/or the surrounding world fails me.

This humid and uproariously green May-become-June have brought more subjects to my attention than I can currently cope with, but there continue to be tomorrow, next week-end, the days left out within the current week and all the times ahead. An adventure I had intended on and followed through was to find a Connecticut warbler in the Sax Zim Bog, a designated important bird area just a few miles northeast of where I live. Locating the song that resounded from a territorial adult bird out the open windows of the car was none too hard as I rolled along where these uncommon warblers had nested in the most recent years. The song led me briskly out of the car, into rubber boots and over a flooded ditch into a forest completely upholstered with mosses, all beset with pores of rain and snow-melt probably safe for a person to drink, and in little armadas along my way, more lady's slippers than I had ever seen before. All proved to be the variety known as stemless, occurring in cream tones more or less pink-tinged like cheeks or noses, or else uniformly pink like any fleshy body organ you think it most resembles.

Back from where the lady's slippers flourished one Connecticut warbler held onto a branch about twenty-five feet up in a tamarack. Skipping incessantly from perch to perch is what most warblers seem to do on descent from their migration, when most people see them--but this bird sat presiding. In due time I sorted him out by the long yellow taper of his body, running almost to the tip of his tail feathers, after I'd passed minutes searching straight up with the binoculars. He would peer at me at length, strange invader that I surely was. Our friends the birds, both the common kinds and the hard-to-find, watch us at least as often as we watch them, I believe. Pressure from approaching birdwatchers is a well-known source of stress to many birds. But today's Connecticut warbler was, I suspected while I stood there, largely unworried since his nest was somewhere else, probably lower and further back in the bog judging by his hourly disappearances that way; meanwhile I was either stumbling around or standing just below his singing-tree or prowling back in the other direction nearer the road where I'd first heard his song in its three parts, emphatic with avian certitude. It struck me what an object of fascination I may have seemed if only because of the whirl of mosquitoes that beset me as I stood below him; I saw him crane his head, grey all the way to chest level which was black-infused, the eye neatly ringed in white, to gather in all possible meaning. Mosquitoes after all make up a big part of his diet.

I learned from my late daddy's old bird book, the Audubon Bird Guide to Eastern Land Birds by Richard H. Pough, published by Doubleday and Company in 1946, that here in the U.S.-Canadian border region and some ways northward the Connecticut warbler favors the black spruce/tamarack bogs for nesting but that further to the northwest where this species is most numerous it gravitates to uplands full of poplar. Though 1946 was a long time ago, I wonder if many of the habitat preferences given in this handbook special to me for its descriptive text don't hold true today. Despite its name, bestowed on one or more specimens identified on migration through the eastern seaboard, the Connecticut is primarily a nesting bird of interior Canada.

Follow-up from finding the lady's slippers led me away toward home, through damp meadows overgrown with alder and willow, back through more of that subarctic type of bog that lies open to sun. Here was a profusion of kalmia polifolia or bog laurel along the edges of overflowing ditches, everywhere in pink blossom. The petals being joined at the base, the corolla or blossom has an especially unified look with scalloped rim and long white stamens and pistil. The budding flowers are nut-shaped and fluted like a trademark hard candy or ornate button.

Another spring arrival nearer the house was our local wild iris versicolor, the blue flag, and subsequently in dryer meadow open to view from a passing car, the orange upthrusts of Indian paintbrush all in a swath over maybe an acre. Because I first saw this uncommon plant, which like the lady's slipper is a parasite on certain neighboring plants dependent on certain soil bacteria, near the Great Divide in Wyoming, I think of it as a westerner in our country and am right away reminded of the local magpies, western relatives of the crow and raven. In our part of Minnesota the magpie claims its easternmost home ground, though we doubtless have a lot fewer of them here than do the mountain states to the west.

From seeing certain wild species, a person's gaze may widen to places way, way beyond, where we felt or expect we would feel freer; we've been and could again go visiting there. The mountain West is that kind of a place to me and doubtless others who aren't from there. My most recent enjoyments have included the short stories of Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, further popularized in movies. Music, silenced but faintly recalled for its harmonizing of the desolate, the ruined and the sweet, is the undertone of her story 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' whose foreword reads: "There is a belief that pioneers came into the country, homesteaded, lived tough, raised a shoeless brood and founded ranch dynasties. Some did. But many more had short runs and were quickly forgotten."

'Cowboy Songs' is about newlyweds still in their teens, gone alone onto the Wyoming prairies to begin family life in echoing poverty, out of range of their elder relatives' and acquaintances' supercilious and judgmental bearing. Archie is an orphan born in Ireland and adopted out, Rose the daughter of a drunken teamster who carries freight from the railroad docks and a mother who is 'grey with some wasting disease.' Archie learned old lilts and lyrics in his earliest years and carries all of them in memory wherever he goes, given to sharing them whenever the mood is right. Harsh fate separates this couple forever as he devotes himself to faraway paying work, Rose toils alone through her first pregnancy which she's compelled to keep secret, out on the waterless range where she is abandoned, dying of complications as Archie tames horses, then rounds up cattle through a winter's blizzards, mainly trying to make a living for himself and wife back home.

What I make and sell comes to me, absorbed, even mentally overwhelmed amid days spent among these lingering star bursts of evolution, with the knowledge in mind that so many forebears in this country must have been just as bedazzled by creation, depicting as they could the same subjects I find there, or bundling them into song, but I will never know them except in tiny ways by the heritage we draw upon and in various ways sing. Many of these predecessors faded and died in the economic hardships that come with valuing most what we feel could never have a price, in a world and culture that have for a long time imposed their prices. Yet of course all the assorted, clashing types of people who've co-developed the industrialized world are in so many senses one with all the artisans and singers.

A Spruce Grouse Comes Promenading

From North-Central North America - A Bird and a Rugged Flower, Given from Year to Year

Just a week or two ago spring had still only partially taken hold at our latitude; we needed our jackets and the grass was greening only where it had absorbed the most water. No green had yet overtaken the height of the woods apart from the blackish evergreens, but could be seen below them on all kinds of shoots. My memory of those couple weeks or so of early to mid-May seems to have knit like a tapestry of springs accumulated from the past, a treescape I could hardly have imagined developing in this delicate manner, phase by phase. Springs henceforth, as I'd come to envision them, would be products of a new regime of climate drying and baking these border-region lands the way we saw happen two years ago. Or, I had supposed, I'd be moved away, too far into a city or suburb for the privilege of noticing the spring widespread for hours and days at a time.

For three weeks or so this rainy May we were visited by an assortment of sparrows, some kinds come to stay and nest in meadow margins or woods, and some on their way as far as the 'land of little sticks' at the beginnings of the tundra. White-crowned sparrows are subarctic-nesting songbirds known to North American birdwatchers from coast to coast. I recall these dapper sparrows as ground-gleaners under our bird feeders in central Indiana through the freezing months of the 1970s, on snow or bald ground, and knew their short song, with melodious notes withering into husky ones higher on the scale. Their song seemed, fantastically, to remark on the shredding tops of herbage tattered in the frost--plaintive but nothing extraordinary. But in Minnesota we are central enough on the continent to also see the Harris' sparrow in spring and in fall, a temporary regular coming and going from breeding territory along the tundra, through the prairies to the south. Where I grew up, between Indiana and Ontario at Lake Superior's eastern end, we were too far east to see the Harris', I would say all these years later.

They foraged all around the house on the soggy lawn last week and the week before, a big sparrow with grey cheeks and pink bill, the face, throat and top of the head splotched black as if someone has thrown a bottleful of black ink head-on at the bird, yet it just goes about its seed-plucking at ground level in the knowledge that for now nothing else matters. I have heard the song, which will always seem like the first line of a song without a finish, from low in the shade of spruces that form a wind-break on the north.

To the south in a patch of mixed woods, second-growth like so much woods, low with pooling rain and meltwater beneath the aspens and firs, I found a stubby few specimens of a flower like an aster or fleabane, just getting started with a tuft of drab florets having a greenish eye hidden in whitish. Stiff little leaves angled out from the stem like leather, each cured on top with a lustre of green. I thought: I've seen this plant in a photo in one of the handbooks. Five minutes later the name surfaced out of some botanical photo or other I had seen in years of paging back and forth among similar wild plants: coltsfoot. There are four kinds of coltsfoot, or Petasites, included in Britton and Brown's three-volume An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States and Canada. To be sure which species we've got, I'd have to wait for large basal leaves to emerge alongside the wands after they had gotten taller and mostly finished their flowering. Yesterday was the day to wander back over there in rubber boots, since the snowmelt and ooze from the saturated soils lingers in the open and under the trees, nurturing a whirl of mosquitoes not to mention a busy crop of ticks. What we have is what I'd suspected: Arrowleaf Sweet Coltsfoot or Petasites sagittatus.

Open country today is so often overrun by introduced weeds including things at one time seen as useful in the garden or for livestock forage, yet our native specialist plants still hold out in their traditional ranges, not always on public land but on private land like that down the road, in far-flung rural tracts over-browsed by the deer whose numbers once were checked by wolves or pumas or grizzlies in an era of greater plant and animal diversity. The multitudinous flowering plants have been losing out to a degree little known as a result of so many grazers since we've killed most of the predators.

In a landscape that some call wilderness, depopulated a generation or so ago, there will be a non-human community trying via each species' own life cycle to find its way into an inclusive balance. Walking and wheeling my way through this part of St. Louis County I've been surprised both by what I do and don't find. Probably I haven't covered enough acres yet. But in commemoration of this majestic spring amid the swamps I decided I would put two hallmark finds, a visitor or bird of passage and a wild native lurker from the plant world, into one design in my usual mixed-media, primarily watercolor. This will be on stationery soon, devoid of any title unless the sender or recipient care to look it up, but storied if they'd like to ask for a story or two.

      

Unfinished hand-illustration of Harris' sparrow and the arrowleaf coltsfoot. To see related work please go to 

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A Newest Questing Bird - Finding the Garganey, a Stray from Asia

In my art it's been the longest-sought birds, special to a kind of habitat, that I've wanted to paint--because I went all that distance on all those forays to try and find the bird, and on finding it had to linger indefinitely to see its most obvious, its subtle and tucked-away markings, all that I could see in the time I had. Sometimes too I've painted birds I had never expected to see even while visiting ideally suited habitat where they had been well-documented. Drawing and detailing that bird lent me the thrill of discovery all over again, the bird's form pulled out on paper, in wet and dry media in a blended effect that seemed my best for bringing back the whole experience in a setting as true as I could conjure. But what I'd make of the garganey, seen on April 27th at the first corner off the main route leading north from the Crex Meadows Visitor Center outside Grantsburg, Wisconsin is less likely to be a painting, though I wouldn't say absolutely it won't be.

The garganey is a Eurasian teal, a cousin to our blue-winged, green-winged and cinnamon teal in North America. The teal are small ducks of creeks, puddles and shallow lakes. The garganey in North America is a repeated vagrant that courts and shares feeding ground, as this one did in Wisconsin, with native teal like the blue-winged.

While driving southward from Minnesota last wet and blustery Sunday to find this duck, a species entirely new to me, I knew I'd encounter a lot of other birders. As I drove, the little car entered ever more rain and slued about in the winds of mid-continent equinox and of neighboring truck traffic. I was impatient with excitement. At Crex Meadows conditions were of the harshest kind found in spring, excepting late snowstorms, for viewing birds; we all stayed in our cars unless a certain bird ID could only be made clear of watery window glass. I rolled to and fro over the same stretch of hardpan road gone to muck, wondering at a clunk-clunk-clunk sounding from the right rear tire. The wipers churned, raindrops rolled on the glass, and as I kept turning around in pull-outs or U turns I grew increasingly dizzy. I blamed a coffee and a huge frosted cinnamon roll for what had come to seem a little like motion sickness.

A man I had met once before was staked out in his compact car just a few steps above what's labeled the Erickson Flowage, one of the diked canals that the state of Wisconsin maintains for aquatic wildlife; there, he said, was where the garganey had been earlier this morning, foraging with a couple of blue-winged teal. In an hour or so the garganey flew in with two or more blue-winged teal and afforded intimate looks, while it drifted seemingly unbothered by the nearness of rolling and stopped cars, drivers spying from the obscurity of their windows. I got out and stole back to the trunk of my car to bring out my spotting scope which I beamed on the garganey. Because my vertigo by then was staging a take-over I may have looked a little drunken to anyone observing, even as the shivers were setting in. I wished I had worn something with a hood and was glad of a pair of knit gloves that stay year-round in the car.

Moments later I vomited out the door of the car onto the road; I hadn't been that sick in twenty or so years. Pretty ironic, throwing up in the view of a life bird species, still calmly about its business in the waterway below. Having seen the exquisite body markings of the garganey through the scope I craved a look at its open wings but dared not spoil the scene for others or send off the flock of ducks by any approach on foot. When the ducks eventually rose to fly on their own they were pointed facing the cars, so I got a glimpse of pale grey wing surface high up on the outer side. By now I was so dizzy I could hardly sit up in the driver's seat. Grantsburg, I thought, had an urgent care but I wasn't precise on how to find it. For lack of any better idea, not in my sharpest state of mind, I called 911 for assistance rather than trouble any of the other parked birders. On two calls to 911 I asked for an escort if possible rather than an actual ambulance, though when offered I accepted my first-ever ambulance ride, since an ambulance as escort seemed unheard-of to the first responder. I was nervous of abandoning my car among the marshes with my spotting scope and a half-completed painting and watercolor kit shut inside to the mercies of conceivable vandals.

Along with all the stuff I'd insisted on carrying from the car, I was checked out that night as a healthy adult female with norovirus. I got sick again, much more dramatically, inside the van of the emergency-care nurse who drove me the couple of blocks to the Wood River Motel for the night. But that night's sleep, Zofran gels and a delicious can of 7-up quelled the symptoms for the time being and I gratefully caught a ride from the motel proprietor back out to the T of two roads where the car had remained all night.  Much the same poor visibility reigned in that ongoing tempest of stubborn late winter; it lambasted the few cars of Monday morning birders still hoping for a sighting to start the week. Few to no ducks dabbled within our eye view, and I thought better than to step forth into that wet cold again.

Determination, surmise and restraint rewarded by luck had characterized this quest much more than any poetry of drawn-out observation. So I don't feel a painting being born of the two-day escapade, but look at it with a half-and-half mixture of satisfaction and regret that I couldn't sit up and await an opportunity to see my quarry lift off in the opposite direction and show me his beautiful silver and green wings. Not all experiences get to the point of feeling whole. But as other birders worthy of the utmost respect have said, that's birding, which at its best includes a kind of courteous trade-off of time and closeness between observer and observed. Maybe the garganey will do a spring sojourn at Crex and I will get by there again, even en route to seeing something else.

Living / Working at the Pace of Metabolism

All the coming week is supposed to be chilly with a lot of clouds. So much snow melted last week that the footing while I walked into woods mossy and dank the year round was most uncertain, my knee-high boots almost filling while I reeled across from spot to spot of ground uplifted over the flood-pools.  I was headed for a patch of spruce bog that remained after logging took out other hardwoods and conifers that surrounded it. Not only were there slush and holes full of water, but fallen trees lurked below ground where only my feet could find them. Every step or so was a save from plunging at least one arm underwater. I was carrying that same unfinished watercolor I keep talking about, the spruce grouse, and the water would have been numbing to a hand or an arm if I'd had to catch myself.



People in general--except I guess for a rare, not very sociable set of us--seem depressed by this kind of day, the leftover snow exuding its raw breath, saplings and treetops restless with wind-shiver--never mind the woodcock whirring pale orange out of hiding on old leaf-litter, first baby leaves of wild strawberry, buds fattening on most branches. It has been a serious old-fashioned winter. Still I felt more alive than on any other day of the whole past week, reminding me more than anything of the kid I once was.

It's natural to wish setbacks on any part of the business world and government that works to sell out these nooks of wilderness. Many of the threats to them come wrapped up in the knot of technologies that speed up all artificial, commercial processes as if their perpetual growth were everybody's dream. What happens when we run out of growing space? What prices will we pay along the way to that end? How universally will we know we've maxed out? I have to trust the earth will know and will react, lapsing into its own episodes of dormancy and spurts of violent weather to re-balance moisture, temperature, or soil compactness. But the behavior of our societies seems at least as chaotic in terms of the long-range effects on lands, waters and atmosphere. What gives me hope is any evidence, even if theoretical, that conserving wild lands proves obligatory for us and our descendants for our survival. Industrial ventures and our own proclivities for growing bigger and bigger suburbs could mess up our own support system so completely that all we'll have left is the semi-wild, which, with any amount of vision, we'll learn to work with and blend into in all of our designing.

However, feeling myself hidden from sight of all but wild animals, I say I will be like one of them. I'll carry my load over my own shoulders--off-road vehicles mean to me nothing so much as filth, ruts, erosion, expense and fatness--and will keep comfortable through the heat of my own body when I go out practicing my choice vocation. Chilly-fingered but snugly clad in layered clothing that included snow pants normal to the skiing season, sitting on a parka against the damp, I attempted a little detail work, all about dead wood. I wanted the dead wood of spruce, especially to celebrate the adaptation to bitter cold through miniaturization of all plants including the wet-loving black spruce in a spruce bog. The season was early and conditions too cold and damp for working much with watercolor--it would dry too slowly--but I'd craved getting out there on a trial first visit of the new spring. A friend's husband long ago called these conditions pneumonia weather. In any case I could see, a little better than before, what I still needed to do on the page when the sun's been at work for us for a while longer.

No birds or beasts showed themselves as I crouched; that's pretty predictable. But I'm normally poised for surprise by warm-blooded kin while I'm in those secret places. While at the laundromat earlier I had read about a prehistoric bird in Roger A. Caras' Source of the Thunder: the Biography of a California Condor, ©1970 Little, Brown of Boston. I encountered this passage about the condor, a survivor from times before the last ice ages --a species which has been, to the extent possible, safeguarded from extinction in patches of California, Arizona and adjoining desert lands, a little fringe of the American expanse it once occupied. The condor was long ago widespread in North America and was, Mr. Caras says, the thunderbird of native Indian legend. The Indians of our region depicted the thunderbird in their art.

     Several times she lifted her wings, spread her tail, and felt for a hopeful, even encouraging current of air. There was no such encouragement to be had. Finally she could take the strain no longer. The demands of her parenthood were too great. She lifted her wings straight up, reaching with them nearly five feet above her back. She extended the feathers of her tail, elevated it as well, straightened her legs, and pushed down hard against the perch. Then, in one coordinated movement, she brought her tail and both wings down sharply, shoving with all her might at the same time. Her full twenty-two pounds were instantly airborne and as she started to lose precious altitude she raised her wings again.
     
      ...After the initial twelve beats though, she was able to glide for a thousand yards, then she beat twelve more strokes to gain altitude. By this time she had passed over the ridge to where a rising thermal from the steep wall beyond surged beneath her. She rocked slightly and then lifted. She banked a few degrees to the left to adjust her direction, caught the thermal again, and curved off in the most magnificent soaring flight to be seen in the world of birds today. 

     When she flapped, the whooshing sound her wings made could be heard fully a half-mile away. Now, in soaring flight, at ever increasing altitude, the sound was less and was heard by no one but her. It was like a soft wind in a pine tree. Forty percent of each wing was open slot area, finely adjustable to her minutest flight requirements. Her extraordinarily long primary feathers, each an elastic and flexible wing in its own right, turned on their axes and were thrust automatically forward at a slight angle. She was moving at a speed of thirty-five miles an hour and still accelerating. It would be half an hour at least before she would move her wings from the horizontal again.

The whole day served to remind me that movement paced at the speed of a searching hand or a foreleg striding, or a raptor soaring home, may be ultimately the most justified--that slow and steady like the tortoise may win the race, because whatever burns the hottest at the mid-levels where we live tends to burn itself out, and so the tremulous water will be left alone attracting whatever grotesque or camouflaged creature comes to drink it or enters it to get across. The meek will probably inherit the earth.

                                                Labrador tea holds its freeze-dried leaves into the spring. Subarctic travelers, carrying as few provisions as possible, have for centuries steeped the leaves for hot tea.



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