Even Nowadays, the Revised Impact of Wilderness Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

                               

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

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

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

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

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

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Faced with the Unruly Cosmos

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

              Loud—limp—the wind…

              huge cold shoals of cloud left dark

              to park themselves above us…

              Linger and see what rueful governing’s

              due from their last low glowing.

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

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

               

               I must remember that

               wherever we assemble, overflow,

               and with our wistful whiskers, blow alone

               into canals that disappear under

               the overpasses where today's roads veer

               with pulsing whoops, we mix--a hazy current

               full of crowding islets, blurring the flowage

               with our thoughts' corrosion. Notably--

               should this islet, floating, heave that other, 

               cleaving it, it would impair our gliding 

               clarity, that islet's death damming our stream, 

               granules in confusion teeming to

               take refuge as a platform spanning a

               scattered trickling to our river's panorama.

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

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

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

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

             

Pelicans and Some Broadcast Omens of February

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

                                                      from along Admiral Rd. in the Sax Zim Bog

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawn of a World Economy not so Far Beyond Belief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Met a Legend in the Dark

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

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

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

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

In a World Responding to Climate Upheaval

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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.