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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Holding Out in the Background - Can we Divorce from Fetishes tied with Crude Oil?

In isolation (momentary) someone says : am I the only person in this whole room/station/store, etc. who cares what's happening? though it seems of no consequence to care.

Yet awareness of the unstable climate that's challenging all our prospects can only be increasing. In the seasonal patterns, what are we about to start seeing? (Could the forecasts of climate catastrophe still end up mistaken?) What I've lately most noticed are the long autumns that linger into traditionally winter months, in particular 2011/2012, the winter that barely took hold at all. That January near Ely, Minnesota-- whose winters have the reputation of the frigid sub-polar kind with a higher and higher snowpack-- exhibited the merest bare ground with cold glitter on it as I worked in or out of the parked car, laying in the multi-toned canopy of spruce that would shelter my favorite bird of recent times, the strutting spruce cock, whose illustration is still in stages of finishing two years after I started it; the work awaits the reappearance of bare forest floor these weeks with our persistent fields of drifts this year. 

Yes, winter conditions fluctuate naturally from year to year. In April 2012 a visit to the Canadian shores of Lake Superior further evidenced the winter that had never been, with forest duff as dry as the lining of a scarecrow's pocket in a sun-withered corn patch, the ferns of the 2011 growing season standing brown like cornstalks under the firs and cedars. However Lake Superior itself oftener and oftener reveals boulders and rock ledges that used to stay covered in water; this is attributed to faster evaporation following from markedly shorter seasons of ice cover. But yes, last fall the water stood a bit higher.

The winter of 2012/2013 was closer to the old norms, with recurrent snows and a generous snow pack, sub-freezing weeks and snowfalls showing up even into May, so that teens and young adults exclaimed at what a cold winter this was but the older ones said no, this was actually typical of what once was, this hasn't been such a brutal winter.

Now we have this long defiant snow season, when the influence of the North Pole is skewed way down over North America, and temperatures this far north in late March demand a parka hood or knitwear for a person's head if you're walking some mornings or evenings. This was my first winter when I've ached deep inside my back for several days running; it was almost certainly my lungs, after heavy breathing from skiing along the open road when the temps never even neared 0 Fahrenheit and northwesterly winds skated over field after field. Eastern Europeans and Alaskans meanwhile utterly lacked any of the protracted freezing that would keep up their Olympic ski runs or sled trekking. Here in northern Minnesota between the snow-shrouded meadows as we peel off our coats we're asking each other what June this year might look like or whether there might not be much growing season, though we're not really worrying since summer has always come back in due force.

Feeling that a recent popular advisory, the Rolling Stone piece titled "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" will soon have been widely shared and digested, I was fascinated to attend a hearing in Duluth on March 20th for a proposed expansion of an oil pipeline, Enbridge Energy's Alberta Clipper which would cross this state's northern third. The line is taking heavy crude oil down from what once was pristine taiga forest in northern Alberta, into the Upper Midwestern states where Superior, Wisconsin will be a hub for distribution to refineries eastward and south. At the same time the scientists studying the dilemma for its carbon implications point to the requirement for our survival's sake that we leave all possible petroleum reserves in the ground or else push earth's climate into a regime of tumult and extremes that will take down civilization.

I read after the hearing that opinions had been about half for, half against the plan to increase the existing pipeline's shipping capacity from 570,000 to 800,000 barrels of oil a day. While I sat in the hotel ballroom among the 300 or so who were there to listen or testify I heard four or five testimonies opposing the project on the basis either of hazard to water from leaks or spills (they occur with every pipeline, sooner or later) or to the climate. Most emphatic were the president and CEO of a local solar energy company who called the Alberta tar sands project 'a lethal carbon bomb' and the young lady who spoke after him who, in her thin high voice, avowed that 'a barrel shipped is a barrel burned.' Each of these testifiers asked the reps for Enbridge in separate wording: how do you react to knowing that?

For any veterans of civil disobedience, all that I witnessed at this hearing probably seemed unremarkable. But, as if I were listening to the soundtrack of a drama without video, I noticed how each of these two testimonies led straight to a dumbstruck silence on the part of Enbridge's panel of engineers and attorneys. Everyone present must have been thinking: so what are they gonna say to that? What do the energy-sector jobs and sports and music sponsorship which Enbridge had funded matter against a carbon outflow that, sector by sector, causes the whole gross economy to tatter and come undone? And that helps drive whole regions into mega-drought and food insecurity or outright famine? Then, just as many of us were beginning to formulate our versions of the answer, the attorney in tones of pained patience, probably reading from a prepared rejoinder, said that the people of America have said that they want an increasing domestic supply of oil and gasoline to assure the supply of...whatever, name anything you can think of. And so that determination measured entirely in dollars settles it; of course pipeline expansion is what we will do.

Petroleum pipelines and mining ventures, high-rises and new sports arenas, water diversion schemes and highway interconnections will continue burying and polluting soils that have given root to ourselves and more than ourselves as long as resources remain to do these things because too few of us know how to quit at our investments, whatever these might be. Our prehistoric ancestral societies' expansion schemes appear to have brought on die-offs and dispersals in so many cases where limits to growth were reached, in food-growing terms especially. Weather that stunts and kills food crops is a direct threat to those of us living now. 

Our communications network wraps around the world, but our interconnectedness does not protect localities from localized or regional disaster. Local and regional crises reverberate into international burdens. The Bible of my Christian forebears tells of the Tower of Babel, a legend borne out of Hebrew and Mesopotamian traditions in which people built a temple or ziggurat aimed into the heavens, based upon the assurance of a common language. But God somehow, exerting divine will through the nature of the peoples, decreed that the attainment of heaven was not to be. In The Greater Trumps, first published in 1932, the British theological novelist Charles Williams revealed, through a character's vision, a conception of the Tower of Babel as a linkage of hands:

"Somewhere, very vaguely, he would think that he saw in front of him, fashioned of the mist...the great Tower which reached almost out of sight, so loftily it grew up and then always--just as his dimmed eyes strained to see the rising walls--tottered and swayed and began in a horrible silence to fall apart, but never quite apart. It was raised by hands which, from within the rising walls, came climbing over, building themselves into a tower, thrusting those below them into place, fists hammering them down, so that the whole Tower was made up of layers of hands. But as it grew upward they changed; masonry below, thinner levels of masonry above, and, still above, masonry changing into hands, a few levels of moving hands, and (topmost of all) the busy working fists and fingers. And then a sudden spark of sunlight would fall on it from above and the fists would fall back out of sight, and the hands would disjoin, swiftly but reluctantly, holding on to each other till the ruin tore them apart, and the apparent masonry, as it was rent by some invisible force, would again change back into clutching and separating hands. They clung together fantastically; they shivered and writhed to avoid some principle of destruction that lurked within them,..."

Pricing for food, shelter and transport may start the undoing of the world economy, analogous to the tower, in our near future. If excessive hot sun, precipitation and ever-less petroleum fuel to grow the gigantic grain crops a humanity of billions needs in order to eat are our foreordained destiny, why are we still building everyday cars so they will go above 80 miles per hour, and why are we still advertising gasoline toys bought in at least half of cases by thrill riders? Because desperation was the only condition that ever cured people of their most spendthrift excesses. And yes, many people are over-booked with work and speed out of habit to try to save on travel time. And even though the industry-based drive for conformity, ease and time-saving has herded the peoples of the earth into a tower of babble or a culture of interconnected mega-cities, many, many cherished differences and aching disparities have seen to it that we keep falling loose, disconnecting, as well. Desperation due to an overburden of people may somehow, in some drastic ways help thin the ranks.

A thing I wonder each day is whether earth's loneliest, remotest, least-peopled places will in these times of difficulty retain their status as middle of nowhere. Will the most built-over lands on earth keep on being centers of everywhere, hospitable to survivors of the future, because of amenities that linger there, or will a great many of them turn into wastelands? I wonder this because I live in a depopulated region, a farming area that still supports wolves, pine martens and fishers, and am there by my choice, which gives rise to the art I do. It's about the living things that always took care of themselves, that I regret in so many cases are being crowded out of a homeland surpassingly beautiful in the eyes of city and country folk alike. Climate catastrophe threatens these plants and animals with extinction, ultimately, yet a collapse of our affairs may also mean salvation for some of the birds, beasts and wild herbs. I love the North with its icy breath as a consequence of my own history, but also because of the body efficiency it promotes for a robust type like myself--I burn up what I eat better than ever before. I adore the austerity shown by the frizzy, velvety and leathery low plants best adapted to these rocks and sands and peat bogs. I love the hidden adaptations in northern plants and animals to cold, poor soil, beset by frigid black nights, from the food-finding strategies of the carnivores to the capacity to grow only in slight increments, like a 50-year old swamp spruce that looks hardly bigger than a long-handled mop with handle stuck in the ground.

Austerity is found among plants and creatures of hot deserts as well, and they have their champions as they should. A citizen of cold deserts might, on immersion in southerly deserts of cacti and sage, learn to feel his or her inner kit fox and make a home there, but so far I want to speak for the little half-forsaken things that stand and quiver before a northerly wind a thousand or two miles closer to the Arctic. What will be our fate?

Boreal and Black-capped Chickadees of Canadian/U.S. Border Region and Northward

https://www.etsy.com/listing/80321335/bird-note-card-watercolor-chickadees?

In the Mind: Southern Fiction has Brushed against Snow-Country Art

In literature most widely cherished as art--whether novels, short stories or plays--a theme of actions and discovery is painstakingly woven through still portraits constructed of the most perfect word imagery for the people, indoor or outdoor space being presented. The portraits would never mean so much as they do after the actions have culminated in that exact, truthfully-wrought, exquisitely-constructed scene. Two works enlivening these late winter days for me were written by Carson McCullers, a 20th-century writer of the southern U.S.-- just this morning I finished her short novel The Member of the Wedding. The unnamed little southern town in the years of World War II reaches out to me like a setting I may have ridden or stepped into at some hour in my past.

The concluding scene reports on the death of a child character whose lingering image, in the mind of the main character Frances, is 'solemn, hovering, and ghost-gray.' He was a little boy of six years, revealed all during the story as inward-looking, with his own secret fascinations that help to set him over on the edge of society more than an average boy. We see him attracted to the girlish belongings of his older cousin Frances--a doll given her as a gift, which he names Lily Belle in the shadow of Frances' disinterest, and her plumed hat and high-heeled shoes. More than once in her characterizations Carson McCullers revealed the frustrations of non-heterosexual people in a time when being gay was treated much more than in our century as a form of emotional disturbance. The little boy John Henry West for all his childish manners and unfolding personality comes across as a package of complex inclinations never to be defined, his probable bisexuality a trait here-again but gone again escaping any mortal notice outside the narrative.

On this March Sunday with the clocks set ahead for the summer season and a melt commencing in trickles and drips from all the trees after this showcase boreal winter, I felt as if time had come unmeasured a little and we were free to push not just forward on the calendar but in all directions, any period we chose to visit or revisit. That closing scene of The Member of the Wedding was full of a sense of flight out of desperation, between regrets, into the hope of a new and broadening era in the lives of both leading female characters, the white teen-ager and the black matron who has done her best to set the girl examples learned through her own striving. Stories, like our solitary and shared conversations, move backward and forward and sideways in time.

In a vision of the deep South, here's a passage from the third- and second-to-last page of my library copy:
     "It was the time of the Fair and a big banner arched the main street and for six days and nights the Fair went on down at the fairground. Frances went twice, both times with Mary, and they rode on nearly everything, but did not enter the Freak Pavilion, as Mrs. Littlejohn said it was morbid to gaze at Freaks. Frances bought John Henry a walking stick and sent him the rug she had won at Lotto. But Berenice remarked that he was beyond all this, and the words were eerie and unreal. As the bright days followed one upon the other, the words of Berenice became so terrible that she would listen in a spell of horror, but a part of her could not believe. John Henry had been screaming for three days and his eyeballs were walled up in a corner stuck and blind. He lay there finally with his head drawn back in a buckled way, and he had lost the strength to scream. He died the Tuesday after the Fair was gone, a golden morning of the most butterflies, the clearest sky.
     'Meanwhile Berenice had got a lawyer and had seen Honey at the jail. "I don't know what I've done," she kept saying. "Honey in this fix and now John Henry." Still there was some part of Frances that did not even yet believe. ... He came to her twice in nightmare dreams, like an escaped child dummy from the window of a department store, the wax legs moving stiffly only at joints, and the wax face wizened and faintly painted, coming toward her until terror snatched her awake."

Pathos followed me into the spruce, fir and cedar forest this afternoon, scooping heavy liquefying snow on the front ends of my snowshoes while I broke a pathway, then found a spot to sit on below a cedar with lots of  spiky dead lower branches. They'd be one model for my painting of the spruce grouse. There isn't much more work to do on it by now--just a whole lot more bristling deadwood under the darkness of tree canopy. I sat sinking ever lower as the snow melted under me and my spread-out parka behind the snowshoes, which I kept strapped on as I detailed my art piece and looked out through the nearly still shadows all beset with dead and living wood at all angles, at lichens formed like hair or encrustations, snow slumping off of boughs where it had held on all these past frigid weeks in great globules, hearing the wind like a vocalization of thaw and coming leafburst.

Pathos is frequently connected with the onset of fall but I felt it for the approach of spring with all its layers of busyness. The spruce grouse painting still sends me walking a few more footpaths in search of certain rocks and latticed fallen branches without being satisfied yet, since the painting is for me an ultimate showing of all the many-textured scraggliness seen under the tree tops near the U.S.-Canadian border and increasingly north of it, down to the grey-green ground level. Here is one precious occasionally-seen grouse, also called partridge, relative of the ptarmigan that lives to the north of the tree line. This I've come to visualize and cherish, with a sense that it won't stay with us forever, long though the time has seemed.

 

http://www.saatchiart.com/TBeyer

We Encounter What We are, and Transform

Don't a few more people than in former eras wonder sometimes at the priority we each still put on a venture--artistic endeavor, marketing, haute cuisine, just as examples--especially when reminded that by thirty or so more years living on earth may just be all about mere survival?  Who might afford the money and time for such products, mundane or exquisite, among the desperate generations to come?

But since life demands we carry on with the things that bring us a living or inspiration, we figure we might just upgrade what we offer in accord with trends that surface. The tallest and bleakest trend in more and more people's perspective is the emerging volcanic mountain range of symptoms that indicate our own over-extension-- too many humans, too much ongoing, extractive, polluting overgrowth.  The earth's become like a human body overwhelmed by metastasis in one of its own organs. We are that organ, something that thrives at earth's skin-level.

A few years ago it sounded as if I was stating a religious belief whenever I said to anyone that I believe we're already experiencing global warming. I knew--and who didn't know?--lots of other folks who were dismissive, saying things like 'the earth is very old and has coped with many, many changes in climate through the millennia' or 'it's all a liberal hoax.' And those people are still around, caught up in their own comforts. But more and more people on their own appear to accept that the news documentaries scattered through the years introducing a changing global weather regime were correct and bode frighteningly ill for future generations.

Speaking as I am like some movement's disciple, I respectfully cite as this outlook's prophet Bill McKibben, the author and organizer who has publicly and in print described the climate crisis, mustering Americans to events crying out the need for, as nearly as possible, abolishing our mass reliance on fossil fuels. He's one of the best-known leaders of the movement to deinvest in fossil fuels. It was Bill McKibben, interviewed recently on Democracy Now, who said that before the end of the 21st century, with average global temperatures risen by seven or eight degrees F per the computer models, all of civilized life on earth will consist of emergency response measures. In the same interview he alluded, most meaningfully to me, to an earth where winter will be gone, winter as so many of us cherish it with all its majestic gliding sports and immaculate frozen scenery.

In this exhilarating winter of 2013-2014 I can't help feeling a rush of sentiment to create memorials to the snowed-in forests all around me.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/180400950/snow-landscape-surreal-watercolor-boreal?


Or I reach around me for literary parallels that help explain the behaviors of all of us who've pushed the problem to the stage we are in now. A most classic parable that could have been about the climate crisis is in Grimms' Fairy Tales: 'The Fisherman and his Wife.'

The solitary fisherman and his wife start out the story living on the sea coast in 'a miserable little hovel.' A magical fish, the flounder which the man luckily reels in one day but releases, grants wishes whose  fulfillment the wife demands from their home which she never leaves, each time sending him to call back the flounder to approve her latest.  First she wants a pretty cottage with several rooms, a larder and well-appointed kitchen. In another week or so, tired of that, the wife calls for a big stone castle in its place. Promptly the next day she finds herself disappointed to have a castle when she can't be king, so she sends the husband back to call the flounder to declare her the king. Then it's for her to be emperor, pope and finally lord of the universe. Each time the husband in his trepidation returns to the shore he finds both sea and sky uglier with turbulence and foul coloration.

By the time the woman announces she can never be satisfied unless she's made lord of the universe the man can only call back the flounder out of fear of his wife's rage. Quoting the last paragraph of the story:
     "Then he pulled on his trousers and tore away like a madman. Such a storm was raging that he could hardly keep his feet. Houses and trees quivered and swayed, and mountains trembled, and the rocks rolled into the sea. The sky was pitchy black. It thundered and lightened, and the sea ran in black waves mountains high, crested with white foam. He shrieked out, but could hardly make himself heard:
                "Flounder, flounder in the sea, 
                Prythee hearken unto me:
                My wife, Ilsebil, must have her own will,
                And sends me to beg a boon of thee."
     "Now what does she want?" asked the flounder.
     "Alas," he said, "she wants to be Lord of the Universe."
     "Now she must go back to her old hovel," said the flounder, "and there she is!"

In the event of modern-day overreach, we might justly expect there will be punishment, complete with tragic deaths of countless people. I see that this old parable is touching not just on narcissism to the extreme of wanting to be God but also hinting at a hunger to be bigger and bigger in our consequences on the face of the earth. The waves, the houses and trees react the way they do in the mega-storms repeatedly in news coverage today. Dreams in recent centuries of super-cities, climate-regulated and self-serving and mutually supportive covering the landscape, may be cast away just as some super-cities find themselves outposts of human survival, each making do with life strategies that fit the place, time and conditions. Admittedly no one really knows what the worst we can do to ourselves on the whole will look like.

'Hell on earth' comes mind, as in the last days of the Biblical Revelation, or in the notion that people are so stupidly evil and greedy that all but a few souls may be wiped from off the earth. Don't most of us agree that we will have to change course, by force or in advance, and still won't live through the worst of what's to come?

Charles Williams, the British theological novelist, poet and critic of the mid-twentieth century, ended his novel Descent into Hell with a man's death by stages down in a pit, dropping ever lower beneath the moon which the character, Wentworth, confuses with a clock-face in a tower and at the same time with his own watch, over-wound and left broken at home. A silver, million-miles-long rope has just shot from his hand upward into the moon, disconnecting him from time in which he'd remain able to act for the better or the worse.

Charles Williams' talent allowed him to narrate from within a dimension that included the metaphysical and physical interwoven. He relates the most subtle gradations of difference between one moving force and another, "percipient  and impercipient," conscious and unaware. The fictional Wentworth had allowed obsession with a woman he only knew casually to turn her into a phantasm who went with him, agreeing to all his own lustful wants, wishes and notions, till her image dwindled into something that disgusted him and collapsed altogether. He is full of hate for everyone else, rivals to his own self-importance. In the concluding few lines:

     "He had now no consciousness of himself as such, for the magical mirrors of Gomorrah had been broken, and the city itself had been blasted, and he was out beyond it in the blankness of a living oblivion, tormented by oblivion. The shapes stretched out beyond him, all half turned away, all rigid and silent. He was sitting at the end, looking up an avenue of nothingness, and the little flames licked his soul, but they did not now come from without, for they were the power, and the only power, his dead past had on him; the life, and the only life, of his soul. There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded. Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily, everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void."

What is personal among each of our motives will remain, I think, till it is burned or corroded out of each of us. Fabulous landscapes ever veering into winter will for a long time I think be mine. But in sorrowful recognition that Bill McKibben is likely right about a future earth with the phenomena of winter cooked away from its sub-polar regions, I titled the above painting Repercussions. Interpret it how you will. In dream likeness the gull is dashed to smithereens that are one with the snow flakes as it crashes against the strange edifice of combined origins, manmade hotel and cliff face.