The promised thunderstorm has finally arrived in the McKenzie District, rattling overhead.  The forest ridge is receding in a blue veil of rain, and the scarlet, thumb-sized hummingbird that thrummed outside my window all day is suddenly nowhere to be seen.  Sleeping dry beneath a maple leave, maybe?   I’m writing in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest library, watching sudden cascades of rainwater over-shoot gutters, self-sequestered with a big table and a wall of windows, yet easily distracted among dangling tangents of my own scribbled notes.  It’s been an amazing, whirl-wind Writer-in-Residence experience; tonight I’ll sleep in the forest, dreaming of owls and newts and alpine monkeyflowers no larger than my pinky-fingernail, almost ready to flower.  And I’ll tuck these poems away for a few weeks.  Perhaps they’ll germinate like squirrel-buried nuts while my attention is elsewhere.

A few resonant lines from recent readings, as I wrap up loose threads:

Barry Lopez (who has written about the Andrews Forest) from his essay “The American Geographies” in Finding Home: Writing on Nature and Culture from Orion Magazine. Edited by Peter Sauer.  (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992):

… As a boy I felt a hunger to know the American landscape that was extreme; when I was finally able to travel on my own, I did so. Eventually I visited most of the United States, living for brief periods of time in Arizona, Indiana, Alabama, Georgia, Wyoming, New Jersey, and Montana before settling years ago in western Oregon.

The astonishing level of my ignorance confronted me everywhere I went. I knew early on that the country could not be held together in a few phrases, that its geography was magnificent and incomprehensible, that a man or woman could devote a lifetime to its elucidation and still feel in the end that he or she had but sailed many thousands of miles over the surface of the ocean. So I came into the habit of traversing landscapes I wanted to know with local tutors and reading what had previously been written about, and in, those places. I came to value exceedingly novels and essays and works of nonfiction that connected human enterprise to real and specific places, and I grew to be mildly distrustful of work that occurred in no particular place, work so cerebral and detached as to be refutable only in an argument of ideas.

These sojourns in various corners of the country infused me, somewhat to my surprise on thinking about it, with a great sense of hope. Whatever despair I had come to feel at a waning sense of the real land and the emergence of false geographies–elements of the land being manipulated, for example, to create erroneous but useful patterns in advertising–was dispelled by the depth of a single person’s local knowledge, by the serenity that seemed to come with that intelligence. Any harm that might be done by people who cared nothing for the land, to whom it was not innately worthy but only something ultimately for sale, I thought, would one day have to meet this kind of integrity, people with the same dignity and transcendence as the land they occupied. So when I traveled, when I rolled my sleeping bag out on the shores of the Beaufort Sea or in the high pastures of the Absaroka Range in Wyoming, or at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I absorbed those particular testaments to life, the indigenous color and songbird song, the smell of sun-bleached rock, damp earth, and wild honey, with some crude appreciation of the singular magnificence of each of those places. And the reassurance I felt expanded in the knowledge that there were, and would likely always be, people speaking out whenever they felt the dignity of the earth imperiled in these places.

William R. Jordan III., “Restoration and the Reentry of Nature” also from Finding Home: Writing on Nature and Culture from Orion Magazine. Edited by Peter Sauer.  (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992):

Ecological restoration is in the odd condition of being a practice but still not quite an articulated idea.  Yet, as a response to a problem it is full of promise.  (…….) The plan was to create here on this hillside overlooking Lake Wingra a sample of the great hemlock-hardwood forest that once covered thousands of square miles in the northern part of the state.  By the 1930s that forest had been destroyed, and the resulting slash fires, soil erosion, and economic devastation contributed to the great economic and ecological disasters of that decade.  Here, however, someone decided to try again.  Sugar maples and hemlocks were planted in the light shade under a stand of old oaks.  Today their crowns are beginning to join those of the taller, older trees overhead.  In summer this is now a shady spot under the maples, and the understory is thinning in places, becoming more like proper maple forest understory.  On a bright fall day the place glows in sunlight filtered through a golden crown of maples.

The woods is not natural.  It is not artificial. It simply defies these distinctions; it is both.

“This,” I think, remembering the line from A Winter’s Tale quoted by Frederick Turner in his essay “Cultivating the American Garden,” “is an art / Which does mend Nature, change it rather; but / The art itself is nature.”

Nowhere is this art more evident to me that here on this hillside, walking under the trees of this planted forest.

Margaret Herring and Sarah Greene, from Forest of Time: A Century of Science at Wind River Experimental Forest. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2007).

The canopy (studied from a gondola, dangling from the jib-arm of a giant crane that brings researchers 250 feet up, into the upper stories of the forest) was no longer seen as just a roof held up by wood. The Wind River canopy crane opened a world that is just beginning to reveal itself to scientists in the 21st century. (….) One of the first lessons scientists learned from their new vantage point was that the forest canopy was much more complex than they had imagined.  It was not just opened or closed.  The deep narrow crowns and undulations in the outer canopy created a complex surface with eight times more leave area than the ground below.  Gaps in that canopy opened to layers of lower canopies, creating stacks of microclimates and microhabitats.  Researchers referred to the layered structure as architecture and found plants and animals using different parts of that architecture for different purposes. (….) A notable characteristic of Douglas fir that caught the attention of researchers throughout the century was that these trees grow to be very big and very old.  What were the secrets to living old and well in the Pacific Northwest forests?

Afterword in Windfall journal’s “Poetry of Witness in the Northwest” issue:

It’s important to draw attention to these areas for a variety of reasons—because we need to express gratitude for the wonderful planet we inhabit, and we need to teach about places that might be damaged if no one is paying attention to them. And, most importantly, an intact natural world is the sine qua non for our very existence. Those of us with the financial resources, good health, free time, and geographic good luck to be able to go into the green world regularly need to continue to write poems of wild nature.

And from Joan Maloof, another previous Writer-in-Residence at the Andrews Forest (included in The Forest Log):

A Short Poem Early on a Fall Morning

The bracken is brown,
the maiden’s hair is turning gray,
you poets, with your list of names,
you will become silent when the snow falls.

This week I have been listening to some of my old audio recordings of Robert Bly reading at college poetry readings, conferences, radio interviews, etc. In honor of National Poetry Month, I am reposting this Bly poem, in honor of my own teachers:

….(Read the complete poem at Poetry 180.

A Remembrance: Three Who Helped to Shape the West – Bay Area Blog – NYTimes.com.

In recent weeks, the West lost three men who helped to shape it: Edgar Wayburn,a past president of the Sierra Club, Stewart L. Udall, who was the interior secretary in the 1960s, and Charles Muscatine, a Chaucer scholar who was among the University of California, Berkeley professors fired after they refused, in 1949, to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath.

Come with Me
by Robert Bly

Come with me into those things that have felt this despair for so long—
Those removed Chevrolet wheels that howl with a terrible loneliness,
Lying on their backs in the cindery dirt, like men drunk, and naked,
Staggering off down a hill at night to drown at last in the pond.
Those shredded inner tubes abandoned on the shoulders of thruways,
Black and collapsed bodies, that tried and burst,
And were left behind;
And the curly steel shavings, scattered about on garage benches,
Sometimes still warm, gritty when we hold them,
Who have given up, and blame everything on the government.
And those roads in South Dakota that feel around in the darkness …

Source: Poetry (September 1964).
Poetry Foundation

Robert Bly, “Come with Me” from The Light Around the Body. Copyright © 1967 and renewed 1995 by Robert Bly. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

I just stumbled on a fascinating article from a June’07 issue of New Scientist, introducing me to the term drosscape meaning “urban badlands.”  From the perspective of urban planning and landscape architecture, drosscapes are those abandoned, abused, wasted, unplanned, chaotic &/or polluted landscapes at the farthest edge of large urban areas.  As a word, I find drosscape a bit more poetic, and broader in scope, but similar to brownfields, which I’ve long used to describe similarly spoiled areas (former industrial zones) which are generally located *within* inner cities.   The article includes this wonderful quote from Alan Berger:

“Dross is integral to the urban landscape.
The holes are part of the whole…”

Read the article:   Drosscape – New Scientist (June 4, 2007) .

Sending out a heart-felt message of gratitude to my friends and loved ones:

For the past two days, I’ve been in a post-bolide glow. My thinking has looped something like this: what were the odds? — to be sitting on a frozen shoreline just then?— my gaze already lifted to darkness, open to the world, my pupils properly enlarged — at the moment a green fireball flared through the sky?

It was like walking through darkness to a cabin door.  The thick wooden door of the universe was flung open for a few seconds, revealing — lamplight! birch logs crackling in the great fireplace of Creation!! — before the door swung shut again.

The odds against a glimpse were… astronomical.

Brief and unsettling as it was, however, I don’t conclude that the fireball was a rock sent to tear through my fragile web of understanding.  Quite the contrary:  it was a green beam illuminating a gap in my understanding.  Ultimately, the bolide was a cosmic net-mender, dragging a skein of glowing green thread, soldering the gap shut with its fiery departure. Or am I sounding too much like Chris, from Northern Exposure?

The nature of that gap has something to do with origins and endings — as a writer, my burning desire is to learn how did it come to be this way? And then: why did it end? Not just failed relationships, or the plots of great novels, but mass extinctions, Epochs, rocks. For example, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the origins of minerals. Maybe I was writing poems during science class, back in high school, and this is the psychic payback:  endless questions.  I wonder if everyone else is filled with similar wonderings, or if I’m the only one who didn’t study hard enough.

By diligent reading, I’ve pieced together some of the local mineral story. The copper deposits of the Copper Range have an igneous and metamorphic origin, born as mineral-rich liquid magma upwelled in volcanic faults of the Keweenaw.  The nickel deposits of Sudbury, Ontario, located 300 miles due east of here, are not so much “deposits” as scar-tissues, formed after a meteorite struck the earth, cracking the crust, leaving a great impact-crater known as Sudbury Basin. Last year, at a dinner party, I met an amateur geologist who explained to me that “ejecta” debris from Sudbury crater flew all the way to Marquette Michigan, creating smaller impact craters.  Fascinating stuff!

Most of my curiosity has focused on the Iron Ranges of Upper Michigan (and northern Minnesota). Around Ishpeming and Negaunee, for example, one finds terrific examples of the “Banded Iron Formation,” which geologists call BIF for short. BIF is typified by layers of gorgeous ferrous rock, striped red-black or red-silver (banded hematite-jaspelite, sometimes with quartz and specularite):

BIF: Banded Iron Formation., Originally uploaded by D E Russell

Chunks of BIF serve as heavy bookends on my bookshelves, and adorn my friends’ desks and gardens, token gifts from my Iron Range travels. BIF deposits formed as ferrous sediments on the floor of a shallow ancient sea. Some theories suggest the iron precipitated “out of” the seawater through chemical interactions, or photochemical means. Other theories suggest that iron precipitation had a biogenic source — it might not have happened without ancient bacterias at work in the ancient seas.

Fossil evidence for the biogenic theory is preserved in the Negaunee Iron formation: Grypania spiralis, considered one of the world’s oldest megascopic fossils (“visible to the naked eye”) was found in the iron ore of the Empire pit mine. Fascinated by the idea that Upper Michigan might claim the world’s oldest fossil organism, I set up a meeting with scientist Tsu-Ming Han (Grypania’s discoverer), who was employed by Cleveland Cliffs’ Research Laboratory. Tsu-Ming arranged permission for us to go down in the Empire mine!  As he explained: my opportunity to see the fossil in situ was short-lived. The ore containing Grypania was a bare, narrow “rock bridge” — a ridge separating two vast deep, surreal pits. Covered with pines and fog, the rocky ridge would have resembled a Chinese mountain, impossibly sheer, with a haul-road cutting down-slope at what felt like a 45% grade.

Isolation (mountain painting) originally uploaded by “heart-felt-robot”

In this case, the image was painted within the mountain, rather than OF the mountain.  The fossil-bearing ridge was slated to be “mined out.” I remember that day as if it were a fever dream. We donned hard hats and drove halfway down the haul road, dwarfed by trucks big as brontosauri, grunting loads of crushed rock uphill. We picked our way along a precarious talus slope of loose ore, careful as mountain goats, collecting sheets and shards of BIF. The layered rock, oxidizing, could be cracked open, separated like the stuck pages of an old book, to reveal fossils shaped like C’s, O’s and J’s, preserved for 2 billion years, lucky clovers pressed in a book of poems. I keep a large specimen on my bookshelf — evidence — to remind me of our ancient origins. Grypania spiralis. That was ten years ago — the rock ridge is gone, and my guide has since passed away.  The rare fossil evidence has been crushed into tailing sludge and taconite pellets, coming soon to some steel girder near you.

Ancient origins, endings — follow the string.  That’s the mental nudge I received, as a bolide blazed over Lake Superior. There must be other examples of bolides flaring over Lake Superior, I thought. Witnesses? Previously recorded incidents? That’s what led me to this incredible sentence, from an abstract for a paper presented at the Geology Society of America Conference last month:

“In the Lake Superior region deposition of most banded iron formation (BIF) ended at 1.85 Ga, coincident with the oceanic impact of the giant Sudbury extraterrestrial bolide.”

Suddenly I understood!  My Grypania fossils witnessed their own bolide, a meteoric event greater than anything our species have experienced. That bolide did not hit “Sudbury” as we know it, but land under shallow ocean water: the result was broken crust, vapor storms, tsunamis, global oceans stirred. There would be no more deposition of iron.  When the great bolide shattered into Sudbury, it closed the chapter of BIF.

One more hole in my mental sock has been mended!

As John Muir put it: “Tug on anything at all and you’ll find it connected to everything else in the universe.”

According to UNESCO, an entire language goes extinct — every two weeks! Experts predict that half of the world’s languages will be lost in my lifetime. Human languages are living things, right? So we say it is natural — words are born, words flourish, words fail us or experience revivals, words become “endangered” and fade away.

Still, I was frustrated to learn that The Oxford Junior Dictionary (published for schoolchildren) has removed numerous words describing the natural world, in order to make room for new words describing technology. Here are just a few of the nouns Oxford dropped:

acorn, ash, beaver, beech, blackberry, bloom, bramble, county, decade, doe, fern, ferret, fungus, gooseberry, heron, minnow, mint, mussel, newt, otter, ox, panther, porcupine, psalm, raven, starling, thrush, vine, walnut, weasel, willow, wren

An explanation attributed to Oxford University Press states:

“When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance. That was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed.”

In an ironic twist, “blackberry” was removed from OJD, and “BlackBerry” was added. Widespread substitution of virtual for natural experience (and now language) leads to what Richard Louv calls “nature deficit disorder, not in a clinical sense, but as a condition caused by the cumulative human costs of alienation from nature, including diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses” (- Last Child in the Woods).

“Picture of a Dodo, taken from Naturalists’ Miscellany of 1793.” Originally uploaded by kevinzim

For several weeks now (yet it seems like months), I’ve been happily sorting documents and photos and all manner of personal papers in my late father-in-law’s office, trying to bring his files into some sort of order. He led such an incredibly rich life — a rare gem with more facets than I can truly comprehend! Some of C. Fred Rydholm’s “roles” included wilderness guide, woodsman, father, councilman, mayor, historian, published author, storyteller and beloved teacher… and all this living culminated in an office stuffed with documents of every type, spilling from torn paper grocery sacks and banana boxes, arranged in layers resembling sedimentary rock. I feel I am on an archeological dig now, working with a feather brush and a tiny trowel. Every so often, I have come across a scrap of paper on which he typed a favorite verse or quotation — this puzzled me, since he was known for reciting them from memory. My husband suggests that he used these when (frequently) he was asked to speak or make remarks at various meetings and civic organizations. Discussing this tonight, I was reminded of an old poem he really loved, which he recited from memory this past winter, even as cancer was draining his energy.  I can still hear his voice as I read the poem:

Tackle The Thing
- Edgar A. Guest

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he tried.
So he buckled right in with a trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and did it.

Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one has ever done it”;
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat,
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and did it.

There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure;
There are thousands to point out to you, one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.

I’ve recently added some work to GPS, a Global Poetry System hosted by South Bank Centre in the UK. Here are a couple of the posts:

Blake (Antarctica)

Tennyson (Antarctica)