Coppice Success(ion)

I think I read somewhere about there being European hazelnut coppices known to be 800 years old. Beyond Old French, I'm not sure where the etymology leads, but the practice of cutting back trees that could be counted on to re-sprout is at least as old as tales of the Hydra. (How many of the Hercules stories have to do with the heroism of farm labor? The stable-cleaning labor is not even metaphorical.)

Whether to reinvigorate an old berry bush or to generate a new supply of withe or wattle, cutting back the sprout-prone tree is an act of the wise, though the proliferation happens just as dependably for ignorant modern hackers. Of the few people who even know what a coppice is, only the lunatic fringe maintain one.

Never as exciting as a new field, but crucial for the self-sufficient farm, or even the urban homesteader, a coppice is one of those mundanities whose importance and interest flourish with a little attention.

I inherited a yard with over half a dozen clumps of native beaked hazelnut. A couple have been removed (and in this, I m optimistic--at least one will require repeated abuse for years before giving up). The others represent several life stages of hazel regrowth. Skinny little yearling whips remain flexible: weavable, knottable, plaitable. Another year or so and they make decent stakes. Then kindling and pea-poles, and later on the big tipi poles I use for beans and hops. Using various combinations, I can make hoops to support dahlias and peonies, woven fences or punji sticks to keep the dog out of seeded beds, and on and on, any function needing a straight pole, forked stick, flexible withe,...

The life cycle of a coppice, at least in my garden, is one of attrition. Rising up in resentment against a clear-cut, dozens of sports sprout the following spring, each vigorous and boldly set on reaching the sky. For a year to two, thinning to remove the erratics or to provide some flexible pieces removes enough to let the survivors become thicker than my fingers. Looking at each shoot, I then prune for the eventual shape of the clump: removing cross-branches, thinking about ease of future harvest, removing unwanted shade, and maintaining paths. The results will provide me with sturdy stakes and poles that will eventually return to the soil (for I am horder of my quarter acre's biomass).

As the trees age, the decision is whether to rotate within the clump, or between them. I can selectively take out the older trunks to keep a succession of new, nutful, and reachable ones rising. This will give me a steady supply of various-sized cuttings. Or I can let the whole thing grow to a ripe old age--until I am tired of feeding the squirrels who are the only ones that can get a the nuts, that is--and cut it all to the ground so that a proliferation of small shoots rises the next year. This will give me wood for cooking, and if done at the right time, a good harvest, followed by years of abundant cuttings.

Either way, the succession plays out over the years. Either way, the stubborn hazelnut roots send up their persistent pleas for sun. Either way, that non-descript bush off at the edge, making do in shade too thick for crops, is an important organ in the organism of this yard.

A.D. Disorder

With the new year, some people are wondering how to pronounce 2010. Twenty-ten, two-thousand and ten, and so on. The people who in my childhood would pronounce the year Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-five are all gone now, and the odds of Twenty Hundred and Ten look pretty slim. I like the stripped-downness and rhythm of TWO-oh-one-oh, personally, but then I'm an outlier on most matters of popular taste.

More to the point, it's too hard for me to think of 2010 as anything other than an accidental abstraction. There are all sorts of calendars. Chinese, Hebrew, and Mayan Long Count all have us beyond a piddly 2010. Even the Western calendar has been messed with and re-set a few times, and in its present form is not even endorsed by the mish-mash of gods and ancient celebrities whose names appear on its months and days. January 1 of Year 1 on this calendar does not even correspond with any particular significant day in the life of the Nazarene honored by the year count.

Look at A.D., Anno Domini, or as the pious must intone on solemn dates, "The Year of Our Lord." First of all, he never used this calendar, and will probably mark his second arrival on a Hebrew calendar. While Jesus is implied, A.D. literally stands for "The Years of our Domination." History may be written by the victors, but there has to be some higher level of victory to be able to write the calendar. Every time a non-Christian signs a contract with the A.D. date, the crusade wins a small battle. When the world celebrates the New Year on January 1, the global mind becomes occupied territory, part of the western dominion.

Before empires economic and military, before the iron hand of the Church had strewn saints' days on a calendar to be used throughout it's earthly domain, every fiefdom's master was free to make his own calendar, but there was no reason to think it would be used over the mountains. The variety must have been stunning, and it would be interesting to see what systems of reckoning existed.

For the most part, though, calendars of the distant past probably reflected the only truly sound dominions. Linked to the moon's cycle, or the solstice, or the caribou migration, a calendar can claim some empirical basis, some relevance beyond the aspirations of a prophet, or, as is more often the case, the political animals who invoke the prophet.

The further we have moved from time markers anchored in the physical world, the less sense it makes. Why should the new year not be the moment that the days stop getting shorter and start lengthening? (Then the southern hemisphere could have their own new year, offset half a year from ours.) Why should months be 28, 30, or 31 days (not to mention 29 every 4th year), instead of one lunar cycle?

The simplest explanation is that our calendar is a cobbled-together instrument of domination, such as the Bush administration. Like that gang of thieves and torturers, the Christian calendar is not a conspiracy, which suggests some kind of secret agenda. It tells you how many years of domination have passed, and has no term limit. Nobody elected it, but we're all stuck with it. Every time we celebrate the New Year on January 1--or crazier still, structure our economy on a fiscal year starting July 1--we reinforce the dominion of capitalists who use an ancient Judean socialist revolutionary as their shill. We drift from the everlasting life of the tides and moon, the seasons and solstice, and become subject to abstraction.

Cool Cell

What I know about slime mold will fit in this entry, but my fascination with it will not. Slime looks and acts like fungus sometimes, but then it up and moves. Time-lapse photography of slime mold on the move looks like a sentient creature on its way somewhere; this huge single cell can solve mazes (at least if there's a yummy sandwich at the end). Or sometimes it's not so much the moving as the design it makes as it expands: delicate lacery, shiny honeycombs, shapes that you cannot believe are natural, much less produced by such a 'primitive' life form.

Then they fruit. Sometimes the spore-bearing bodies look like mushrooms. The one I just found growing on a maple stump looks like it has little metallic balls standing on impossibly skinny hairs. How does this stalk, thinner than some spiderwebs, hold the ball up? Advanced materials science research, or just more primitiveness.

A single cell that can outsize any of us. That can move to get at something it has no organs to sense. That exhibits sublime engineering. That will outlast us all. Another evolutionary miracle.

What the Hay?

Drawn east repeatedly this year by a burning house, toxic waste, and the inevitable toilet installations, I drove through central Washington on I-5 again and again. The east side unfurls over the Columbia Plateau, and like a flag it is flat overall, but also ripples across ridges and rivers, and closer in most of the ground is rolling. There's wheat, but you're not in flat Kansas anymore.



And there's grass. Two years ago when I drove cross-country in January, I saw truck after truck after truck of hay. Out here, they're invariably bringing Eastern Washington hay over the divide. Grass grown in the Puget Basin just cannot compare, for reasons that remain secret to most of you. Western Washington is crawling with alpaca and lama, but I'm not gonna try and tell you they're eating it all. From the level of horse-trading that goes on on craigslist even in the burg of Olympia, I'd say that our equine friends are responsible for a chunk of this consumption, but the reason doesn't really matter.

The point is that the maritime northwest demands hay from the interior, and every year there are massive runs of grass from Kittitas and beyond, fighting up the mighty 90 and spilling over to feed grateful west-side ungulates. So, eastside farmers make hay, and westside ruminants eat that instead of foraging on native forbs.

That they're not eating any native stuff at all is a problem in itself, because those hay fields are exotic monocultures for the most part. Imported species grown for export. Classical colonial ag, probably down to the part where the profits stack up a lot quicker in far away coffers than on the farm (no idea what it means, but a bunch of hay stockpiles have Korean writing on the tarps). Anyway, a field that once had dozens of native species is now covered with one introduced grass, where food and medicine grew and offered itself to the first people to live there, now nutrients are forcibly extracted for cattle who live 150 miles away.

I don't know how this works out for farmers, and if they can make hay in the economic sense, I wouldn't begrudge them. But my guess is that like every other agricultural market (especially in the wake of NAFTA and the other 'free trade' agreements that somehow end up subsidizing large agribusiness), they experience punishing years. Even those years are numbered, because spilling down the slopes and along the I-90 corridor, the houses are coming; there are people who commute across the Cascades to work in the urban west. Farmers who own land may cash in one last time, but then the land will be ruined for hay, suburban blight-stricken and barren.

And in archaeological time, it's hard to imagine those settlements surviving. No economic base, pretty easily cut off from water, wind-plasted--a periphery that far from the core gets cut loose first thing when history tilts savage. Humans will pull back and the weeds, some natives among them, will colonize. Ghostly winds will howl through abandoned tract homes and strip malls, which I can only pray will be hauled away as the toxic waste they are before 50 years passes and some archaeologist has to record them.

Backroads: Stoner Road

This fieldwork began strangely like they would in Hawai`i back in the day: cruising into the boonies, and suddenly hanging a left onto Stoner Road. There is no sign, people like to pretend it doesn't run by their house, but Stoner Road has a place on the Washington map, somewhere between 46.76667 degrees north and the Know No Trail, just as prophecy foretold.

Some people say that leaving the straight and narrow and venturing into woods populated with stoners is dangerous, especially alone, but I wasn't worried. Mostly because I was ignorant and foolish back then, more than a week ago. I'd followed stoner trails before, stepped around their seedy spoor, even found some of their fiendish shrines, but I'd never really felt hunted by them before, never felt the hair rise up on the back of my neck on hearing a twig snap behind me.

I followed the trail as far as I could, which is to say until it started getting too steep and eroded for archaeology or a glimpse of stoners in the wild, and so I doubled back to abandon trail-walking and bush-whack upstream. It meandered through a nice little floodplain with another bench a couple of meters higher. Dead trees, or what the specialists call "large woody debris" shared spillway and retention duties with a few iterations of beaver dams. Every once in a while there would rise the rigid skeleton of a large cedar, phallic from afar, but upon closer inspection bearing the femiform lips of old bark stripping scars, the hollow womb of a mothering tree (condo for many a critter), the scratches of bears and cougars come to seek solace.

And then, in my far periphery, I thought I saw the blond dreadlocked coat of a stoner. Turning suddenly, I was face to face with not one but two juvenile specimens. The male appeared to be sub-adult at least, maybe fully mature, but it is always hard to tell with them. After a brief lag, the female slowly turned toward me and stared, and the male followed suit.

"It's a dude, dude," she whispered, causing his eyes (already pointed at me) to slowly focus and register--through a cloud of exhalation--my presence. I knew what would happen now. When their normal routine of clever subterfuge and camoflage (hunching over when lighting up cheap cigars stuffed with weed) fails, stoners take one of two evasive actions: one is to get the pursuer stoned and slip away during his inevitable lapse in attention, and the other is being able to randomly recall the incantation releasing the power to become very small.

They of course offered their still-smoking joint to me.

"Know no no no, I don't smoke it no more," sang I, and although they were young, they were well lored by theior elders, because they recognized and appreciated my Ringo impression. I think it's fair to say that it blew them away, because it set them to laughing. Chortle turned to chuckle, horse laugh and finally to ringing peals of laughter bounding through the fir, bouncing off the trunks as I laughed with them until, bent double coughing up the remains of a guffaw I saw my feet sunk in the mud and flashed onto the grim reality: they were trapping me in a contact high, probably had been blowing smoke at me with each laugh, which would only make it funnier, therefore making them laugh more smoke my way--a self-triggering feedback cycle, another of those deviously clever tricks of their species.

And so I stopped laughing, intent on regaining my wits. As I straightened, I could see them  running away. Faster and faster, or were they getting smaller and smaller? I'll never be able to say without doubt sticking in his crowbar, but if I had to swear I would say they had remembered how to get small. I thought I saw them, bodies shrunk to the size of marmosets, take one last madcap leap, arcing toward a tree and growing infinitesimal exponentially, disappearing into this mossy microscape.

Weedboy

To be a weed: an ambition most rare. A bad joke to most, but a guiding principal to me. I want to grow like a weed, to survive and thrive beyond my native range.

For what is a weed but a success in the wrong place? Globalization, climate change, even good old fashioned cross-pollination, what are these all if not foreminders that the finicky curators of the world will never win? Most of the “pristine” environments of the world are illusions—the Amazon rainforest was once an Indian garden, the Virginia woodlands of 1606 an oft-burnt game park—and all of them will change and morph as new arrivals come. Some of the new arrivals wreak havoc when freed from the strictures of their homes—the frowning disapproval of elders, the clampdown of the predator’s jaw—some species are like those drunken sailors on liberty, running roughshod over locals and dispersing their seed wherever they can. Even in this, though, even in their sneaking or invading, there can be value, as like a virus they test the strength of their hosts, the strongest of which gain immunity, bear stronger offspring, and adjust or outlast the exotic pathogen.

But I am no apologist for the weeds that wipe out the native species, and don’t aspire to that. I seek humbler weedhood: the kind that takes hold in harsh un-vegetated lava flows and sidewalks, that crawled out of a swamp but can make do in a desert, that can be whacked all summer and sprout anew in the spring. Stubborn, ineradicable, persistent, stoic, broken but not bowed: possessed of a continuum of obstinacies despicable and fidelities admirable.

Weeds grow paradoxes. I am the ugly flower nobody suspects of wafting sweet airs, a mysterious and unexpected gift, rewarding most fully only the curious who will take the time to put their nose to the dirt. I am the koa haole, scrawny invader tree whose spindly shade nurses young endemics, whose taproots break eroded hardpan and start soil growing again, feeding it with nitrogen fixing nodules, whose succession eventually runs its course and moves elsewhere.

I am the medicine hidden in the cells, known best to the uneducated peasants.

I am the dandelion in the lawn, relentlessly poisoned or pried up by most, but still offering gifts to any and all who can see them. Yellow cheer to the sad. Fluffy toys to the ticklish and the kids whose breath still blows happy winds. Healthy greens and roots to the hungry. Wine to the parched. Life’s renewed foothold in the paved and smothered land.

Weeds wander, and make homes wherever they can. Quick to recognize the hospitality of the plowman. Wont to spread their seed far and wide. Ready to try new fields. Happy to occupy the fringes and exhausted places spurned by affected cultivars. Able to pull up roots and move in when it is time, or to put them down as opportunities arise. Likely to improvise with roots from stems, sprouts from half-eaten bits and old damaged seed. Always a thumb out to hitch a ride in a boot, a feather, a gust.

Unafraid to land and try growing in someplace new and unexpected. Weeds pioneer where others would hesitate, and are seldom heard to complain when the place they improved gets gentrified, pushing them out again (although they do tend to sneak back in the second you turn your back).

Kill the Leaf Blowers!

I have a new all-purpose policy that will benefit the nation's security, envirnonment, public health, and eduction. It's simple. Get rid of the leaf-blowers.

In the past couple of decades, leaf-blowers have supplanted rakes. Archaeologists hundreds of years from now will attest to this fact, especially since most of the consumer models don't last much longer than a rake, and will be among the diagnostic artifacts of late 20th and early 21st century strata of landfills. The era that the Bush Dynasty would have had historians term the New World Order, but which will more likely be known as the American Twighlight.

And if I have anything to do with it, leaf-blowers will cease to appear in the not-distant future, their vile presence will end, and humanity will be the better for it.

Why?

A lot of it has to do with reliance on crappy little combustion engines, the kind that are churned out cheaply enough to be commodities, not durable capital. Because it takes a cheap engine to power a tool that must find its way into every house with an SUV and every grounds maintenance crew, leaf-blower engines are low quality things with no attention to efficient design. They are made by and for corporations who thwart attempts to regulate the emissions, efficiency, noise, or anything beyond shielding the populace from the most negligent and grievous bodily harm. Because in our era the consumption economy rules, leaf-blowers use too much fuel and spew too much noise and exhaust. They degrade the world we live in.

Maybe they are just little things, and I'll grant that the typical user burns only a few gallons of gas a year using them. But there are millions of them, and grounds crews fire them up daily to move grass clippings, leaves, and litter at residences, businesses, office and school campuses, and government facilities. Meanwhile, our government sends men and women (many of whom ran leaf-blowers until they signed up with the military seeking a better life) to die in foreign countries, protecting the crude flow so that Americans will have the freedom to waste. Leaf-blowers, like other conveniences that run on fossil fuel, are a security threat.

And did I mention that the noise and stink are annoying? No, beyond annoying. Indefensible assaults on the environment, or on God's creation if you think of the earth that way.

Besides that, leaf-blowers grease the skids for the American slide down to fat stupidity. The rake is a work-out tool, and when operated by someone with a sense of the world around them--the wind patterns, terrain, vegetation--functions as fast as the blow-hard machine. The leaf-blower disconnects the user from their place, reduces the clean-up process to point and shoot, absent any deft flicks of wrist or awareness of mind. Watch most leaf-blowers in operation, and you see idiots blowing the same leaves over and over, often fighting a wind that funnels through their neighborhood most every day. I've seen people blow and blow at a soggy or twig-entangled leaf for minutes without thinking to let go of the trigger and use their hand on the leaf for a second. These guys get fatter and stupider as they forget what a rake can do, and I don't think the fumes are helping much.

And it's not just that they play into individual laziness of mind and body. Leaf-blowers give whining, droning voice to sociopathy. People who would never rake a pile of leaves into their neighbor's yard seem to have no compunction  about blowing them just over the property line. This goes double for blowing leaves into streets, and where I live, that means gettig rid of leaves into bike lanes, where a mat of slippery leaves is not just an incovenience, but a hazard. (And a word to you assholes who do this: the cyclists will veer into the road, impeding your SUV.) And of course the noise and stink. The most obnoxious thing a rake can do is scrape on some concrete, but I had to listen to the on-and-off buzz of a neighbor's leaf-blower for hours today. And if his inconsideration doesn't rise to the level of sociopathy in your estimation, how about the assault I would've unleashed had it lasted another hour?

When the blow-hards aren't putting their leaves where they will be someone else's problem, what they usually do is bag them up (often needing a rake in the process) and have them taken away. These folks are not usually the composting type. Members of that vast suburban nation whose reverence of consumerism and spotless lawns led them to buy the blower in the first place tend to put leaves in plastic bags (more petrochemicals), treating this biomass like trash, maybe hauled to a greenwaste facility if their suburb is affluent and educated enough, but still something offensive, needing to be taken out of their site. For some reason, they cannot enjoy the beauty of colorful leaves on a green lawn, and feel compelled to blow away leaves until they can gaze on an expanse of what could be astro-turf. They may be good church-goers, but complain incessantly about the leaves that fall on god's green earth. These same people will then buy compost, soil amendments, and of course fertilizer (more petrochemicals!), oblivious to the irony their inartful stupidity hath wrought.

So that's why the leaf-blower is a tool whose time has come to disappear. It lessens the ecological and aesthetic value of the place where it is used. It keeps us tethered to a fuel source (and often as not an overseas factory) that undermine our political and economic security. It makes us less healthy, more stupid, and decreasingly connected to our patch of earth and to each other. So pick up a rake (which works just as well, and costs way less), rebuild your muscles, enjoy the smell of leaves and grass, hear the birds sing, and bask in freedom from that stinking, droning blow-hard.

DK

Only just now, typing the title, did the Dead Kennedys initial-joke click in my delayed response brain. DK = decay. Jello Biafra, be happy that you continue to provoke and amuse after all these years.

Like the punks and some of their fancy-pants intellectual allies, I embrace decay and believe that any good recipe for creation has to have at least a dash of destruction. But this is not just some intellectual BS (though I have plenty of that), not a philosophical position or a post-modern pose. In the most grounded ways possible, decay is crucial to my life.

Take away decay, and you rob me and every other archaeologist of a livelihood. Banish decomposition from this earth, and the material traces of our past all stand whole and ready for any chump to recognize. Part of the magic I possess that makes me an 'expert' is my eye for the pre-decayed reality of a place. The cabin that once stood where only a few fireplace stones remain today, the sumptuous meal reduced to some greasy cracked rocks buried in the ground, the hubris-wracked republic implied by a desert scattered with scorched human bone and cratered roads. If most of the past does not burn and rot, if parts of it are not swept away by floods and toppled by temblors, then my tribe's feat of reconstructing panoramas from a few random puzzle pieces becomes no more useful or interesting than broccoli in the lion's den.

And as with every other gardener, the pleasures and sustenance that grow from the earth would be denied me were decay to halt forever. The soil shat by microbes, worms and bugs, by rats, cows and compost bins--none of it would exist. And we'd be stuck trying to squeeze blood from stones. Life on earth would have run its course and died off long ago, like Dick Cheney's soul.

And so I embrace decay and adore entropy, those generators of middens and loams.

Land of Lilinoe

Years ago, when I should've been writing my thesis, I laid on the bed in our Honolulu apartment and watched the sky. Nothing unusual there, me being a pro procrastinator and the view being out over town toward the ocean through the glass doors to the lanai, but that time sticks in my head because instead of the usual blue sky or Pinatubo sunset, it was rain that enthralled me.

Perched on the south slope of Puowaina hill, our place was saved only by the tradewinds from being an oven in an urban, leeward heat-scape. But on that day the deep moana blue of the ocean and cumulo-dotted azure of the sky was replaced by wave after wave of rain sweeping in off the Pacific. A band would pass and the sky cleared enough to see the next one blowing in.

Squall lines, I guess the salts would call them, but the winds were puffy, the rain misty, and instead of closing the door and cowering in the face of stormy onslaught, I found myself willing each rainwave closer, tolerating the intervals only because the clearing and warming made the next arrival that much sweeter and soothing.

Having so many names for winds and rain--sometimes specific right down to the sound, the intensity, and the valley where they fall--Hawaiians probably have a name for that rain, but all I know is that when it comes that way, misty and delicate, it is lilinoe, maybe noenoe also on that day.

What the Salish peoples call their rains remains a mystery to me for now, but I know that the fine misty rain lives here, and not just on that rare day when tropical moisture and backward winds make magic. Sometimes the atmosphere collapses and clouds come down to earth, or fog spores burst from their hiding places in the moss, or Puget Sound steams. However it happens, we may spend days or weeks walking in a liquid atmosphere.

Sure, there are downpours and dowsings, squalls and storms, but there is plenty of lilinoe as well. The fine droplets fill the air, sometimes glowing with sunlight whose source cannot be pinpointed, but which glows from every iota of the atomized rain. [Damn Hollywood for using the title Liquid Sky, which is the phrase I feel swimming through this atmosphere.] Often the only drips are from the trees that capture the mist and gather it into rivulets before letting go from twig-tips and leaflets. On these days my beard creates measurable precipitation.

Sometimes it shrinks beyond droplets and mist to something like vapor, wettening everything without ever raining. The firewood tucked safely under a roof grows damp as the corpuscular fog courses into every crack and cranny. The edges are washed from everything, and sfumato creeps to the fore in every landscape. Sounds are swallowed, and only the nearby exists.

Fire Comes in

October rolls around, and fire moves inside. Maybe the weather gives it a few more weeks outside, heat and drought overcome rain for a while. Maybe flickers its arrival, oscillates between forest and hearth before making the jump for the long winter ahead. But rarely does November blow in to find fire still cavorting under the lowering sky.

This summer, wildfires were not so bad as expected (and in some quarters, desired, for where there’s smoke, there’s work). Climate change has induced drought, let forest-ravaging bugs move north, and spawned severe lightning storms at whose fulgerite-toed feet blame is laid for many a wildland blaze. Especially on the western Cascadian slopes, swaths of dead and weakened conifers stand brownly, needley tinder tempting sparks. 

I work with people who fight forest fires, and when they talk of the next summer, their eyes smoke over and their jaws clench, knowing that the Northwest will not be immune to conflagrations forever. They grant that this year’s acreage burnt may not have been so bad, but grimly acknowledge the colossal and growing fuel load, the budget cuts that have decimated thinning of that load, the fact that fires kept emerging for weeks this year after the usual close of the season. They worry that their job security will come at the cost of an inferno. They know that it ain’t just the lightning, it’ the people who start fires, who build stick homes in forests that have burnt since time immemorial.

After summer’s blazing heat, but before the blanket of wet settles completely, people here have long had burning seasons. Today it may be timber slash piles, and for millennia before it was the dried grass of the prairie, the clean-picked and exhausted berry patch. Ecosystems exist here that would not have been born without anthropyro-sparked mosaics of regeneration; mile after mile of black prairie soil sequesters this carbon truth. Not an escapee or a mistake, but fire the ally: clearer of underbrush, landscaper of game parks, feeder of berries. Under the knowing hand and at the right time—autumn cool, February sunbreak, spring flush—this not-so-wild outdoor fire helped humans prosper.

It is the Northwest, after all, and at some point the lows in the Gulf of Alaska and the Pineapple Express bring in the moisture, outdoor fires wild and feral retreat for another winter. Their tamed cousin builds a glow inside as it has for millennia, drying soaked boots and warming chilled toes, cooking savory meals, lighting the dancers and crackling along with the drumbeats, embers shimmering reticulose like an octopus’s skin as tales unwind. We welcome and nurture this fire as part of our family.

Evobootion

My first college room-mate was a rich kid from Lowan Guyland (whereas I was just from Goy-Land), and my first exposure to guys who own a lot of shoes. I mean, this Himelda showed up to live in a 144 square foot room with more than a dozen pairs, many of them various shades of patent leather dress shoes. At the time, I pretty much only wore combat boots, and at night I could hear them clumping over to his closet to menace his patent leather slip-ons.

It took years and some education to understand that this guy was just exhibiting classic evolutionary dynamics. Finding fertile ground in nouveau riche Dicksville (or Dix Hills, whatever), shoes had diversified like finches to occupy every niche, from the family's carpet showroom to various ritual contexts: Passover, Mall Cruising, trips to The City. Furthermore, through showy elaboration, his footwear had a demonstrated ability to signal to potential mates, "I have money, and I am not afraid to spend it on ridiculous crap." If I sound bitter, it's only because I find it sad when exotic species displace the indigenes that spent so many generations adapting to a place, that a flood of Gucci knock-offs extirpated farmers' clodhoppers and fishermens' chest waders.

In time, my engineer and combat boots mutated, as selective pressures shifted from seeking punk rock mates to psychedelic quests, which required things like moccasins and a pair of romeos bedecorated with day-glo lizards and such. Man, am  sorry I don't have photos of those to post.

In the absence of a trust fund, the struggle for survival meant that those died out before too awful long, replaced by two major branches: rubba slippas and work boots. The last post introduced these species, mostly in an island leeward ecosystem context, but here I'd like to get into the diversification that burst forth when the varied demands of the Pacific Northwest began to affect new generations of boots.

Ambulamuchimus affordii. Low-rise cheap boots have survived the migration. Flexible generalists like these are fairly adaptable, and can get by in a variety of environments.

Ambulamuchimus robusta. With their top-grain cattle hide, lug soles (nearly worn off now), higher tops and insulation, and all around more rugged construction, these specimens outlive several generations of A. affordii, and in fact I inherited these from my dad. In addition to that sentimental allure (of little intrinsic value in the survival of the species), these are of good enough quality that I take the time to oil them. Their framework is such that the worn soles can be replaced, rather than dooming them to oblivion. A triumph of longevity that more than makes up for the low reproductive rate.

Fossicker aquaticus.  These exhibit adaptation to the cold nearshore waters of the Puget Sound watershed. Waterproof, insulated, and crucial to the intertidal surveys and stream-walks an archaeologist needs to do in the northwest.

Gwarus lumberkackii.  And finally we arrive at the corks, or calks, or whatever you want to call the giant spiky boots favored by those who must traipse through mossy forests. These can stomp into oblivion those pansy combat boots I wore so long ago. They transform wet slippery blowdown into boreal highways, ice into sidewalks. Waterproof, impervious to cold, and quite fetching to boot.

Boots In-Side My Head, I Said Boots Inside My Head

Being an anthropologically-minded archaeologist, I find myself judging people by the boots they wear into the field. In Hawai'i, of course, there were plenty of times when boots weren't involved, and I did more than my fair share of work in rubba slippas and fake birkenstocks. Bruddas usually wore the same, or would show up in gum-boots or steel-toes (or unadorned cowboy boots in paniolo country), at least back in the 90s they did. I had a Tongan supervisor who always wore rubba slippas ("flip-flops," haoles) on survey through the jungle, and swore that it was just as safe, that it made you walk more carefully. He saw more artifacts than anyone else, and I think that the pace and tactility afforded by the slippas helped.

On many crews, there would be somebody with a pair of high-end hiking boots made by some company that proles like me don't even recognize. Not that I have a problem with quality footwear, but often it was the wrong tool for the job. Lava chews the soles and jungle rots the top off of any boot, so it never made sense to have expensive ones. Plus, the people with the expensive ones were, often as not, lazy and/or clueless when it came to hiking through the bush looking for sites, the kind of people who'd gotten educated in classrooms only, who didn't understand the value of game trails and drank water from camel-packs instead of a Menehune Water bottle re-used for the umpteenth time. Sometimes insufferable to the point of citing Dunnell in the field.

Then there were the people who would show up in sneakers to slog through mud or traverse a'a. Sometimes they would end up losing one or making it through with bloody ankles; always they end up being the Limiting Factor. Now and then this would happen when some dumb haole kid (me, circa 1991, for instance) would show up in rubba slippas in a vain attempt to feel local, but lacking the skill to go off-road with the things, or the judgement to leave them behind when heading into the thorn-paved kiawe groves.

I'd go more by cost than anything else, but found myself in Hi-Techs pretty often. When I worked on the Big Island with Pele's insatiable hunger for soles, I would head to K-Mart every month or so for another pair of whatever was cheap. Being the devotee of made-up ritual that I am, I carried over my practice of interring T-shirts that had reached near-compost stage to boots, stashing them in lava bubbles. A sacrifice, an offering, a recognition that the land had won. Some day, some archaeologist will run across these and wonder...