Mojourner Truth

Brittle-flex

2012-01-26T21:17:00.000-08:00

The photo above is of ice on an apple branch. First, the branch caught snow and ice that stacked up on top, and froze there. And here, the next day, some of that ice has slipped and slung itself don below the branch.

But ice is hard. When I whack it, or some giant branch comes crashing down, ice breaks like the glass it mimics. Crystal brittle fragility. Or, if it gets thick enough, hard and unyielding, unchanging if nobody turns up the heat.

Or speeds up the clock. Unimaginative reckoning of time traps our perception, makes us think things are solid when they are fluid, immutable when they are changing before our eyes. I've always had a weakness for the revelatory power of time-laps photography: a seed spreads her dicot to reveal a luscious tendril that becomes a plant. But with a little patience, the same can be seen without the fancy equipment. Glaciers flow, the hard little ice on an apple twig sags like a rope.

Or, the thousands of frozen shards cracked from a falling branch cascade like water, like in this shot (yeah, I know, it doesn't really show up). Hard pointillist frags conspire to produce a fuzzy flow. Then the virtual shutter of my camera freezes it into a cloud that will never move on. Of course, not even that is true: the file will degrade, pixels will disappear and move every time it is copied or re-saved. And by the way, your screen shifts everything a little to the right.

Stolidity becomes fluidity. Slow is not unchanging. Pieces become wholes and break up again. This post may be edited.

Weather Feral

2012-01-23T22:38:00.000-08:00

Lights out, everybody home.

After months of lulling us into a false sense of security (or, for the neurotic, misplaced worry over lack of precipitation), the weather unloaded on Olympia this past week. It began with rumors of snow, and the masses watched TV or teemed to websites with little snowflake icons. Weather geeks spent more time looking at radar and satellite views, and tuned into Cliff Mass at every opportunity, because his fans like to hear him talk almost as much as he does. Me? I'm one of those outliers who just reads the Forecast Discussion from the Seattle National Weather Service office.

They called for 1-3" on Monday, and again on Tuesday, and Olympia came in at the top of that range, although it was melting from the bottom the whole time, and we didn't end up with a full 6 inches Tuesday night. As the next system came round, the NWS discussion began with a quote from Airplane, "I sure picked the wrong week to quit drinking." Various models kept predicting different amounts of snow, and differed on when it would turn to rain.

In the wee Wednesday hours, more focused on keeping the fire going than sleeping, I peeked outside and began to lose interest in the predictions and models. At first, it was a desire to replace speculation with data. The snowflakes were flat and shiny, frozen hard, and the dripping from the roofline had stopped, so clearly, it was getting colder. As day dawned, snow continued, piling up rapidly.

The last time I paid any attention, meteorologists were saying that the Olympia area might top out at 6 inches…right about the time we hit 6 inches. By mid-day, there was little sign of warming, or even of the predicted cease-snow. I'm not one of those people who scoffs at forecasters for sport (a dull, uninventive sport, indeed), but I do think that sometimes they need to ignore the model and take a walk outside.

Snowflakes got smaller, and eventually turned to pellets of ice. The warming trend never kicked in enough to give us rain, save a brief partial outbreak 24 hours late. Precipitation came in one frozen form or another for a while, and atop the snow grew a crust of ice. I decided not to shovel the driveway, reasoning that it would only result in an icy surface.

Besides, why drive? Olympia is not known for being able to handle major winter storms, and I had firewood and food. My winter fertilization had escalated beyond ignoring the weather pros to withdrawing from car culture.

And the process would continue. I got more attuned to small cues in the weather over the course of the storm. Wind direction and intensity read in the trees and chimney output, the ominous swarming of gulls seeking refuge from the bay, the sound and feel of the snow as I stalked through it.

At the same time, withdrawal from civilization became more pronounced. After an all-too-brief respite, I could hear traffic building on I-5 again, but I had no desire to join in. As consumption junkies and ailment addicts succumbed to "cabin fever" (which does actually exist, but takes weeks to incubate and only ends with a lovely spring or ugly cannibalism), people shoveled drives and ventured out to join the madding crowds buying potato chips and crappy beer as if survival depended on it.

Instead, my time went to winterizing the homestead, by which I mean playing in the snow with the kids, sculpting a giant bust of a baboon, and building a mini-luge track over the driveway. Because I'd become more attuned to the weather as it is--not how a computer say it may become--I knew exactly when to make the ape and sled run so that they'd become coated in ice.

At some point, the power went out. So I went out, and listened as firs cracked and alders popped. Ever 10 minutes or so, there was a big branch falling, the initial break followed by the glassy cascade of ice freed from twigs and falling to earth; this symphony may elude my aging ears next time around, so I gloried in its irregular crescendoes. I helped the apples shed some ice, and learned that blueberry twigs just break if you try to help them do the same.

Eventually, I headed in, shed a few wet layers, and tended fire. I barely run our electric heat if I can help it, but at this point the fire became more than a hobby. It kept the house warm, and for a couple of days it is how we cooked. I McGyvered a little grill, making some pie-like things and sausages, warmed a pot of soup and foil packet of potatoes, stewed a mess o beans, and even made espresso (NOTE: the plastic handle of those little Italian espresso makers will look OK, but then melt to your hand, the sneaky bastards.)

The house shrank into the den, four hominids by the window or the fire, depending on whether they valued light or heat more at the moment. Furniture and the TV disappeared under wet vestments, and the floor became a layer of bark fallen from firewood. Daylight ruled, stretched only a bit by candleflame. Trips beyond the dripline to get more wood, to forage for fun, but otherwise, a family sticking close to the hearth, not so different than the thousands of generations before our kind got electrified and uppity.

Feral is not all fun. Splitting and hauling wood, knocking ice off the food trees. I guess making a baboon sculpture and sled run is not exactly necessary, but it takes effort. My kids said, "Dad, you're steaming," and it is true that I did create my own tiny weather system. The day after the ice-fall, the Olympia climate replicated this on a larger scale, fog and wood-smoke enveloped everything.

Yet, the I-5 noise grew. People drove by. Eventually, a snowplow made it even to our side street. Civilization once again reared its ugly head (for those who could afford it), and there were rumors of free frozen food from the grocery store stricken with powerlessness, inciting a rush. Also, those stricken with cabin faux-fever rushing onto the roads.

Eventually, this included members of my own family, and somehow I ended up pressed to shovel the driveway (taking out the luge run, which was disintegrating but still heavy as hell), working up enough heat to reduce small thunderheads of steam over my balding pate. Then, because of the car-driving acumen supposedly bestowed on me by my manly parts, I drove the family out into the slushy grid of asphalt that separates us from snow-baboons and other allegedly inferior apes.

And it was not pretty. Guys with overly active dangly bits driving like madmen. Everyone converging on the stores with electricity to buy…whatever. Cabin feverishness gone amok. I found myself in a grocery store (turns out that my foil stash was unequal to the task of fireplace cookery--so I guess there was some purpose), and was infuriated to learn that with a quarter million people lacking power, Safeway chose to use its precious current to play Phil Collins "music." Inforgivable.

I was glad to get back home, and play feral again. More fire. More observing the weather (quickening wind from the south with some thin spots in the cloud cover, a good sign for thawing, and mercifully short of the damaging high winds that the weather geek rumor web was predicting), which somehow stuck within a degree or three of freezing for days and nights on end, yet provided an interesting array of precipitations, fogs, and overcasts.

The adventure is over now, except for the telling. Work was abuzz this morning. While the novelty will fade, the legion is yet to be born. A few years of typically minor snowfall, and January 2012 will loom larger. That gnarly tree? 2012. The abundance of firewood? 2012. The half-assedness of future winter weather? Bow down before 2012, when the wild demigods of winter skewered the weak with mighty icicles, when the trees cracked under the unflinching ruthlessness of La Nina. Yes, in time this half-hairy ape will spin these few days into mythology, and the un-sullied minds of children and superstitious souls of the old will nod in agreement and supplication before the spirits of weather unfettered.

Happily feral

A Foot o Frozen Stuff

2012-01-18T21:00:00.000-08:00

After a couple of days of a couple or three inches, it cut loose today. I was tending fire to keep us warm, sleeping on the couch and rousing every once in a while to mate new wood with old glowth embers. On the 2 o'clock round, I saw snow falling. At four and a third hours, the back porch light revealed big sparkling flakes mounting quickly. Dawn seemed to come late, so dense was the snow, inching up past boot height.

By then, the school district had admitted the inevitable. My job had pre-empted the snowfall, telling us to work from home, but I'd already decided to take the day off. Write technical reports or play? No choice at all.

And play I did, but not nearly so much as a certain first grade girl who: ate her weight in snow, buttressed a snow-fort, staked claims to untrodden quarters of the yard, explored the pick-up bed full of flakes, and made snow angels (though not in the same quantity as face-prints, mind you, and not quite to the same effect as the motion-deprived snow-crucifixes she also embedded in the deepening white stuff). Among other things. At one point, she menacingly wielded a plastic lettuce knife at her sister; I'd foolishly given it to them to sculpt snow with, feebly unable to predict her using a giant green plastic knife as a, uh, giant knife.

Baboon, or Australopithecene? I care not, so long as he guards my abode with ferocity belying his lazy grin.

Me? I'm more of a hands-on worker of snow. It took me about an hour of surprisingly aerobic work to make this. Nestled in the winter-shadow of the south hedge, it's some sort of great ape. Cracker has this song, "Guarded by Monkeys," which rocks lyrical and guitarical mad genuisness, but monkeys are only good in troupes, being fairly insubstantial, even frail, one-on-one. So I opted with a single big-ass ape (ass not pictured). For scale, the pupils of it's eyes are bottle caps. Rumors have already made it back to me that a case of Winterhook is buried in this creature's medulla oblongata, but it ain't so. This will have to do for home defense as well as a stand-in until I can realize my life-ling dream of hanging out in snowy hot springs with Japanese monkeys.

Eventually, the snow petered out, leaving a foot or son on the ground. Miserly little ice pellets finished off the day, but too few to bring down the power grid (I hope). Just in case, the fire is still burning.

Yes, I'm gonna say it: Grillin and Chillin.

Attack of the Suit Zombies

2012-01-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

The Northwest is not immune to the Zombie fascination sweeping the nation. Seattle, especially, had had it's share of zombie events, and the fact that hipsters there proclaim that the craze is Over can be taken as evidence that they were at the leading edge of the phenomenon to begin with.

But to my eye, it ain't over. Like most things that replicate, it has evolved. Zombi americanus, your run-of-the-mill species, is widespread to the point that supernaturalists have all checked it off on their lists and are bored with them. Fortunately, diversification has reared its many heads, and new species are emerging.

One of these has popped up in Olympia recently. As soon as the legislative session began, swarms of Z. politicensis were observed on the capitol campus, and milling about at coffee shops and bars. They are easily distinguished from local warm-bloods and zombies by the fact that they all wear suits, which is extremely rare here. Only the Alpha males appear very comfortable in these garments--the young staffers and interns look outright comical, dressed up in big-boy clothes--and are the only ones to fear.

The rest of the pack mostly occupy themselves clumsily rushing to hearings they cannot comprehend or, as I said, milling about, trying to look important but with such vacant eyes it is impossible to take them seriously. Loitering behavior is interpreted by some ethologists as evidence of decreased brain function, and I am not going to argue that, but there is more to it. Look at them; they are almost all male. Nobody has yet explained the gender imbalance, but we've all noticed it. Some say it is because politics, like its sporting analogs mixed martial arts and golf, is interesting only to those afflicted with testosterone poisoning.

My theory is that all this milling about is the suit zombies' way of attempting to find a mate. Hang out long enough at the drinking establishment, and maybe a female will become enamored enough with that Armani suit to let it be removed. She is likely to be disappointed, the dangly bits being among the first to drop off after zombification. The slow brain that is a hallmark of the genus takes a while to come to terms with this, and attempted mating behavior drags on for years in some cases.

Some observers suggest that Z. politicensis has already separated into two species, but I'm reserving judgment until I see a real difference, especially since most of the splitters rely on mental inclination, which is so very limited in the genus. The Equus variety is allegedly distinct based on having a highly developed social conscience compared to Elephas, but this quality remains latent, rarely expressed in a way that would lead to conflict, much less actual domination. This may be a result of the testicular absence, but I make it a habit not to check. If anything, the Elephas tendency to want to chop off pieces of the body politic ("Teachers....unnnhhhh....Unions!" they moan, waving cleavers) seems like better evidence of differentiation.

Meanwhile, the living among us tolerate this seasonal visitation. Local businesses sell them coffee and alcohol to fuel their milling about. Soon enough, they will leave, long enough before summer that the rains will wash away their residue so we can feel clean again. It is frustrating to have the rest of the state, whenever they complain about some policy, refer to it is "Olympia's," rather than pointing at the suit zombies who live elsewhere and congregate here for a brief while, but we have thick skin and all our parts. We carry on after the carrion moves on.

More from the Abyss: Wave Them Big Hairy Arms

2012-01-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

Kiwa puravida male holotype: (A) Dorsal view. (B) Ventral view (A and B Scale bar = 10 mm; Credit: Shane Ahyong, NIWA Wellington). (C) in situ next to Bathymodiolin mussels (D) Scanning Electron Micrograph of a detail of K. puravida's 3^rd maxilliped and the comb-row setae which it uses to harvest its bacteria (scale bar = 150 µm credit; Shana Goffredi, Occidental College]. (E) Setae covered by bacteria from 3^rd pereopod (see Figure 4E for scale). (F) Dense aggregation in situ. (G) Shipboard photo of K. puravida using its 3^rd maxilliped to harvest its epibiotic bacteria. (H) Comb-row setae with bacteria filaments stuck among combs (indicated by arrow).
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026243.g001

Oh yeah, that's a Yeti Crab. My new favorite species. This one is from the waters off Costa Rica, where you least expect a Yeti, which only makes it better.

You won't run into one, lazing on the beach or even scuba diving. Unless you know where the deep-sea methane vents are, and have the right submersible, you'll never see a Yeti Crab except on screen. It is another one of those creatures who live where the sun don't shine, a denizen of the abyssal deep, a realm I've waxed un-poetic about before.

A couple of cool things about Yeti Crabs: they occupy hydrothermal vents as part of a fauna that differ from those worms we've come to expect, and they are farmers. The Yeti's genus was only discovered in 2005, and in the past year scientists found an incredibly dense population of them near Antarctica (check out this article), at vents where the usual swarms of shrimp and vestimentiferan worms were absent, but new species of barnacles and snails were discovered.

Reading this, my initial thought was that hydrothermal vents, being rare and widely dispersed, might each be a world unto itself, populated with a unique fauna found nowhere else, isolated. But in this article reviewing the past decade of research, that turns out to be only partly true. Yes, scientists now believe that there are entirely new biogeographic regions centered on vents, but they also have begun to collect evidence for dispersal between vents, deep fracture zones and currents that allow larvae from one vent to find and colonize another. So there are species of Yeti Crabs in the Antarctic and Indian Oceans, as well as those off of Costa Rica. Between these far-flung worlds, benthonauts go where no man has gone before.

In the Antarctic, where they were so thick that scientists said they looked like piles of skulls on the ocean floor, and elsewhere, the Yeti Crabs prove to be not abominable, but peaceful. Most crabs would eat you as soon as look at you (assuming you're already dead and ripe enough to scavenge), and have no hesitation to use their chelipeds to capture and dismember prey. But not the Yeti. No, this genus grows hair on its pincers, forming a field in which bacteria thrive. It feeds the bacteria by waving its hairy arms (the first species documented was dubbed Kiwa hirsutus) in the flow of hydrothermal vents. Then it uses a specially adapted appendage to scrape off the bacteria, its only known food.

The earth farts, the crab waves its claws in the methane, and everyone is happy. Sounds gross, but how different is it than humans using cowshit and urea to grow food? It's certainly more efficient, dining way down on the food chain, and it has the benefit of digesting methane and hydrogen sulfide before they can contribute to our greenhouse gas problem. My main hope is that it makes the crab taste like farts, so we don't start harvesting them for our own food.

The information above came from this article:

"Dancing for Food in the Deep Sea: Bacterial Farming by a New Species of Yeti Crab"

The article was written by:

Andrew R. Thurber¹^*, William J. Jones², Kareen Schnabel³

You can fund the article at:

http://www.ploscollections.org/article

No

2012-01-01T20:52:00.000-08:00

Someone else's cleaning project

I woke up his morning not hung over, but just sick of it.

Sick of what?

It,...whatever it is. Fatigue, tired of something I cannot quite name and getting even more exhausted trying to pin it down. A feeling of malaise worse than President Jimmy had. Verging on La Nausee, which makes me think of French intellectualism, which just makes me feel sicker. I wanted to say no to something, but I was not sure what.

The usual cure, for me anyway, is to get busy with my hands or my mind, creating something. But nah, too run down.

A few more hours of moping, and it made me so itchy I finally resorted to Strategy #2: jettison junk.

So now I entered the garage, tossed a bunch of trash, and organized what seemed worth saving. Piles of woodchips from carving--into the fire. Paper and bottles--into the recycling bin. Outright junk--into the trash. Various organic crap--out to the yard to become...more yard.

Then it hit me that I had something to banish from my life that might actually rise above the usual clearing-out that accomplishes all of the above, and do something worthy of an major purge. I quit facebook. First, I posted that this was my new years resolution. Then, I navigated the labyrinth separating facebookers from escape. After a brief moment of regret for all the hilarious things posted by a friend of mine that I will now miss, I had my wife check, and yeah, I'm gone. My resolution was gone before anyone could "like" it and reel me back in by my ego. I am now a virtual nobody.

Which feels good. Now, on with life.

Resolution Grade

2011-12-31T19:17:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, I wrote some resolutions, and since I'm outta time, the moment has arrived to see whether I lived up to them. Realizing that I cannot remember what they were, there's a sense of doom, that they were just another resolution-grade list of things that never came to be.

Cut Back on Coffee. This one's easy. I was being facetious, since I'd just gotten an espresso maker and could cut the volume without decreasing caffeine, so this one doesn't count. If I got a grade, though, it would be bad, since I drink as much as ever and have lapsed on the espresso making. The only saving grace is that I kick in an extra buck every month at the work coffee club.
Grade: D-

Do it Myself. Again, not so good. I gushed all sorts of stuff about producing a meaningful amount of my own food and riding my bike, but didn't get farther than increasing how much produce I can and pickle. On the other hand, I did grow and preserve more than last year, built some things that could have been bought, and did a little bit of work on the truck.
Grade: C

Be a Thorn. The implied ending to this resolution was "in the side of The Man." This was more unusual before Occupy. And I did write letters, protest, donate money to an organization or two, and engage in some armchair activism whose ineffectiveness may fall short of pointlessness in the long search afterlife blog blog posts. I definitely could have done more, but at least this one is un-tinged with shame.
Grade: B

Spread the Love. Ask the ones who I love, and you'll find mixed success here. I did make a point of saying good things where in the past silence would have reigned.
Grade: B-

Stop Procrastinating. That depends on which aspect of my life is being considered. Some intentions remain mirages on a horizon. Others, I've made progress. Also, I have to admit to being half-hearted about this, because of course I am a pro crastinator, and enjoy drawing out certain things.
Grade: INCOMPLETE

Follow Through. Part of this grade is a judgement on fulfillment of the above, and on that it looks like maybe just on the plus side of mediocre. In the bigger picture, I'd like to say the situation is different, but it ain't. I get credit for merely entering this post.
Grade: C++

There we have it, a mixed bag, a shapeless blob of a record. The average is a C or so. By completing anything I have risen above the pack, or at least onto the plus side of the normal distribution, and so grading on a curve, I benefit by a full letter grade. Once again, failing less badly than others is enough to shine in America.

Final Grade: B

Card Carrying Member of KAOS

2011-12-17T09:40:00.000-08:00

I written about radio before, and am starting to suspect that it's going to be an altar in the temple of my curmudgeonhood. At the coming of aural autonomy, my preference was cassettes, probably because they let me record other peoples' music (piracy was more labor intensive in those days, but for every hardcore 7-inch 33, there were an ungodly number of cassette copies), and because radio offerings sucked at the time.

Now, that's different. Partly because the same social outcasts' flat out refusal to be told No led to a wave of low power stations, many of which fizzled, but enough of which survived to get their DNA on the air, where it has replicated ever since. The airwaves of 1980s Virginia, badly infected with commercials or stuck in chronic classical, are banished to space, where aliens hearing them may decide that there are no signs of intelligent life.

Living in Olympia and working statewide, the radioscape around me offers not just a pretty diverse genus of public stations, but community operated broadcasts. From Spokane to Skagit, on down the road through Everett, Seattle, Olympia and Portland, volunteers give voice to their place. People playing things you'll never hear elsewhere, people getting a chance to express or explore something that matters mostly in that small patch of earth. To have a station that adds diversity to their community invigorates culture and Culture.

The local identity and grass-roots operation of most community stations are also, I think, important for democracy. Radio broadcasts reach people beyond wi-fi hubs and fiber umbilicals. Transmitters not owned by Clear Channel can air views unfettered by corporate mores. And if the time comes, know that the revolution will be televised, but only in between commercials, and you'll get better news on the radio. Oddly, the elder media spent much time this Arab Spring fawning on the democracy facebook and youtube, but radio remains and effective and cheap tool for freedom lovers.

Not free, though. Which is why I am a member at KAOS, Olympia community radio. Because it's not just that the call letters are hands down the best in the nation (sorry, KBOO), or the discounts kicked back at me from local bidnesses--I really do want to make sure community radio stays on the air.

KAOS brings us Democracy Now and other shows that would not be broadcast otherwise. They have not just Native News, but a great 4 hour block of native programming on Sundays; is there another station like that? And I cannot count the number of times I've cooked dinner listening happily to View from the Shore or Chant Down Babylon. The last thing I hear driving away from Olympia is usually static-scratched Amy Goodman. I tune in at random other times and get introduced to music from around the world, some of it so new it's live, but some harvested in the early days, most of it efficacious and restorative.

So yes, I am proud to be a Card Carrying Member of KAOS. Are you?

Taking Out the Garbage

2011-12-09T09:14:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, the city dropped off the new trash can. Last year, some rats chewed a hole in the bottom of one, set up house, and were eventually relocated to the landfill. Maybe we called about it, or maybe it was just garbage can replacement week, but in any case, now there's this snazzy new receptacle that says I have a Waste Wise Home. I am wise about so few things that this makes me puff up with pride.

But alas, I am a data junkie and a skeptic, so I have trouble accepting accolades without knowing I've earned them. A quick look on garbage day confirmed that for a block in either direction, there are only two or three of these little trash cans, so maybe I am generating less trash than a typical neighbor. (Rolling the tiny trash can back down to the house, my burgeoning sense of pride made up the difference in volume.)

I don't have reliable figures for how much garbage my neighbors produce, and I don't feel like going down the road with a scale to find out for sure, but the EPA reports that nationally, 4.3 pounds per person per day is the average. We Americans apparently make more trash than actual products. We may be the value-subtracted champions of the world.

But compared to 30 years ago, we at least recycle more, an average of 34%, say EPA figures. This means that the average person only produces 2.9 pounds of outright garbage every day. More or less what we threw out 30 years ago, as it turns out, so we seem to have increased junk production to keep pace with the recycling fad.

I don't know how big or small a pile 2.9 pounds of garbage is, and estimates in the weight/volume conversion game vary. New Mexico cites a hefty 225 pounds per cubic yard, King County (where Seattle lives) lists 177 pounds per yard, and Honolulu a mere 100 pounds (ah...I remember the lighter garbage of the tropics). My Waste Wise can holds 20 gallons, which is about a tenth of the 202 gallons contained in a cubic yard, so a full load equals somewhere between 10 and 22.5 pounds.

Sounds hefty, but four people live in this house, and garbage pick-up happens bi-weekly, which means the weight of the full can must be divided by 56 to yield pounds/person/day. Run those numbers, and you get somewhere between 0.18 and 0.4 pounds/person/day. This is about 10% of the alleged average output. I have a little bit of a smug grin right now.

How is it that my family can be an order of magnitude lower than average? A big factor is that we compost almost all of our food waste. Other than occasional fowl bones, it all goes out to the back corner the microbes and possum buffet.

Another factor is what we remove from the garbage portion of our waste stream. Our recycling bin is about twice the volume of the trash can, and although I have no figures, the percentage that is recycled--by weight or volume--has to be well over 50%. The table below (also from EPA) shows paper, glass, metal, and plastics amounting to 54.5% of total output. Except for a small portion of plastic that is not recyclable, almost all of the weight in these categories gets recycled around here.

Of the remaining categories, there are a few that never make it into a trash or recycling container. Olympia offers food and yard waste recycling, but I covet my biomass, and either compost it or feed it to the wild-ish area in back under the alders. Wood? I cannot remember there being an occasion for wood to be thrown out; trimmings and windfall stay in the yard (the occasional larger alder ends up as embers under salmon), old furniture ends up being sold or donated, and leftover lumber from projects either gets stashed for future smaller projects, or turned into kindling. Leather, rubber and textiles? Pretty unusual for them to reach the discard pile.

What's left is mostly plastic. The un-recyclable lids of containers, plastic-coated paper, and packaging. Some of what any modern American brings into their house inevitably ends up as garbage. Lots of packaging has no secondary use. There are things that will never qualify as hand-me-downs. The best way to deal with these is just to avoid bringing them into the house in the first place. Minimal packaging is a criterion when I shop. By growing some of my own food, I eliminate a bit more, and one of the benefits of canning is that those jars can last forever (take it from an archaeologist), and each time I use one that's one less can inthe recycling bin. I really should start making beer again, so I can pull the same trick with bottles...yeah, that's it, making beer is good for the environment.

So, that's the lowdown on garbage production at this residence. Well below average, but it does not take much effort. At some point in the future, landfills will be mined for the minerals and petroleum-based products they contain, but until then, it would benefit us all to aim low.

How low? Think personal. By filling the garbage can 26 times, I am producing somewhere between 66 and 146 pounds of trash every year. The EPA's figures indicate most people are pumping out just over a half ton; Americans are getting fatter, but even that is way more than most people weigh. If everyone aimed to produce no more than their weight, we'd see an 80% or more reduction in trash going to landfills, which would benefit is all (except maybe those future garbage miners).

ADiversion

2011-12-07T08:15:00.000-08:00

What the heck does this have to do with it? For that matter, what is it?

In the last month or so, I keep getting hits here from people searching "A. D. disorder." Being from a culture that worships many maladies and their neuropsychopharmacological treatments, I'm guessing that they're looking for attention deficit disorder, but are too close to the beginning of their journey of enlightenment to know what the A and D stand for. Or, they are themselves stricken, and cannot focus well enough to choose between acronym and full terminology.

To the latter, I apologize. My post A. D. Disorder has nothing to do with ADD or its frenetic sibling ADHD. It's a brief essay on calendars and social domination. Not what you were looking for at all, and maybe exacerbating your condition by throwing you off track in your quest for relevant information. At least I don't remember there being any places in that post to click off to somewhere else.

Blogs have become a long form these days. Twixt text and tweets, ADD may have moved from disorder to the new order. I used to think of myself as shiftless, unable to focus on anything big or time-consuming: I blog, and do not novelize. But now, cranking out posts with hundreds of words, stretching 8 or 10 paragraphs some times, I appear to be cured. My attention deficit still leaves some slack compared to the emerging norm, in which people you talk with glance don at a tiny screen every few seconds.

And now, I have lost many of the people who started this post. Many of the people who land on this site spend less than 10 seconds. Some, because of ADD. Others, paradoxically, because they maintain enough focus to quickly identify my irrelevancies and enough discipline to move on. Those who remain are the special few who somehow skipped the top few pages of google results and landed in my iconoclastic domain. I thank you all for having the patience and curiosity to land where you did not expect, but take the time to look around.

Now, off with you. Find some other strange cul-de-sac of the internet to fritter away your time.

Oh, but first, something completely different.

On "Fighting for Freedom"

2011-12-06T09:09:00.000-08:00

I won't subject the general audience to a purely political rant here. But over at Mo Comment, there's a new post about how we should completely change the concept of "fighting for freedom," so often invoked as justification for war, but not much used at home, where our freedom lives.

The post is here.

Crawler Free

2011-12-01T18:49:00.000-08:00

Zero hits on this and the subsidiary blogs today. Way better than 1 or 3 or 7, which seem to be the multiples of web crawler hits.

Anthropocene

2011-11-30T20:20:00.000-08:00

In case you did not know, there is an International Commission on Stratigraphy. They decide the chronostratigraphic units that reckon our geological time. I'm not saying they deserve the entire credit, but without them, we'd be stuck in the Pleistocene, baby.

But here we are all smart and modern, in the Holocene Epoch, ever since 11,787 years ago this coming December 22. We know this because a shift in deuterium excess values was observed in the GRIP ice core in central Greenland, spelling the bitter end of the Younger Dryas cold period. Adios, Pleistocene, giant sloths, and dire wolves.

Many stratigraphic units are decided by extinctions, but more often of much smaller creatures than the megafauna that capture our imagination. This makes sense, because stratigraphers intent on finding minute changes tend to look in fine layers of sediment, and it's hard to squeeze a mastodon into one of those, not to mention the fact that for every giant mammal there are untold multitudes of rotifers. And when temperatures change, or atmospheric chemistry shifts, certain teeny species die, while others emerge from obscurity to fill new muds with their skeletons. The individual deaths and the mass extinctions were not for naught, though, their ancient sacrifices have borne unto us just the sort of proof we need that the earth changes, and is nearly a million times older than the stratigraphy-deprived biblical scholars used to tell us.

Not that the establishment of global stratigraphic units is completely automatic, uniformly legible to all geologists. I don't know enough of the ICS workings to state it as a fact, but I do have enough familiarity with academia to hypothesize that there exist disputes, heated disagreements, perhaps even feuds over just what comprises a certain boundary, or precisely ho old it is. One area of disagreement I do know about has to do with the most recent epoch, on the candidacy of the Anthropocene.

"Cene" is the favored ending for stratigraphic series that define epochs, at least since the dinosaurs left the scene. "Anthropo" of course refers to the most hairless and arrogant of the great apes. So Anthropocene refers to a new chronostratigraphic unit corresponding to our presence on a scale that influences geology.

Not so quick, some of the ICS brethren say. Perhaps we are again over-estimating our importance, and geology will wipe us and our sediments away. But it looks to me like we've deposited enough concrete to make our mark.

Among the pro-Anthropocene contingent, there are various ways of reckoning its onset. Some argue for the beginning of agriculture as the threshold, since this is when humans really began altering soils and sedimentation, both with intentional acts like tillage and terracing, as well as with mistakes and disasters ranging from a burst irrigation reservoir to the Dust Bowl. Personally, I think agriculture will prove to be to fluid a concept to nail down, besides which it may end up subsuming the entire Holocene and perhaps more, depending on how it is defined, and then what is the ICS to do? Backtrack? I think they'd rather not.

Other criteria abound. Such as, the beginnings of cities, which create deposits of structures and artifacts that last long after they people move on or bury them under more stuff, as we are wont to do. Or, the wave of extinctions in our wake. Or carry on with the atmospheric chemistry or global climate approaches that have defined other chronostrata--we've warmed the earth and perforated the ozone, isn't that enough to merit (to our own demerit, maybe) a human epoch? It took us a while to get to that point, but what about the creation of highly radioactive isotopes? It is no coincidence that the "present" in radiocarbon time is AD 1950, the years when enough atmospheric tests of nuclear bombs occurred to screw up any subsequent carbon dates.

Eventually, it won't matter what we say. Alien paleontologists will land on earth and reckon by their own system. They'll find a strata rich with large bipeds, and if they are lucky, they may find one of them clutching a laminated copy of the International Stratigraphic Chart.

Skagit Air

2011-11-16T22:30:00.000-08:00

Two pleasures make the thousand-plus miles of driving I do each month bearable, and occasionally sublime. Both come through the air to me, or any other driver with eyes and ears: photons bouncing off scenery and radio waves broadcasting from towery.

To round a bend and see snowy tors, trees towering as forests blanket, water racing to the Salish Sea, spring and fall foliage, and, and, and. To see any of those, especially on some blue highway where you can pull over or slow to landscape pace, is to experience anew wonder, which I guess is why I pity people who think epiphany is a rare thing.

The radio, it's more something to wile away the miles. Satellite radio remains in my future (and even then, only maybe), the tape deck in the truck beckons my past and finds that all the cassettes were dumped before last move (a collection ranging from Richmond hardcore punk bands to some Dead and Allmond Brothers foisted on me in college to, uh, memory grows dim now). I drive a government rig, so there ain't no fancy stuff like a CD player.

So, it's radio, which suits me fine. I tend to go with community stations (KAOS near home, KBOO nearer Portland, KSER in Everett,...), or cherrypick from the wide array of public radio. Now and then, a college station comes in (like coming down toward CWU from Blewett Pass). In some places, classic rock is the only thing better than country or religious stations. The latter of which I sometimes listen to, believe it or not, because it's good to understand what people hear, especially because Christians operate the most powerful transmitters in marginal areas and are the only thing to listen to.

But usually by that point, traffic has let up, scenery holds its own, and the radio is off.

Last week, I found myself running north and downstream (mapheads may already have guessed that this is along the Sauk toward its marriage with the Skagit), already in shadow as the sun settled its way down past the islands. But the sky was clearer than smart people expect at this time of year, and as I hit the final stretch, the moonrise came into view. The photo above is from the Skagit River bridge, and cannot come close to capturing the beauty. Moonwash on fresh snow, the river sluicing the old snow seaward beneath me. River trees hugging leaves close, claiming a few more nights of their warmth before skeletonizing for the winter. I hung a U and drove back over to see it, stopped, rolled down the window, took some photos, breathed river air, rolled on and did another and idled leisurely back across before heading down-valley.

The moon smiled in my mirror between the trees when they'd let her as I sped into the fading sunset. Then she rose above them, and the ridges and even the big peaks with names like Little Devil and Big Devil, Mount Torment and Forbidden Peak. Shining unshrouded, moonbeams free to play on rapids and pools, boughs and bergs,...and in my rearview mirror.

Even though I was enjoying the scenery, it was getting dark, draining color and making it harder not just to look, but to drive safely on a road more traveled. Eyes on the road, ears took over, and I tuned to Skagit Valley Radio, KSVR 91.7. I'd heard them before, and besides my bias for community radio, had found that they possess a miraculous thing: a broadcast range that reaches way up-valley, farther than you'd expect for anything other than religious stations (and maybe some brute force commercial transmitters, but I don't get to that end of the dial much). It's always a joy to be way outside of town and hear something other than Christian radio or its more commercial colleague, Country.

Eventually, I got back to what passes for civilization these days and had to face I-5. As I climbed the on-ramp, a Seattle station played the cruel joke of starting a Fresh Air episode promising to blow the lid off everything we think we know about canine domestication, and then a minute replacing it with some lame-ass big-C culture thing. I know that they'd played the dog one the night before, but the radio spell was broken.

But the moon was still there, shining in my window, lighting a few wispy clouds. I stole some glances while trying not to crash or be crashed all the way home.

Meanwhile, Over at Procrastacritic

2011-11-15T12:32:00.000-08:00

In October, I posted another review from the archives, this time about Rocky. Then I delved into TV, with an episode from the original Hawai`i Five-O. Somewhere along the line, my unhealthy fascination with Joe Dirt came to the surface. Now, I've completed another TV-land review, about the human denizens (and one robot) of Lost In Space.

All these and of course delvings into Hestopia appear at the Procrastacritic blog, and I am too lazy to copy them here.

Occupy Walmart

2011-11-08T19:18:00.000-08:00

One of the litmi of the Left is Walmart. "I Don't Shop at Walmart" stickers appear on bumpers of old Volvos, Prius's, and other awkward-to-pluralize brands preferred by progressives. Labor protests the poor wages (poorer still if you are a woman) and the anti-union stance of the company. Liberals smirk and giggle at that People of Walmart website.

And strangely enough, it works in the other direction as well. The Right--or at least the rank and file, the commoners with the votes, the LumpenRight--shops at Walmart. Scoop up them Asian goods, even though it meant your brother got laid off. Buy that beflaggled patriot wear and the disney princess crap. Squint and grunt at them commies who would let unions into Walmart. Swipe the card while Walmart swipes your paychecks. And for God's sake, vote Republican.

So, with this powerful symbol of piratical capitalism run amok, amidst every community with a 15 acre pad site and the critical mass of consumer households to offer, we are occupying parks? Parks?! Land that already belongs to the public?

Granted, marching into a Wall Street Bank or a Walmart Street retail establishment and setting up a tent invariably results in arrests, whereas most cops are just letting the protesters stay in the parks, entertaining themselves at the seeming cluelessness of some college kids, and the un-bra'd chests of others. Occupying private property is frowned upon in the US, and it's really hard to imagine Occupy Walmart lasting more than a few days, ending in the ozone and burnt hair aromatic aftermath of taser fests of the rent-a-cops and eventually the real ones.

But, we can protest outside. We can hold up signs about jobs outsourced and landfills bursting, about grandpa serving his country and working all his life only to be humiliated as Greeter because he cannot afford retirement. OK, that's a long sign, but you know what I mean.

And, stealthily, we can protest inside. Pick up something and replace it on the wrong shelf. Try on the maximum number of clothes every time, ask for assistance, do whatever it takes to make the workers work more, because that's the only way they'll get more hours and more cash, the only way Walmart will create more jobs (crappy though they may be). Get yourself hired there, and then invite in a union. Go in and apply stickers with "This Used to be Made in America" or some other clever shit I cannot think of right now.

Or not. You don't need to sneak and snivel. Get in their face. Rouse the rabble, yell crazy stuff or go all yippie-theater on them 'til they escort you off the premises, making everyone there a little freaked out, a little less inclined to hang around and spend more. You don't even have to go there physically, just write letters to the editor, blog, expend your own breath ranting and exhorting (or, if you are not a blowhard like myself, riffing reasoning). Talk to your Walmart-shopping friends about how the place sucks money out of localities (not just what you spend there, but jobs lost, taxes unpaid, resources expended on their behalf, not to mention that act that someone who works at Walmart is eligible for welfare because the pay is so shitty).

Occupy Walmart however you see fit. Squelching the flow of customers, shaming the company in the public eye (all you gotta do is tell the truth for that to work), or advocating for their workers. Whatever you want to do. Just don't buy anything there.

Where's the Food, Dude?

2011-11-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

It Went That-a-Way

Don' let the picture fool you, it's over at my food blog, Mocavore. Remember how I said I was gonna start spinning off topics? Well, I got on my ass and did it.

Mocavore is where I'll put up the canning, where there will be foraging reports and recipes. Oh, and the Garden series that used to be here? It's gonna root itself over there now. Food from the stone age to what's still on the stove may be featured. I'll ramble about my eating habits and bramble about agribusiness. Also, there will be pie. Or maybe just a crisp. I am not enough of a foodie to care about crust.

As for now, there's the initial post, which aims to make sense of what the blog will be, but will lok like a wider and wider miss as time goes by. "Mocavore" means nothing. I went with it out of lassitude (roll over the first letter of Locavore) and egomania.

Anyway, that's where the food is. There are a few more posts up as well, about gardening and what's in the pantry, as well as the most recent, which is about this.

Cannes You Effing Believe it?

2011-11-04T22:58:00.000-07:00

Massive unemployment, enforced austerity, pittances eroded to nothing, poverty growing deeper.

Meanwhile, the G20, self-proclaimed leaders of the global economy, live it up in the Riviera.

This is gall unmitigated, for the politicians, property of the corporate titans, to be in Cannes, concocting plans to force the swarthier of the Europeans, and for that matter, commoners everywhere, to do their bidding. A global elite of technocrats (fronting for the parasitic plutocrats) teaming up to tell the workers what sacrifices they need to make, foisting on local leaders a set of monitoring regimes and conversions of state resources into private property. "Give up your drachma and democracy," say the 20, "and we'll give you Euros and austerity." And should the Greeks or anyone else have the gall to insist on a voice, a vote, they'll be punished with a coordinated financial assault, after which the buzzards will swoop down to pick the bones clean and sell off the skeletons.

Sadly, I can believe it. Morosely, I see the alleged champion of change and freedom that I helped elect, smiling broadly, happy to be part of the pack of wolves devouring the rest of us before we get too skinny to be any good.

Or no, that metaphor is wrong. The literal truth is more disgusting, and less insulting to wolves. The G20 dine on fine French food and wine (as the rest of us subsist on beans and rice), then retire to the veranda to take in the balmy Mediterranean air, or to the smoking room to hatch further plans for transforming government pensions and social safety nets into guarantees that the world will be safe for oligarchs to invest profitably.

If for no other reason, the leaders who engage in this sort of behavior should be punished for being so severely irony impaired. If they keep up this blind ambition, they will awake to the surprising reality that they are far outnumbered, that they are Mubarak and Marie Antoinette. And the poor will drink their champagne for a while, then get back to work.

Unoccupy Wall Street

2011-10-17T00:37:00.000-07:00

My last post expressed some doubt as to the sustainability and soundness of the Occupy protests happening. It is only fair to suggest alternatives, or be branded a do-nothing whiner.

So, let's Unoccupy Wall Street. Denizens of the financial district are not among the readers here, so we can begin by claiming success in terms of the physical place, but you know that's not what I'm getting at. Divest. Don't let your money occupy their vaults.

You live near a credit union that can take care of your banking needs from saving pennies to getting a home mortgage, and they won't Lincoln and Hamilton you to death with fees. You'll be a member, sharing in the profits and governance of a financial entity beholden to a broader ownership and longer time horizon than profit-obsessed big banks. You may also have a local bank that has a stake in a healthy community and treats its customers decently. Either choice beats parking your money in an institution prisoner to quarterly profits, sophisticated (yet still fundamentally stupid) gambles, publicly-funded bail-outs, exalted executives, and just plain greed.

But I don't need to convince you why, just that you should take that step if you already have not, and make your personal finances Unoccupy Wall Street. This November, vote with your finances. While media images of hippies and anarchists doing everything from wearing sinister masks to making love easily lend themselves to dismissal or discrediting of the Occupy movement, it would be hard to misinterpret the image of a run on the banks, a line of people in front of Bank of America waiting to withdraw their funds. If I had the audience to pull it off, I'd call for November to be Vote With Your Money month, a coordinated action. Doing an Unoccupy Wall Street event during the election month (or maybe the cyclical, slower-building version of the plan: Withdrawal Wednesdays), seems like a decent strategy to focus attention and impact on the action.

The financial effect to the big financial players would be negligible to begin with, and the power would be in the perception that we commoners are sick of playing their game. But as was the case with ending South African Apartheid, a few humble divestitures can lead to a few more, and eventually reach a tipping point where continuing business as usual becomes too costly, and real progress happens. You can be the beginning.

Meanwhile, it's a matter of retreating from the various corporate territories you occupy. Get food that was grown closer to you (your own yard would be a good place to start), and processed less; go to restaurants run by local families. Clothe yourself at thrift stores and yard sales, so even if that shirt was made for a famous name brand, they don't get a cent on the transaction. Keep driving the same old car (repaired by your unemployed neighbor or a local shop) or hop on a bike or bus. Disconnect the cable and just use your phone for phone calls instead of incessantly connecting to the corporate web. Make your gifts.

So really, unoccupying Wall Street turns out to be a bunch of small, easy steps. You'll find that you end up saving money. You will be more free of the corporate matrix, and at the same time more connected to your community and interested in its welfare. In the short term, divesting improves your life. If enough people unoccupy Wall Street, then in time our nation's life will take a turn for the better. Try it.

Occupied

2011-10-16T23:24:00.000-07:00

A month after the Occupy Wall Street protest began, the movement has replicated on an international scale. I live in Olympia, Washington, where our own Occupation began this weekend. Wrapping up a year that began with massive labor protests ignited by Wisconsin's union-busting, I have to say it is inspiring to see people taking to the streets, speaking out, refusing to just sit back and take whatever abuse AmeriCo feels like dishing out.

But occupations are mostly doomed. In Iraq, the West Bank, Soviet satellites, and on down the list, occupiers find themselves at odds with local populations, trying to maintain order in places they do not know or understand, stuck fighting an opposition when they'd rather be home. Having chosen a military metaphor, the movement faces congruent difficulties. In the US, occupying private property touches a deep nerve; people in general may not care what you do on someone else's property, but they sure as hell don't want someone camped out on their private property, and will oppose on principal such action. Occupying a public park, on the other hand, creates an insurgency among the usual users and the municipal authorities charged with serving the general public, which may feel no common cause with an occupation force perceived as radicals and people with too much time and too little work ethic.

This may not be a fair perception, but it is sure as hell reinforced by corporate media, ranging from the all-out attacks by Fox and other right wing organs on 'un-American' protesters to the regular mention elsewhere of marijuana smoking, un-focused, and by implication unlikely-to-succeed, occupiers. Evil or addled, or maybe just plain naive as some pundits would have it, the story line rarely credits the movement with potential to create real change, and drags before the cameras an unending series of spokespeople who cite goals that are vague beyond comprehension, or have to do with grinding a very specific and odd ax, or betray ignorance. The resistance benefits greatly from the fact that a leaderless movement that worships free speech and personal autonomy can be "represented" on camera by the most idiotic among the occupiers.

Another flaw lies in the territory being occupied. In Manhattan, it is Zuccotti Park, which despite its name is not a public space at all, but the property of the Brookfield Properties corporation. Elsewhere, Occupy clones are popping up in public spaces, but it's not the county or city or state that the occupiers have a grievance with. Occupy a city park, and you may inconvenience the municipality, the people who the week before had gone there to feed pigeons or play with kids, but you do not hurt the corporations that looted our economy. In fact, you do them a favor, setting in motion a conflict between citizens who occupy the park and the civil servants responsible for maintaining it. If I were a Wall Street banker, I'd be laughing all the way to the, uh, my work, as city officials fretted and faced unplanned expenses while occupiers focused sizable effort on avoiding eviction and the remaining citizenry split into pro-, anti- and apathetic camps. Divide and divert, and meanwhile very little corporate real estate is occupied.

I support my family by working for money, which means I cannot go down an take part in the Occupation, at least not in the sense of living there day in and day out. I can lend support, bring supplies, write blogs and comments lauding this patriotic antidote to the Tea Party. But my occupation is something else, and I don't have time to occupy a city park. Instead, I'll occupy my house, which is actually just a tiny percentage mine, belonging as it does to the mortgage holder (in my case, this is a local credit union, and not a Wall Street bank, so mine is a peaceful occupation, nothing adversarial unless I chose to stop paying the bill I willingly signed on to). As much as I support civil disobedience and speaking out against our greedy, corrupted system, I do find myself wondering who it is that will have the time to occupy a park for weeks or months on end, and whether with all that time, they might have something to do that would create more tangible progress.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will it devolve into an extended dance party that accomplishes nothing? Will people lose interest or hope and go home? Will the clampdown roll through like MacArthur's tanks through Hooverville? Will corporations see the error of unbridled capitalism and surrender?

I'm pessimistic enough to think that those question were presented in descending order of likelihood, but optimistic enough to think that beyond the Occupy movement, there may be positive change. The protest may have some deep flaws that keep it from being sustainable in its present form, but this week people are talking about issues that were buried a month ago, and maybe in a month they'll be taking more substantive measures. Occupation may prove to be a vital step on a journey that leads to a better nation.

Fission

2011-10-15T13:58:00.000-07:00

This year, I'll end up posting about twice as often as last year, which was twice as much as the first year of Mojourner truth. There was never any focus to begin with, but the blog has grown in various directions, and that along with the increased number of posts made me decide recently to spinn off.

So now I'll have separate blogs for food, politics, the Northwest, culture, and of course procrastacriticism. As I write this, a couple of those topics stand empty (and un-linked to) and others stay hidden (and un-thinked of). Maybe I'll cross-post here, but maybe not. Some of these blogs will die on the vine. Others may live on while the Mojourner Truth fades into obscurity. Or,...something completely different.

Slow Dawn at the Tower

2011-09-27T23:10:00.000-07:00

Brian Fagan stands out as one of the more engaging archaeological writers, but this piece in the magazine Archaeology makes him seem out of touch. He's dispensing emerital wisdom of the ilk that tells young up and comers that they've missed the Golden Age, and in so doing reveals what looks like ignorance.

You cannot count on a lifetime academic position, and the number of sites is growing perilously small, he opines. The former is true, but has been apparent for a couple of decades. Meanwhile, in the US as in other jurisdictions with the "anything over X years old is archaeology" rule (X=50 in the US, by the way), sites are multiplying every year. It may not seem fun to those who qualify as historic themselves, but the fact remains that the vast quantity of stuff left on the land in the 20th Century will keep legions busy for the foreseeable future, and they will learn dirty secrets that never made it into print. At the same time, methodological advances and migrations of technology into archaeological practice mean that we are able to discern sites that were inaccessible or invisible when young Fagan came of age. I find sites now using air photos, LiDAR, and sonar, while colleagues make use of everything from internet archives to X-ray fluorescence to find new sites and wring more data from artifacts that sat silent on shelves for decades.

He pretty much concludes that CRM (cultural resource management, which is basicvally archaeology that is done in order for someone to comply with law or get a permit) and other forms of non-academic archaeology are some other discipline, which is elitist, sadly dismissive, or both. CRM, like university-based archaeology, is what you make of it. People in both realms sit back and do little, and people in both realms make significant advances. I know genuine idiots, idealists, and geniuses in both the ivory tower and the trenches. Some of the best archaeologists are those "content to be a technician"--the fact, however, is that few of them "quietly vegetate," it's just that their utterances occur in the field and over beers, instead of in academic and upscale publications. Eventually, they are overheard by grad students who publish and "legitimize" the knowledge.

Fagan's article betrays not just the obvious academic vs. CRM bias, but a deeper elitism that just pisses me off. Citing the great discoveries of his "golden age," he reels off a list that includes an unspeakably ancient human ancestor (is there no older patheticism than the popular idea that older is automatically better?) and a couple of sites intentionally constructed to exalt ancient despots. Nothing about the vast majority of humankind that has been widely and intensively revealed in the past few decades of archaeology. And again, this idea that the leveling off of funding for purely academic archaeology is a disciplinary death knell, it suggests shameless ignorance of the vast majority of archaeology. He goes so far as to wave off young up and comers, to advise them to put their happiness before anything else, which he bizarrely equates to having a career in the insurance industry before retiring and doing archaeology. For me, years of work serving a sector that systematically rips people off before attempting fieldwork with an aged body seems like hell.

In the final paragraph, he seems to come round to sense after all, recognizing that "archaeology is what you make of it." Yet he still manages to ask questions already answered by those of us who work on the ground, like how to do archaeology without digging everything up, or can conservation be a mainstream part of archaeology. And he misses important questions like "What to indigenous cultures think we should do about archaeological sites?" or "What can archaeology teach us about adapting to climate change?"

One day, I will be old and irrelevant. I only pray that my readership will not be so broad, so my embarrassment may be minimized.

It Must Be Fall

2011-09-25T15:19:00.000-07:00

We are in the post-Equinoctal world, Autumnal Edition. I would know this even without a calendar, because of these events:

Rains returning to the NW
Between clouds, the sun angles in low, below hat brims and car visors
People searching for "heatilator" are landing at this blog again

Garden 11: The Hoop House

2011-09-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

September, and tomatoes are finally ripening.

I tend to go with the flow (Disclosure: rarely in the main stream, sometimes along a flux as inscrutable as neutrinos through granite), and opt for simply ept over the fancy engineering available to today's gardener.

But the flow's so slow with the maritime Northwest Spring, especially this year. The sun may climb quickly from it's root-bound Winter Nadir to the sunshine daydream of a Salish Summer, but the clouds wet and dark rob the light and waylay the warmth. So to get some early(ish) greens and tomatoes and beans going, I decided to goose the flow a little this year.

June 2011: The plastic comes off.

This photo shows only the hoops, but imagine it covered in clear(ish) plastic, trapping air to tap photons that make it through the clouds; these shivering ragged survivors do manage to warm things up a bit. Not enough to affect soil temps, though, which I measured frequently and never saw get past the low 40s Fahrenheit before I yanked the plastic and let the real summer in.

Anyway, the shot from the roof there illustrates my approach, which stems from frugality and some would say lassitude, though I prefer to think it is clever(ish).

Dig a 12 by 4 foot bed sloped slightly down south.
Lay out a 25 foot soaker hose up and back.
Get some skinny pvc, stick one end in the ground in a corner the bed.
Go down the long side, planting another every 2 feet.
With the help of a boathook or friend, bend these over and stick the other end in the ground.
Get a roll of heavy clear plastic sheeting, and lay it over the hoops and secure the long edges.

The only thing you cut is the plastic sheet, and there's no exotic material required. Easy. Cheap.

Spring's greenhouse reborn as Summer's tomato cage.

Plastic retraction time comes when the tomatoes start pushing against it, which as luck had it this year was when we started to get real stretches of clear sky, sun showering down on chlorophyll for hours on end. At which point I took a couple of old tomato cages I'd made a while back out of leftover fencing, and laid them over the hoops. Just guide shoots up where you want them and they'll flop on top, maybe even sling a few of the branches below. Watch for fruits growing into wires, but otherwise you're pretty much done til harvest.

South of the tomatoes, I had lettuce and spinach, some of which had an extended growing season as the growing tomatoes kept the sun from hitting tender leaves all day. To the north was a single row of string beans, climbing twine to a line strung from eave to eave on the end of the house, but that's another story.

From the post-Equinoctal perspective, the hoop house seems like a worthwhile investment. Digging the bed was by far the most labor intensive part of it, and that gets easier over time. Everything is off-the-shelf and inexpensive, and one person can make it in under an hour. The tomatoes alone pay for it the first year. I'm glad I finally did it.

Fanless

2011-09-21T23:25:00.000-07:00

Fanless. A state of being without: a) a mechanical device for moving air, or b) sufficiently multitudinous devotees to invey Stardom(TM)

Either one sucks. For example, "a)" sucks when you realize the hotel room you just checked into qualifies, and you ate Taco Bell on the road. Or "b)" sucks when you want stardom.

The latter of which affects me not. This blog logs its lowest numbers, lately. And happily I write whatever the hell I want. Like this:

That a certain national hotelier systematically lacks bathroom fans, however, bothers me. It should bother them, as it is bound to adversely affect repeat bidness among: trysters, eaters of beans, very sensitive loners, and other demographics.

Garden 10: Food for All, or It All Ain't Food

2011-09-07T23:59:00.000-07:00


One of the Blueberry Guard

It only occurred to me as I vainly grasped for a clever post title that my rationalization for procrastinating myself out of any serious attempt at pest control in decades of gardening could pass as a Garden Philosophy. Maybe more, if I can pump up a fully righteous head of steam.

Meanwhile, back in the garden, a diversitude of creatures ambulate, root, hyphaeate and otherwise occupy what is in theory a controlled landscape. My monotheistic ancestors, farmers dependent on the God of Abraham (and the Holy Ghost of Agronomy), plucked bugs and pulled weeds til the cows came home, until one of those cows in it's brahmic wisdom brought forth unto these farmers a bounty of chemicals. Most tillers of soil lost out to the conglomerates who replaced stewardship with production, and had to leave the land to those who could wrench the greatest efficiencies out of topsoil tranmogrified from living organism to platform for nutrients, herbicides, and pesticides. The Holy Ghost ascended to the heavenly throne, and nations came to depend on the chemiracle to feed themselves, their armies, and their trade surpluses. (Then came genetic engineering, the chimeracle, but that's another episode...)

But those bugs and slugs flitting and crawling, the weeds stealing soil and crowding crops, the molds and fungi and microbial malevolents...they may be threatening the beans, the carrots, the squash, the tomatoes, egads--the hops! Maybe. But then again, some provide haven and ambush sites for pest-devouring preyers, diversity and distraction enough to derail disasters. The complexity of a soil only sorta weeded (not hoed and turned, much less the more harrowing experience of mechanifarming), strung through with a felt of roots, hyphae, tunnels and wee webs of creatures too multitudinous to comprehend, lacks a uniform veneer of predictability, but is a better long-term bet.

Chemfarmers gain a momentary advantage. The weevils and weeds die, the crop comes in (barring misapplication, bad weather, and the plethora of troubles that will always ace farmers). But not all the pestiferous fauna and flora die, and the survivors immediately set to breeding immunity into the population. The survivors represent a diversity-poor selection at first, theirs is a high-stakes gamble that overcoming a single chemical will result in success. But if they win, they win big, and a field becomes a field of weeds, with a single species dominating to an astonishing degree.

Which is almost as lousy a place for the animals and fungi as was the industrial moncropland.

Meanwhile, back on the tendril of thought that started this post, my garden has no resident chemical residue. I've been known to directly expel and even violently attack a plant predator, but I don't poison anything. Which means that anything there can be food, even if not for me. If the ladybug can gobble the aphid with no worry, good. If herbivores have a plethoric buffet, so much the better for any one food plant to survive. If the fungi select out the weakest, then evolution points me in the right direction (or more precisely, away from a wrong one). I do not get miracle yields, but I get my share.

More Irony, and some Ire at Morons

2011-09-05T21:48:00.000-07:00

Hellscape Texas (NOAA photo)

I used to have to sate my Rick Perry irony hunger by looking at the title of his book, Fed Up. It can be read in the "Up with Feds" sense, contraindicating the semi-literate rants between the covers, subliminably urging his almost-semi-literate fans (admit it, most people who buy it do so for ornamentation, not to crack it open) to support Federalism.

No? You're right. That's a ridiculous stretch. He wants to fuck them snide lyin' sons-a-bitches (=scientists) up, and ain't gonna let no bureaucrats and technocrats tell him what to do. The guy genuinely hates government.

Or does he?

Today's events suggest that he may not believe that all gummint is bad, that in fact swaggerin' and prayin' may be usefully augmented by science-based action, funded by...taxes.

Because today, Perry could've been strutting in front of a crowd of South Carolinian Tea Partiers and the national press, railing against the liberal elite and big government. Instead, he flew back (shepherded for all the way by those helpful FAA guys Republicans would like to get rid of...again) to coordinate government response to wildfires. Making sure that state resources are applied against the thousands of fires consuming beloved Texas ground. Will he refuse federal fire crews, disaster relief?

No. He'll avail himself of the evil he points to in the public square.

Some would say that's hypocritical, but there's some irony in there too. And it gets better: the emergency he's dealing with is a consequence of global warming, which he denies even exists. Texas is experiencing it's worst drought ever, with record high temperatures. Don't take my word for it, I'm just quoting a report from the Office of the Texas State Climatologist

Nope, you cannot make up irony like that. A government scientist (whose data will be crucial in securing federal assistance and funding), a public employee, proving his idiot boss wrong. I hope for his sake that he's got a union.

HI NW

2011-09-01T22:20:00.000-07:00

Maybe you knew about it all along, but it was not until I was fully grown that I learned about the Hawai'i - Northwest connection. Cook and then Vancouver sailed (and ailed and aled) between these places in the late 18th Century, and there are those who feel that certain petroglyphs in Bella Coola may demonstrate that the Hawaiians had already done so before. The Hawaiian islands provided sandalwood and firewood, provisions and crew (weary and horny Anglos jumped ship in Lahaina, and adventurous Hawaiians took their places) during the fur and silk trade. Maybe because they both loved kings, the Hawaiians and British took to each other, among the expressions of which was a minor migration of Hawaiians to the Columbia and points north, in country that was then more Brittanic (or Gallic, maybe Russki).

I moved to Hawai'i before I knew any of this, and so I was a little surprised to find that a favorite dish there, and pretty much the only local kine grind with land-based non-starchy vegetables in it was something called lomi salmon. Tomato (hard to grow in the islands since diseases and fungi caught up, but historic sources indicate it did alright soon after introduction), onion, and salt salmon. It looks like this (but tastes even better):

"Lomi" derives from lomilomi, the Hawaiian art of massage. You need to turn the ingredients together with your hands to get the tomato juice on the salmon, to bleed onion spice into the tomato, and to spread the salmon salt throughout.

I made this last week with the trimmings from a king salmon I'd inexpertly filleted. Salted and drained and resalted and redrained and salted again the bits o salmon. Rinsed and dried and added a diced Yakima tomato and homegrown progeny of Walla Walla onion.

None of the girls would share it with me, because they figured the salmon was raw. True, it was never cooked, but the salt basically dehydrates it, so it does not seem so raw. Not exactly jerky tough, but the salmon ends up being a salty, slightly chewy nugget in the soft tomato matrix. The onions add crunch, sweet allium crunch. I had no ogo, but may try to get some next time.

This dish marries the Northwest and Hawai'i Nei, transcending a swath of the world's largest ocean. To eat it is to consume history, to break open the barrel of salt fish in a Honolulu house, to hybridize cuisines in a Kanaka Village kitchen on the Columbia. To have it here and now, with a sun-ripened tomato, a sweet onion from my yard, and a salmon that swam the morning before it was salted, is delicious beyond description.

Fear and Loathing (and bliss?!) in the San Juans.

2011-08-29T21:51:00.000-07:00

Last week, I traveled to one of the San Juan Islands. Sounds like a place in Latino Latitudes, but they are our northernmost islands, ever since I stopped counting Alaska. After S. Palin said she could see Russia from there, oligarchniks have quietly been buying back pieces of it, and they now own enough land, oil futures, and moorages to have reversed Seward's Folly.

Meanwhile, down south, I sat on the deck of a small workboat, skimming o'er glassy waters on the way to my favorite island this side of Kaua'i. It was an international expedition, more or less, there being employees of two sovereign nations aboard, but tensions were low. My coffee buzz, borne of a 4AM wake-up and 2 or 3 hours of not-quite-as-fast-as-that-douchebag-in-the-BMW driving, was gone by then, and the remainder were northwesterners, cool enough not to let their 30% caffeine bloodstream affect their behavior.

My job was to make sure a little hilltop was an OK place--archaeologically speaking--to plant a small weather station. I knew this would only take a few minutes, but was interested in what the reps of this other nation had to say about the whereabouts of a place that all of us agree exists, but none of us has been able to locate on a map, much less on the ground. Or, too many people have been able to locate it on a map, but they don't agree. Not violently, or even vehemently, more in the manner of a loss collective.

So there was no drama. No conflict. No more to write about.

So I ambled over to a place where some workers had been, uh, working. With big machines. And they'd gone where they were not supposed to. And obliterated some stuff.

Irrevocably. Done. Nothing more to say.

So I continued to the south beach. Solo, toward the solace of data collection. The home of a man who invented a particular kind of mill saw, reduced for the time being to notes and numbers. Measured, sketched, GPS'd, until there are hours to rediscover the stories and graft them back to this bare limbwork. Sounds dull as it gets, but the uncreative busy work soothed me just then.

Moving on, it was time to climb. 600 or so feet up is the summit of a hill called Olivine, and for part of the way I followed old miners' roads, weaving twixt boulders loosed from earth but not barged away. Higher still, heading for a bald patch where I might have left a bag carrying camera and binocs, lost on the last trip here. In the camera, a memory card holding the only images of that place that had been torn away by machines. In the binocular lenses and dark interior, lagging photons showing 21 years of birds and cliffs, of places unreachable and just plain look-worthy. Memory and data, at waypoint 680. Maybe.

But only after crumbly cliffs and a final steep ascent under a sun as glaring as it gets in these northern islands (Not saying that much, Hawaiians, but acclimated me felt hot.) And there, in the place I had sat: nothing. No camera, no binoculars. Oh well. A pretty day, views down to the island (and a camera to catch 'em), the channels, more islands and straits, ocean. Boats unzipping wakes. A bell clanging in its language, inscrutably charming to my ignorant ears.

It was all downhill from there, beginning easily enough with a trail. Becoming a trace. Then just places less tangled than others. Then ever more precipitous slope, alternating between slick bedrock and loose talus made one by a moss skin over a skeleton of roots and rot. One leg carefully lowering my entire weight, then the other. Zig-zag switch-back, starting to wonder if I'd be back to the dock on time at this gastropodean pace.

On the other hand, it gave me time to appreciate the ancient fire-scarred trees scattered in this slanted forest. Occasional grandfathers, gnarled and interesting, surrounded by young'uns.

I was looking up at one, it's branches akimbo with codgerhood and a disregard for verticality not tolerated in the tree farms and young forests I usually travel. Hunter S. had gotten that way in his old age, and years earlier had been nearly as curmudgeonly in his dismissal of amateurs one toke over the line, scoffing that until they'd dealt with the acid bats descending near Barstow, they had nothing to whine about.

And maybe getting all worked up over a hallucination is not that big a deal either. Imaginary bats swooping from the sky may be bad, but real yellow-jackets swarming up from their nest in the depths of hell ain't no picnic either. I'd been strung three times before my body responded. They never really entered my vision, barely nicked my consciousness as anything other than pain when I took off in a clumsy cetacean approximation of running. Another sting, and realization that I'd be stung to death and devoured by the yellow-jackets at this rate.

I either stumbled or decided to jump, who knows? In any case, I looked down-slope and saw my feet before me, plowing downhill as I slid my butt across moss and logs, bouncing off rocks, pawing and clutching at whatever could help me steer this descent, maybe keep it from accelerating out of control (any more than it was). Extreme luge...sleds and ice are for panty-wastes. My mind thinking only of getting away from bees. Eyes pitching in by trying to spot a precipice before it was too late, and managing to do so.

Stop. Stand. Stung.

Again with the mad down-ward dash. Hop and lope, slide and hope. Managing to stick most of the landings and surf over a salal patch without it clutching me. Finally finding myself having covered a lot of ground, much closer to my destination. More importantly, out of the airspace of the squadron scrambled to chase me away. Not long after, I walked onto another old road, ambling calmly dockward. About 5 stings big enough to qualify, but no gashes, serious bruises, or broken bones sticking out of my skin.

All in all, not a bad day.

Downgrade

2011-08-08T07:58:00.000-07:00

Why did Congress not insert a line into the budget for paying off the US credit rating agencies?

It worked for the financial firms who were busy trading toxic products that companies--including Standard and Poors, which just downgraded the US rating--winked at and rated highly, causing the economic crisis we are now in. Nobody went to jail over that, and the corrupt bastards who put in the fix made out like the bandits they are.

Reporters spill ink and bits over the rationale for the downgrade, while pundits conjure up whatever consequences will entertain their audiences. Here's a basic article from the Washington Post; you may not agree with that organization's politics, but the story mostly limits itself to the facts of the case.

While missing the point almost entirely.

The downgrade is a perfect metaphor for our government's demise. Ever since Reagan, the Depublican Party has wanted the government to shrink (in the case of ideologically driven zealots) or at least demur to The Market (in the case of the business wing). Now, a company whose complicity in massive fraud should have resulted in a decimation as the culpable employees were hauled off to prison is instead punishing the government (and along with it, the local governments and commoners who have run of the mill investments, and who must borrow money on the open market). The administration reportedly objected, but was as impotent in maintaining AAA status as it was in negotiating with the GOP.

Is there any question who is in charge?

Decades of de-regulation gave big business the freedom to make more money than ever, with less obligation than ever to society at large. The "too big to fail" myth and some well-timed extortion gave them a windfall when their filthy house of cards fell, a massive transfer of wealth from public coffers (I chipped in, and so did you, most likely) to corporations and companies. And now, just to let the government know who is in charge, the perpetrators decide it's time to downgrade the government and let the stock market dive.

Well, not entirely to punish the government.

Because if you follow the money, you see some interesting side benefits, and maybe some structural change that makes the upper hand that business already enjoys that much stronger. The stock market was probably due for a correction anyway, having gained value more on the basis of speculation than the anemic and jobless "recovery." With no major corporate welfare on the horizon, the smart money jumped out at the opportune moment when it would punish the administration (after all, Obama only gives them 95% of what they want) and, oh yeah, make a pile of money while the suckers flounder and panic.

And now, with its less than pristine bond rating, the US government can expect to pay more to borrow that money. This is one arena where trickle down theory is likely to come true. States, counties, and municipalities are likely to see interest rates rise as well. Consumers (the name for what used to be called "citizens" in quaint times gone by), if and when financial institutions decide to start loaning more openly from their enormous reserves, can also count on paying more.

It infuriates me to see the mastery with which this has been played by the wealthy few. They own enough representatives and senators to make sure that they are never substantially constrained in their practices, and mock the ability of regulators to keep up with their sophisticated larcenous financial instruments. When their more ridiculous gambles go awry, they demand that the government bail them out. If populist anger should tempt the congressional puppets to think twice, actions like the downgrade remind them of the big capitalist thumb holding them down.

The stated basis for the S & P downgrade--that the debt ceiling debate brinksmanship reeks of dysfunction, that there is no reason for confidence that the same clowns will come up with the majority of cuts promised, and so on--is entirely plausible. But then why did they not come to similarly wise conclusions before the private sector imploded our economy?

The takeover is complete. Now, maybe Wall Street solons will be freed from having to spend tours of duty in the cramped and underpaid offices at Treasury, Commerce, and the Federal Reserve, and just issue their orders from the board rooms where power truly resides. Unless the people demand it (and that seems unlikely so far), the government has been downgraded, and the financial leaders are fully in charge.

Omigod Man

2011-08-03T05:06:00.000-07:00

Aside from the online POTA (Planet of the Apes) crowd, almost nobody looks to me for film criticism. Maybe because I know so little, and don't know any of the names to drop or references to make. Also, I like to review movies way after they come out; I'm averaging nearly 4 decades after release, for I am The Procrastacritic.

In 1970 (+/-3), Heston embarked on a trio (plus the POTA sequel, if you wanna count that, which I don't) of sci-fi flicks, each set in an earthly future rendered dark and dystopian by human folly: the Hestopian Trilogy. Planet of the Apes kicked it off, and Soylent Green finished it. In my usual shiftless way I arrive last at the middle: Omega Man, a post-apocalyptic costume drama. Like the others in this triptych of hubristic humanity gone awry, OM returns to certain aspects of the species Homo hestonii: his journey from adventurous gay man to abusive heterosexual, pathological criminalism, and race relations.

We begin with the decked out in sweaty suave, epaulettes rippling in the breeze as he speeds though an abandoned city in a big red caddy (Hunter Thompson appropriated the caddy and sense of doom for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). The stylish safari look was judged just right for the character, Robert Neville, indulging in his twin passions of looting and shooting, and was so popular with audiences that studio execs green-lighted the epaulettes' re-appearance in Soylent Green.

He is alone, Colonel Neville, the reward and curse for having saved himself from a man-made plague while all around him perished (not having had the Hestonian wisdom to be germ warfare scientists themselves). Now, he must spend days hunting down and killing zombies. At night, he plays chess with a bust of Julius Caesar, and furthers the costume aspect of the movie by saying "I dress for dinner on Sundays," sporting a green velour jacket and ruffled blouses.

But let us not dwell on sartoriality, let us get to the point of the movie, which is…I'm not sure. So why not just make fun of the oddities? Three years after everyone died and presumably failed to produce more food, and Neville's got a fresh fruit platter and a string of bratwurst; there's always ice in the silver bucket. Car and flashlight batteries remain fresh forever in this miraculous world, different than the 1978 I lived through, where we had crappy batteries that lasted six months. Finally, in a world full of stores, Heston's natural looting mania seems to be focused mainly on clothes, expressing his every mood (to whom?) with a new outfit for every occasion.

Then there's The Family, a multiracial zombie-ish coven (disaster strikes a few years after the big race riots, so of course the first thing the survivors to is get together in harmony, right?). Well, almost harmony, because the black guy in The Family is dishonest and violent. So much for progess: the innovation of the movie is to have black people in white-face make-up. The strangest thing is that after three years of intensive searching, Neville has not found them, even though the first kid he meets knows exactly where they are.

He(ston) wants to root out their nest, kill them all before they kill him. Were they really trying to kill him before he took to shooting them on sight? I'm not so sure, but as usual when encountering the Other in Hestopia, the only solution is to shoot, for god's sake, SHOOT! Oh, and drive like a fucking maniac (because when you are the last man on earth, every car is a rental). Costume-wise: he usually chooses something militaryey looking for ops like this, like when time was of the essence and he managed to slip into a form-fitting blue rayon flight suit.

Eventually, Neville trips across a group of survivor children (awww), protected by an aspiring germ warfare doctor (no, no stretching the limits of plausibility there), who he should have taught how to make the anti-zombification serum. But instead, he goes to the only other healthy adult, so that he can have The Kiss That Changed The World (sorta,...OK, not really).

For she is African American. Yeah. And Chuck Heston is as white a Moses as you'll ever see. Of course, this shocking romance occurred years after Poitier and Hepburn had made the move on the big screen; even Shatner and Uhuru had blazed the trail on TV while Heston was avoiding women altogether on POTA. So Omega Man kisses a black woman, subject to certain rules: there must be a false start, the kiss itself must not be lit well enough to see, and she must die before there is an issue with, uh, shall we say, issue. The costume for this scene is an pirate shirt with understated puffy sleeves.

If I don't understand what this movie is about, it's not for lack of trying by the authors and director, who beat me about the head and neck with symbolism. They foreshadow and then at the end indulge in crucifixion, savior Neville arms asplay, passing a vial of his own blood to the future that they might be saved zombification by the Pharisees or Pagans, or whoever those anti germ warfare freaks are.

Depublican Hegemony's Money Hedge

2011-08-02T05:49:00.000-07:00

First of all: Depublican may look like one of those Republicrat chimera words, combining the two party names, but it is not (even though the percentage of Republican vs Democrat would accurately reflect the current balance of power).

Depublican refers to anti-government sentiment, the desire to de-public the nation. Always a Republican ideal, but adopted by their pliant alleged opposition. Democrats, who as a party once allied themselves with the working class and disadvantaged, have assented to too many assaults on the populace to claim that they believe in serving the public.

The debt ceiling deal just revealed to the public illustrates this. The GOP paraded it's most radical wing again and again during negotiations, while "liberal" democrats (defined as anyone who wants to maintain a shred of social safety net) were silenced and marginalized as the main party engaged in its usual waltz to what is called the "center," but which by any 20th Century definition would have been pretty far right. The "compromise" that emerged consisted of known cuts to domestic social spending, further cuts to be determined, and no rollback of the Bush Dynasty's give-aways and tax breaks to wealthy individuals and corporations.

Follow the money, and what is it doing? Flowing from the pockets of the working class into the coffers of the investor class, not back to the general public benefit. Pieces of the government are starved as a result. Depublicans are glad to see this, never having liked government, and in the few areas where their dim minds did see some benefit, they feel that privatization of government functions is always the answer: replace public education with charter schools (and if that fails, throw them kids in a for-profit prison), continue replacing military functins with security contractors, and so on. Depublic the gummint.

Depublishing helps smooth the way. Dumb down the 5th estate until all it does is repeat press releases, and make sure it presents both sides of the story, no matter how vacuous or harmful one side may be (if you must skip one side, let it be the "liberal" one). Steer away from facts in black and white, and toward "perspective" on a screen, ready to be deleted and replaced as the situation demands. Replace critical readers with products of an education system geared toward standardized testing and vocational placement. Decrease the percentage of coverage that deals with matters of import, and increase (un)Reality TV and entertainment news.

Why do all this? Why wreck the country? Being from the South, I recognize part of it as simple racism. Richmond VA and Washington DC are examples. African American majorities elected their own leaders, and whites left, depleting property tax revenue to the point that the new leaders faced financial crisis (sounding familiar yet?). In both cases, whites maintained leverage over what happened in the cities, in DC to a ridiculous and colonialistic extent.

But the real reason to wreck it is not to make white people better off than black people. At least, not all of them. Follow the money, and you will see that a large portion of Euro-Americans get screwed by Depublican policy. Like most everyone else, they are becoming worse off, while the oligarchs (mostly white, for sure, but the main qualification is a heart of pure greed, and that knows no color) are rolling in the cut. The Tea Partiers, the lumpen mass of idiots who heed the commercials and skew the polls ever more to the right, they wll end up just as bad off as the rest. Poor dupes.

The way to mobilize this idiotic army of voters (a necessary evil to the Depublicans until they find a way to eliminate voting) is not all that much different than what Goebbels did during the mid-century German experiment. Cover the airwaves with the Big Lie. Repeat until True. If possible (and it was, thanks to the Bush Dynasty's ever-handy Supreme Court), present the propaganda as free speech, have them open the doors to unlimited corporate spending in a case called "Citizens United," a master stroke of doublespeak. Let the people vote, but make sure they are not actually deciding anything.

This has gone on long enough that the US now represents the corrupt 3rd world regimes I was told about as a kid. A few rich people run things, fair deals are few and far between, and the great majority of people are kept in place with whatever combination of destitution, drugs, disinformation, and disharmony can be delivered.

Can it be reversed? Sure. It usually is. The Depublicans are protecting themselves by amassing all the wealth, but even the big hedge can fall to the small axe. The problem is that the process can get difficult, ugly, even bloody. And it requires the public to take action. No leader will lift us out. Look at how quickly our president went from Hope and E Pluribus Unum to handing over the keys to the Depublicans. There can be no Of the People, By the People, and For the People if we sit and wait.

Backroads: Habitat

2011-07-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

Mmmm. Shoulder verdure.

Roadless wilderness is a sublime thing...I've been told. Like most of you, I've never been that far from some sort of road. Maybe I have a pretty loose definition (re-arranged lines of 'a'a lava that would kill any car, 'Opihi Road on Moloka'i, Grays Harbor County ruts sporting alder just small enough to barrel through, tire tracks through pastures,...the list goes on), but still, I've rarely been more than a couple of miles from a motor vehicle trail of some kind. Old rail grades, rotten remnants of corduroy, routes traveled once by horses iron or meaty--maybe little more than a scar on the land now, but evidence of prior human traffic nonetheless. Sometimes these routes are harder to walk, much less drive, than the non-road nearby, but the point is that these are not pristine, wild places.

And yet, nature always reclaims them. Weeds sprout (rudely or restoratively so? depends on your perspective, or maybe your human hubris score) into the most heavily traveled roads in the nation. Even if the DOT crews manage to spray them, still the undersides and crevices and shoulders support spores and seeds and all manner of microbial life ready to start the reclamation process again.

Until there is a verdure. I've driven enough places poorly traveled to recognize the progression: forbs climbed by vines pierced by seedlings topped by a relentless future that tunnelizes the road before erasing it entirely. As long as the road is still maintained, the progression stops somewhere along that line, but on the back roads I spend so much time driving, it has begun, and stands poised to pounce. The day after construction, the artery begins to narrow. Some growth happens between tire tracks, but the real action is at the boundaries of this incursion, flanks subject to constant attack as nature abhors the biological vacuum of exposed subsoil or fresh gravel. Grading, mowing, chainsaw work all sweep it open to one degree or another, but in fact all back roads are terminal patients, and the further out they are, the more reliant they are on extensive life support.

Or from another angle, they return to life support. The early succession plants feed critters from mice to moose. Tribes used to burn their trails and other clearings in the forest for exactly this reason, to provide forage. Where can the four-leggeds find something to eat? Not in the dark understory of decades-old trees, but there's plenty along the road shoulder mowed last fall. Eventually, salal and salmonberry establish themselves, setting out a berry buffet. Roads tend to track in weeds, it is true, but this includes blackberry and other species that despite their alien-ness (and maybe egged on by their invasiveness) quickly establish themselves as abundant food source for native animals. On each shoulder lies a line of edge habitat, between the flat barren road and the forest or field or sage beyond is a strip of ecotone, often with resources not available outside it. There may be a ditch in a dry land, a berm raised above swamp, some anomaly that creatures will recognize and exploit.

These back roads, the more remote of which only see the occasional vehicle, have been adopted by some of the wildlife for travel as well. In a park where they know they are protected, you can see deer and elk making use of the open paths, pausing sometimes until cars come to a standstill, but in wilder places the animals generally yield the right of way, bounding off in that moment when they can hear your truck, but before you see them. Bears make heavy use of the roads, much easier traveling than having to haul those big bodies through the woods (not to mention the berry buffet, always a sure lure for the ursine).

I'm not an advocate for more roads. There are too many already, and it bums me out to see the number of newer roads failing to make use of older road beds, adding insult to injury, braiding ever broader impacts. Something about sitting up on a D-9 makes a guy want to cut new ground, not dress up something pioneered long ago. Pressure from environmentalists and the First People mean that a new road now may be less likely to be an ecological disaster than a new one 50 years ago, but they still become scars. Culverts clog and become landslides sometimes, ripping far larger gashes in the landscape. Sadly, some of these are built for a single use, from the wagon roads built by the army and abandoned all in a few 19th Century years to the ones still built for a timber harvest that won't be needed for another 80 years or so (at which time the dozer operator will scoff at the design and rip open a new one).

But it is also a mistake to plan as if this will stop. Or to believe that we humans are so powerful that we've permanently ruined a placed by driving into it. We drive back to our homes, and the plants grow, the animals traipse and browse. Nature cushions the blow, eventually makes the road something only an archaeologist would recognize. She shrugs it off, beginning with the shoulders.

And Her Little Doggy, Too

2011-07-24T09:12:00.000-07:00

Newcomers to this blog, expecting gardening or backroads or nature, you are about to get a dose of the shiftlessness and dissanctity that crops up from time to time. Continue on only if you are not readily offended by death and sacrilege:

Garden 9: Simulated Anadromy

2011-07-22T22:15:00.000-07:00

I spend a lot of time walking around in the woods and can confirm that yes, bears do poop there. Often enough, right in the middle of a trail. What do they care? They're moving on, and won't step in it.

But they don't poop so much in the burbs, or city lots. Nor do eagles and ospreys. Gulls save their payloads for cars or pile it on the pilings and docks. And cormorants, well, I've always been told that they are relentless autocoprophagists, but really I believe that they just don't mind shitting where they eat, right back in the water.

And that is how, gardeners of Olympia, we've been robbed of the bounty of the sea ever since settlers wrested the place from the gathering of bears who had held sway for so long. Without all these critters feasting on the fish runs (not to mention the sad depletion of the runs themselves), then dropping steaming piles of recycled ocean-dweller upon the land, we no longer get that special fertilizer. The salmon spends years in the Pacific gobbling oceanic energy, and dutifully brings it back to the land, fetching nutrients from that vast soup, concentrating them, and allowing a fair amount to make landfall. Nitrogen? Sure. Also some iron from the blood, calcium from the bones, and so on. Best of all, that plethora of trace elements so readily soaked up in the ocean, but spastically and stingily distributed on land.

This cycle, bringing the riches of the sea back to the rivers, swimming deep into the landmass, was already recognized by the people who lived here since time immemorial. Recently, science has caught up, studying isotopes locked in old growth trees, recognizing the cycling by anadromous fish of nutrients into the terrestrial system, salmon making that one last leap, miraculously becoming part of the land. There is a growing awareness that the ecosystems of the northwest would be weak spindly things without the fish bringing surge after surge of fertility from the ocean. Reacting to these studies, descendants of the people who maintained an agreement with the salmon people for millenia commented, "No shit."

One day, people will have extirpated themselves from most habitats, dams will crumble, and whatever salmon remain will be free to spawn and rebuild their finny tribes. Until then, I'm stuck buying jugs of fish emulsion, simulating the gift of anadromy. Smells horrific (worse than just a dead fish, I think, and way worse than bear poop), but my garden thanks me for a drink or two of this goo, liquefied diarrheatic Alaskan fish. I've tried to convince the family that I could feast on coho from time to time, then do my bear impression out in the garden where it would do some good, but they're unconvinced that the result would be less offensive than the ersatz gull-crap in a jug.

I've never been a fan of fertilizing, and yeah, I know that much wiser and more experienced gardeners have better approaches, but I'm too cheap and lazy to haul my ass over to Black Lake Organic and get the lovely blend of ground stone and stuff, or to make a total fertilizer a la Steve Solomon. Gangs of opposum and rats pillage my compost, so I don't really produce enough to make a difference.

So it's ground up fish for my garden. Cannery waste..fins, guts, and bones made into fertilizer. I like that what would have been waste (or another Hormel product) is serving some useful purpose instead. I like the poetry of anadromy.

Garden 8: Summer Rain

2011-07-16T04:46:00.000-07:00

Summer sun took it's time peeking through on the far south Sound, but Olympia has not had decent rain for a while. Clouds taunted us garderners with their rainlessness (robbing lumens to boot), or else absconded while the sun turned its full attention on evapo-transpirating moisture from our sandy soil.

I resorted to soaker hoses and occasionally setting a sprinkler to spradiate over a few feet in dire need. I don't use a lot of water, though, for a bunch of reasons: plants on life support depress me, I'm devoted to a Creator named Evolution (who will not abide cheating for long), water costs money, and water from a pipe has too many additives and subtractives to match the vigor of the H2O that falls from the sky.

Now we are in the midst of a steady rain. Not the light mist that dampens the surface and leaves roots begging for more. Not a sudden downpour that erodes and runs off. Just hours and hours of rain falling on flowers, washing foliage, quenching roots down to their deepest. And the plants will respond; even the light dose earlier this week had them stretching higher, flexing and filling out, darkening green, multiplying blooms, growing fruit, and just generally splashing brighter and bolder brush-strokes across the canvas of gardens. After this drink, if we don't backslide into too many days of mold-inducing cool wet weather, the plants will drink in sun and go off.

So while other Olympians may be cursing the souply ground at Lakefair or the damper on other weekend activities, I'm thankful for this liquid gift. Sitting here, hearing drips hitting deck like some tireless woodpecker, I see not the greyed weekend, but the saturated weekend. Some sunny day in August, I'll revisit this rain in the form of tomato flesh, squash, beans, greens, and all the other transmogrified precipitation climbing back skyward from my patch of ground.

Pleading the 5th

2011-07-11T20:51:00.000-07:00

The flag says the wind is waking on this 5th of July. The sole sign of the 4th is an over-stuffed trash can, visited now by a raccoon who nearly tricked me into missing sunrise, but this is all aftermath. I'll get back to it eventually.

A glow through the curtain crack told me it was after 4AM, when the sky near the Canadian border wakes and stretches, scratches at the dark, itching to become dawn. My family sleeps; I slip onto the balcony to see the shift. This is my church.

Above, the celestial blue is deep, but shallower than bottom, already less than the darkest our short Summer night offers. The horizon rolls out red as I stare out toward sea level, maybe 20 feet below my vantage and stretching for miles across the Strait.

Straight lines, but none of them able to withstand close examination. First and most obviously fallen: the horizon. A seismographic line of dark beneath the red, mountains pushed up by countless quakes, volcanic peaks like Baker and Glacier stand in for the big events, while mumbling multitudes remind me of the lesser but commoner rumblings that keep the Cascades rising.

Just above, lines between blood red and bled red, between the warm hues and blues. Infinitely many and fine lines. All straight in my pitiful little human view, but arched across the planet's fulsome curvature. And just where are the lines between redder, red, blue and bluer? I cannot pin them down, each dissolves color into colour, moving as unchecked as the rotation of our sphere through aeons, never to be delineated.

The water's surface, could I see it off in the dark distance at the foot of the rising Cascades, would be as straight as it gets. Pre-dawn calm, glassy smooth, perfect reflectory for the light show and the jagged silhouette of the mountains. But curving around the globe, warped by tides, and at any close view too cleaved and waked, blown splashed eddied and flaked to be truly straight for even a few feet. Water flows and will not be imprisoned by plane geometry, though for a crystalline moment it may let you squint and imagine mirrorine perfection, time unmoving.

Over the next hour, the calm is invaded as the approaching sun awakes winds. First, rifflets--islands forming. Then an archipelago. No white-top chop, not yet waves, really, no undulating horizon, but still the glass has shattered, letting me know that the flatlining peace of the un-dawned day is about to pulse to life and light. Before too long the meditative reflections have been swept away: the schooner's mast rippled apart, the seismograph of hills even more spastic, the stars and planets lost again.

Still, there are islands of calm. Lees maybe, or less romantically, sheens of oil or whatever was in last night's fireworks. But the way the wind blows and the tide flows, and these islands of calm remain, I suspect they are the deep waters running still. In and around one, a seal's head and wake sketch dances on the surface, then disappear. A pause, and then another dance. Neverlasting, never over. A fishing hole, maybe, some mystery known only from the underside.

Closer, in the thin strip by the strand, a raccoon mama emerges from the rip-rap and scrub-brush to investigate a trash can filled beyond capacity by last night's revelers. My eyes obey evolution and look. The tableau beyond, no matter how sublime, cannot compete with the creature. Like a fly crawling across a master's canvas, it demands attention, at least momentarily making the human eye follow motion and forget art.

But not for long. I've seen a grander motion already, and resolve to focus on it. From peaks left of the big mountain, shadow rays have shot subtly through the glow. Fanning darker into the lightening sky, lines of blue hue washing the warmer colors, paradoxical announcement of light soon to come. My eye rides them down to their center.

And in a bowl twixt peaks comes a brilliant green flash. More than a flash, a growing bubble, bursting finally into the yellow curve of the rising sun.

And day dawns.

Quickly the red draws itself on a line west, beyond my view. Maybe at my zenith, still there for the watchers beyond Tatoosh, but soon enough passing them as well, racing across the Pacific, chasing away stars and dragging up winds in its wake.

The sun stabs straight at me, as it always will over water. This low, the glaring orb remains attached to the long ellipse of the blade, and for the first time I see the sun's first reflection as a paddle, the sun a knob on the handle, slender Salish style, dipping into the sea. And so starts another journey.

Garden 7: Volunteers

2011-07-04T08:18:00.000-07:00

They come every year, volunteers. If they didn't, I'd despair at the bare areas. Even when their aim is off and I transplant them to another spot, I depend on these plants that come back on their own, no tilling or planting, no slaving at saving seeds and protecting them from damp weather and damned predators.

The volunteers just pop up. Some I've come to expect. The calendulas, dill, and red shamrock pictured above all fall in that category, just like the little Hawaiian currant tomatoes that I plant exactly once at each new abode, thereafter peeking between and beneath each Spring's growth to spot the volunteers that will ramble and rove, dropping enough seeds by fall to ensure the next generation.

Some gardeners look down on volunteers and weed them out. Even varieties they like, they want from new seed or starters, placed in their appointed position. These may be the same folks who pray to a god for some particular outcome, who think that deity and power concerns itself with placing all the pieces of creation just so, with dictating their moves forever after. Me, I'm happy to be a lackadaisical creator, casting some seed and letting evolution take its course. Maybe now and then playing the vengeful god, ripping out a greedy weed, cutting short the life of an underachiever, unnaturally selecting out the obnoxious and weak.

But then again, I tolerate a fair number of what some people call weeds. It might be different if I gardened in a more pristine environment, but I live in a residential development, in what was once an orchard in what was once a clear-cut in what was once a successional forest in what was once a prairie in what was once a virgin forest. Maybe not all of those, but a disturbed landscape nonetheless, where a red shamrock or a tomato does no real harm. If the weed be yummy, fragrant, or otherwise delightful, it is a volunteer.

In enough abundance, a patch of volunteers might be thinned into something approximating a row, but their nature is never so boring as that. A geometry more fractal and chaotic than linear, expanding sometimes exponentially, their math has what my dad always loved about that field, wonder and elegance, something very different than the cut and dried thing it is thought to be by the unimaginative.

Each volunteer is a mystery and a miracle. I never know how many there will be, or where they will emerge. Some, I don't remember having planted last year, or maybe ever. They may be gifts or offerings from the birds and rodents who also enjoy the garden. They may have awoken from some long dormancy, echo of a garden decades old. Some trickster may have planted them to see whether I could recognize a gift. Others reappear year after year, sensing that they are wanted and loved.

Every volunteer is a step on the evolutionary journey. Drifted from the carefully selected product of the seedsman, perhaps, but closer to being perfectly adapted to this place. Diversified and crossed, selected by nature so local it knows my yard better than anywhere else. Roots feeding hyphae feeding soil, growing a horizon particular to this garden, which will spawn who knows what new variation. Volunteers save us from the hubris of over-selection, from the trap of uniformity sought by the big corporate seed builders.

And besides, who can hate something that pops up on its own, offering gifts? Whoever cannot love an echo that returns and blooms is deaf to the joy of creation.

Garden 6: We Love Weeds

2011-06-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

Weeds. I've waxed spewetic on the subject before, but cannot let it be. Weeds are in the eye of the beholder, and the stupider the eye, the more abundant they are. Or in some cases, the more educated the eye. I work with people who know native plants and their exotic foes so well, but myself, I fall back to the questions of the earthling: Is it edible? Therapeutic? Good smelling? Just plain purty?

If yes, it don't deserve eradication. UNless maybe you can answer 'yes' to: Is it a bully?

Pictured above is a foxglove, Digitalis. It as uses to those who know how to heal hearts with it. For me, not so knowledgeable in pharmaceuticals, it's just pretty, and that's healing enough. I likes me some purple and green. I imagine how the hair inside tickle honeybee belly and laugh myself. Tempting an tubular, oh the bells.

So yeah, I may yank a few of these here and there: where they take up space more fruitfully filled by something else, where they'll grow only spindly and weak, but not in the odd corner, not in the driveway egde where a flower would liven things up.

I love me some weeds. Accidental (didn't see them coming), ornamental (but my, aren't they lovely), blessings (going with the flow has its rewards).

Garden 5: Urban Herbin'

2011-06-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

Beeing busy, it's nice to have some things going on in the garden that don't require so much attention right now. Fruit trees and berry bushes, pruned and carrying on by sheer momentum as I dig, plant, thin and weed. Perennials pushing skyward as I fuss over their seed-dependent neighbors. And herbs.

Garden: 4. Going Up

2011-06-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

Urban gardeners constantly crave space. On a lot less than 1/4 acre in area, with a house, driveway, alder shade (and roots) and a few other things gobbling up arable land, I am always seeking out new ground, including the labor or ripping up a gravel RV driveway. But eventually, short of demolishing the house, there just is no more land. And then it's time to garden vertically.

Garden: 3. Tis the Peason

2011-06-26T07:39:00.000-07:00

Not that I don't enjoy the planning, digging, and all the other jobs that lead to a garden actually producing, but when harvesting begins, happiness makes a quantum leap. Earlier in the year, my thickly planted garlic bed offered up scalliony goodness during thinning operations. Catch it before clove formation, and you can slice right through end to end, nothing wasted.

June crept up on me before the snow peas started coming in, but now there is a flood. Every morning starts with a garden walk, pods crisp and dewy are my first meal of the day. And then part lunch, snacks, and dinner. Some become stir-fry, but most just go straight in my mouth, and my kids. The younger one, especially, sits in the circle garden of peas, munching. There's probably only about 16 row-feet, but the abundance knows no bounds at this time of year. Yet, this is one crop we never get bored with, never get caught in the zucchini conundrum: what new recipe can we plan to hide the sameness of the ingredient? The green purity of peas, the prep-less package pops in your mouth. Done.

The direct joy of eating gets better with the subversive spice of eating without paying. A couple of bucks for seeds, yeah, but not 5 dollars a pound for the flaccid grocery store pods, or even more for the good stuff at the farmers market. (I love you, local farmers, and truth be told will still be buying most of what I eat from you.) Expanding the garden each year means that freedom is growing, or at least that I get to eat better stuff for less money. Both amount to a bit of divestiture from the globalized food machine.

Meanwhile, scapes escape the leaves on the garlic, offering up it's second meal. Diced, thrown in whole just to exude flavor,...however you want to go about it, they're a welcome taste of summer. And harvesting them can be a sensual dance. Slyly slip a forefinger inside the curve, a comforting thumb pressing on the back, and slide toward the tip until snap! the scape finds release. Cutting seems so brutal, besides which you can end up with tough stuff, nearly woody, no fun to chew. As with just about any picking, it's good to take what comes easily, if you're pulling hard your timing is off, or you're doing it wrong and hurting your plant.

The other thing coming in now are strawberries. The first are a mystery variety from the neighbor's leftover shoots planted last summer. They carpet the ground under and around blueberry bushes. Birds peck at a few, but they are not as ambitious as a 6-year-old, who is eating nearly as many of these as the peas. This year seems much better than last for the berries, or maybe just the joy of harvest seasons beginning has me all blissed out.

Lettuce prey has fallen to garden forays as well by now, and Olympia spinach, too. Cilantro still does not seem at home here, but is better than last year, reinforcing my garden superstition that seeds from far away--in this case the southeast--takes a few seasons to acclimate. Garden superstitions abound, even in my often science-bound mind, which suspects that they pertain to phenomena perhaps unexplained, but not necessarily inexplicable or supernatural. Seems like somethign I'll write about eventually.

But for now, it's time to glory in the abundance. To revere the reawakening of earth's generosity. To maybe, as Mr. Lowery says, sing songs of the fecundity of life and love.

Garden: Part 2, Hardened Surfaces

2011-06-25T05:47:00.000-07:00


Pretty Irrelevant Photo

I've spent more than my fair share of time removing gravel, sidewalk, and rocks to let soil kiss sky and revive again, but it's also my experience that a gardener needs some barren, hard places. Fully sun-baked if you can get it (and we are just now in that part of the year where that's possible, Pugeteers): harsh, a thirsty patch that won't drink any water, a callous upon the land.

Why? So you can kill weeds, first of all. In drought-strangled Virginia, I could toss a weed any old where and the sun would delight in beating the life out of it. Here, it might just as easily take root and manage to slip by and set seed. And even if the one laying on the driveway does have seeds, they're on concrete. A few may wash down to a crack or blow away to fertile ground, but mostly this is the end of the weed road. Speaking of which, every time the car pulls in or out of the drive, the weeds get pulverized: first step on the soil road.

Because yeah, the hard-top better be helping me make soil, or I'd rip that shit out. I confess to being a dirt farmer, soil is my primary produce, everything else is after. My garden aspires to the urban homestead ilk, and I'd just as soon turn my weeds back into soil than put them in a bin for the city. Same with compost--am I just gonna give away my biomass? Huh-uh.

The Utilitarian Herb Dryer

The driveway may not be as pretty as the first photo, but it's a better herb dryer. Put 'em on the asphalt, and it goes even faster. This is where refinished furniture, paintings, screens wet from being cleaned (yeah, like I do that) and whatever else needs drying goes on a sunny day.

And when it's not a sunny day, having a hard surface is still nice. To walk on without being in the mud. To let the rain wash the dirt off something. To send some sediment and water to that soil patch downslope. Level hardscapes rarely ever exist. You may think it is, but water will prove you wrong. Anyway, completely level slabs are for chumps. You want gravity and water to help you clean it off, and not just willy nilly.

There's also something about a barren patch in the midst of a garden that provides balance. The hardness feeds soil's softness not just with organics and sediment, maybe, but metaphysically, or maybe that's just the sleep deprivation talking. The hard speeds the spin of the soil-weed-soil cycle, at any rate. Weeds thrown upon the altar sate the more ravenous of the soil gods.

So yeah. Gardens should have hard surfaces. For those and other reasons. I have no brilliant or pithy summation. What did you expect from someone who delves into a garden series with a post about barrenness and concrete, death and dessication? Stay tuned, it gets easier...

Gardening Post 1

2011-06-21T05:55:00.000-07:00

There have been other garden posts here before, but this is the first one lacking a decent title. And by decent, I mean smart-ass, obscure, and/or irrelevant.

This is my fourth spring gardening in Olympia, and meteorologists say the region is a month or so behind schedule in terms of warming up. Even without the delay, the climate here allows for snow peas, strawberries, and lettuce on the summer solstice, which has blown my southern mind each and every year. Back in Old Virginny, where 90+ temps have become common even in May, the season for these has long since passed, and green is turning brown.

This shot is from the roof of my house, looking down into the front yard, which loses some grass every year. The road-side bed has wild strawberries, herbs, camas, a saskatoon, and the usual array of weeds, volunteers (as in, weeds I can use), things I cannot remember, and sprouts trying to fight their way through the strawberry blanket. This was the first bed I carved from the lawn.

At the far lower left is a glimpse of the driveway, along which I planted a row of blueberries in year two. The bright green patch has some strawberries that came to me from a neighbor wilted and unhappy late last summer. They're producing well right now, so much that there are some left for me after the kids have their fill. This be also has burgundy shamrocks that I may or may not have planted, spreading into a nice blanket and providing my youngest with an inexhaustible supply of tangy treats. There's also some mint edging, artichokes, bitterroot, oregon grape,...and of course stuff I cannot recall right now.

The stone walkway comes from road cuts all over the state. It has taken years to accumulate. Stonecrop from an island up north is filling in the spaces, and is starting to bloom now. I had creeping thyme, but it gets as ugly and invasive as a neo-conservative after a while, and I ripped it out.

The triangle beyond is mostly new, having been excavated last fall and winter to make room for a meadow full of stuff from east of the Cascades. Violets, lomatiums, sage, blue fescue and other grasses, hawkweed, camas,...and various things that either arrived as seed or stowed away in the roots of something else. Also here: a dwarf Fuji apple, lavendar, more herbs, a dahlia or two, calendula,... I'm not adamant about having a purely native garden. This plot is basically an experiment to see whether the hottest, dryest part of an Olympia yard can sustain things that would be more at home in the sundrenched Columbia plateau.

The far corner has a sickly cherry tree, a garlic patch, and a circle of snowpeas that form a little fort where my young daughter can sit and snack, hiding from traffic driving by. There's also another saskatoon (like the strawberries, transplanted during that brief window of bad transplanting weather last summer, but in this case refusing to fruit as a result) and a mystery blue or huckly berry. Winters squash and cukes are poised in these beds, ready to take over after the garlic is done. There are also onions and some scarlet runner beans just taking hold.

Out in the back 40 the mix of haphazard planting and geometric removals of grass continues. Along the fences are berries. A few fancy black and raspberries that I actually paid for, but also some wild himalayan blackberries that I prune into something like temporary submission, thimbleberries uprooted from logging roads, and mystery berries that were set out for free by the road this spring (but which had so little roots that less than half seem to be surviving).

It's hard to see, what with the grass that I let grow tall and free, but there are three rectangular beds that are the closest thing I have to a traditional vegetable garden. They are more or less 4 by 12-foot beds, the size I can irrigate with a 25-foot soaker hose. Snap peas are producing heavily in one as onions are finally feeling warm enough to grow. There are radishes just beginning to be ready, beets still a ways away, and carrots only now sprouting their first true leaves. Summer and winter squash are planted, ready to fill in as the earlier crops finish. One bed has a variety of tomatoes. At the north end of each bed, where they won't shade everything else out, are hops. Willamette and/or Cascade planted a couple of years ago, and Fuggles a couple of weeks ago.

The tall stump (footholds cut in it for the girls to reach its perch) is slowly being swallowed by native blackberries that I am experimenting with (a subject you will see here, and probably in future posts). The perimeter of that bed has Quinault strawberries just about to ripen, a native bay, a rosemary bosai'd by the last winter, and mint. Oh, and a lilac, fireweed, iris, and a cool green frog.

Maybe you can spot what's left of the rhubarb in the background, regenerating after harvest. The copse of alder that fills most of the yard has lots more native blackberry, hazelnut (I get withes and bean poles from it, while squirrels and jays hog the nuts), and various woodland plants I've snagged and tranbsplanted. Among these, oceanspray is doing really well, and in a few years should yield some digging sticks (it's other common name is ironwood).

Not shown is a tiny hoop house with tomatoes and lettuce south of the house, and a more ornamental bed along the fence at the north end of the house, with ferns, red and evergreen huckleberries, and the neighbor's rhodies arching above it all. There's another similar one across an isthmus of grass that has shrubs on a tapestry of groundcovers, most all of which is native.

So there you have it, the basic, dull introduction. More like there I have it. I used to keep a garden journal in Virginia (but the dust with a broken computer, I think), and am a little ashamed that it took me this long to get going again. Are you still reading this? Congratulations. All I meant to do was start keeping track of what's growing, where, and when. You are incredibly dedicated.

Backroads: Grain to Hops, Hot Rods and Rattlesnakes

2011-06-18T09:19:00.000-07:00

After a few hundred miles of winding through Palus country, it was time to high-tail it outta there, quit the wending and set a course back to Olympia. It would have been easy enough to hit I-90, turn on the cruise control, and join the flow of vegetative travelers heading west at great speed on the straight and not so narrow.

Screw that. Besides the boredom factor--Hay barns labeled in Korean and even the Columbia crossing have become uncomfortably numb--that route would dump me into the Pugetopolis traffic mire and force a traverse of Fort Lewis, where vital national security interests require perpetual slowdowns. Yeah, screw that.

Better the backroads, which in this case gave me a crowier flight home, not too far north or south of the line from Colfax to Chehalis, leaving just a jot of interstate to endure on the final run north. Plus, I love going through White Pass, topping the Cascades on two lanes, usually with little company. And in this case, a chance to cover new territory, stretches of Routes 26 and 24 I'd never rolled through.

Amber Waves are for the Slow.

If my driving had meandered as much as this post, I'd still be on the road. But I gassed up, got a good dose of caffeine, and floored it. Climbed up out of the depths of Colfax, gaining speed, positively screaming once I'd negotiated the crossroads of Dusty, Washington. The wheat was high. No amber waves; amber is frozen. Green stalks bent back in the slipstream as I sped faster and faster, pushing an ever larger air-wake to either side.

I'm pretty sure I reached velocity sufficient to distort the time-space continuum holding my brainpan, making the rolling hills seem to flatten out. Then, geography caught up as I passed Washtucna, heading plainward on an asphalt arrow pointing at Othello. I must've passed something interesting, but at speeds so great that all points blurred.

Hanging a left, 26 became 24, zooming down to the Columbia. Maybe slowing a bit, trepidation mounting. Because I was headed toward the contaminated Hanford nuke site, where scientists once made plutonium for bombs, and now they try to find ways to clean up the waste. Currently, the plan is to make it into glass and unload it on Chihuly and all the other glass artists inhabiting the Northwest. Look for a new line of glowing bongs.

Relax. Nothing out of the ordinary at the Hanford Site.

Windows rolled up, I made it through with no adverse effects. At least nothing that will appear in the near future. As an added bonus, I was not hit with any stray rounds from the Yakima Firing Range. And the road ran straight and smooth, as they often do in areas where federal dollars augment state transportation funds. Bottom line: gauntlet successfully run.

Rattlesnake Hills, Rattlesnake Clouds

Then, off to the left, the Rattlesnake Hills. Ancient, constant. The road follows the hills, skirting north of them as it approaches Yakima, keeping a respectful distance, or maybe just following the path of least resistance. I thought I was having a vision, hallucinating rattles on the tails of clouds that hovered above, but the photo says it really happened. Still, reality and natural (even scientific) explanations cannot convince me to write it off as nothing special. Atmospheric echoes of cartographic names? I love that kind of stuff, it's sustenance for a religionless soul like mine.

Mmmm...agriculture for beer's sake.

Yakama country (I suppose "Yakima" may be more accurate, this being outside the res in lands appropriated for newcomers) is famed for hops. In June, after a slow cool start, the vines race upwards almost as fast as I flew through horizontally; sticky tendrils grab the driver who slows too much in their midst. Left alone, these vines grow like kudzu does in my own homeland, but here they populate a tame tracery of wires and posts. I've seen hop patches before, but never the miles of fields that line 24 on it's approach to Moxee, a place named for the edible roots that preceded hops, but which is now growing more tract homes than anything else as change keeps moving. Root grounds to homesteads to industrial farms to exurbs. Progress?

Past Yakima, back onto 12, settling into a well-traveled path for me. Fast climb, faster descent. Another story.

Undulationland

2011-06-18T07:03:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, I had occasion to cruise Palouse country. Or Palus if you prefer--it still sounds the same. It means the region and the Palus tribe to themselves and their neighbors in Sahaptin languages, and falls within frontier rules for spelling of "pelouse," the French word for greensward, which also makes sense in this land of grasses. This is but one way in which the Palouse is hard to pin down.


Palus Country

Driving the roads through Palus country--261, 127, Whoopem Up Hollow Road, and others--you experience the shifting lay of the land, the tricks or perception and perspective. Rolling hills cradle valleys flat with silt and sand and wiggling only sidewise, canyons reach deeper to find big rivers. The hills have a bag of tricks to hopelessly confuse the traveler who strays off the beaten path, and bewilder even those who don't. They come in all sizes, but the hilly region is vast, so you start to think they are all a little bit different, but mostly the same. Often, nothing else breaks the horizon to provide scale, and what appears to be another smallish hill may take much longer to drive up or around, prying loose your visual from temporal.

Even with my habitual crutches--maps of paper and ether, memories of the satellite view pored over early in the morning--I found it easy to get disoriented and to doubt myself. Though the terrain undulates wildly on the human scale, all but the most detailed topo cartography fails to capture it; maps flatten the country to a degree that they are nearly useless for recognizing any one hill. Only where there is a big butte or where water has sliced deep below the surrounding hills do the contour lines reveal much. Except for the Snake's coulee and canyon runs, the rivers and streams tend to be the only level terrain, serpentine as you fly over and look down, but generally with less vertical relief than the cottonwoods lining them as they meander through flat-bottomed valleys.

Rivers Snake Through It

It is possible to wander the hills without ever finding the waterways, though, especially before the roads pierced the region. On foot, you may think you are following a draw that will eventually lead to a rivulet to a creek to a river, but you are just as likely to run into another hill. Go ahead and climb it, and see the next hill, but not much more. Only a few buttes offer you enough height to view over the country, and they are much farther away than your eyes lead you to believe; you may succumb to dehydration or frustration before ever reaching them. Life sustaining rivers like the Snake, the Walla Walla, and the Touchet hide below the horizon (a little easier to find than the Giant Palouse Earthworm), and of course the Palouse with its magnificent falls.

Inscrutable vermiform script crawls across the sky. Maybe prophets can read it.

The good news for wayfaring strangers is that navigation by landmarks is not all that necessary. The sky is huge, and unlike here in Olympia, visible most of the time. The sun ans stars broadcast directions. Jet trails and clouds seem to hang forever in the same spot on some days.

But for the most part, no wanderers roam the hills. Small roads wind among them, bigger roads shoot straight through. The Palouse is mercifully free of truly big roads, though, and even the main throughways like Route 12 are two lanes most of the way. The summer heat coaxes tar from them, and when the sun hits it just right, it shines. Mile after mile of squiggly lines, like Arabic writing under my tires--the moving car reads, and having read, moves on. Or maybe Tibetan script, my truck rolling over with it's prayer wheels.

Ratified Treaty?

2011-06-12T07:51:00.000-07:00

Last year, as the season of seeds filled out, I wrote of rats. I haven't been seeing so many lately, but Olympians unafraid to broach subjects rodential confirm that our fair burg continues to have an issue. My last conversation with the pest control guy (yeah, "control," because they don't even pretend to be able to exterminate the population on even a local basis) revealed that the population is booming. The big Norwegian rats have only advanced a little way uphill from the downtown and waterfront, but black rats (a.k.a. roof rats and maybe some other names, Rattus rattus suggesting that scientists saw this kind first, or worship them as the archetype) are everywhere, moving beyond our neighborhoods and into the woods. Roof rats are smaller than their viking cousins, and maybe less berserk, so I was a little relieved to know that what inhabited my neighborhood, although I'd have been happier with kangaroo rats, which are not really rats, but a desert creature, or maybe just a denizen of old Warner Brothers cartoons.

Initially, I signed a non-aggression pact. As long as they refrained from giving me and my family the black death, I'd leave them be. Other than compost (comprised primarily of fresh-ish veggie scraps that they don't really like anyway), I was not obligated to provide aid of any sort. They would aerate the soil, do some clean-up (my yard would be a thicket of hazel otherwise), and stay in their territory, which is to say the Outside.

But one of their number, whether rat bastard or dirty rat I cannot say, started cheating, and before long they were chewing holes under the bathroom, living in the attic, and finally deciding that they should come through the wallboard and into our home.

Enough.

I killed a couple, and hired rat guy to get some more. We hardened the defensive perimeter. Rats are smart enough not to want to work too hard, or to risk their lives, and they kept out. Michael Pollan wrote about the Omnivore's Dilemma, but the Opportunity of rats and every other omnivore is that when denied one thing (the bacon on my kitchen counter), they make do with something else (the calendula seeds in my garden). I tried to avoid setting out a buffet by keeping the dog's food inside (even though Mr. Crow would not share much with rats anyway) and canceling plans for the backyard granary.

The truce seems to have held, and I see fewer rats than I used to. Maybe they are in a downward trend for a while. Populations of rapid breeders tend to have booms and busts, and even though the winter was not that bad, we're still a few months away from the abundance of late summer and fall, when seeds and nuts will be everywhere. More likely, the rodents are underground.

Literally. Lots of tunnel activity evident lately. I only hope that they are just trying to avoid being seen, afraid of being picked off by humans and hawks. My fear is that they're using the truce to breed an army (rat mammas can pump out ten in a litter, several times a year for about three years), or breach the perimeter surreptitiously in advance of a massive assault, or bring in explosives under the house foundation.

For the time being, though, hope trumps fear, and I continue to make offerings of compost (and they continue to drag it into their tunnels, transforming it into soil), and have not killed any this year. Once the house was clear, I un-hired the rat guy and stopped setting traps. We'll see if that works, or if this is just another scam like Hitler's non-aggression pact with Russia. (Ew, bad comparison. I don't wanna be Stalin.)

No doubt there will be more to this story. The sickly hairless tale of rats and humans will continue to co-evolve. We're stuck with each other.

Sorry, Bentho-Biologists

2011-06-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

A while back, in the mood to both glorify the 20th Century Nature Show, and probably also to indulge in my penchant for high-brow fart jokes, I wrote this post called Abyssal Vent. I didn't mean any harm, and none would have come but for the end of the semester rush to do "research" for science class term papers. As it stands, I now top the google results hen people search 'abyssal vent,' with ot without quotes. Go check it out yourself (and drive up my numbers, bwahahahahaaaaa)

Then again, maybe you shouldn't. Or maybe you should click on some of the actual information out there. Not that mine is bereft of information on deep sea biomes independent of that bastard, the Sun, but there are plenty of actual experts who have built pages and sites with all kinds of information. Sure, most lack the loving attention to methane humour, but they're probably better to cite if you are writing a report. Besides, a lot of the other people that you find with that search have worked long and hard, and don't deserve to be derailed by a snickering shiftless fool like myself.

But I do have to admit, it makes me happy to see an old post gain new life, to think of some high school kid citing a blog entry borne from a desire to taunt and make fart jokes (and better yet, if the kid manages to get by with it), and to educate the young 'uns about David Attenborough and classic nature shows before Shark Week killed the genre.

Why Did I do that?

2011-06-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

The last post had to do with reading, maybe re-reading 1984. Which was a mistake. Incredibly depressing. When the message is that the future is a boot stomping on a human face, forever, then it's time to stop reading. Ignorance may not be strength, but the bliss will do.

Then, I spent time on an island. That always seems to help. Beautiful country, interesting fieldwork, and peace. Lambs and sunsets, seals and kelp. More on that later. For now, back to the techless happiness.

In what may turn into an ironic twist, discovery of a nice used book store on the island, turned into purchase of a book on the history leading up to the Everett Massacre, a dark hour for the proles and outer party dissidents.

Three Cubed Years Later

2011-06-04T07:57:00.000-07:00

Two years before that which radiochronologists by convention and archaeologists by custom deemed "the present" (1950), E. Blair a.k.a. G. Orwell finished a novel imagined to occur 36 years after publication, thus determining the year in which Apple would unleash its brand upon the PC market.

You with me so far?

Good. It's been three-cubed years since 1984 now, and things have changed. Things have stayed the same. For one thing, I am absolutely sure that I recently read 1984. I was supposed to in high school, but may have shirked. May have read something else, been tired, or listened to Death Piggy instead. Or hung out with my girlfriend. Or something.

Hard to say, what with the past being so over and inaccessible, tossed into the memory hole and all. In 1984 the Party revised the past, trying to control the future. In 1984, the year after I graduated high school, post-modernism had made the journey from France to the US, from oxymoron to paradigm, and the past was reduced to contested construct, and the future was bright for madmen, and scary for the rest of us. We truly sat on the brink. Of what, who knows for sure? Thermonuclear war, unending prosperity, a New World Order,...something more ambivalent?

Yes, ambivalent. The only sure thing.

What we were on the brink of was full-on computer revolution. Mac promised freedom, and delivered tactically, but may have granted that old mustachioed Brother of ours a durable strategic advantage. Conceivably: immortality. Not that Apple invented everything, or even everything cool. It's just that by designing computers that we want in our homes, that we can interact with more humanly, they managed to insert the telescreen into our homes. I sit here now with a camera aimed at me that could be visible to a hacker anywhere. Could be someone just having fun looking in on random strangers. Could be a criminal. Could be a state (worse yet, corporate) security apparatus. Could be Big Brother his own damn self. Whoever it is, I love you.

And also, please don't put a bullet in my head. Or anywhere else for that matter.

But it's different than a telescreen, having a computer. For one thing, I can turn it off, or defeat the camera with a folded business card, or write bullshit, as I am wont to do. The web has allowed images of brutal repression to be seen, which may do some good, living up to the now ironic "1984" Apple commercial. More so in Egypt than in Syria or Bahrain, maybe. News flourished, then diluted, become motes on the broad horizon of information we can now perceive.

And there's always that potential for the device to go from convenience to spy. Maybe I value my privacy more than most, I know for sure that there are many people willing to carry a GPS-enabled phone, web-ready, its blue tooth bit into every little wi-fi cookie offered. Not just for whatever hacker may be bored enough to look at, but for everyone on facebook,...twits.

Few of them are being spied on for any purpose other than to pitch the right ads at them, but nearly all are willing to sacrifice actual interaction to fritter their opposable thumbs away on ether. Stuck in Apple's GUI, playing with cool apps, wallowing in irony, being cool. Not revolutionizing, just thinking that the Arab in the street has a cool shirt showing a guy screaming in protest, unaware that the image was lifted from an Israeli kid, posted more or less randomly online.

You still with me?

I'm not, to be honest. It was something about the past being sketchy, then Big Brother watching, or something. Post-modernists stepped in where Stalinists failed, and to be honest (if such a thing still be possible), despite recent setbacks, the P-Ms still hold enough sway that I can claim to be confused because of them, because of confusion in general as a condition of 21st Century American culture, and not be held responsible for having not fully read the book, or understood the terms of agreement that flashed before me before my thumb hit click and launched me into personal computing, gateway drug to the web, delivered thus unto whatever spiders lurk there.

It's the Environment, Stupid

2011-06-03T19:46:00.000-07:00

If history via film documentary is to be believed, ragin' Cajun James Carville's mantra lifted Clinton to victory in 1992, back when votes were counted in presidential elections. "It's the Economy, Stupid." Clinton hammered the GOP on their mismanagement of the economy, reminded voters of how poorly they'd fared after being trickled on, and swept into office.

In 2008, I suggested that things had changed a bit, and that now It's the War, Stupid. I was wrong, people don't actually care that much as long as the dead are foreigners or the poor and working class who fill our military's ranks. Not just that, but I was hilariously wrong in suggesting that the Mayday action by longshoremen--shutting down ports as a war protest--represented an awakening of the Boston Tea Party spirit, completely unaware that a couple of years later the Tea Party would have been hijacked by bitter, rusted wing-nuts.

2012 election coverage is heating up, with Great White Hope Mit Romney (a German phrase meaning "with gypsies") declaring his candidacy today, but I find it hard to get excited. I'll vote for the lesser of evils, sure, but to call me an Obama supporter when he has embraced Republican policy on the economy and wars would be an exaggeration.

The problem is more fundamental than US politics will ever manage to address, unless I am being blind again to a radical change just around the corner. It's the Environment, Stupid.

As I write this, the morning news is focusing on the economy. The Dow slipped 2% yesterday, the conventional wisdom being that this is due to the weakness of our recovery from the Great Recession.

Look deeper, though. Why so weak? One factor is the weather. Violent storms lay waste to places, places where there had been jobs. Floods drown other jobs and stall even more as supply chains become clogged on riverways shut down while the Army Corps flounders amid disasters it created. I just heard from family in Virginia that temps climbed well into the 90s during May, reminding us all that summer will bring the kind of heat that slows everyone down, evaporates water supplies, and spawns hurricanes and tornadoes. We may get lucky again, and dodge a year of major storms hitting the Atlantic and Gulf seaboards, but if they do, look forward to more economic stall-outs.

Deeper still, the Japan earthquake and tsunami disrupted a major economy, one of the aftershocks being stilled production lines at American plants. The spectre of nuclear accidents is bound to dampen investment in more such plants here (despite generous corporate welfare having the Obama boost), and Germany has already made the choice--characterized in US media as an economic drag--to abandon that path in favor of more difficult routes to energy production (and, in a move utterly foreign to us, energy conservation as well). Meanwhile, Icelandic vulcanism disrupts air travel even of the leader of the free world again and again.

Meanwhile, glaciers melt and sea level rises into our neighborhoods. Considering the portion of the global population residing and working in coastal areas, this has implications too enormous for us to want to consider, and so by and large we do nothing, waiting until a disaster forces action, by which time the remedies will cost far more. There will be casualties, human and economic. At the same time, the ocean grows more acidic as it ameliorates our pollution of the atmosphere. So acid that fish stocks are affected (not to mention krill, sweet sweet krill), and shipping firms must spend more time and money maintaining hulls. Many eyes are on the arctic, where the melting may finally open the Northwest Passage that Europeans searched for forever, but that will not eliminate the adversities wrought by stormier acidic oceans and drowned waterfronts.

Sea and air trade has spread bugs and pathogens worldwide, causing damage to timber, agriculture, and other means of extracting GDP from the earth. Climate change, too, is not likely to be a positive in natural resource economies. The northwest has dodged firestorms for years now, but as the beetle-killed forests expand, we can be sure that La Nina or whatever has spared us thus far will not hold out forever, and vast tracts of timber will go up in smoke before they can provide jobs. Droughts do not just have it in for the former Communist lands, and will visit us in their own sweet time.

In the meantime, the political minions of our corporate overlords work ceaselessly to avert any legislative or regulatory attempt to stop them from dumping toxins into the biosphere, and to thwart the lawsuits now required to enforce rules already on the books. Every year, more drinking water supplies are found to be contaminated, and the brownfields expand, often irreversibly poisoned--more land and water subtracted from our base for sustained human survival and culture. And it ain't gonna get cleaned up at this rate: the same politicians who prevent sensible regulation cite economic hardship to prevent funds from being used for environmental clean-up, or for jump-starting clean energy industry.

Increasingly desperate, we double down on all bets, hoping that technology will rescue us, that science will go messianic on us and bear miracles. Sounds crazy, right? Not so much to the hucksters hawking genetically engineered snake oil and fracking the hell out of mother earth; they'll make their money, spend lavishly, and die seven months into pacemaker number two,...before the cosmic repo man comes. Weeds in the field? Just buy this herbicide immune soybean seed and spray the hell out of your field. Water no good? Try our bottled water, we swear it's safe, and stats show that you'll never be able to pin your cancer on us. Drought stricken, fish all gone, locusts swarming? No prob, try new Soylent Green, made with sweet sweet krill,...sorta.

Old 'Awa, New Tea

2011-05-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

The great thing about a 3-day weekend is how it gives you time to concoct a complex plan, get started, procrastinate, rush to take care of the chores you'd ignored before because the project seemed cooler, and finally make a little more headway on the project before collapsing in lumbar agony. That's why I am sitting on a heating pad with stacks of wood cut, yet unjoined, in the garage.

My ridiculous primate architecture is modern enough that the skeleton is no longer so adept at canopy cavorting, but in many aspects not much different than a Cambrian creature. The spine is fine supine in the ocean brine, but sucks for feet on concrete or bending over.

In Hawai`i, one option was to drink some `awa (a.k.a. kava in most of Polynesia, yangona in Fiji, or Piper methysticum in the priestly language of botanists), which relaxes the muscles and either alleviates pain or makes a guy forget it in the midst of kava conversation, which flows easily and abundantly. I've seen it called a narcotic time and again, but it just ain't so. I used to sit under the banyan tree at the community garden, having a few cups with the Rotumans, Fijians, and Tongans, spinning yarns and stringing stories. Tongue numbed and eventually legs too, but nothing like being drunk and much subtler than the western pharmacornucopia had trained me to withstand.

I grew a dozen or so plants in the cinder of Puowaina, adding years of leaves and compost before anything was harvested from black soil full of worms. Most were still going when I moved away from the islands, leaving them in good hands. The ones I dug were approved of by the garden crew, and my finest waka roots made it to Kona, to Nu`alolo, to Moloka`i Nui a Hina.

Anything left from that batch would be a decade or more old at this point, but it turns out that I had some other `awa in the freezer, sitting untouched for who knows how long. I know a guy who spent a little time in Fiji and a few people with Hawai`i connections, but nobody to sit with and socialize over a bowl of vintage root. So, I broke into it for the medicinal value tonight, and here I sit, obviously feeling well enough to remain in the chair and blather on. So now I know that yeah, kavalactones retain some effect even after years in a freezer. Enough so I can blather further on. And on.

And off. To way back when I was writing about blackberries, a couple of posts ago. That had to do with another type of drink: blackberry leaf tea. Specifically the local native known as the trailing blackberry (a.k.a. dewberry to people who are more mature than I am, or Rubus ursinus to the science Latinists). I had hoped to dry it under the sun yesterday, but the sun got wind of that, and hid behind the clouds, snickering audibly.

I'd also planned to cook up some tender shoots, but got waylaid by designing and starting to build something, and instead put off even stripping the leaves off the stalks til the after dinner sun-break today. The result is shown below, inside and away from dew, sending out aroma runners through the house, tendrils of citrus and banana peel wafting and tickling noses. I think it'll be good tea.

A Compendium of Gathering

2011-05-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

Bracken and Black (High-end forager supply company, or AC/DC allusion?)

Nettles are flowering, and the time is past to gather them, but as the year rolls on new opportunities arise low and high. In among the tangles of young trees, webs of bracken rhizomes have been sending up shoots for a while now, and last week I managed to snag a few in that liminal state between tight fiddleheads and loose leaves--not ideal, but not yet deadly. (Well, maybe. Bracken contains carcinogens, but so do a lot of things. I grew up on the East Coast, where all late-20th Century children were marinated in toxins, so I'm not worried about a few ounces of fern at this point.) If it snaps off easily, I figure it's still good.

Nicely coiled fiddleheads are a little earlier, and harder to find, having not reached up through the unraveled blanket of last year's dead fronds. On the other hand, when you see a patch of the orangey leftovers of last year's patch, you know where to poke around. It's just a question of finding a place where you don't have to reach through too many blackberry canes or branch-tangles to get at them. Long ago, it was a lot easier, since tribes burned some areas to fertilize the bracken and thin out the competition. Yet another case where "gathering" is not so passive, and tending was the order of the day.

Wait, did I just make it sound like native gathering was in the past? No, it carries on. Generations of assaults by guns and germs, assimilation by churches and boarding schools, lost land and knowledge,...none of this has completely wiped out the old cultures of the northwest. In forests around the Salish Sea, tribes have answered the call of the rising sap, congregating around cedars to get boughs, bark, and roots.

In the Days of Yore (Last Week)

As the Plains people used all the parts of the buffalo, so do the local tribes use all of the cedar. Wood becomes houses and canoes. Roots become baskets so tight and durable that you can boil water in them. Boughs might be woven more loosely into baskets that hold clams. The inner bark can become anything: hats and clothes, ropes, mats, diapers,...it's as versatile as plastic, and much more sustainable.

The practice is to take a little bit, allowing the tree to heal itself. While tribes don't depend on the tree to clothe everyone anymore, they do use the bark. The photo above is a group of kids from a tribal school, escaping their more urban home to connect with the trees and nature. Another tribe is gathering bark in preparation for hosting the canoe journey next summer, when they will need things made from the bark for themselves and for a big potlatch. To give a visiting elder a nice cedar hat in 2012, people have to be on the ball in early 2011, scouting trees, pulling bark, cleaning and curing it, and finally spending the long hours of weaving that produce the gift.

Every time a kid learns to pull the bark and transform it into gifts, she is adding a strand to the weave of culture. She is perpetuating traditions thousands of years old, and preserving knowledge that may be useful for thousands more. She adds her weft today, and becomes the warp that her kids will add to tomorrow. Every student who learns that the ferns are ready when they are ready, that gathering is governed by earth's cycles, that simple knowledge can be profound, that working with nature instead of trying to dominate it yields great rewards, is tapping into a flow that has sustained his people for millenia, and is a far greater hope for the future than our petroleum economy.

Spring arrives, the fronds stretch up and the sap rises. People who listen hear the call, and receive the treat.

NOTE!: Bracken would be hard to eliminate, but cedar bark worth harvesting is far less common. Tempting as it is to go pull some and try to making something, think twice and talk with the tribe whose territory you are in before even thinking about stripping a tree. There is a lot of spiritual and practical knowledge that governs how it is to be done, and if a bunch of people descend on the forest to gather, many trees will be needlessly damaged by the unskilled or over-harvested by even well-intentioned students of northwest native cultures. Undeveloped lands where tribes can exercise traditional and treaty guaranteed rights are becoming less common, and land managers have enough to worry about without an influx of people with no treaty rights gathering bark.

In general, if you are going to forage, think about who will come next year, a decade from now, seven generations in the future. If you are cutting off their chance, you are not doing it right.

I was gonna write about tending to the wild berries

2011-05-29T06:10:00.000-07:00

but it turns out I already did. That time, didn't post any photos, however, so here are a few. I just trimmed back the new Spring runners, who in their enthusiasm would drown the carpet of older growth that has been flowering heavily this month. Where a shoot can cover new ground (like the pile of alder and cherry branches I want to hide), I let 'em go, but otherwise I want every precious photon that makes it to the South Sound ground to kiss the berries.

Can you hear the bees?

Last year, I found that doing this makes the ordinarily tiny native blackberry swell up and sweeten. The wild imperative is to cover ground, send out runners to new bare spots, clamber and climb through other plants: colonize, colonize, colonize before the canopy closes so tight nothing will grow below. The berries seem to be secondary, the way to get birds and mice to transport a few seeds should the vegetative expansion stall.

So in I step to cut off the natural process for my own benefit, or my kids' benefit, anyway. This year I am more organized, and have caught the runners at a really good stage: tender tips, well-formed leaves, not enough time for alder debris and other dirt to add what I don't want, or for bugs to chew what I do. I've heard of the tips being candied and preserved, and tasted a few as I was cutting: there is a hint of berry flavor wrapped in mild astringency. Books say to peel them, but I found that pinching a shoot and running my fingers down it strips off what passes for thorns on new growth. Not sure whether I'll candy and preserve them, but they'll probably work in the wok or steamer, maybe snuck into a salad.

Liko

The liko, the emerging leaves on the extreme tip, has more thorns and both the texture and flavor are stronger than the stem, so I'll pinch those off for tea. I'm hoping that it will be analogous to some fine Chinese tea I had one time, formed entirely of the baby leaves picked at their tender best.

Further down, the runner is too tough to eat, but the leaves are good. Again, it's a matter of pinch and pull, but this time I keep the part I removed, and toss the stalk. (As soon as I write that, I find myself wondering what uses the stripped runners could have. Hmmm...) And again on another matter, I cannot overstate how nice the leaves are right now. No bug holes or eggs or exudations, no blemishes, none of the hardness of texture and appearance of old leaves. I have read many times about gathering blackberry leaves for tea, but nobody mentions that it should be done at young runner stage. I've already mentioned the tender freshness of the produce at that point, as well as the future benefit in terms of berries, but there is also this: the thorns are smaller and not so stiff, so it's easier and less painful.

It's rumored that there will be sun today, and the leaves can dry. That, I could not plan, but the rest of the timing I will take credit for later today as I sip some tea, and later this summer as I feast on fat juicy berries.

The Gospel of Thallus

2011-05-28T07:06:00.000-07:00


Flaccid Thallus

In writing the last post, I learned the word thallus. It's the scientific term for the undifferentiated tissue comprising the bodies of kelp and other algae, fungi, and as you've probably guessed, Myxogastria, the predators of the slime mold world (for which I carry a minor obsession). Getting over my initial disappointment with the word having nothing to do with phallus (except when mushrooms look like penises), I realized that it's a pretty interesting concept.

The level at which thalloid tissue is undifferentiated is cellular. No fundamental difference occurs between one cell and another in kelp, even though the plant appears to have roots, a stipe, leaves,...all the parts that in a more complex plant have their own cell type. The kelp thallus is the entire plant, one kind of cell from where it grabs the ocean floor, sometimes stretching hundreds of feet to the tip of the leaf-which-is-not-a-leaf. It's all thallus, baby.

Roots and trunk? Nope, thalloid "holdfasts"

Organisms lacking cell differentiation are considered primitive by primates, but there is an elegance in their design. Thallus-bodied species create analogs of all the necessary organs and structures from a single type of cell. Efficient and clever, if you ask me. Why bother with complexity and all the risks that come with it if you can replicate the effect with simple building blocks? In the human world, the power to turn a lump of undifferentiated clay into a living being is considered divine, but somehow when something similar happens in the algal or fungal worlds, it's just "primitive."

Midrib and leaf? Huh-uh, just more thallus.

From ancient sects to cyber sex, humans have worshiped the phallus, but rarely the thallus, even though it has procreated for eons before the first complex erection aroused or amused or horrified a female. We've populated our mythologies and comic books with shape changers, but show no appreciation for the humble thallus, adopting the forms it needs to, changing as the slime mold does from something shapeless and amoebic to flagellic and plasmoid, even going zygotic and making fruiting bodies when it gets in the mood. We presume superiority, but will be outlasted by these simple beings.

Backroads: The Kelp Highway

2011-05-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

On the Kelp Way in Clallam County, looking over at Vancouver Island.

How about instead of a backroad, I follow the first road this time? The stream so main that it was traveled by the first people to head east into the Western Hemisphere. For most of my life, this was presumed to have been the Bering Land Bridge, the rim of Beringia, a tectonic plate where some dry land peeked up when glaciers borrowed the ocean's topmost fathoms. People followed game across the arc of dry land, and ended up in the New World, where they made big fluted spearpoints for the convenience of archaeologists, who would name them after the town of Clovis, named after the first King of the Franks, who never conquered anything within a few kilomiles of New Mexico. What these people called themselves, nobody knows, but it was probably the same as nearly every other culture that has had the sense to avoid citification: "People."

It does not much matter, since Clovis people came along after others. Earlier sites have emerged over the years, and though plenty of people argue against the 40,000 year old dates in Monte Verde, hardly anybody disputes that 15,000 or so (feel free to give or take on the order of a millenium or two) is OK. In the old days, this was a problem because the period when the land Beridge was exposed was later. But now we know that people lived here before they could walk here. It already looks ridiculous and bigoted to espouse such an utterly baseless theory as "People could not get here except on foot. The land route was not available until 11,000 years ago. Ergo the hemisphere was settled after 11,000 years ago. Oh, and aren't these spearpoints cool?"

Sure, Clovis points are cool, but you know what's cooler? This:

This is an older type of point that has been found along the Pacific Coast. In the California islands, it was found along with a lot of bird bones, and is presumed to have been used for hunting them. The most common name for these is "crescent points," because they have that shape, sorta. What they look even more like is half of the bottom of a cowry shell, but the point is that they are every bit as beautiful as a Clovis point, and from a functional standpoint may be even more elegant (there are a bunch of Clovis points that would be useless for hunting, they are so big).

The photo comes from an article here: Link

I don't know a lot more about this than you (maybe less), but the idea in that article and elsewhere, that the people who made these artifacts settled the New World by boat, is hard to resist. Kelp grows continuously enough along the shores of the North Pacific that long open-water voyages are not necessary (also: not precluded) to get all the way to California. Kelp forests are incredibly rich in food, and their wave-dampening fronds offer canoe people the respite of smoother water. They offer access to shellfish clinging to rocks that would be extremely difficult and risky to get at on foot. They take People alongshore until they find a nice place to stop for a while. Or even stop forever, set up a village and stay. Even those People, however reluctant they may be to set out on a thousand mile trip, venture back into kelpy waters regularly for everything from the kelp itself to fish, birds, molluscs, pinnipeds, crustaceans, and all the other orders of life stacked in the deep larder of a kelp forest.

Kelp Highway Off-Ramp.

Glaciers plan to return still more of the water they borrowed during the Pleistocene, and we can look forward to more drowned land. By the time we run out of petrochemicals, we may have difficulty walking between hills that have become islands. Kelp and kin will still be there, topography will become bathymetry, and the seaweeds will cling to it. Even if (OK, when) the big one hits, the Subduction Zone quake that drops pieces of crust deep below sea level, then kelp thallus will respond with prodigious growth; the kelp forest will just get taller, more fecund. If we adapt to reality, and don't insist on living by some back-asswards theory, we'll be alright too.

Ain't Rand

2011-05-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

Under the heading of belated criticism: Ayn Rand is full of crap. This is not as procrastinatory as you may think, since this rant was triggered not so much by her original foolosophy as by the worship of it on the more recent Mad Men TV show. Which yeah, I saw years after it first aired, and don't appreciate nearly as much as the shills would have wanted me to.

Kinda like capitalism. And advertising. And fauxlosophy.

Yeah, faux. I don't use a lot of French, but sometimes it sounds right. And what better way to accuse someone of being fake than to deploy it in a way that signals both pretentiousness and base punniness?

Anyway, Ayn ain't Ayn. She was a nice Russian Jewish girl who changed her name. Self-loathing or just false advertising? I dunno. Websites argue over whether Rand was stolen from a typewriter bRand, but seem to agree that Ayn is a bastardization of a Finnish name. "How can I sound northern European without being too Teutonic, not Nazi Nordic?" she must've figured..."I know, Finnish!" No, it's phony Finnish, Fauxnish.

As for her alleged philosophy, constructed to make the rich feel good about themselves. I have it on good authority that there are actually people in the upper reaches of the American financial apparatus who still buy it. Greenspan was a fan. Atlas Shrugged is based on the preposterous idea that the rest of us would be in a world of hurt were wealthy industrialists to go on strike (nope, workers know how to keep production going), as if self-involved greedheads would work collectively in the first place.

The concept that self-interest among the wealthy is good for everyone has been disproved by decades of trickle-down economics, which amounts to a severe drought for the working and the poor. Turns out that lassez-faire capitalism is not nearly as good for the vast majority of people as for the unfettered few. It is a damning irony that the wealthy individuals and corporations set free by deregulation spend so much of their time implementing the opposite of laissez faire among the rest of us: exclusive vendor contracts are prizes, captive audiences cherished, cartels and monopolies seen as success. While much has been written about the complex and creative financial instruments devised in recent decades, the brain power has come from math majors despairing of an honest job, and the patrons essentially use these tools like the ghetto thug uses a gun, to rob people who work for their money.

There is another Rand, the Rand Corporation, which is just as dubious. I had an uncle who worked there when he was not in the CIA (that's a joke, people: once you go in you are never out of the CIA). The name is another construct, a not-quite-contraction, not-quite-acronym based on "Research ANd Development," though it could just as easily be Research AND nothing; they have pioneered and exemplified the "consulting firm," a creature that privatizes the thinking functions of government, and holds zero responsibility for implementation and consequences of its clever ideas. (Was it with RAND or the CIA when my uncle supported the brilliant strategy of arming and training Bin Ladin to fight a superpower?)

Borne from the defense industry, but now claiming much broader relevance, RAND is an enduring example of the transformation of minor governmental ineptitude and frustration with red tape into a cash flow from public coffers into private hands. Not just theirs--RAND being allegedly non-profit--but to the security firms replacing the military and the arms manufacturers who profit from endless military action (or if not action, readiness). And if the transfer of wealth from taxpayers to corporations does not yield the desired result, then RAND is at the ready to do another study; the dollars flow free of responsibility and consequences.

Ever since Reagan became spokesman in chief, advocates of laissez faire government have had their way. Even before his ascendancy, the Rands of the world justified the actions he would take, stated that what was good for the rich or for the national security apparatus was good for all Americans. We should know better by now that to believe such fakes, having transferred most of our wealth to plutocrats and frittered away large piles of public wealth on wars we fight to deal with warlords and dictators we installed and supported. Wish I could say that I believe we have learned our lesson.

Same Old Same Old Paradox

2011-05-22T05:29:00.000-07:00

Fresh-baked rock. But would I know that if it weren't so obvious?

Archaeologists face the challenge of reconstructing the past based on the tiny percentage of it that does not decay, wash away, fall prey to collectors, or otherwise get gone. But before we even get to coaxing tales from stones, we have to find them. In that search, human habits are both boon and bane.

Much as we want to think we are different, that we have higher intelligence, we are animals, mammals with habitat needs, habits hard wired. Until recent generations when urban living and industrial farming has been drained the countrysides and made possible lifeways disconnected from subsistence and survival activities that were typical since we spun off from the ape clan, we have not escaped the biological imperatives. Omnivorous us can adapt to all sorts of environments, but we need to be near fresh water, and we'd prefer some flat ground with a field of vision not entirely obscured by vegetation.

Oh, and we burn things. Lots of people now live in bad habitat rendered acceptable by architecture and infrastructure, but even city dwellers like to have a campfire now and then, and when we head out to do this, often as not we end right back in what our brains' ape lobes recognize as good habitat. Places people camp now often end up having been discovered thousands of years ago. For that matter, a lot of cities are built where towns replaced villages replaced camps replaced the spot where the first human to lope through decided to stop and rest. Habitat preference narrows the archaeological search, because we tend to return to the same old places time and again.

But it also complicates the archaeological record, the stuff left behind by waves of ancient passers-by and rooted residents. For one thing, more recent inhabitants and visitors tend to remove the most obvious and interesting artifacts. Sometimes, people recognize a place as being rich in arrowheads or some other cool thing, and make a concerted effort to take them. Occasionally, the people doing this are careful about it, and make voluminous notes not just about the cool stuff, but broken and dull things as well as the dirt around it all; then it's called archaeology instead of looting. Methods and motivations don't affect the end result much at all, though, the archaeological record is non-renewable, and once disturbed cannot be studied again.

Even if they are not taking things, people make archaeology more difficult. They dig holes for trash or poop, make ruts and spin wheels, and do all sorts of things that churn up the layered sediments archaeologists rely on to tell time. Some of this can be sorted out.

But primitive imperatives also cause us to do things that distort archaeology not by removing or moving artifacts, but by adding imposters. Unless campers are kind enough to toss in some artifacts, a modern campfire can look just like an ancient one. Rock reddened and cracked by the fire, ash and charcoal settling in. All it takes is a few years of leaf fall or a river overflowing its banks and depositing silt to sink the modern campfire and make it harder to determine if it is ancient. Yeah, the technology exists to get a radiocarbon date from the charcoal or piece of deer bone, but the money is not often there. In my job, it's never there.

There was a place I worked at on Moloka'i where we found a bunch of C-shape shelters, a small stone wall (Shaped like which letter? Yes, a C. Very good.) that forms a little windbreak. Hawaiians made them all the time when they were not at their regular house, and when you find a large number, it can mean that the area was heavily used, or was used for a long time. The place I'm thinking of had some sweet potato fields and reefs with fish, so it made sense to find them here. But then I talked with a guy from the island who had joined the marines, and remembered being sent back to his home island for training. Thrilled that maneuvers had brought him to familiar turf (habitat whose subtleties he had previously mastered), he set about teaching the haoles in his unit how to make C-shapes and gather shellfish. The result was new "sites" that looked just like the old ones. Some probably made use of old ones, even. I'd noticed a few shell casings around, but on an island where lots of people hunt and military surplus rifles are common, had just assumed it was re-use of ancient features.

Some tricks of the trade help archaeologists sort our the modern from the ancient, and on balance its better to be studying animals with definite habitat preferences than randomly peripatetic creatures, but human habits can mix things up. I hope we're getting past the 20th Century tendency to dump heaps of glass and metal and plastic everywhere we go, even if it did help sort out ancient from modern activity. The contemporary, environmentally sensitive camper or hunter who leaves behind nothing more than some organic material to decay, maybe some fire cracked rock and charcoal, may make my job more complicated, but I am glad that humans are still humans. It's comforting to look into the fire, chew on some local bounty, and see the past.

Ode to Backroads

2011-05-21T07:40:00.000-07:00

Maybe the last road you'll ever take

In this blog, you may have noticed an obsession with backroads.

Long ago I took the off ramp from the freeway, began avoiding the arterial routes. I hate being in traffic's mainstream, locked into someone else's pace, breathing their exhaust. The primary road lacks soul and scenery except when the desire to move large volumes of vehicles from point A to point B cannot avoid traversing beautiful country (I-90 through Snoqualmie Pass, for instance), and even then there is always some better alternative (two lanes of Route 20 to the north, or of Route 12 to the south). Freeways aim to streamline and thus shed everything interesting, force everyone into the same rhythmless rate of travel, offer quirkless repetition of the same few gas stations and fast food places. Urban thoroughfares consist of a series of stoplights between which strips of stores and other concrete castings mark what was once a landscape as corporate occupied territory. Where mindless masses heed the realtors' idiotic mantra of "Location, location, location," pioneers with all their memory are pushed out, humans with their individuality are hidden somewhere behind facades, and even businesses grow less diverse and interesting. Top dollar rent, bottom feeder culture.

Maybe my penchant for backroads stems from something simpler, though, and all of the above (and more, believe me, there's much more to that rant) is just rantionalization of a more basic desire to avoid traffic.

Over the years, many of my best friends have been the same, people who will take longer to reach a destination if it means avoiding highways and main streets. Humans who crave green roadsides. Apes with an appreciation for the offbeat and historic.

Back when I'd only driven for a few short years, I read Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. Already a lover of backroads, I cannot say it influenced me as much as the book and my internal narrative enjoyed a happy feedback, a harmony. It reinforced my belief that the road less traveled holds more promise of adventure and discovery, of meditation and discovery.

Over more years, backroads driving has become more than just a personal preference. Curving roads cannot be driven too fast, and in slowness there is more opportunity to see the lay of the land: terrain, vegetation, and old human haunts emerge in a way speed will not allow. As a student of cultural landscapes, there is no replacement for this kind of recon. The capillary network of small and semi-forgotten transportation penetrates most of the country and its history. What seem to most of my contemporaries to be roads to nowhere often go to a place that once was somewhere, to the old timer with a trove of memory or the ruins of where that memory settled into the earth.

So I take the lesser tine at the fork in the road, and follow. Sometimes this is history thrown into reverse: the old game trail that became and Indian Trail that became a road, then was bypassed and became less useful, less used, and abandoned. Shoulders shrug away to nothing, two lanes become one, pavement grows leprotic and patchy, and eventually fades to gravel, to mud-ruts. Trees arch over, salmonberry and blackberry crowds the lane, scratching the sides of the rare truck that enters with all the fervor and skill of a beginning violin student. Eventually, you come to the point where the plants just grown in the road, or maybe to the washed out bridge or dug up road where further travel must be on foot.

On lucky days, this means a 3-point turn (maybe 5 or 7), but other times the road ends with no wide spot, just dropping into a ditch or swamp. Then comes the slow back-up, trying to see the road behind through dusty windows and cockeyed mirrors. Either way can scrape the nerves like the brush scrapes the truck. Slipping off a narrow logging road leaves you in one of several predicaments: praying that enough wheels have traction to drive out, high-centered and figuring out if the winch can save you, a long walk out musing over ways to avoid ignominy among peers, or a quick and accelerating tumble down the mountain. None is pretty, but most are not deadly. It may take hours to walk out to find help, and this never happens in areas where your cell phone will work.

A different danger is getting stuck because someone blocks you in, parking in front of a gate you'd locked behind you. Sometimes, in quest of something, I've driven through an open gate, risking being locked in. Passing such portals carries some risk, maybe some thrill. The ones I tend to avoid either have evidence of heavy ongoing use (running into a gravel or logging truck barreling down and not expecting to see me is not something I want), or that have no trespassing signs, especially the home made ones, complete with promises of shooting.

There is a dark side to some back roads. Residents may be friendly, or they may live there because they do not want to be found--fugitives and recluses eye the passerby with suspicion, with one hand resting on a gun. The lone lost traveler may get help, or may disappear after a short exchange has established that nobody else knows where they are. Last week I drove a road that set my skin to crawling, my mind wandered to a Puna road that looked like this but for the lack of red cinders, a road where a girl was raped and killed because she thought a lone bike ride would be fun, but happened through the turf of meth-smoking animals who thought it would be fun to run her down.

Nothing bad happened to me, and it rarely does on backroads. The isolation of back roads just lends itself to musings that can turn dark and paranoid under the wrong circumstances. Just as easily, though, you may come around a bend and see epiphany, or at least some interesting wildlife. Lots of times, I've seen a bear helping himself to salmonberries colonizing old logging roads, or come out of the woods and into a vista, or found a road on no map that leads to exactly where I want to go.

Meanwhile, some schmuck is tied up in traffic. There are people who never venture of the beaten, paved, and strip-malled path. I feel sorry for them, but not enough to want them out on the fine web of rural roads that I mostly enjoy alone. Too many people, and I'd have to give up some of the traveling habits that make backroads so much fun. No slowing down in the middle of the road to snap a photo, or outright parking there to poke around, knowing that nobody's coming. No peeing in privacy right out in the open. No foraging without giving away secrets. No, I am very happy that the main stream is where it is, and that poetry aside, almost nobody takes the road less traveled.

Stupid Metaphors About Writing

2011-05-16T19:55:00.000-07:00

Yeah, someone searched the words in this title, and found me.

I just looked and there I am on page one of the google results, along with a bunch of automated compendia of quotes and writings about writing. Just when I thought it could not be any more dull, I saw that there was also, right at the end of the page, a link to Douglas Adams quotes. I am in good company.

But what I was writing about were writers' stupid metaphors, or at least boring and uncreative metaphors. Google and other engine searches not necessarily catch onto order of subtleties.

OK, the real reason I wrote that post was because I'd just had this epiphany that I could slip in a surreptitious and approximate f-bomb by writing the words "metaphor queue." It would have been really funny to the one person who caught on if I hadn't gotten antsy and commented (on my own blog, how tacky) just to repeat the punchline. And now I just feel cheap and Leno-esque, having killed the punchline by repeating it.

By saying it again, more obviously, to see if people got it.

And by writing about it even more, now.
Oh, how I hate myself.

The only thing that makes me fell better is knowing: 42.

Cooookin in the Rain, I'm Cooking in the Rain

2011-05-15T07:21:00.000-07:00

Warning, Objects in the grill-dome reflection appear fatter than they are.

Yeah, the title is stolen from a musical, even though I despise musicals in general. I do make an exception for Clockwork Orange, though.

Cooking out holds an almost completely opposite place in my esteem, as long as I am the cooker-man, and the few times I haven't enjoyed it can be blamed on inexplicably bad meat or unavailability of good wood.

But not rain.

Which is good, living in Olympia, where fair weather grilling is not possible often enough to sate my hunger for smoky goodness. If I held off every time clouds threatened rain, or drizzle dropped, or outright downpours dampened the day, I'd be a sad shell of a man. If the Oxygen to H2O ratio is high enough to let flames get a hold of the wood, then I'm good to go.

Yeah, wood. I am not a modern American griller, weekend warrior with a thousand dollar gas grill or a humbler briquet bucket. I do not have a "Kiss the Cook" apron or feel the need to dress up in silly summery outfits. I have no fancy gear, and my grill was foraged on Large Trash Pick-up Day (prior to which, I had a little hobo set-up consisting of a few cinderblocks). But I am pretty particular about what I'll cook on.

Gas is an idiotic expense: somewhere far away somebody fracks the earth, refines the stuff, compresses and ships it, and charges me enough to make it grate on my homesteader soul, but not enough to really pay for the environmental damage. Besides: no flavor.

And briquettes? Long ago when I used them, the lighter-fluid infusion bothered me to begin with, and the occasional appearance of nails and other foreign objects reminded me that yes, I was cooking something I would eat on a lozenge of ground up who-knows-what. I imagined the maker, a "legitimate businessman" (sarcasm implied, whether you want to take that as the mafia euphemism or just an indictment of capitalist worship of cheap raw materials) dumping old lumber covered in lead paint, bits of railroad ties, and all manner of toxic crap into the hopper.

A couple of times, I bought actual charcoal, the slow-burned nuggets of wood, crow-shiny chunks with fire enough left in them to cook. But again, my cheapskate DIY self just cannot abide the expense, even if I had the cash to spare.

So I scavenge wood. In Hawai`i, I had a secret spot on Puowaina where kiawe (mesquite, more or less, to you gringos and chicanos) was there for the taking, and supplemented it sometimes with mango from the tree I'd trimmed. In Virginia, it was hickory from the back yard thinning. Here, it's alder, again from the back yard. I am on year three of the wood from a single big alder I took down, and now I know why the Indians would use the half-rotten, age-softened wood to smoke fish. The smoke is abundant and flavorful without being too acrid or overpowering. Saying so may mean that I cannot return to the south, but: it's better than hickory.

So out I go to find some windfall twigs and maybe some cedar splints to get the fireball rolling, adding on progressively larger pieces until the real chunks are going. All the while: running out front to pull some garlic and get it clean and diced, back to check the fire, in to flavor the fish and burgers, back out to check the fire and fiddle with it's air supply, in again to grab another beer, back out to spread the coals how I want them. Then bring on the food, and set to grilling. Often as not, I'll be talking with my sister, already fed and 3000 miles away, as the process unfolds. Nice long conversation, and the coals are ready. This is how I measure time; watches are for chumps.

The black dome not only lets me pull this off in the rain, but is an important tool in any weather. Opening and closing the vents below the fire bowl and atop the lid to regulate the air stream, sliding it askew or removing it entirely to let the oxygen river rage. The dome lets me be miserly with the heat, especially important when cooking something big, toward the end of the cycle as the coals are ashing out to nothing, and the food coasts in to done-ness. Beneath the grate, holding it off bottom-dom, are a half-dozen carefully chosen volcanic rocks that have soaked up heat during the conflagration, and radiate it back now. Thanks dad for teaching me the physics, and mahalo Hawaiians for teaching me how to choose rocks that won't explode.

Over the past couple weeks, we've had sunny days that demanded cooking out. Both times, rain has appeared, but was kind enough to let me get the blaze going before cutting loose. Dome on, I watched as the drops hit the black and vaporized instantly with a sizzle I could feel (if not really hear anymore), the lid never appearing wet, as in the photo above (see the little steamer?). As the fire stopped sticking out its tongues, as coals glowed softer, rain made shrinking circles of wet; I suppose I could calibrate evaporation time with temperature, but an intuitive sense is enough. By the time the dome has cooled enough that droplets have time to collect and rivulet down the sides, the food is done. Imprecise and variable according to conditions, but again, that's how I regard time: I want it to speed up and slow down, stripped the standardization that puts it in charge.

Because years from now I may forget, here is the menu as of late:
Burgers from local, organic, pastured beef (first ground beef in years, and it's retty good)
Steaks of local grass fed beef tenderloin (some people claim the leaner meat is harder to cook, and corn-fed fatty stuff is better, but people are lazy and stupid)
Burgers of mushroom, beans, garlic, and probably something else (wich I'd written it down, because the taste, texture, color and mouthfeel are better than any veggie burger I've ever eaten)
Sturgeon on a foil boat laden with olive oil, garlic scallions, and sea salt
New potatoes from the farmers market, same prep as the sturgeon

Lame Metaphor Queue

2011-05-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

From National Geographic to the local paper, journalists eventually find themselves writing about archaeology. As if to prove that culture never changes, they resort to the same lame-ass tropes and metaphors again and again. Maybe they can be excused, since most of the writers know very little about the subject, and write about it as infrequently as archaeologists discover a Pompeii. But the other day, a friend passed along his "Archaeology" magazine, where I'd have expected the writers to come up with something better.

Nope.

Barely a dozen pages in, and there's an article describing a site as a "time capsule," one of the top three stupid metaphors in archaeology writing. An actual time capsule consists of an well-considered collection of artifacts and documents reflecting a particular moment in history. Olympia has several buried near the capitol, and like other time capsules, the intent is that they be dug up at a specific time so that future hominids can gawk at our primitive technology and laugh at our predictions. If an archaeological site is a time capsule, it is one buried by a malicious thief, who took all the good stuff, erased 99% of the texts, and filled it with a random collection of fragmentary junk.

The most stupid metaphor is "treasure." People in search of treasures have ruined more archaeology than anything else, ripping through and tossing aside the entire context in search of valuable trinkets. Treasure means reducing millenia of history to the momentary market value of a few shiny objects like the greediest and dim-wittedest of corvids. Archaeologists covet the dirty rock that turns out to come from thousands of miles away, the broken bowl in the ancestral style, the mud-stanking length of cordage that opens a fleeting window on Pleistocene fashion. Moreover, any one object is imbued with value exponentially increased should it come beneath a certain layer of volcanic ash, or along with charcoal flecks that can reconstruct forests and offer up a date, or any number of associations that make no sense to the general population. If artifacts are treasure, they are the treasure of a crazed ascetic hermit, the five objects whose inferential haloes encapsulate the meaning of life to him, but look like filthy trash to everyone else.

The third metaphor? Take your pick: lost world, window on the past, mummy curses, whatever. Probably worse than any of them is how so many writers look at archaeologists and see Indiana Jones. Wearing a hat? Jones-esque. Doing field work? Indiana-style rugged. Whitey guy? Just like Harrison Ford. None of the above? Still, an Indiana Jones glint in the eye.

Never mind that Indiana uses femurs for torches, never takes notes, and doesn't own a trowel. Writers want us to be him. It's inconvenient that we often occupy cubicles instead of temples of doom, that we have no bullwhips, and buckle very little swash. Five minutes into the interview, when the archaeologist starts to explain radiocarbon decay, the writer's eyes focus behind the speaker and on the screen where Dr. Jones does something more interesting.