Re-emerged

First there is a building, then there is no building, then there is* -Donovan (If he'd been an archaeologist)

The ebb and flow of humans on the land fascinates me. Most people see the forest and figure it's always been there, big trees out beyond civilization's paved domain, wild lands untouched, or at least not covered with buildings. Even for those who recognize second or third growth and know that there's not really any "pristine" anymore, stumbling onto the wrack of some past society's highest tide comes as a surprise.

But I should let that tidal metaphor alone, because a lot of the stuff left behind by retreating humans in this part of the world comes not from moderate daily motion, regular as the moon and achieving balance over time. True, people have walked all over this landscape since time immemorial, but until the past century or two they just didn't create that much trash for archaeologists to find. Twentieth Century Homo sapiens, though, they created a splash, a flood that reached just about everywhere in the blink of an archaeologist's eye. For enough generations that we don't even think of it anymore, this has been because of cars and the places we need to go in them (including trailheads and campgrounds tucked in the wilds), but the underlying source of this inundation of landscapes by metal and concrete lies in the resource extraction economy that the Territories and then the States relied on so heavily.

I don't have to get metaphorical or writerly about it, because the language is right there. Men seeking minerals and timber experience boom and bust; only to someone with a drawn out sense of time does it look like an ebb and flow. Discover gold, and there's a Rush.

Hidden in the forest was a lumber mill.

By the same token, when the trees are cut or the ore peters out--or larger economic forces make the investment unwise or untenable--people tend to walk away without delay. Often quite suddenly, but usually not before removing whatever's useful, to the point of prying up the rails and ties and loading them onto the last train out. Scavengers continue to pick at it for a while, but the forest eventually cloaks even big mill buildings and then takes it's sweet time devouring what's left. A place where hundreds of people lived and worked populated by animals, train whistles replaced by bird calls.

That is, until the trees get big enough to harvest. Then it may turn out that that mill is a historic site, or at least an archaeological ruin, and someone like me gets called in to be the ironic bureaucrat. A plan to cut down trees may be complicated by the presence of an archaeological site composed of the remains of: a timber mill. The place where thousands of acres of clear-cut were sawed into boards and shingles may have, in the years since falling silent, have developed a patina of historic significance that merits its protection from: a timber harvest. Yep.

Or maybe not. Not all old stuff is meaningful. Archaeologically speaking, the place I've pictured above does not have much potential, especially considering that you can go back into archival sources and get orders of magnitude more information about what happened there than you can from the few artifacts left behind. People only lived there for a decade or so, their household trash was hauled somewhere other than the place where the trees were cut, and much of the area was tidied up with heavy machinery after abandonment. Other than agreeing not to knock the building down unless it becomes clear that there's imminent risk of it falling down (maybe on a litigious history buff), the landowner didn't have to alter his plans much.

As long as the mill walls stand with no trees around, the mill lends scale to the few other remains of this former town: a few houses along the road, the concrete bank vault sitting alone in someone's yard, and the building down the road that used to be the school. Trees are more likely to grow back than this particular town, but for the time being you can drive by and marvel at the vine-covered walls. Just don't go crawling around too close, because it might fall on you, or you might drop into one of the deep concrete caverns.

* I wrote about this place previously in a post called "Swallowed." You're welcome for me not calling this one "Regurgitated."

The Communality Garden

It's that kind of garden.

In college, one of my first anthro classes had a focus on community gardens in DC. I was pretty weak on the fieldwork project, not good at walking up to strangers and asking them questions, but the idea of a community garden seemed pretty cool. In Honolulu, I joined a community garden, eventually sponsored by the city but initially a guerilla garden wrought by a nonagenarian local Chinese woman who'd tended it through the years, walking up Punchbowl hill with a bag of scraps from her job at the UH cafeteria. The suburbs comprising the erstwhile GOP powerhouse Eric Cantor's district, where I next lived, were not fertile ground for anything smacking of community, food sovereignty, or any other potentially anti-corporate crap, so I gardened my own quarter acre more or lessa alone. Moving to Olympia may have been my best chance to join a 'normal' community garden.

But instead, I chose one that defies the usual model of assigning each member a small rectangle within which to grow a tiny individual garden. Sprouted by Sustainable South Sound, this garden is a plot to grow food in the neighborhood where it will be consumed. And instead of a grid of little gardens, it's two big gardens, dozens of beds that everyone works on together. We all chip in to buy seed and supplies, spend Saturday mornings weeding and planting, and harvest the results, which are distributed equally. Whatever division of labor that exists is self-sorting, and although some may work a bit more than others, nobody lazily skates by.

Which is what makes me wonder, "Are we being communists?" I mean, "From each according to her abilities, to each according to her share" is how we operate; isn't that a mere paraphrase away from Marxism? I've only ever gotten one garden member to cop to anything left of Socialism, but I have to wonder.

But then I also have to think, "So What?" We're not Stalinists, there's no distant committee committing us to 5-year plans, and the garden has no gulag. We're more like the autonomous collective (not really an anarcho-syndicalist commune, as some would have you believe) in Monty Python's Holy Grail. Everything we do has a mandate from the masses, there's even an Occupy-style blocking mechanism to assure consensus. Far from a Utopian pipe-dream--because I know that's what some of you suspect this amounts to--this system works.

Indoctrinating the unsuspecting youth with corn, oats, squash, and beans.

I'm not much of a joiner, and subjugating my opinions to group-will (especially when it comes to gardening) is not always easy. But the end results are worth it: plenty of good food, cameradrie, and the sort of smug satisfaction that only bountiful locavore collectivism can justify. In Honolulu, I rose to the Presidency of the community garden, and I loved that land the way I do any place where I have time to plant roots, but it was a collection of fiefdoms, and not a communal effort. A 'president' was required to make peace between the cat-feeders and gardeners, Tongans who cooked a dog and the Chinese woman grossed out by the thought, a bi-polar woman with a point about the mission of community gardens and the man growing sesame and chiles for sale, the guy who brought in barrels of toxic adhesive for "irrigation, or something" and everyone who didn't want cancer,...that kind of stuff. "Community" gardens can sprout plots that grow weeds, cat-piss, and strife.

Many Leaves, One Head

So, I am happy to be a part of this communalist garden, or whatever it is called. As we plan for the coming year, uncertain that this piece of land will be available beyond that, it's good to know that this experiment worked for so many years. If this garden cannot remain, it's not because of the people. we'll pop up elsewhere if and when this land becomes something else. Or maybe not. Whatever happens, I am glad that this garden happened, and can walk away knowing that the soil is better than it was when I arrived. For me, that's just fine.

The Rain is Back, and So am I

All of a sudden, I see it's been months since I posted here (if that makes any sense). Today, we've finally returned to prototypical Northwest weather: rain, the horizon blurred by a liquid sky, drizzle-drop-drench. I was just talking to my kids, and they agree, it's a relief.

So we must be fully acclimatized to this place. Last week, even though it was a full 20 degrees cooler than "sweltering" in the land of my birth, I was sweating, unable to keep count of how many sunny days we'd had in a row. The girls agree: too many days of bright blue skies in a row becomes oppressive. We welcome the wet blanket now.

Summer rarely reaches the white-sky, humid hellishness of a mid-Atlantic summer here, and it's true that we all soak it up, enjoy it, and retreat from the indoors. It's no accident that Northwesterners spend so much time hiking and camping and such. (OK, not me, but other people, whose jobs keep them inside most days.) This summer more than most, I took a hiatus from blogging and other trivialindoor pursuits. Instead: gardening, fieldwork, and gazing into the yard that became my own, and moving.

So, a new season, a new (old) house. Through great willpower, I've managed to put off doing yardwork at the new place, but that's about to change. For one thing, the communal/community garden is starting to wind down. For another, who the hell wants to dig up the yard when it is hot(ish) and the ground is hard? For yet another, there were side gigs and wildfire-chasing to do while the sun was out.

Now, as the drizzle softens the glacial outwash that is my yard, it's time to dig in. Now, as the Equinoctal threshhold has been crossed, there will be time to write. (As opposed to just clicking in photos at Anthrowback, my minor-effort summertime diversion.) Now, as Winter wrings the glare of Summer sun into a pool of mild Autumnal reflection, it's time to seek shelter under roofs and with kin.

Freedom Inc.

Phoneto by Zonk'em

Outside of Buck's Spice Shop and Darby's, two businesses I gladly choose to support, there is an interstice of green in the sidewalk. Grey, gray,...grass! There's a little (but still larger than the li'l lawn) brass plaque identifying this space as a park. Now and then, there's the sign you see here, miniscule but effective.

"Keep off the grass*" resinates this week, what with the opening of the first legal pot stores outside of Colorado. As my family waited on Sunday morning for a table at Darby's, we saw the sign and the roach** thoughtfully tucked into the park to stack on another entendre***.

We laughed, and took a few photos, inspiring other people to do the same. My kids didn't start doing drugs, I managed to hold onto my job, and breakfast--although served to Led Zeppelin live--was delicious, and in no way a freakshow. Legal pot in 2014 Washington is,...so what?

It was interesting to hear reports on NPR that actually spoke of today's opening of pot stores here in terms of "civil rights," maybe not on par with gay marriage (local reaction: we're totally used to it,...so what?), but a great day for freedom, in the words of a guy who'd been in line since 4AM (sorry, guy who showed up at 4:20) to be the first to buy legal weed,**** only to say he'd light up to "Dark Side of the Moon,"***** sorta like he has for 33% of the 1,287 bags of reefer****** he's bougth before, illegally.

Equality for people who don't fit in the archaic man-woman identities and roles is a civil rights issue, but what happened today is a consumer issue. In Americo, though, consumer freedom has increasingly stood in for and even pushed aside the more basic freedoms in the Constitution.

Today gets reported by those who worry as the Beginning of the End, gateway drug to utter debauchery and decay. Meanwhile, others spout some crap about Freedom when what they're being offered is a chance to pay premium prices plus 25% tax (that's right, Washington State imposes a 25% tax on this freedom) for something that's actually pretty easy to get outside of the official stores. The saying "Freedom isn't Free" needs to be amended, "And it's Heavily Taxed".

So, light up and celebrate if you must, but don't let the ability to go to a store and light up legally make you think you're more free, don't let THC be the opiate of the masses, and don't develop memory loss about more fundamental freedoms at stake in this changing AmeriCo. For real freedom, don't feed the stores that will compete and merge and take-over and consolidate into the same corporate creature that stalks every revenue flow; go chip a park out of the concrete.


* an archaic term for psychoactive cannabis
** an archaic term for the remains of a partially smocked grass cigarette, or "joint"
*** a French term. I only explain archaic terms, so you're on your own for this one
**** archaic term for grass*
***** archaic stoner music
****** archaic term for a joint** or maybe weed****

Swallowed

On the Road to Now-nowhere

The archaeologist hacking his way through the jungle, parting the bushes and glimpsing a Mayan pyramid in the grasp of lianas rising toward the canopy, is as easy for most people to imagine as the other archaeologist (this time wearing a pith helmet) kneeling at the base of an Egyptian pyramid in the desert.

In this part of the world, tribes built no pyramids, and the rains made ruins of their mightiest longhouses before archaeologists got to them. There are no ancient lost cities in the Northwest rainforest, at least not anything as obvious as you would see in Honduras or Peru.

What does exist are more recent cities, no less festooned in ferns or draped in vines. Entire towns that thrived into the 1940s have been swallowed by our temperate jungle. You might realize you are approaching one when you find yourself on a causeway, smaller trees in your path and a slit of sky above, as in the first photo. This path used to be a road, or if flat and not so curvey, a railroad. Rails and ties are gone, because like the towns, timber railroads flowed and ebbed; when the trees were cut, the rails were lifted and sent elsewhere to haul out another forest.

Once upon a time, this perspective would be under a railroad.

Huge swaths of western Washington were stripped of their trees. It started with the California Gold Rush, when Puget settlers found a ready market for logs and lumber, but the pace and scale really took off a generation or two later, when steam power jumped ashore in the form of donkeys (a machine used to haul logs) and iron horses. Instead of a few lumberjacks and teams of oxen (I don't see much evidence that actual donkeys played a major role in NW logging, ever), logging became an industrial affair. Men who had cut their fill in Minnesota in the 1870s moved west and by 1900 were engaged in technologically and logistically more advanced logging.

As Europe crept toward WWI, its New World sons built mills to saw the great Northwestern forests into boards and shingles. As the war erupted, they kept on cutting and eve picked up the pace. Huge mills sprang up by rivers and streams, no longer because a water wheel provided the power, but because dammed waterways made ponds capable of holding vast quantities of logs dumped from trains, sorted, and fed to the machines before being hauled back out as lumber destined for markets nationwide.

The scale of some of these operations boggles the mind, given their seemingly remote locations to modern residents of Pugetopolis. Substantial amounts of capital were sunk into towns stretched out along rail lines in places where less-traveled road pass today. Hundreds of people answered the work whistle every day in places that now boast a few trailer homes and little more, or that have been completely swallowed by resurgent (of degraded) woods.

Because of Wobbly Slavs, Commie Finns, and their other organized comrades, the mill owners built housing and infrastructure to attract and retains the hundreds of people needed to cut the trees and run the mills. They sometimes got electricity and sewage before their neigboring communities. Though the work could be brutally demanding and dangerous, workers came, and the Company was ready with houses for the family men and hotels and pool halls for the lone lumberjacks, ready to circulate the paycheck back into company coffers. There would be an office in town, but nearly always, the money ultimately flowed to Seattle or back east.

Didn't I see this in Myst?

Workers' fortunes flooded and ebbed with strikes and strike-backs. Owners went boom and bust as markets rose and fell. But ultimately, few of the early 20th Century timber towns escaped the inevitable: when forests became stumps, there was no money to be made. Companies that owned the land they'd harvested might eke out a few more bucks enticing hapless outsiders (among them, Dustbowl refugees) to buy clearcut land for farming, but the towns went down. As soon as the timber ran out, so did the companies, salvaging what they could of the machinery and rails before they pulled out.

Workers went elsewhere, voluntarily or otherwise, and the businesses that served them went under. Salmonberry settled and alders arrived, vanguards of a long distant old growth forest that may see the whole cycle repeat. Wooden buildings were burnt or demolished or just left to collapse. Mill roofs fell in, leaving only concrete shells of the buildings. Log ponds were colonized by beavers or eutrophied on their own.

And now, less than a lifetime after many of these towns heard the whine of saws and hoot of the whistle at the end of each shift, only the birds and wind make noise. Trees, vines, ferns, mosses, and untold numbers of microbes and arthropods colonize these old towns in the name of nature. Even in my limited awareness, there are dozens of these abandoned towns, sprouting timber (some of it now being harvested). The high water mark of civilization's tide is way back in the woods these days, and towns that were are swallowed.

Hansville

Welcome to the Foxtrot Delta Alpha Hotel

Here's a shot from Hansville, by Norwegian Point. Close as the crow flies to Pugetopolis, but it feels a lot more remote standing there, buffeted by the wind.

Looking toward the water beyond the flock of shorebirds, there's Useless Bay (named for Ensign Ulysses F. Useless, fleet scapegoat of the Wilkes Expedition), then Whidbey Island, and then Mounts Baker, Shuksan, etc.

Four Mountains

Tahoma, its lenticular cloud drifting inland.

Late Fall and Winter are not supposed to be prime viewing for Cascadian peaks, but a drive today during which I could see Rainier and St. Helens pretty well reminded me that I've been inordnately fortunate this season. Like the week befor Turkey Day, when I got this shot of Tahoma (aka Tacobud, aka Mount Rainier, aka several other Salish and Sahaptian names) from the north. Far to the north, zoomed way beyond the lens capabilty and into the low-end camera digi-zoom range. What the image lacks in resolution, it gains in poetry, with the whisp of peak-cloud above and the rolling Cascadian holls below.

Il Posteriori de Montana Santa Helena

A few days later, and many miles south, I snuck up behind Mount St. Helens (various native names, many of which amount to "smoking mountain") and got the shot above. As I recall (dimly), I was standing on the edge of a gravel quarry full of bullets and cartridges and garbage, but lift the lens above ground and shoot into the distance, and beauty repoaces ugliness in the memory of that day.

Not far away in distance or in time from the St. Helens shot, I was able to spot Mount Adams (ask the Yakama about the name, because I just don't know). This is the west side, more or less, and in November, it was still not so snow-covered as you might think on the brink of December. Snow was late this year, and no doubt it looks different now.

And finally, here's Hood (I'll let the Oregonians talk about their names for this one). Shot from the north or northwest, way across the Columbia. I have better photos of this, but it's not bad, and it's from that same week, it's the pick for this post.

These shots are from different perspectives in the space-time continuum. I've had what they call a "five mountain day," when I was high enought (strictly elevationally speaking) to see the peaks of five of the snowy Cascadian volcanoes from a single spot. Jefferson, Hood, Adams, St. Helens, and Rainier, viewed from Table Mountain above the Bonneville damn.

The regular Cascades seem high enough (thousands of feet higher than the Appalachian chain, which formed the pinnacles of my growing up years), but when you get to one of those peaks, and see these snowy monsters looming high, you begin to understand big mountains. Hawai`i Island has similarly large volcanoes, although the tropical clime robs (or disrobes?) the snow mantle of its awe-inspiring potential, and the full mass is hard to appreciate without being well out to sea. Even in Olympia, Tahoma looms large, even larger when you remind yourself that it is 50 miles away, but still imposes itself on the horizon of any clear day.

I am pretty sure that the closest I will ever get to these peaks are the flanks, and that most of my appreciation will be from a distance. There's no inner drive to conquer and avail myself of "summit" as a verb. But as long as there are clear days and cameras, I will pull over and take a minute to appreciate and take a photo for memory's sake.

Backroads: Egg and I Road

At the intersection of a memory lane and a road not taken.

One day this Fall, as the leaves were changing color under clear blue skies, I drove out through the Chiumacum Valley, past he town of Center (location one of my favorite  government facility names, the Center Work Center), and up the west side the valley to look for archaeology. For my effort, I founf one abandoned house, rumored to be haunted, but that's another story.

Getting there requires a short jaunt on Egg and I Road. The Egg and I was a book by Betty MacDonald, who followed her new (and before long, former) husband on his cockamamie dream of leaving the city and starting a chicken farm. Hilarity ensued, as it often does in the memories of people who go through ordeals. According to an article at Historylink, Betty's sister had told a publisher that she was writing a humorous book, and so The Egg and I came to be to save sister Mary the embarrassment, along with the dedication "To my sister Mary, who has always believed I could do anything whe puts her mind to."

The book came out at the end of WWII, ideal timing for a funny book about anything but the war, and long enough after the Depression for its sorrowful depredations to fade under a patina of humor. By then, Betty had left the chicken farm and re-married (what became of her chicken-raising husband Robert Haskett at that point, I do not know; he was stabbed to death in 1951 by another woman's jilted husband). Millions of copies of the book sold, and it became a movie. The Ma and Pa Kettle characters from Betty's book spawned a whole series of movies.

In 1981, a road first built about a century earlier was officially named "Egg and I Road," memorializing the way to the chicken farm. It runs western slope of the western fork of Chimacum valley to Route 19 (aka Beaver Valley Road) on the east slope of the east valley. There are pastures and wooded slopes, but no chickens that I could see, and nary a porch-sittin' hillbilly to be seen.

The chicken farm that turned out to be so funny and lucrative is part of a larger story that didn't turn out so well (check out Richard White's "Land Use, Environment, and Social Change" for a more thorough telling). By the late 1920's the combination of railroad logging technology and a roaring economy had led to the clear-cutting of unprecedented swaths of land, which then seemed worthless. Attempts were made to present acres of stumps and now exposed and depleted forest soild as great opportunities for farming. Generally, people tried, failed, and left, because farming in glacial gravel full of stumps does not work so well. According to White, one of the few chances to make a go of it was to raise chickens, so at least Haskett was on the right track, even if it did not work out.

Not the barn, but a barn on Egg and I Road.

These days, the pastures around Egg and I Road feel idyllic. The  urban crow can be there in a 20-mile flight from the filthiest part of Seattle, but the Sound and the land's folds make it more remote. The presence of a quarter horse farm airport indicates that the neighborhood is not entirely safe from gentrification, but it looks like there are still regular people who live there. Between the Bremerton-Poulsbo sprawl and the long-urban Port Townsend entry to the Sound, the Egg and I's neighborhood is remote enough to retain its rural charm. It never was as isolated as the book made it sound, but it remains a back road.

Olympia in October (in Color)

Walking Home, Clouds to the East, Nearly Sunset

Walking to Work, Cold Enough Morning to Fog Up the Lens

Priest Point Park

Forsake Fossil Fuel

Of all the energy sources powering the blogosphere, dissatisfaction with the status quo ranks pretty high. From carefully constructed criticism to ad hoc rants, blogs complain about where we are, where we were, and where we're headed. Often as not, the blogger thinks that by calling out some flaw, highlighting a problem, readers might be inspired to change their minds, maybe even take positive action. But the status quo is one hell of a grindstone, and while a brilliant critique may nick it, more often the critic is worn down. Once in a great while, some random or sudden event may lead to change, but more often it is action, collective and directed and occurring in the non-cyber world, that re-shapes the monolith.

The ways we power our society, by burning fossil fuel and by coaxing electrons from rivers or water, wind, and photons, has been a recurring subject here at Mojourner Truth. Sometimes, I've argued against continuing to rely on oil and coal, but of my small audience, I have a feeling that many agree already, and doubt that my words pulled anyone off the grid. Other times, I've extolled the virtues of renewable energy and low-tech efficiencies, but how many people have a heatilator? Blogging is impotence, published.

Recently, though, I actually took action that may make a real difference. For the past year, I've gotten a small block of my energy from renewables. The utility offers you the opportunity to purchase your energy just from wind, hydro, solar, and reclaimed methane, $4 at a time. A month or two ago, I switched to 100% renewable. It costs marginally more, but since I'm not much of a power consumer (no air conditioner, no TV, and a near-Ludditic reliance on muscle-powered gear rather than electro-gadgets), electricity overall is a minor part of my cost of living.

I am not quite so green as Ed Begley in that Simpsons episode where he speeds off in a car "powered by my own sense of self-satisfaction," but my 100% renewable electricity does have me feeling pretty smug. And the more people who do this, the less incentive industry has to drill and frack up the earth. I don't share many Americans' belief in the magic of The Market, but I do understand that changes in consumer choice affect what's for sale, and if we collectively choose renewable energy (imperfect as it may be), maybe a mountain in West Virginia doesn't get flattened, maybe a midwest aquifer won't be pumped full of frack-chemicals, maybe the climate will stabilize.

An extra 1.25 cents per kilowatt-hour buys me this non-fossil energy. The energy company says that for a typical house, the environmental benefit is equivalent to taking a car off the road. But there's also no military cost to using power that is 100% domestic. It's a small act, but it's meaningful, and in aggregate, it will help shift us away from our dangerous reliance on oil, gas, and coal that are killing us and ruining the earth for our progeny.

If you live on the Puget Sound Energy Company grid, the way to do this is here. Everywhere else, just do a search on "green power" plus your local utility.

Camas Fields Forever

For two weeks in a row, I've been blessed with fieldwork in a sublime Cascadian meadow. This last time, I encountered other western Washington folks who'd made the trip top see the legendary camas bloom--the place is so famed for this blue lily that it's common name is Camasland. Last week was the time to see the bloom at its peak, when the flowers are so thick that swaths of meadows turn blue; I offer these photos (which are pathetic  stand-ins for the real scene) to those who missed the day. Explorer accounts back to Lewis and Clark speak of camas meadows that appeared to be lakes, although to my own eye (connected to a mind that demands less sense) the biggest areas of camas looked like pools of sky, complete with fluffy white clouds of American Bistort.

Camas is just the best known of many plants in this meadow that are important to native people. This meadow is a treasure to the Wenatchi and other tribes that came here generation after generation, congregating in large numbers to harvest the roots, socialize, and later light the fires that kept the meadow from reverting to forest.  The soil is black from thousands of fires, dark rich testament to centuries and millenia of tending to this special island of meadow in the Cacadian treed terrain.

While the blue may look more like sky than water to me, the camas lily appreciates lower, wetter ground, which means that sometimes it lives in the silt of relict channels and silted in streams. Camasland is a flat meadow within a bowl of forested hills, and the stream that winds through it has meandered here and there over the years. The photo above shows the faint blue of camas in one of those old channels, with the yellow flowers and larger foliage of balsamroot on the banks. Difference in elevation between these zones is only a few inches, but that's enough to nurture quite different vegetation on each. The meandering blue is an echo of a stream, a channel living forever.

This landscape is special to modern people as well. Years ago, the state decided to conserve the ecosystem here, and set aside most of it. There are rare species involved, but the place is special also because of the abundance and cultural importance of some of the more common species present. Preserving this place forever means that the ancient yet fleeting beauty of a wildflower meadow will not become a housing subdivision (the fate of most prairies west of the mountains) or some other modern development that will be fleeting compared to the natural and cultural history of Camasland, but which could do irreversible damage.

Moving On: Mountain to Sea Day

Up a 5:00 this morning so I can get from this:

 

To this:

Drop about 3,000 feet in elevation, reset the eyes to tide-flat mode, and be glad I don't have to dig through rock for another day.  Gotta run, the tide won't wait.

Call of the Wild-ish

On the way home from work yesterday, I saw a deer walking down a city street. Olympia has a lot of green space, and hundreds of tasty gardens are in prime condition right now, so deer are a common sight.

This morning at about 4AM, I heard a coyote howl. Maybe the same one my daughter and I saw a couple of months ago, running through someone's yard here on the East Side.

 In what may be related news, there sure are a lot of "Lost Cat" fliers posted around here.

One Kid, Two Kid, Red Kid, Blue Kid

Here's one kid. She is punching a snowbank, which insulted her family, or otherwise earned her wrath. She could care less that it is bigger than she is, and is happy to be the center of the shot.

 

Here is two kid (numero uno, in birth order), walking atop a snowbank that she saw as a walkway to another view. She is happy to disappear into its immenseness, and would be unhappy were her face to be recognizable.

I love both of these kids. They are both osum. They have some samenesses, and they have some differences. It would be sad otherwise.

With both of them, there is magic. The combination of complements, or play of opposites, or whatever they are to each other, creates alchemy. The kind that can turn a Northwest mid-winter day cloudless, that can make their dad's stoiclear eyes tear up with happiness. 

World Radio Day

Ironically (I think that's the right word), I found out about World Radio Day on the internet. 

I love radio, think it is important, and write about it from time to time. But I won't do that again now. Instead, here are some links to radio stations up here in Washington (and one on Kaua'i) that keep me going as I drive from signal to signal.

KAOS Olympia

KPLU Seattle

KUOW Seattle

KBOO Portland

KSER Everett

KSVR Skagit Valley

KYRS Spokane

KKCR Kaua`i
 

 

Green Tree?

Every year before Christmas, newsrooms in cruise mode revive the great Real Tree vs Plastic Tree debate. Every year as Hannukah kicks off, my college room-mate attempts to understand why so many goy insist on killing a fir tree every year. After all, Jesus only killed a fig tree (Matthew 21:18-22), and didn't do it again every year.

In terms of appeal, fake trees win only among the extremely fastidious and the lazy, for whom cleaning up a few needles is too much of an imposition, so the articles in recent years have often focused on the environmental aspect of the debate. Initially, the ersatz Tannenaum contingent had the upper hand, asserting that cutting a tree down every year damaged forests, whereas plastic trees last forever. 

But nearly all live (then dead) trees now come from farms like this one, just outside of Olympia. People like me come and cut trees, and the farmer plants more. A recent study shows that if the tree farmers don't kill the groundcover plants between trees, such farms are good for carbon sequestration--not as good as a forest, but still significantly better than fields of annual crops or pasture lands (and bonus: no cattle farts), which is what most Christmas tree farms were previously.

In my case--recognizing that this will not be true in all parts of the country--there's the added benefit that the round trip to get the tree consumed less than a gallon of gas. Plus, I'm supporting the local economy, helping a farmer make ends meet, and helping forestall the loss of farmland to development. Because this is an ongoing operation, new trees replacing old every year, it's a relatively stable habitat for birds, deer, and other critters that like something between grassland and forest. No, it's not pristine, but it has some ecological value, and it beats the hell out of a lot of the alternatives.

Meanwhile, fake trees are made of petrochemicals and metal ripped from the earth, processed in factories that consume more oil and create toxic waste, packaged in cardboard boxes (killing trees! the horror) and more plastic, and shipped from China the trucked to your locality. The carbon footprint is large, and the sequestration value zero. If these trees lasted forever, the footprint might be amortized, but fake trees make their way into landfills, not from generation to generation. 

[A Digression: The same goes for ornaments on the tree. If you are stingy and nostalgic like I was this year, then you have ornaments that have somehow stayed out of landfills for decades. A bunch are made from Christmas cards and chicken pot pie tins recycled when I was in second grade, waylaid from the waste stream for twoscore years.] 

All this should be famliar to those of you who reard or read reports on the Real vs Fake theme before Christmas, but what about after? Fake ones go back in a box or into the garbage, so making them less environmentally harmful is a matter of holding on for as long as possible before trashing them.

For real trees, the environmental impact can vary a lot depending on what you do after the holidays. At one end of the spectrum, you  could burn it. Torching a dry fir can be a great show, but it exhales the carbon it breathed in from the atmosphere for years right back into the air in a few minutes. You could douse the flame before it consumes the wood and bury the charcoal, in which case the carbon could stick around for tens of thousands of years. 

Many counties and municipalities have programs to mulch Christmas trees. Olympia even comes around to pick them up. The chipped trees become mulch in parks and in some cases may be sold or given to citizens; this extends the useful life of the tree, provides a local source of mulch with a lower cost and fuel use, and ends up in the soil. Sequestration time varies depending on conditions and from needle to branch to bole, but again something is better than nothing, and the breakdown feeds soil microbes, fungi, arthropods, and so on--it is carbon recycling, not emission. 

I'm stingy with biomass, and would no sooner give the city my tree than I would my compost. At some point in January, I take the tree outside, stand and all. This being the maritime Northwest, it can stay there looking green and alive until April or May, and in years past I have placed to to seem like part of the landscaping. Some years, as Spring comes round, I cut off the boughs and lay them among the blueberries as a nice acidic mulch; I may come back the next year and toss the skeletal branches aside. The trunk gets tossed in back for the native blackberries to clamber over, and eventually to return to the soil. Other years, I remove the stand and toss the whole tree in back. Birds hide in it, berries climb through, and the soil beneath gets better year by year. 

I rationalize habitually, but in this case I really do think that my choice of tree and my treatment of it after the holidays is as good a way to go environmentally as most of the alternatives. A live tree, planted out after Christmas, would be better, but I don't own any ground to plant in, and I don't know many people who have the space to do that year after year. No tree at all could be better, maybe, but it sounds like no fun. Besides, I want my local tree farm to stay in business.

Up Ballot, Down Ballot

Too cheap to spring for a stamp?

If I were a real political blogger, I'd be standing on a fiscal cliff right now, looking at Gaza, but procrastination is more my style, so here goes some election analysis.

In Washington State, progressives did pretty well, winning all the statewide offices but one, throwing their lot with Obama, and approving a couple of intiatives that would make most of my native Virginian cohort shake their heads in pity or raise their voices in rage. So, it was an excellent election.

But it struck me that an interesting thing about the final numbers (these can take a while to generate in a vote by mail state. which is pleasing to pro crastinators), is that they don't just tell us who won, but maybe also what is most important to Washington voters. Take a look at this table, which compiles the results as of November 16, 2012.

Slightly over 3 million votes cast, and the presidential race, unsurprisingly, garnered the most. He  won by a healthy margin, and appears to be even more popular than legalized marijuana and gay marriage. Perhaps the only consolation to my visiting mother (Southern, Baptist, elderly, and need I add, pretty conservative) is that Washingtonians also voted in large numbers, again, to make statewide tax hikes difficult for the legislature to pass. [Two more statewide anti-tax votes, Advisory 1 and 2, also broke in comfortable margins to seek re-instatement of tax loopholes, but far fewer people overall voted on these issues, perhaps because they were confusing or, as the "advisory' label indicates, meaningless. I cannot help but wonder how much it cost taxpayers to have these ineffectual pro-corporate statements on the ballot so as to throw a couple bones to the next round of "fiscal conservatives," but I digress. Before returning to the flow, I'd like to marvel once more at the irony that while we vote against the more remote taxes that may or may not affect us, we tend to pass local levies that certainly will.]

Inslee won the governor's office after days of nail-biting, but besides earning only a thin margin, the total votes cast in that race indicate that it was less pressing than marijuana and gay marriage. The other close statewide race, for Secretary of State, proved even less compelling if you go by number of votes (which is pretty much the point of this post, so I will); it was the only GOP win at that level, and it is interesting to note that they pulled it off with a woman. As the huge margin in the Senate race shows, however, we prefer Democratic women.

Further down the ballot, we see that even in positions as important as Supreme Court Justices, unopposed candidates are 1/3 less compelling than contested races. Along with the head of OSPI, about a million voters sat these out. [At this stage, I feel compelled to say that the 100% wins listed for these offices are certainly, if minutely, exaggerated; I know for a fact that there was a write-in for OSPI.]

The last lines in the table are for a couple of congressional races in newly defined districts. Each went Democratic in about a 60-40 split. For a while, there were rumors that gerrymandered-out Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich would run in the 10th, but it did not come to pass (I love you, Dennis, but running here would have reeked of carpetbaggery). Instead, we gave Congress Heck, a guy who's poster featured a single red star, which in many parts of the country would have been interpreted as a communist or satanic badge. I'm pretty sure he is neither, and am relived to be rid of Hererra-Beutler, who was the most unresponsive elected official I have ever dealt with.