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.

Agriculture and Bias

Orchards count as agriculture

In the past day or three, I've been reminded of how weird our understanding of agriculture is in modern America. Another blog that I regularly read, written by an educated, smart woman, linked to an article about the novel theory that the introduction of agriculture actually led to instability and population collapse in Europe. Then today, working with some other archaeologists and archaeologists-in-training, we talked about how generations of our forebears (and their cultural anthropology kin) have sworn that in the Northwest there was no indigenous agriculture or horticulture, just hunting and gathering.

Like most children of Western civilization, I was taught that the rise and refinement of agriculture allowed production of surplus, which was what allowed humanity (some of it, at least) to step off the dreary treadmill of subsistence, so that some people could become businessmen, priests, bureaucrats, artists, and all of the other divisions of labor that make up a civilization. Even among the cynical who viewed some of these jobs as blights upon humanity, there were few that argued the basic tenet that by making the transition from gathering and hunting wild foods (yes, in that order, if you are to be honest about where the calories came from) to farming domesticated crops represented an advance, creating some respite from the struggle for survival.

Only, if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view (so long, Bible Belt readers), agriculture does not provide stability. It is inherently unstable. From a diverse spectrum of wild plants, adapted to local conditions over millenia and more, people came to depend on a select and quite small group of species, using temporaryu success to grow larger human populations. Over time, this became more pronounced. Hundreds of wild starches gave way to dozens of grains and roots, and ultimately to a handful of cereals and russet potatoes, often grown outside their optimal range through generous application of non-renewable chemicals. Nomads moved to villages, which became cities and morphed into megalopolises. We stand now as the coyote did in the old road runner cartoons, over a canyon on a board nailed to a board nailed to a board, cantilevered so far out on a gamble that we are doomed to fall, unable to skitter back to solid ground. Evolution punishes monocroppers and urbanites who forgot how to find or grow their own food.

In our hubris, we have assumed that human selection can successfully replace natural selection, when in fact all domestication amounts to co-evolution. From corn's point of view, it has caused humans to adapt their behavior toward its own ends. We winnow down the gene pool to emphasize the parts that maximize kernel production, eliminating competition from weeds and even regional maize variants, maximizing acreage, extracting fossil fuel to fertilize and distribute the crop. Zea mays has domesticated and trained Homo sapiens to its benefit, not ours.

What amounts to genocide of other grains and the once diverse array of locally adapted cultivars of corn has resulted in such a narrow, patented gene pool that we are now at greatly increased risk of collapse in a major element of our food supply (and the same goes for soybeans, rice, wheat, and any other major food crop) should evolution create super-bugs, fungi, weeds, or diseases that could rip through the millions of acres planted in the same damned genome. Or maybe  the dirty work will be done by climate change, or the growing scarcity and cost of the chemical additives and artificial genetic alterations that are already deeply entrenched responses to the biological and climactic threats we already face.

Our smug modern bias that by replacing a "primitive" society (in which nearly every family produced its own diverse and locally adapted bread, vegetables, and protein) with a few corporately owned farms churning out the national output of food and food-like subtances is misplaced. Even before evolution engineers collapses in production, the elmination of diversity and removal of people from the healthful effects of working the land has created epidemics of heart disease, diabetes, and the other diseases of civilization that decrease individual fitness and create increasing drains on social resources. More angioplasty, less art.

Camas fields do not count as agriculture

But let's step back from that brink, back to the early days of agriculture. The domesticated crops all began as wild plants. As a young anthro, I was taught that this happened in a few select places: Mesopotamian cereals, Mesoamerican grains, Andean tubers, and a few others. While this select club would be expanded from time to time, membership rested on transformation of primitive forms to highly productive domesticates. People who ate "wild" foods were not agriculturalists, or even horticulturalists. They were foragers.

A prime example of that class were the indigenous tribes of the Northwest, who stood out among hunter-gatherers in having a higher level of social stratification and cultural elaboration than anthtropologists expected of tribal, non-agricultural peoples. Being an exception only proved the rule, however, since it was pointed out that a peculiar natural abundance of food, from salmon runs to camas meadows, was what allowed them to advance beyond, for example, their Great Basin counterparts.

But the more we look, and the more we listen to the Native cultures, the more we see that the Northwest tribes (and although I am ignorant of the details, I would have to suspect the tribes in other parts of the country) were not passive collectors of a random bounty. People burned meadows to return nutrients to the soil to such a degree that once-poor glacial outwash became black loam, while at the same time arresting succesional processes that would have liked to establish forest where berries and root foods grew. Harvesting techniques aerated the soil, gave next year's crop room to grow, rotated the burden of harvest, and propagated new generations of food. There was weeding and transplanting. Just because Tribal knowledge acknowledges first and foremost the role of Coyote for the origin of many foods does not mean that the actions of mortals played no role in the perpetuation of those foods. My suspicion is that the "wild" characterization of foods like camas and cous has as much to do with our lack of investigation as with absolute reality--the same people who weeded out the death camas, who harvested roots and berries over millennia, am I to believe that they never rooted out smaller, sicklier plants in favor of tastier or more productive ones? Are we supposed to think that because a food plant is found within it's "natural" range, it was not the result of transplanting or establishment of patches convenient to trails and settlements? I find that hard to swallow.

But our bias is that if a plant is native to its range (typically defined thousands of years after people began eating it, hmm...), it is wild. If it is not ridiculously oversized, the food part dwarfing the other elements, it must not be domesticated. If it is merely tended, rather than planted in rows or milpas, it is not agriculture. Our bias is that hard farming work, rather than knowledge of how best to feed off of natural systems with minor inputs, is superior.

We see what we want to see (I'll admit that I want to see humans who adapted to a place over millennia as pretty wise to its ways), and so Euro-Americans who conquered continents generally want to see that as progress. Casting agriculture as a noble effort, even as a single God's will that Man exercise dominion over the earth and its lesser creatures (Indians included), serves that goal. Defining what everyone else did as inferior helps make the stealing and subsequent transformation of the land more justifiable to most Americans, eases the guilt of wiping out thousands of little societies attuned to nature to make way for a large one attuned to itself. Bad as that particular bias may be, the one that may come back to haunt us more deeply is that other bias, the one in which we presume that civilization is always getting better, that we are exceptional, and our agriculture is smart and sustaining, rather than unstable, a dangerous taunt toward evolution.

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.

More from the Abyss: Wave Them Big Hairy Arms

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. Thurber^1*, William J. Jones², Kareen Schnabel³

You can fund the article at:

http://www.ploscollections.org/article

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

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.

Garden 7: Volunteers

 

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.

Backroads: Grain to Hops, Hot Rods and Rattlesnakes

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.

Gorge-ous

April along the Columbia is the time of blooms. Apples and cherries that were bare grey bones weeks before grow buds, the buds swell into pink and white balls, and then they start to reveal their inner selves as compact potential relaxes, opens its arms to the sun and bees, and reveals the actual flower. Before long, beehives filling with young and honey, fruit beginning to form, the petals will let go their grip on the mothership, fluttering in the spring breeze, snowing.


Just like snow, their beauty varies with perspective. With the sun at our back, or with dark at theirs, they gleam white or bright pink. Sunbeams traveling through their thinness can release a glow. Coming at you out of a bright sky, the same flower flakes can look dark. Look at the petals (still treebound) in this photo: the ones below look bright, while those above with sky behind are dark. Same petals, similar level of contrast, completely different perception. Color can be apparent, not absolute.


The intricacies of a single petal laying in the grass can pull in my eyes to orbit for a while, taking in tiny beauties. Sumptuous surfaces like only a fresh flower has, wavy edges, folds like tiny mountain ranges, subtle colors invisible even a few feet further away.

Or, the thousands. Dressing the wind, revealing it's body. Twinkles and constellations covering the ground. Drifts of nothing but flowers nestled in the roots of their mothers, soon to settle and melt back into her. 


This all unfolds over weeks, starting low and south, working its way higher and norther. Trees closest to the river's dammed valley start first not just because of the elevation, but the water moderating winter's last chilly breaths. Driving north from Wenatchee, past Orondo, toward the apple depots lining the river at all those other towns, turns into a trip back in time. Orchards adrift in spent flowers, trees adorned with open blossoms, crews on ladders thinning burgeoning buds, branches studded with buds just awakening, and further on, last winter holding on. The same thing happens, even more suddenly, as you head up a side valley, or even move from the south slope of a hill to its north.


Later, the trees will sculpt cherries and apples, fruit-forms manifold and delightful. Like the flowers, their beauty will be individual and collective, multiplied by perspective and nature's fractal variations.


I hope you have the time to appreciate it. Slowly; the blur from a car is nice in its way, but take the time to stop. Inhale. Take a bite and chew slowly like a cow with nowhere in particular to go. Stroke the petal gently, tug the fruit free. Gaze at the orchard, stare at the apple of your eye. Revel in this northwest beauty.

I Sat in Front of the King

A couple of days after my encounter with a queen in Wenatchee, eating lunch in Twisp, I sat in front of the king, an older gentleman who, every 4 minutes would make a pronouncement:

"I'm gonna pick up 3-4 more horses." No reason given.
"I ought to buy a few hundred head of cattle. Seems like the fish and wildlife Department won't even talk to ya about leases till you have a herd."
"The job those boys did on the fence,...I might ask 'em out to do the whole property."

Basically, listing things he would acquire in that odd monarchic tendency toward bucolic nostalgia. Like Marie Antoinette playing  milkmaid in Petit Hameau, a rustic Swiss-ish village she had built at Versailles. Do they ever really blend in? Heck no, but the rich spend a lot of money locally in their quest to feel like farmers, which is the modern capitalist version of the Prince and the Pauper, and acceptable to the peasantry.

Sometimes it works out well. The locals, or at least a family or two who do the king's dirty work, may get the run of the place during the 90% of the time when isn't around. Suppliers of feed and fencing, gear and luxury goods, have a new customer who not only pays on time, but can be counted on to spend extra if the seller so much as hints that some other guy is doing similar things. The king must win at the game of competitive consumption. 

But then, the king ain't from here, and he don't exactly understand some of the balances he is upsetting, the social and environmental  laws he's breaking. He overpays the young guy (who everybody knows is an idiot) while the dad (who everybody knows can fix anything and needs the work to stay off the bottle) remains silent and grows bitter. He fences off open range, brings in questionable stock, and when he grows bored (or scared) of nature goes on a building spree that bulldozes the old Indian village, paves the single best field in the valley, and pollutes the night sky with floodlights.

With any luck, the king gains a new fascination and moves on before he does too much damage. Without it, he falls so deeply in love with the place that it becomes his court away from court, and other nobles follow, inflating land prices and making it impossible to farm or ranch any more, ruining that which drew him there in the first place.  The occasional king is smart enough to notice and regret this irony, but most don't even recognize what happened.

Blessed be the Falls

I escaped the Palouse the day before the winds whipped up.

Which is a good thing, as any veteran of the winds there can tell you. Me? I've only been there once, yet I now have the gall to write about it. 

Hills blown down round, no one of them anything big by northwest standards, but still dwarfing the hell out of any human, who can only clamber up to see another horizon, same but different. Outside of riverine unfurlings, the land in summer was hot and dry, in winter frozen solid. Many's the homestead begun well that has dried up, reduced to a smudge on the landscape, a rickety thicket of locust and boards.

The tribes knew when the time was to go dig roots or find a herd, and made their way through this land of loess on trails connecting hundreds of generations. A 160 acre homestead turned out not to be a going concern, but wheat farming on a massive scale seems to be working out, vineyards are moving in, and the land is tattooed with furrows and fencelines. This too shall pass, but it will take a while to completely erase.

The Palouse River cuts through this country, and there's a state park there where you can see a big waterfall, the whole volume of the river chuting through a deep notch near one bank. Coming up from the Columbia and Snake, it's a relief to see a river wild, flowing free, dropping over geology, not a spillway. The falls arc down in a white stream onto a pool hugged by cliffs, a hole in the landscape. Away from the froth, the water is shady and protected from whatever winds may be whipping about up top. Naturally, the pool has a uterine shape.

So of course I have this desire to go down there, but marmot warriors guard the place. Fiercer than the rabbit in Monty Python's Holy Grail. One charged up and gave me a good chattering. I backed down.

Even from behind the fence, the falls roar calls a smile to my face. Mist-fed ferns and mosses soft on walls, embracing falls surging into a ray of sun before thundering down deep in the shadow. Fecundity, guarded by marmots,...who I will eventually outsmart.

 

Soylent Greenbacks

Somehow in the last post, which you should be reading first, I got off track. Watching the movie, knowing the secret ahead of time, the characters' anguish and shock seemed overdone. But then, I've forgotten what life was like before Reagan (our most Hestonian president, I'd say, with that veneer of smiling good nature and great hair over a dickish soul and addled mind), and worse yet Mr. New World Order. As Saul says, we had a world once,...schmuck.

But even in those kinder, gentler days before the Bush Dynasty ascended, people should have understood that in a movie where the premise is that the world is way overpopulated and food is hard to come by, there's gonna be some cannibalism. It's happened with boats and plains and wagon trains full of hungry people, and for that matter probably happens in New York city from time to time anyway.

Maybe I'm jaded by years of living under unbridled and bloodthirsty capitalism, but it also makes sense that a large corporation would pounce on the obvious profit potential in this movie world. A steady supply of willing flesh, a vast pool of consumers hungry for protein, yearning for a new product. As businessmen are so fond of saying, it's a no-brainer.

Soylent Green saw this future coming. Like all tales of the future, it is doomed to looking stupid on some levels: the lame-ass video game would have fallen prey to this in less than a decade, there are no Latinos, and the guns are pitiful little toys. On the other hand, we're well on the way to being a plutocracy, run by a few ruthless people who live in a level of wealth unimaginable to the unwashed masses. Officials who use their position to enrich themselves and appropriate other people's stuff? Yep. Corporations using public resources to enhance profitability (where do you think the Riot Patrol scoopers dump their haul?) and shaping public policy to their liking? Yep. High-powered politicians drawn from the ranks of the wealthy? Yep. Public sector workers not paid a decent wage? Yep. Corruption, dehumanization, women treated as furniture? Yep, yep, and yep.

I heard about a scientific study recently in which burgers from 6 corporate chains were tested, and it was found that they contained between 2 and 15% meat. Slightly more if you count guts and parasites, but basically a Soylent Gray disk. I haven't eaten that crap in years, but in large urban centers, it accounts for a large portion of the menu for those who cannot afford to have luxuries like fresh vegetables. I don't think it has yet become profitable to include human meat, but don't expect Archer Daniels Midland to tell you when that happens. They and the other food-stuff mega corporations may well have nicely bound feasibility studies already on the shelves, just like in the movie.

Which brings to mind a flaw. I can understand the guy from state security hiring a patsy to murder a conspirator who might not be reliable, but to think that they'd leave the investigation to a detective who is not also part of the operation boggles the mind. The bodyguard did not sweep out the books and any other incriminating evidence or kill the priest moments after he heard confession form the Man Who Knew Too Much. Amateurs. Bush I or Cheney would have disappeared the killer, bodyguard, priest and furniture immediately, would have put their own guy on the case; nobody, least of all some rabble rouser, would have ever known about the murder or the greater crime of mass cannibalism.

If word ever did get out, they'd put the media to work explaining that Soylent Green is as American as apple pie (or at least mock apple pie made with pancreas instead of those horrible ritz crackers). They'd have paraded out McCain, who would explain that he took up cannibalism out of necessity in Hanoi, but kept up with it for the pure gustatory pleasure. There would be a new ad campaign on the theme "Soylent Green is People," showing the smiling faces of the diverse Soylent workforce, appropriating and deflating the critique. Anti-cannibals would be branded as socialists and homos, marginalized, and if that didn't work, scooped up by the riot patrol and delivered to the Gitmo Processing Plant.

The voluntary suicide center would be different, too. None of this druidic robe stuff, a final film dwelling on nature. There'd be a big cross. You'd be strapped to the gurney so that you could not escape when you figured out they were lying about giving you the full 20 minutes of nice movie. Fawning Dick Van Patten manning the gates, allowing himself to be pushed around by a half-fed local cop? Hell no: a Blackwater crew, tossing the bullet-riddled bodies of interlocutors into the hopper.

The process, the conveyors and trucks and machines that transport and transform bodies into Soylent Green, appears a little silly now. Bodies given the dignity of a clean white sheet through the whole process? Maybe in the first week of operation, but soon enough some manager would get himself a promotion by figuring out that eliminating the sheets would increase the profit margin, another would move up after devising a streamlined process for gold tooth extraction. Likewise, once the suicider has signed on the dotted line, amenities are unnecessary and a waste. No self-respecting corporation in 2011, much less 2022, would want to justify the expense to shareholders anxious about meeting quarterly projections.

In 1963, Heston marched  with Dr. King and advocated for civil rights. In 1973, he seemed outraged by what the Soylent Corp was doing. In 1983, he'd changed his tune, and by '93 was excoriating the pinkos who would dare badmouth the poor maligned white male. As Heston went, so too did the leadership of our country. Less and less concerned with any right but the right to bear arms, more and more demented. Unwilling to let anything stand in the way of the march toward complete corporate domination of the economy and society. Growing Mosaic in his devotion to the one true god (with his three faces: father, son, and holy cash flow), and disgusted by the humanists.

Soylent Greenbacks are made of people.

Rattus Amongus

Olympia has rats, or some kind of giant gerbil. My family concocts, consumes, and disposes of various euphemisms for these creatures. And no doubt they drag the remains back to their lairs.

And attempted lairs, like in the bottom of our trash can, where they chewed a channel through the bottom and started setting up house. The weird thing is that they brought a Cheeto bag from somewhere else. Which just goes to show: them critters have networks of runs from lair to food to water to the secret escape tunnel to...everywhere. I live in great habitat--enriched with the offal flow of a dense human population--and the most I can reasonably expect without major interspecies warfare is to keep them out of the house. When we moved in I literally had to mortar in places under the house to keep them from coming in via the fireplace.

Granted, our rodents are as adorable as they get: big soulful eyes, healthy clean fur, that perky hop-run they do across the moonlit yard, not too big,...they're not so bad. The girls shudder at the suggestion of just killing them. Poison could kill our dog and rats eventually figure out how to avoid every trap anyway, which over the course of a few of their generations puts you right back where you started, except with fitter rats. So as an archaeologist, I'd have to classify any period of rat-free existence I could achieve as "ephemeral."


Anyway, the rat population is what it is because of humans. They are commensal species with us, and when you have a 2-week trash pickup cycle and a large percentage of composters in a fecund climate with yards providing cover and food, they flourish. We create habitat, they fill it. Whenever I've excavated in sites where small bones can survive, some species or another of genus Rattus has been found. Polynesians ended up transporting them everywhere they sailed, to the extent that one of the ways used to recontstruct their ancient migrations is through comaprison of rat DNA on all the far-flungislands of the Pacific. Really.

What remains unknown is how a rat could survive in tight quarters, with a crew of humans you would think would be intent on guarding their food stores and all the planting materials destined to start life on a new island. Archaeologists in Polynesia argue about this all the time. One camp says rats are just good stowaways. The other side scoffs, and says they were alloowed to survive, maybe even intentionally brought along, because they are edible. Imagine that you are setting out to colonize an island with unknown food resources, but you pretty much know there are not going to be any land animals worth eating. Would you maybe bring along something that subsists on scraps and seeds, multiplies rapidly, and tastes good roasted on a stick? From a survival perspective, it makes a lot of sense. After a while, when you've got your pig operation rolling, you pretend you never ate rat.

But if you're not in the mood for roasted rat (or tarts, or sorbet, or any of those other Monty Python dishes), how exactly does this coevolution benefit humans? I mean, they poop in our food caches, chew holes in everything, harbor diseases,... Well first of all, don't be so damn simple-minded and literal. Species that live and evolve together don't typically have altruistic thoughts about each other--they just have to co-occupy the same space without making the other extinct. The Plague, in the cold light of evolution, only made the European human population stronger. Thanks for the favor, rat.

To find the benefit on a more immediate scale, set back your clock a century or so, before trash collection and widespread urbanization. You tossed rubbish over the fence or into a pit, where rats were maong the creatures and microbes that broke it all down. Rats are incessant gnawers and poopers (dropping 200 turds a day, I've read), so they must be a significant factor in soil formation around human settlements. Through several varied attempts at composting here, I dealt with rodent incursions; they would sneak in and haul off whatever they liked best. They even ate or drove away worms I'd bought for composting, the rat bastards. Eventually, I just opted for a bin on the ground, nothing to prevent their tunneling in. Now I throw in the scraps, and they disappear down the bottom, eventually to become dirt somewhere.

All those tunnels aerate said soil, and provide habitat for all sorts of other critters. And of course when the starving times come calling on the large bipeds, the rats start looking like food again...

So if I were somehow able to eliminate rats from the neighborhood, more stuff would either pile up here or end up in landfills. The soil wouldn't be as good, and seeds would not be so widely distributed within it. I'd have less protein in the end times.

And plus, I cannot help but wonder if, facing extinction, the rats would up the level of their activity from annoyance to truly fighting back. What if the rats, sensing real trouble, started to systematically attack our food supply? Or gnaw through our infrastructure, contaminate us and maximize their disease vector behaviors? Yeah, where would we be then?

It remainds me of that Charles Darwin quote, attributed by some to Stephen J. Gould, but in fact made up by me, "Once the rats figure out how to do agriculture, we are toast."

Fringe Flora

For a while I did archaeology on Kaua’i, which is at least as fun as you would imagine, despite a psychopathic thug who kept threatening me and one long, rainy, snot-filled stint when I did permanent damage to my wrist wrestling through packed clay. The reward for that was spending days in the presence of Makana (watching the wind place misty lei around the mountain again and again), that and some secret things you cannot hear.

I did more excavation there and then than I had since my initiation in a certain O’ahu valley. A fair volume of dirt moved, for sure, but more importantly a high rate of hitting things. Not cool artifacts and valuable museum pieces, but deep stratification, a cache or two, clear-cut features. And lots of charcoal.

Which is what helped me come up with the idea of a “settlement fringe flora.”

Generations of farmers, cooks, and eaters lay down blankets of soil. Cultivation and fallow, cooking and cleaning, occupation and abandonment: all these things lay down a record. All these things make rubbish and soil, holes and backfill, deposits and discontinuities that archaeologists come along later and read. Charcoal that gets buried in the process, the carbon sequestration incidental to human life, embodies a history of the environment (at least the woody part of it). Locked in charcoal is the cell structure of a plant, and patient experts could be hired for a dollar a minute to decode this. The information gained is especially useful when you use it to choose samples for radiocarbon dating, and start looking at things over time.

By buying a few hours of this service, I was able to find the obvious: that the 20th Century had wreaked havoc. Also an earlier chapter: arrival of Polynesian farmers caused discernible but less drastic changes like disappearance of some endemics and introduction of some useful plants. Both of these are examples of selection, intentional or not, cultural or natural, evolution’s famous cutting edge.

But what was really interesting to me was that in taro fields and villages alike, certain species managed to stick around through centuries of human presence. Akoko, Kukui, Lama, Ulei,...these four tended to show up whenever there was a fire. The first and last of these make perfect sense in terms of their own adaptation--they can colonize disturbed areas, they are abundant and not too long-lived, they flood the landscape, especially when humans are around and not planting exotic weeds.

Kukui? Not native, but also not necessarily the type of aggro plant that invades and takes over. No, it’s one of those plants that accommodates people so well that they help it along. The plant one, and it will provide oil, wood, dyes, glue, compost, medicine, even a reminder of a god. The hardshelled nuts will roll downhill or hide in soil for years, ready to sprout and make more.

Lama? This is the surprise. Diospyros sandwicensis, Hawaiian ebony (paradoxically pale wood and all). Not the fastest grower or reproducer, possessed of spiritual significance, and not what you would necessarily expect to be burnt willy nilly. Yet it shows up in many a fire pit. Partly, this is just a physical peculiarity, the hardwood probably preserves better than many species. But I have recovered it in areas where it would have been wiped out in a generation of uncontrolled harvest, where the only way for it to have been used over the long run would be for people to maintain its presence (conservation or cultivation? I dunno).

These four species, I think, are part of a fringe flora. Plants that occur around human settlements. All had uses in the organic technology of Hawaiians, all provided fuel to warm and cook, all escaped extirpation. All maintained some place in an environment settled and farmed, all occupied a Polynesian landscape in evolutionary stasis.

Tender

Native blackberries of the NW snake along the ground. They weave windfall twigs and failing fronds and each other into the mat of forest soil. They snag hiker feet and even though the thorns are pretty small, people pretty much think of them as a nuisance. A few know that the berries are supremely tasty, but they are tiny and sparse on the ground compared to the Himalayan blackberries clinging to every roadside and vacant lot in the NW like some savage velcro mutant.

But I've been letting them carpet the wildish back strip of the yard for the past couple of years, and this year I spent a few more hours messing with the weave. I plucked mustard weed, which unchecked will shade out the berries. Pinched some leaders, rerouted and rooted others. Avoided walking through the patch.

Gave that blackberry blanket some tender loving care. Because I am tender of this tiny piece of earth, and tend to think that something that's native and nutritious is worth tending to.

I could, and sometimes do, make like I do stuff like this for noble reasons (just ask my family who have to hear my spoutings, not just via blogview, but at any odd hour), but I just like spending time outside rapt up in some job, especially when it will end up yielding food. The work itself is pretty easy if you remember that nature is boss and sets the schedule; a few minutes of weeding now might take an hour in two weeks, and still won't bring back the sun swiped in the interim.

In this case, the earth reciprocated. The berries this year are huge compared to what you generally find in the wild. Freed from some of the competition by my selection (seemed natural enough to me), they sucked up soil and sun and now lie fat and sweet and happy in the morning dew.

Which is probably how people became tenders in the first place. Those big eyes saw something tasty and the big brain figured out that it was because of the gap in the canopy or the lack of some other plant or last summer's fire. Most archaeologists would say agriculture is on the order of 10,000 years old, and recognize that humans have used fire to change the landscape for tens of millenia. I think it's also pretty likely that there are a bunch of behaviors invisible to archaeologists that are deep in our past and have to do with tending the earth to get more food. Things like weeding, clearing, peeing at the base of a tree, ripping down branches for shelters,...who knows how long our kind of ape has been doing these things? (Maybe longer than we consciously did anything to make food grow; corn is not the only plant that evolved to trick humans into giving it an unfair edge.)

So, the blackberries can depend on tender-hearted me.

What the Hay?

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





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




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

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

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

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

Ford Fuel

Another fuel post. Mostly because it is a pain to put more than one photo in a post.

Anyway, here we have it. The fuel of the present. I saw windmills from Missouri to Oregon, but not too many, and less than half were moving.
In WV or KY, I saw a prominently located alternative energy center where there was a much smaller windmill twirling furiously. The plants around the place were decidedly stationary, and it would seem that the wind was not making the windmill turn, but a motor. Brilliant! Somewhere in the basement of the place, a strapping scots-irish lad shoveled coal into the power plant. Someone should tell him his indenture is up.

And grain ethanol? It won't disappear anytime soon, but nor will it supplant oil. Corn barely creates more fuel than it uses, and is in-bred to a degree that would make even the Mountbattens blanche and evolution smack its grinning, bloodthirsty chops. One hand of the market pushes farmers into increasingly unwise efforts to grow corn above all else, while the other stirs up a new bowl of dust.