Spring & KAOS in the Air

KAOS is in the air, and probably the water.

At last, I can breathe a sigh of relief. Exhaling the last of that nagging feeling (I'm not religious enough to feel Guilty) and inhaling relief, relief that I am right with KAOS once again.

I've been a card-carrying KAOS member for years, and for the past couple or so, I've joined up the kids as well--they breathe that same KAOS-infused air, and I want them to learn about supporting community. The community of hosts, doers-of-things, and engineers (all volunteers) that makes up KAOS serves up news and music un-constrainted by corporate orthodoxy or the increasingly dullardly NPR strictures (I want the kids to grow up in a place where the airwaves are free, and the chaos is locally grown), and for myself I want KAOS in the air, even if I'm not tuned in.

So when the credit union was hacked any my credit card changed, shutting off one of the trickle-ups of money that keeps KAOS independent, I meant to give them a call and hook up the new card.

But I procrastinated.

And felt off-kilter. A couple or three months went by, and still I hadn't re-coupled my financial hook-up to dear sweet KAOS. I didn't miss KAOS caressing my ears--because I didn't stop listening to this FREE station, but felt dangerously close to Guilt, and about half-past Hypocritical, having extolled and exhorted on behalf of radio--particularly community radio--so often on this blog.

But now I've made the call, and gotten right with KAOS once again. I just stepped outside, and the air was sweet with what most people would recognize as some Spring flower, but in which I could catch a whiff of KAOS Community Radio.

I Heart Microbes

Spring continues to burgeon. The flowers and en-leafening branches are only the most obvious evidence. Underfoot, though, the soil swells as microbes kick into high gear. Without their action, the plants would sit and starve.

Meanwhile, in a cabinet under the counter, acetobacters transform liquid leached from the neighbor's leftover juice pulp into some tangy amber vinegar. The photo above is a slightly color-enhanced shot of the flocculant mat that covers the surface, which as an added gift formed a heart shape. Heart Shaped Floccs--you gotta take your Nirvana where you can get it. 

February

The Mountain in February, as seen through a donut o' snow.

People love to hate February. Once the Superbowl is over, so is the American patience with Winter, no more holidays, just dreary months ahead before things warm up. I had a friend who whined through the whole month last year, and the sentiment is widespread. A Winter's worth of griping gets packed into 28 days.

Oh well.

I like February. Around here, it's one of our many Springs. Bulbs are popping up, alliums putting on growth in the lengthening days. Even on the colder Plateau, this month is when the first of the First Foods emerge. The days have been getting longer since December, but the light of January is still just a slanting sliver. In February, we're halfway to Equinox, and they days are finally brighter enough to notice, especially is we're graced with the Week of Gleaming Sun that pries open most Salish Winters.

Snow donuts, pretty even on a cloudy day.

Not that the only things February has to offer are meteorological. There's 42 Day, when you can celebrate anything or nothing, or maybe throw a Burt Reynolds themed party in honor of the mustache legend's birthday. The usual February also lays claim to being the only month that presents a nice neat four-week package. No other month is so in synch with the lunar cycle.

Then there's February 29th, a day so precious it comes but once a quadrenniad. An extra day, and a reminder of February's trickster nature. Not pinned down to a particular duration, an extra "r" whose pronunciation confuses many (it's mastery requires subtle refinement, and is an aural secret handshake to the non-deaf cogniscenti). February can lull you with a beautiful day or grind you down with a rough one.

What? Am I admitting that February days can be cold, that the weight of prior months of Winter does not press down on this diminutive month? Yeah, I guess I am.

But then I'm a stoic, to a degree. If all you can do in the face of sub-ideal conditions is whine about them, then by all means, enjoy your misery. If the only way you can deal with the tail end of Winter is by looking ahead toward some imaginary Utopian Spring, then fine, but you're missing Now. I get some grim satisfaction from staring down the cold rain and knowing I'll outlast it. There is joy in crouching down on creaky joints and reaching fingers into the earth again, dead frigid as it may feel now, clearing the first weeds and planting the first seeds (without some toil, that Spring won't be so idyllic).

I know the temptation is there to scapegoat February for all your long-Winter, post-Holiday blues, but try to enjoy it. Small beauties emerge this month, the Trickster is planting surprises. You'll get through it just fine.

Wings Over Cascadia

This past May, not that long after the snow had left, I arrived in a Cascadian meadow. Too early for camas and yampah, ground still pretty squishy, so I was jumping the gun relative to the traditional calendar that has drawn people up here since forever ago. But, this was when the opportunity arose, and I took it.

Likewise for the sandhill crane pictured here. What I've heard is that one or two show up at this meadow in any given year, but no breeding occurs. More likely, in the midst of migratory flight, it looks down upon this island of grass in vast forest, and swoops in for a closer look, a rest, a meal. The meadow is welcoming enough that it may stay the season, stop the flying and settle in on ground thinly peopled, a nature preserve in fact. Ironically, this meadow is the handiwork of millenia of human handiwork, a home occupied each summer while people dug roots, raced horses, traded, and did whatever else, including at some point setting fires that maintained this non-forested Cascadian oasis.

May may be early for the human foods (that I know of), and full flower is still a month away, but for the other creatures life is in full swing. Foliage and flowers have the small flyers flitting from plant to plant. This swallowtail may not be rare, and it takes no talent or acuity to find one, but I still feel fortunate to have seen so many of these fluttering paintings.

Some are more subtle, and the closer you look, the more you see. This moth appeared to be a caterpillar-pillaged leaf when I first saw it. Eventually, it grew uncomfortable with my gaze and took off on tattered wings while I stood, nearly stuck in the muck. 

That day, I meandered a mile or two. Not exactly trudging, but not flying either. The clouds of tiny insects, flocks of birds, and solo flyers all took their travels into a third dimension. This little plain of grass surrounded by mountains opened up a patch of sky so they could fly free under a warming sun while in the dank woods beetles crawl.

June Flowers

Orangey Daisy Thingy

Peony

Lupine close up, just before opening.

Lupines!

Phlox

Digitalis fingering the sky.

Valerian. These delicate blooms will transform from sweet to dog-poo smell in a week or so.

Ranunculus gone wild, with the neighbor's rhododendron cascading over the fence.

And finally, a 'weed' Potentilla

Garden 11: The Hoop House

September, and tomatoes are finally ripening.

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

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

June 2011: The plastic comes off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

A Compendium of Gathering

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

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

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


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

In the Days of Yore (Last Week)

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was gonna write about tending to the wild berries

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

Can you hear the bees?

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

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

Liko

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


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

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

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.

On Foot

Work is about 2.25 miles from where I live, which makes it walkable. Admittedly, this doesn't happen as much in the winter (unless there's snow, which I cannot resist), but now that temps are in the balmy upper 40's, and the rain is not as constant, feet will carry me to work more often. 


Some people set a brisk pace, and would cover the distance in a half hour or less, but my sense slow me down. Watching the pink and green haze of emergent buds causes the legs to swing slow (sweet chariot), maybe even stopping to zoom in and appreciate the unfurling beauty of a fiddlehead. My ears listen to try and find where the thrushes hide, their varied songs imitating creaky hinges and the slightly rusted spring of the old screen door that only opens when grandkids are in town. Nose gathers data: skunk cabbage beginning to emerge, air warming enough to carry the scent of awakening green.


Slower still as my foraging instinct kicks in. Pausing to fill grocery bags with tender young nettle shoots. Scoping the woods for bracken fiddleheads to browse. Noting where the Indian plums and cherries bloom in promise of future fruit. 


I was talking with an anthropologist who studies urban foragers in Seattle, and she said that foragers tend to be walkers. Cars go too fast and demand too much attention of the drivers; they can cover a lot of ground and maybe reveal some likely spots and the most obvious of the un-picked fruit trees. Same goes for the bus, although it has the advantage of letting riders look at the same spots over and over, noticing details after enough time. Bikes are more immediate, no windows in the way, able to slow and veer closer to a promising copse. But walking brings time to it's most human cadence, wandering begets wondering, daydreams played out and plans laid out. Details and discoveries appear to the lone biped that remain veiled to the wheeled.


I get to the destination slower than a driver. Getting to work takes about 40 minutes if I don't stop, compared to around 5 if I drive. Not counting parking and the walk from there to the building, traffic, and of course stopping to let pedestrians cross the road. On the other hand, I decompress and alleviate stress, get some exercise. 


Not driving saves me the cost of running a vehicle and buying gas, and relieves the atmosphere of having to absorb fossil fuel's farts. For a guy like me who doesn't subscribe to a religion, but still enjoys being self-righteous, walking is just the ticket: smile with the self-satisfaction of being green, glare at the cars that don't stop for pedestrians, stuff like that. And if I arrive home with a belly full of berries, maybe something extra for the table, or even just the peacefulness born of shedding work worries during an amble through woods and neighborhoods, so much the better.

Not Opening Day

Turns out I jumped the gun, and the Farmers Market opens the first Thursday of April, not the first weekend. Bogus.

But that left more time for foraging. To begin with, garage sale style. I happened on happiness: a sale underadvertised, a house with a lifetime of stuff, miraculously unravaged by early birds and dealers. Then it turns out that the guy who accumulated it shares my name, right down to the non-standard pronunciation. I now have his thermos, the kind my dad and namesake uncle both carried, right down to the replacement handle (it's missing the cup, but I have one). And a vice that can clamp to the workbench, which is something I've been looking for for decades. Perfect. The guy's bowling ball even fit my digits like a glove, a crazy head-konking fatigue-inducing glove. 

Then later, some outside foraging. My younger daughter walked with me to a neighborhood park plagued with stinging nettles, which are still pickable. She played on the swing and explored the woodland path while I squatted and snapped the tender tips, filling a couple of grocery bags. I'll make a quiche for dinner tonight, and freeze the rest. Probably will pick another couple rounds, freezing some and drying the rest for tea, before the season is over. Once you cover yourself to keep from getting stung, nettles are easy to gather, because they form dense patches and love to colonize trail margins, and nobody laments their disappearance or diminishment.

I guess I'm supposed to have some nice photos, food porn shots: macro focus on the hoary purple-green leaf buds (ok, maybe marijuana porn) laying on a richly orange wooden table fuzzing into the depth of field, the hand-made Andean basket filled with a Van Gogh swoosh of sprigs, stuff like that. But what I have is a pair of plastic grocery bags full of wet  smooshed leaves.

But they were free. It was a nice opening day.

Sprout

Since the winter solstice (26 days ago), I've been cooped up aside from wandering the wind-froze canyons of Portland for a couple or three days. Tending the fire and a cold, scrounging up meals, near hibernation. A big cold snapped and sent clouds running for a few days, but the little cold kept me in for the most part, watching the hoar accumulate in the long winter shadows until it looked like we'd been snowed on. I ventured no farther than the woodpile and the bus stop. (And let's be honest, like most middle class enviros, I took the car ride when offered and the bio-fueled bus thus rode on one rider less efficiently.)

But coming home from work the other day, done with a hard week and virtuously waiting for the bus, I saw the light. Twilight, I guess, but anything that keeps the 5:30 sky from being something other than dark counts in winter. Like thousands of generations before me, I breathed a sigh of relief that the days would not just keep getting shorter forever, felt in my ear the tenderotic breath of Persephone.

So today when the clouds thinned and the rain that has pissed incessantly on the south sound since the sunshine daydream let up for a couple of hours, I fled outside. Needed to flea the air in this house: smoked by fireplace, caughed by denizens, staled by cold and spored by mold.

Required as well--fingers in the earth. So it was into the front, to a triangle of bare dirt and its assortment of uninvited and well intended plants. Down on my hands and knees pulling weeds, killing my back but healing my soul. On a material level, the goal was to get rid of dandelions and cheatgrass, clover and other aggressives, root out the competition for the collection of camas and lomatia, bitterroot and alliums, a suite of eats native to the northwest, if not exactly the Puget basin. This will be a meadow, dotted with sage and lavendar. I'll probably wait til another round of weeds sprout, then slice their roots and let them die before putting out the mixed bag of seeds I've been collecting east of the Cascades. The front yard, in full sun and tilted to get the most of it in summer, is my microcosmic eastern Washington.

At the bottom of the yard is a garlic patch. Over a dozen dozen sets surrounding a small cherry tree. Set out last October in the lowest part of the yard, and thus the wettest and coldest, the garlic was a worry for me. The patch froze hard within a couple or three weeks of having been planted, and then it got warmer and wet. The pattern happened again around New Years, with a bigger freeze and complete saturation after. I figured there'd be heavy losses.

And it looks like that even as you walk up to the patch. Only down on all fours, fingertweezing out offending grasses, are the sprouts visible. In the meadow too, tips of tulips and tiny bursts of bitterroot appear to eyes in near-earth orbits. As the weeds come out, violets come to light. Get microscopic in the microcosmos, and signs of emergence are everywhere. In among the mouldering leaves of last year, lavendar shoots emanate. Sedum, beat up and rolled around over the winter, has unveiled the genius of it's strategy, setting down roots from every scattered frag so they can knit themselves together and blanket the poorest ground. Budswell (gods, how I love saying that word)
has begun on blueberries and saskatoon, fat embryonic liko getting ready to greet the air.

It doesn't take much to make me happy. A few more minutes of daylight, the tintiest indication of growth...the promise of a phenomenal future when grey births green, when foliage feeds flowers, when seeds escape their stale dull insides and start growing, reborn and eternal.

Dormancy

A decade of tropical living, gardening and bush-whacking through jungle scrub and desert, eroded my memory of dormancy. Arrowroot and olena clung to an ancestral habit of sprouting in spring and retreating in winter, but for the most parts seasons were worn down and subtle: high temps dropped 10 degrees, mangoes had new shoots or flowers or fruit. But the ground never froze and the trees declined to drop all their leaves and retreat for months.

The Puget Sound lowlands have a bit of a blunted seasonality as well, out vast basin of water keeps the summer from getting too hot or the winter too cold, but there's no escaping trhe latitude, a little past the halfway point from equator to pole. Even the warmest winter lacks the light to keep leaves happy, and as you may have heard, the clouds here jealously filter out as much winter sun as possible.

So the trees that invest in something more than miserly needles are forced each autumn to surrender their wealth, dropping leaves to replenish the soil, and letting the sap settle back down to rest before the spring engorgement. Some plants compltely retreat into the ground, ceding the airspace. Some big critters hibernate, while hordes of insects and their arthopodic kin fall back even further into pupae and eggs, all the winter hiding places of the summer swarms.

Humans bury themselves in layers of textiles, avoid the cold rainy outdoors, and maybe withdraw into depressive solitude. (I'm guessing that over the years, I'll post more entries in winter than summer. One day many people may read this blog, but the making of it is a thing I accomplish alone, buried deep in the loam.)

Winter and dormancy always get saddled with the death metaphors, with the pall of loss and sad decay. Their contributions to fecundity lack the photogeneity of spring. Who wants to turn away from the flower in bloom to look at grey decay, at ill-lit muck?

But the frozen exoskeleton and waterlogged leaves fuel the spring growth. The respite from insects and warm weather give the plants a chance to recover and regroup. The cold and wet winnow the unhealthy. And hidden below ground, roots and hyphae may not be so dormant, the infrastructure for the superstructure often advances before and after any action is evident up top.

And not so much here, but in the desert regions there are species that go dormant for more than a season, beyond a year. Baked in mud, buffeted by winds, biding their time and witholding action until the right rain hits and then bursting forth with astonishing vigor from some unimpressive husk.

Seeds may not be dormant as biologists defined it, but an inert capsule that holds in it the germ of an entire organism seems like a special case of the same phenomenon. The joy of gathering seed each fall, knowing that the seed from one plant can birth a whole bed of progeny is one of the things that keeps me gardening and happy. I've seen seeds buried for decades or longer sprout when given the chance, and there are species whose seeds are engineered to outlast the elements in wait of the wet year or the fire that triggers growth.

My garden is about done for this season, and there are plenty of perennials, bulbs and bushes gone dormant. I'll find some excuses over the winter to go out and work--removing a stump or planning new beds, maybe--but in general I'm goign into garden dormancy as well. Other pursuits spring to life: writing and carving, reading and dreaming. At least some of these will prove to be roots that strengthen next years growth.

Backroads: 142

Riding river roads north from the Columbia's southern swing is to fight a flow of beauty washing into your every sense, inviting you to stop and gaze, dazed and amazed. Climbing the Klickitat on Washington 142 from Lyle to Goldendale on a green May day, especially with almost no other cars around to hurry you, can take a while.

The river ran hard that day, swollen with silt, foaming at the mouth of each eddy. Late wet snow feeding a good flow, lupines a-blooming and the hillsides not yet be-browned, summer's scorch safely at bay for a while yet. The oaks of Klickitat at that fleeting delicacy when the leaves are full but still soft and the bugs haven't really punched in.

Right of of Lyle, the valley gets pretty tight, and the lack of easy bottomland cut off sprawl before it could crawl upstream. 142 swoops along the bank. Meanwhile, and old rail grade has been reborn as the Klickitat Trail, which I  now yearn to walk, downhill like the river, but at an even slower pace to enjoy the bird and water songs, gaze at landscapes and pollinated bees.

The valley never becomes an expanse, but it does open up a bit about 10 miles in. The town of Klickitat is here, but I didn't stop. Wahkiacus gets a name on the map, but I don't remember a town--one of the great things about this road is that so much of it is unbuilt upon. 142 zigs and zags up through the kind of torn and shorn landscape you get when tectonics are at fault, and comes out addled enough to careen eastly when the main river heads north.

Somewhere around here, the road narrows to one lane, which is harrowing only on the frequent blind curves. If I hadn't been so blissful from the ride, I'd have worried that maybe I'd misread the map (or it had mislead me), and I was on a road that pinched out in the hills somewhere, but nah, there was no need for that. As with the rest of the run, the road remained smooth and solid, unfouled and practically untravelled.

The last big uphill run, a line skewing up and across, an engineer's straight edge mocking slope and contour alike, signals the end of the river road. Once you pop over the rim, the road spreads back out into two lanes and sticks to the grid laid down over a century ago in the aftermath of the Indian Wars by men moving to consolidate their Cartesian way. On the flats, the roads run north-south or east-west, maybe cutting corners where it suits. Blockhouse Butte (oddly enough, a hill with a strategic view of the plain) is the only natural feature that causes a ripple in this grid that continues to Goldendale.

Route 142 ends in that town, where it T's out at 97. After the thrill of running the gauntlet under the guns of Blockhouse (I've since learned, much to my disappointment, that the Butte no longer has gun emplacements, there is no Corporal Agar up there making frontier warfare hilarious), 142's magic kinda fades, and it just becomes the seam between fields that ends up in Goldendale. By that time, I was already fondly reminiscing on the banks of the Klickitat, under rustle of oakleaves and scent of Ponderosa.

Another May

As each year passes, as I live through my third slow dawning of Spring in the Northwest, the rythm becomes danceable. Year one was fascinating, but pretty much saw me gawking at the beauty and confused by the unfamiliar. Last year, living through a same but different spring, I began to pick up some patterns amid the dazzle, to learn names for the things that live here, the ways water has of falling and springing and flowing and ebbing. Now this May, back again and famliar enough to be picking up more of the relationships and routines of the critters, the cycles and sequences of the plants.

Each gyre: a little wider and higher, a better view of the territory. Each time round a bit more aware.

And in Round Three: it's not just reading, watching, and listening, a sponge buffeted by the current it harvests. Bystanding days have ended, especially where the green kingdom is concerned.

In the garden: planting and thinning have gone pretty well according to schedule, opening and rehabilitating beds in a nick of time, not procrastinating myself into a corner. What I learned in the first couple of years will help feed me in the third.

On the forage trail: besides having a better seasonal round planned this year, bringing the forage home by planting wild foods in the yard has begun to show results. Also: jumping through some new windows, like the one when sap runs and cedar roots can be harvested and split. Doing this now makes it possible to make a basket this year; more than a month ago would have been wishful thinking at best (and desctructive if it got beyond the pondering), but in a month from now it will be too late.

On the preservation front: knowing a piece of good gathering land and returning to it at intervals this spring has allowed me to document the seasons within spring: yellowbells, bitterroot, biscuitroot, onion,... Seeing this place time and again and learning what different people know of it, how some other places relate to it, and walking it in various weather and light--all these have not just given me a better feeling and understanding of this landscape and where in it there are plants and sites to preserve, but also embedded seeds within me. Roots will tether me to this place, and whenever that happens, it has been mutually beneficial: I learn deeper lessons and the land gains a defender.

Forage Garden

Been while since I posted anything about foraging. The days keep getting longer, pumping more lumens to feed leaves. But other than the greens, the plants haven't begun to pass the bounty along to us. Now it's just berries busy setting fruit, strawberries and apples blooming, fish in the sea maybe getting that itch that will send them riverward. Mostly in winter I gather stones: colorful and stripy pebbles for my crowy eye, road-cut salvaged slabs for the garden walk, all the rocks in between that will one day be a wall, a fireplace,...

This Spring also brings first fruition to some other gathering--growth of forage food in my yard. Over the past couple of years, I've sometimes come home with a pocketful of camas bulbs not to eat, but to nestle back in the earth close at hand. The prairies where they once blanketed have been farmed and developed to a torn lacery now, but camas and onions and fritillaries hang on in some spots.

Besides burning the prairies to open them to beast and bulb, the local tribes were known to transplant, to carry some of the giving plants to welcoming soils, later feasting on the results. So I've done the same. Camas and strawberries have been multiplying in the flower beds this year, bunchberry and huckleberries in the dappled alder shade. Not all has been gathered--nursery--started blueberries and caneberries spread roots here too--because cheap as I am, I will spend money now to get yummy dividends later. True frugality can take a few years to play out.

So I keep adding bushes (like this saskatoon) that will bear fruit one day, bulbs that will multiply. Soon enough, they'll burst the bed boundaries, turn the yard's sunny spots into prairie, fill the understory with strata of sustenance.

And foraging will be ever easier.

Spring!

Happy Spring, yall. The photo is of wildflower in mid-Columbia country.

Days of sunshine led up to the Vernal Equinox, and now a nice Sunday morning shower quenches the advancing plants on the first full day o' Spring. Best of all, someone is giving away wild phlox. So I'm outta here.

Windfall

Alder, scorned upon trash-tree of the Northwest. From irritating thicket to senescence in 50 years, too full of rot to make good wood most of the time, dropping stuff constantly to the dismay and disgust of homeowners. People like the firewood, but that's about it.

There were 7 of these in the yard when I moved in, and a half dozen left now. The other warmed the house and cooked many a meal since I dismantled it nearly a year ago. The buds are red and swollen as little monkey-butts right now, ready to unfurl into something much more beautiful. Sunny and warming quickly right as I write, so we could get leafage this very day.

But standing in the still frosty yard on a clear morning like this, what silhouettes itself against the bluetiful sky are the naughty bits: great dangling catkins ready to explode pollen, cones with their mysteriously beckoning little openings. Strangely enough, most people do not find this arousing in the least, they look up and think, "I'm gonna have to rake all this crap up."

Because yes, after the party is over, the confetti falls away forgotten. The alders are generous, and throw in twigs and branches, slough some lichen and moss. There are people who will bag it up and throw it out, or put it in the green-waste bin for the city to haul away.

But you know I wouldn't do that.

Being shiftless, I've never tracked down figures on how much biomass an alder pumps out on an annual basis. But the spring brings thousands of catkins and cones, spent or wanting to hop into seed-bed, raining residue from the great spawning. Some cultures, closer to the earth by history or just by dint, would recognize this as especially good mulch--leaves can insulate and make soil eventually, but the tree's reproductive organs may bestow fertility, life force. Even if you don't believe in that, there's the biomass, maybe a trace of minerals mined by the tree's roots, worm-fodder. Soil to be.

Did I say Spring?

A year and 3,000 miles apart, I enjoyed spring cherry blossoms, followed a few days later by blossoms made of snow. In Virginia last year, the cherry blossoms had already fallen down in their own flower snow. In Washington this year, the flowers were still on the tree when petals of snow dropped out of the sky.

A few hours later, the snow was gone, the sun was shining, and I was out playing in the garden again. When we told people we would be moving to Olympia, many of them reacted with something along the lines of "The weather there sucks." Snow in late April may not be what people want, but at least it's interesting here. Not so much the months of endless rain, but a meteorological kaleidoscope.

Spring's Slow Unfurling

Photo: Daffodils of Skagit County

Compared to Hawai'i and Virginia, the Puget Spring's emergence happens...very...slowly. I am told this year is cooler than usual, which of course has elders, suspicious of Al Gore to begin with, clucking their tongues at Global Warming.

On this Earth Day, you are bound to find a better blogsplanation of how Global climate ain't the same as Local weather, and point is more that the long, Spring dawns cool and slow here. Which is cool, because whereas cherry blossoms would come and go in a few days in the south, they have hung on for a couple of weeks here. Cool, moist air reigns (and rains), like the refrigerated trailer we used to have at the greenhouse to keep hyacinths from blooming too fully too soon. And this Spring, the lack of more than a day straight of sun has probably suppressed the flowers that normally bloom on the light cycle instead of temperature. As a result, the heather only started looking bad after about 3 months of flowering, and bulb-blooms last to a ripe old age without showing it.
Spring climate may be slow in coming, but the weather often changes from minute to minute. Sure, it rained 6 out of the last 7 days, but most of those six days had patches of sun, sometimes hour upon hour of photons raining unrestrained. In the last week, we've experienced sun, snow, sleet, hail, rain, mist, a smattering of spattering, clouds black blue and white, and weather I could not even begin to name.
If Eskimeaux Sneaux goes by 100 names, I'm thinking that Nisqually must have a hundred shades of gray. Like people are wrong when they say there are no seasons in Hawai`i (you could go with the direction and kind and amount of rain, or just go by the fruit), to call it just "rainy" in the northwest misses the rich drama of precipitation and clouds here.
So, a diversity of momentary diversions, with a slow rollout of process. What could be better for the malihini wanting to learn the rhythms of the place?