Admint Calendar

So crazy it just might work.

Being both a mint junkie and a anti-garbage saver of containers, I have on hand a bag full of little plastic disks that once contained mints. I've used some now and then for seeds, but consumption has out-paced re-use for a while now. This fall, however, inspiration struck my younger daughter and I, and we vowed to invent the Admint Calendar.

Decorating the tree. Painting and layout by the child genius.

After some discussion, we settled on cutting out a Christmas tree shape from a scrap of 1/4-inch plywood, painting it green, and attaching the mint containers. She determined the shape by laying out the containers to fit on the board we had; beginning a single one at the apex, her formula for subsequent rows was "add two, then substract one, then repeat." Making the tree took a few minutes, followed by an hour under a fan to dry it enough to do the next step.

Attaching the containers: over-engineering by the dad. (Not pictured: fat ring o' glue)

We have a genetic predisposition to build things to last, perhaps at odds with the surficial preoccupation of some crafters, and so we attached the containers with a glob-ring of gorilla glue and staples slammed deep into the board. Conveniently, the tops of the containers can be pulled off to allow the staple gun to do its thing.

Stashing the candy. Goodbye 'til Christmas day, Eggnog Chocolate.

All that remained was to snap on the lids and install the treats. Maybe the best thing about making your own Adventskalendar is that you get to put good candy in it. Not stuff that was made years ago. No opening up the door to disappointment. It turns out that Seattle Chocolates fit perfectly, and we happen to love them.

No product endorsement intended, but thanks for the glittery labels, whichever corporation markets this stuff.

So, there you have it. The Admint Calendar. The only one of its kind.

Twilight. All Beauty, No Vampires

Step out of the Darkness

This past February, while everyone from embattled Alaskan codgers to entitled Southern heiresses was bemoaning our only four-week month, I worked on the Pacific Coast of Washington, the notoriously winter-drenched Olympic Coast.It was warm and sunny.

Spectrum in the Spectre-less Forks

I stayed in Forks, most famous during my kids' lifetimes as the setting of the Twilight series of movies and their prequel books, a protracted tale of teenage angst and love, featuring vampires and werewolves in the Northwest, written by a Mormon from elsewhere. The town clings to the notoriety, fading movie images all around, not-quite-copyright-infringing attempts to cash in ready for the tourists unable to see the beautiful, actual, twilight.

Clear skies and stunning sunsets are not the order of February's precious few days in the Hoh Valley. I'll admit that, and I may never have as beautiful a few days on the coast as happened inexplicably this Winter. But instead of dismissing that beautiful twilight as an aberration, writing off Winter as gloom, my memory is lit by that golden softness.

27 Degrees

These shots are from January 20th, and it may or may not have been 27 degrees Fahrenhite, but it was one of those crisp high pressure days. Apparently, I only take pictures at Mission Creek. I do like the arcs and watery sinuousities in this shot.

Turn clockwise 27* degrees, and you sees this. The beach's shelly curves are still there, but so too are a straight stream, logs, the distant horizon, and even a sign, it's verticality standing alone. Land looming large, shadows anchoring the right side. Good in it's way, but I think the top shot's better.

* Maybe not exactly 27. Maybe a boringly even 30 degrees. I just said 27 because it is 3 cubed.

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.

More Ice

In my last post, I forgot the bell-bottomed ice-cicles. Not far below the blobular clusters, these stalacticicles dripped from overhanging moss to the stream,...only to be swept away. The terminal drips knocked off again and again, each time a little bit splashed back up to the descending column. What should have tapered, flared.

Fluidity rushing by beneath, while gravitational accretional forms try to grow longer, but only get fatter. Not great photos, and even if they were, not the most amazing of natural phenomena, but I like 'em, and they do not reveal themselves in many of the places where people congregate, so they are all the more special.

Lili's remix: heavily altered, but somehow more true.

Ice Zoom

From 50 miles away, glaciers may gleam, but ice's intricacy is expressed simply as a reflection of the underlying landscape and overlying light. This shot is from Paddle Park in Olympia, but a spate of recent fieldwork (yes, replacing culverts so fish can get through is a good thing; no, it would not be good to take out an archaeological site in the process) got me in the neighborhood of some pretty ice, expressing a few of its many moods.

A cool thing about frozen water is that sometimes you can glimpse the crystal structure on a pretty large scale, no magnification required. Here on this beaver pond, the freezing surface is only a few millimeters thick, but there are lines a couple of feet long, shooting out in all directions, weaving a web over the whole surface. Between the lines, smooth mirrors of the frozen stuff.

On another beaver pond, the glassy interstices were few. The whole surface was adorned with slivers and feathers of ice.

Meanwhile, by a stream, the spray of a small fall gets locked to a twig in blobular clusters. Not crystalline at all to the naked eye, more like ginseng roots or some other living thing.
 

Four Mountains

Tahoma, its lenticular cloud drifting inland.

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

Il Posteriori de Montana Santa Helena

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Happy New Baktun

The moment of the winter solstice has passed, and with it the change from the 13th to 14th baktun of the Mayan long count calendar. Look for Jaguar Eagle to do well in the next state elections in the Yucatan, but for the rest of us, things may look pretty much the same as yesterday. 

The last time the baktun rolled over, about 1618 AD by the calendar of modern Americans, it hailed an era of accelerating decline for the peoples who had lived in the New World. Not that the 12th Baktun had been all that greaty for the Maya, who had long since slipped into post-Classic decline, but the arrival of colonists in el Norte harkened a more darkened outlook still for the 13th. 

Not being Mayan, and having a shorter attention span, my interest has always been in the annual solstices. Not so much the equinoxes, which although they capture a moment of balance, are just place markers. The solstice is a true transition. Today, the daylight stops decreasing, and it is night's turn to cede ground every day for the coming 6 months. Personally, I went through a fairly major transition on the summer solstice, and look forward to this one, to longer days and a brighter future. 

Most Americans tend to pay more attention to Christmas, which comes in a few days. It's hard to believe that December 25th was the original intent, since the symbolism of a new birth and hope fits so well with the Winter Solstice. But once doctrine gets hold of something, sense may as well give up. 

Even the people who heed the celestial and seasonal calendars these days tend to do so without much understanding of what it once meant. In the post-modern world, we borrow bits and pieces of ancient knowledge without much awareness or regard for the total systems, and call it New Age. At this moment, there are people spending time with supposedly sacred crystals that came not from a personal quest into the mountains, but from a store, and ultimately as the lucrative by-product of industrial mine. The stones don't tell them that they need to check the garlic stash for sprouting, or start weaving this year's berry basket, or even to check the elk movements; they are remarkably free of information and inspiration that would have been useful to almost every other generation of human. 

But then, who am I to criticize? Making some attempt to connect to something bigger is usually a good thing (Nuremburg '36 being a counter-example, and come to think of it, Schicklegruber was a fan of wacky occultishness), and I guess if a sense of personal well-being comes from a crystal. Likewise, if you go to sleep tonight feeling relieved and blessed to have survived another End fo the World, then good for you. 

Me? I'm gonna go check the garlic.

 

Summer Solstice

Damn right, it's a portal.

Happy Solstice, Summer 2012 edition. 

As with several other solstices, I find myself in motion. During a decade or so of living in Hawai`i, most of my mainland trips coincided with a solstice, taking advantage of either the cheap airfares that the carriers offered to islanded expats to fill up return flights dumping Kalikimaka tourists, or getting away over the summer. Either way, being on a jet stretching or accelerating a longest or shortest day of the year. 


And now, again, only covering a much shorter distance (physically anyway). I'll pack up a truck and head 1.1 miles away to disgorge the contents (even at their exorbitant mileage rates, U-Haul will haul in less than a pentabuck). Nothing as obviously different as heading from the tropics to a Mid-Atlantic Winter, or even from a sub-tropical winter to an Interior Northwest blizzard, but a huge change.


The Solstice is maybe just a Symbol. But I'm not one to resist the temptation of grabbing onto the boomerang's pause as a moment of significance, of being (breathless) as the season turns. Decreasing to longing, or lengthening to contracting, the solstices have a magic that the dull equivalency of an equinox will never match. Ecclesiastical turn turn turn, Byrdsong jangling the hippie heart, the weightlessness of a cosmic shift,...however you want to feel it, the solstice sings to those who listen. 

I don't pretend to know how it will turn out. Usually, I'm more  fan of the Winter Solstice, dark though days may be, they're guaranteed to lengthen from there on out. The Summer one, depending on your perspective, is the augur of decline, or the peak. In the maritime northwest, I tend to think of it as more suited to the Western calendrical canon defines it: the beginning of Summer, that point at which days become warm and welcoming. 

At 47 or so, it may be optimistic to interpret this particular solstice as a parabolic peak, a halfway point of life, but then again, I'm happy enough not to look at it as a peak at all, just a vertex of some sort, a turning point. Maybe I'm riding that boomerang's return, turning my gaze to perceive what was once just a backdraft. Or maybe not. All I know is that I am moving.

Brittle-flex

 

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


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


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

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

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





 

Weather Feral

Lights out, everybody home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happily feral

Backroads: Blue Slough

Head west, Olympian, on the ever-narrowing free way up I-5, stay right and swing onto 101, veering off to 8, crossing the black firested hills. Coming down into flat fields and eventually you find yourself on a road called Route 12, advancing on the sprawl of Aberdeen. The city's welcome sign says "Come as You Are," Nirvana fans.

And then suddenly you're on 101 again. Somehow you skipped driving around the Olympic peninsula, which means you have gained a good part of a day. Thank me later.

South across the Chehalis, writhing through miles of mud. Alder and cedar swamp. But you cross a river filled and dredged, urbanized. The ancient salmon weirs and piles for piers, piles for booming, and piles for every other purpose you can think of become entombed in mud or rot and contribute to a cargo of wood from twig to buttswell that rides this river seaward.

And then when the tide shifts, the wood drifts back inland. Into the river, its branches and limbs, its sticks and twigs.

Crossing the river was a beginning toward leaving that, though before doing so you pass through a town with one of my favorite names: Cosmopolis.

Hang a left onto Blue Slough road. That rhymes, in case you're not  familiar with Middle English landscape terms. It refers to a mire, a muddy place, often a river inlet, sometimes tidal. Blue Slough and its ilk nearby meet all of these conditions. The road is a narrow two laner, alder thicketedly woven into the mudflats on one side, a coarse blanket that must ripple during earthquakes and maybe some storms.

The effect of driving through in winter is a smear of grey. (So was the urban part, come to think of it, but I like that as whole lot less.) The clouds either just dark or flirting with lighter, but often brightening no more than an overcast day's glare on the thinned of diesel-sheened mudflat. The alders, buds just starting their spring blush, closer up and whipping by in what still ends up more blur than color. In the occasional house, people warm themselves with woodfires, their smoke smudging further the already greyny picture.

Stop, though, and color has time to compose itself, to make a showing. Down in the bottomland, trees shredding the wind high above you, the ground air motionless. A red fisherman's bobber, dropped in the sedges by a high tide. Patches of shamrocks, dappled or spotlit as the canopy whim decides.

Several times I've made this drive. The road is the wrong way to experience the place. A canoe would be much better. Ride the tide up Blue Slough, or maybe Preachers Slough now that it's not blocked by a culvert. Twist through the floodplain, maybe see some swamp mystery and live to tell about it. Get watched by eagles above and who knows what below in the muddy water. Slow down, drift, lift the veil.

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.

The Fire Inside

This title must already have been used on a bunch of crappy books about sports, self-published memoirs of entrepreneurs, self-help compendiums of snippets wrung form the experience of Winners, and all manner of motivational junk.

My post is about fires, inside. Also about heatilators, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Or maybe not, because I am shiftless, or maybe shiftful. Or just full of shift. In any case, not driven by some internal fire, an unflickering force, or some burning yearning. (Maybe one, but hell if I'm gonna admit to that on the internet.)

Although it's the time of year when my pyromania is confined to the den, I still enjoy a good fire. Right now is nice, the family all tucked in bed, me sitting here with the dog, writing. Me, that is. The dog is no help at all in composition, being more of a sculptor.

Morning fires may be my favorite, though. My 5-year-old has been helping me some this year, placing some of the kindling before the lighting, but for the most part this is another solo domain. If I happened to be motivated enough top bring in more wood the night before, or not motivated enough to brun the evening's supply of wood, there will be enough sitting there under the cantilevered hearth to get going. But more often than not, the first task is fetching wood. On good days that means brisk air under a crisp sky, or even a nice foggy blanket. Other times, it's a dash through the rain.

Then the ritual of turning castoffs into tinder and kindling. I've been working through the yellow pages this year. There was a thing on the news lately about Seattle levying a fee on phonebook publishers, the logic being that they dump these things on every doorstep, and almost all of them end up unused, part of the solid waste stream. Seattle obviously is wanting for pyros. As for the kindling, I've used everything from broken drawers to failed carvings (only actual wood though). This season it has all been the last of the leftover fence boards, sawed and split pieces that were so short or damaged they could not even make a birdhouse floor, snap-crackling cedar, unfailing faggots of flame waiting to be unleashed.

Then the building, setting everything so that a single match of flicked bic can set the tongues a-licking and flames a-rising. Despite being inside, I still set it up like a campfire. I have about the most primitive fireplace possible in a 20th Century house,  with the exception of the heatilator (which I still intend to address later, though I can feel my resolve getting bored and threatening to walk off). So it's a teepee in the corner, usually, cedar and paper with bigger wood erected over it, bigger wood still at the ready. 

Then, flame. Keeping an eye on it, ripping another page from the phonebook if the fire stalls, placing larger pieces where they will catch best. Feeding those hungry tongues with good wood, letting them lick higher, and piling on more. 

I grew up in a house where fires in the fireplace consisted of 3-4 logs, parallel, on a grate. Now that I am in charge, they look more random, and change shape as the conflagration progresses. Lately, I've been into stacking them so they look vaguely (or maybe exactly, for all I know) like Korean characters: black-charred strokes hovering on an orange background. I love that every fire is different, and every moment of each fire unlike the one before.

The new fire roars and cracks. Flames grow higher and whiter with intensity, threatening to climb the chimney. The heat begins to shoulder cold aside. As I add big logs, mixing in hard maple to mate with the flaming fir, I let things subside, and shift my attention from getring things going to building a bed of coals. The big flames having blasted a perimeter of warm air, the task now is to heat up the ton of masonry, which eventually helps heat the whole house.

Along with the heatilator.  Like I've said before, this house has a passive convection system mortared into the fireplace itself, simple and unbreakable, dependent on nothing more than a fire to start pumping air. The state of the art has long since passed this by, what with inserts and fans and pellet-stoves, gas logs, fake electric fires, and all that crap. I know this not only because big box hardware stores have relegated wood grates to some dark corner while new "systems" take front and center, but because of the "stats" feature of this blog.

It turns out that the "Heatilator" post is one of the most viewed. Not so much because there are other aficionados out there, but because there are confused people out there searching for "heatilator air velocity" or "tv over heatilator." That they should end up on a blog with the rantings and ramblings herein is sad for them, and evidence that the web is pretty damn hard up for information on a technology that is not old enough to have developed an antiquarian patina, and not new enough to be a catalogued and well-cached component of the computer age.

But I digress, which is possible when a fire has reached its mature stage. Sizzling slowly, a few logs feeding each other, sustaining a happy glow and an occasional outburst of flame, maple releasing its heat slow and steady: the lifelong love in a warm bed of embers following the passionate flames of the outset. Asking only for the occasional log to keep heating the house. Nothing spectacular, but these long slow burns have more to do with lower utility bills than the big flames.

So I hope that if you were searching for useful information on those holes in yourt fireplace masonry and ended up here instead (the TV will be fine if there is a mantle between it and the outlet vents, by the way, and probably would be otherwise), I hope that this found you sitting by a fire, enjoying the shifting of the flames, the diversion of attention.

But I think you need to go poke those logs to keep the fire breathing, and maybe add another log.

Good night.

Ascent of a Man

I am the luckiest boy in the land. Sometimes I get to climb--trees, boulders, low cliffs for the most part--and it counts as work. A perch which reveals a site to the camera, a cave commanding a closer look-see, a ledge leading to more human habitat. The missions vary, but the fun is the same, my monkey self grins for the sheer joy of the climb, my crowness anticipates some fine shiny object up top. Meanwhile wheeling high above, a raven chukles at the teeniness of my ground-bound ascent.

This week I climbed a few boulders at the behest of my inner meerkat, who needed a look around. But the best climb was up a steep stream. It was work-related in the sense that it would give me an overview of the Deer Creek valley, but I didn't expect any finds amid scoured granite scree, and at least part of the allure was the frozen waterfall.

More clamber than climb, with a stable bed of dry boulders, the ascent was a piece of cake, safe even. A rational and just god might reserve the best rewards for the greatest efforts and epiphanies for the worthy, but I got my shiny objects anyway. The pool below the waterfall was a frenetic merangue, tossing froth and splash around its edges, which at 2000' elevation this time of year means ice. Encasing twig and boulder alike in rippling crystal, stalactiting from branches: ice. And on boulders in the splash zone: multitudes of marbles, cornlike phalanxes of kernels, thousands of little globs of ice stuck together. I imagined them as splashes frozen in mid-air and cemented to the boulder by the miasma of fine frozen spray.

These little globes, each a mirror and a fisheye lens, all more or less the same size but each unique, dazzling and befuddling. Thousands of suns and skies reflected on bulgy little surfaces, lens stacked on stygmatic lens, images of stone crystals refracted, distorted and flipped through each layer. General focus was impossible and isolating one globule among the multitude was nearly so, such was the optic trickery. Somehow the accumulation of thousands of well-defined iceballs, each a perfectly clear lens and polished mirror, added up to an impressionist effect.

Enough of the stone was dry to make reaching the top of the falls possible without having the climb the ice itself, but on either side of the torrent flowed a cascade of ice. From far below, I gazed on what I thought was a wide fall, but at the base pool it was clear that the most of it was ice, a snapshot of a fall stalled for the winter.

Above the top now and moving like a bug, limbs akimbo and body low, I moved closer to the lip, wanting to see the top of this rampart, to look down. And sprawled there, legs and belly laid on dry stone so my shoulders and head could crane out over the drop, I saw that maybe my fuzzy impression from afar had not been so far off. In the channel there seemed to be frozen sections. The ice's edges seemed to be splashing, sheets of it were covered in ripples like flowing water, and bubbles of liquid flowed through pockets of air between ice and stone. Had I had all day, I am sure I would have seen the ice itself flowing. Boulders glazed in a thin sheet of ice or glossed by water spray could only be discerned by touch. All boundaries and edges were twisted, obscured, turned round, refusing to be pinned down.

It was a fine climb, and had I never made that effort, little as it was, I would have missed these icy miracles. As it was, monkey me had a fun detour, crow me was rewarded with dazzling treasures, and my human mind was treated to optical illusions and a lesson on the mutability of boundaries.

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?