Basalt of the Earth

I live on the Ring of Fire. Huge volcanoes rising where Pacific and continental plates hit, rending the surface and allowing earths innards to barf forth.

Ahhh...plate tectonics. When my dad was a kid, they didn't have this theory. When I was a kid, an excerpt about plate tectonics was part of just about every standardized test I ever took. Whoever wrote these tests--unless they were a stealth agent of the American Geophysical Society--had no interest in me learning plate tectonics. But being of a rambling mindset, I took time out during the Standard Achievement Test, the PSAT and SAT, and probably even the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Test, required in Virginia in those days) to ponder the grandeur of Gondwana, the puzzle pieces of South America and Africa, the violent Ring of Fire.

Never did finish those tests, but usually did well, and always felt a gratitude toward plate tectonics.
And now I live on the Ring of Fire. Excuse me while I go away for a few minutes and download the song of that name, preferably the Wall of Voodoo version.

So what does this have to do with the photos? Basalt, baby, basalt. I lived on basalt volcanoes in the middle of the Pacific for many years. Makes sense, because the ocean floor is basalt. None of that granite, afraid to wet its feet.

And here in Washington, basalt again. (Maybe that's what made me leave Virginia again. No basalt. Not even any volcanoes. Sand, clay, and quartz. Ho-hum.)



Here the basalt laps up onto a continent. And here there is cold, so we have basalt that cools into cool columns. Hexagons of stone, sheared off now and then to wow the geologically enthralled.

Another Procession Photo

Yellow Slime Mold was one of the coolest processioneers. Laying on a skateboard the whole way? Truly a fine Species.

Multifloral children and their mothers traveled with this endearing slime.

In then upper left is Mr. Herman and the two ladies from the other shot. You'd think I pasted them in, the way they're in the exact same poses, but this is bona fide.

Mayday Mayhem

I hightailed it out of Seattle on the afternoon of May 1, just as a big downtown march threatened to slow traffic.

And maybe also raise awareness
about immigration and the war.

Since early that morning, the Longshoremen had been on, um, not a strike, but whatever you call it when people stop working for political reasons. Most west coast ports were shut down because the union wanted to protest the war. This was reported on Seattle radio stations, but I'd be interested to know whether any of you heard about this. And if you did, was the story about people who gave up a day of pay and risked worse, or was it about the economic impact of an illegal maneuver by radicals? [NOTE: A week after this post, nobody has indicated that they've heard about this.]
I'd like to think that it was a persistent strain of American freedom-loving waterfront action, a la Boston Tea Party.

Here in Olympia, our protest ended in rocks thrown through bank windows and arrests, as you can see here:
http://seattle.craigslist.org/oly/rnr/664897280.html
This uncivil disobedience included anarchist graffiti in the capitol. Ironically, one of the banks hit was Bank of America, which drew much conservative flack last year for allowing non-citizen immigrants to open accounts.

So what did this accomplish?
A half-dozen activists now get to feel the chill of felony charges (none shipped to Gitmo yet, I believe).
Several dozen people took note of anti-war protesters unwilling to just pace about with placards.
Several hundred people took note of the arrest of vandals.

Banks paid rush-job rates to replace windows, and may face higher insurance rates. (Clever anarchist ploy #27: Make the Capitalist machine turn on itself.)

And this result as well. One blogger suggests that despite what you hear in the news media about the importance of the economy, the fact that people are now sacrificing their freedom and their pay to protest the war suggests that It's The War, Stupid. We are distracted by the diarrheal bursts of "economic numbers" without context, encouraged to worry about our household economies, and not the deathly quagmire overseas. The most amazing thing is the audacity of the propagandists, who blame high oil prices on everything from China and India to hedge-fund-hogs and Nigerian 'terrorists.' Everything except the horrendous instability of the Persian Gulf region wrought by our Iraq misadventure.

A poster In Olympia last Saturday

Onlooker Photo

In this shot, it seems like everyone is really looking at something, but not all at the same thing. The Procession is that kind of parade: species varied in pace and style, a myriad of enjoyment, not marched to the specifications of network coverage. One woman looking up while her friend looks down, another peeking out from behind, a big guy glaring at me...Oh crap. I think he's coming over here. I hope he doesn't go rhino on me.

And who is that man with the hair I had in 1986? With the Hawaiian shirt. I have a sneaking suspicion that he may be Paul Reuben, or whatever Peewee Herman's real name is. His Big Adventure film is showing at the Olympia Film Society this month, and everyone knows that Peewee is so fiendishly professional that he would have to do some audience research, the type of guy who would think nothing of putting on some weight and dying his hair just to walk among the fans who would return his masterpiece to the big screen after all these years.

And do you think that's George Carlin behind him?

Procession of Sea Species

Due to popular demand, here is another posting with photos from Olympia's Precession of the Species. Olympia lies at the southernmost end of Puget Sound, and so it should come as no surprise that aquatic species were well represented. Lots of jellyfish floated through, a life-sized blue whale spouted and fluked amid a school of dolphins, and a bigger-than-life-sized salmon swam upstream.

Here is a honu worthy of a Hawaiian parade, and an exquisitely crafted angler fish.

Sturgeon Story

Once, long ago, a fish entered the Chesapeake. A sturgeon, sticking to the bottom most of the time as was the way of his people. Nose swiveled to the mud, he swam from cape to cape and up every bight and river, past eelgrass and
oyster-bed, into every creek and gut. For sturgeons are long-lived, curious, and methodical. And they know the best grounds underwater like a hog knows truffles on land, sniffing and snorfing to beat an uptown wine tasting, snout-plowing into the aqueous soil in the better spots to see what comes up.

Over successions of forests, generations of turtles and man, and epochs of insects, the fish swam and swam, learning the bay. Out of sight from all but a few creatures, and for most of whom the suddenly gaping mouth of a sturgeon was the last thing they saw.

His survey done, and so too his inclination to head into the ocean again in search of another Chesapeake, the fish made the rounds of his favorite bay-beds, feasting the whole year through. Shooting up or down the deep Susquehannok channel, he would dart up the rivers, passing the falls sometimes. As he grew, only big rains made deep enough water to pull that off, but he was now a big bull fish, and would push his torpedo nose damn well through anything these rivers could send down.

Older and larger, progenious of the Chesapeake sturgeon, so strong now he only flicked his mighty tail once to get from Potomac to Nansemond, the mighty beast began to feel like a dinosaur. He had feasted every feast and nosed every mudflat, every pebbled channel, every sandy bed through the bay and its rivers from mouth to headwater. Nobody else remembered the real good times any more, the pristine waters before the fire-makers had come. A few times he came close enough to watch these beasts, and on two occasions he had been spotted; the first had left a stone chip embedded just below his back fin. He had watched a few generations of these two-leggeds along the banks of the river that they would eventually call Powhatan's.

At one of these villages, the people caused a grove of walnut trees. The rains of late Autumn would wash down the decomposed but still bitter hulls, and though he hated it at first, somehow his taste grew to need it. And more often he found himself leaving the anonymity and safety of the deep to get the walnut scent. The first few times he was seen was by children who screamed and ran. Seeing nothing by the time they arrived, the parents figured the monster was another children's game.

Perhaps because he had grown so old and alone that he had grown bitter, the walnut grove and its astringent black brew drew the fish back again and again. Nothing else in the bay interested him anymore. On starlit nights he would gaze at the grove for hours. And one night he was watching trees heavy with nuts certain to be falling in droves within a half-moon. Suddenly, his tail twitched mightily, vaulting his body ashore. As if crawling through the eelgrass, his fins instinctively rotated, heaving his bulk to the closest tree. Gills burning already, his mouth gaped over the tree and inhaled the nuts, leaves, twigs and all in one gulp. Twisting on the rebound, flopping back, he was more awkward than he had been since the Pleistocene.

But he was also safely back in the river, so that the creatures who poured out of the lodges did not see the fish. They only saw the jagged bole of one of their trees, and quickly decided that the children had been telling truth, not tales. Few slept the rest of the night, but none had a plan to deal with a tree-eater who had created a goodly gully escaping to the water.

The next day the men canoed up and down the river, more of them running along the banks, all armed with bows, clubs, and spears. Kids followed and threw walnuts at every little turtle nose on the water. Nobody of any age bothered to attack the sly ancient boulder down in the mud a half-mile upstream.

That night, there were big fires, and the big fish felt like the darkness was not cover enough to guarantee safety. He laid deep and low, watching their glow and biding his time. For the old sturgeon had watched fire-makers, and knew about them as he did about most any other creature in the watershed a defining paradox. And for these smart monkeys, it was this: They only stick with something for any time if they have already been doing it forever.

Seeing as they had not guarded against giant riverine tree-eating monsters before, it came as no surprise to the sturgeon that the lights flickered out one by one until one night there were none. And on the second night of dark, well before the moon arose, he slipped in close to watch and listen. The fire-makers slept, but he was wary. Then weary, afraid to venture landward, but overcome with the dullness of watching nothing happen.

Again a spasm wrung through his spine so suddenly and strongly that his tail launched him over the bank. And again panic and burning gills could not convince his fins they were not feet, and the piscoid landing craft advanced from the beachhead up to the tree-line. Gills, eyes, and mouth all searing now, he lunged and bit the largest of the walnut trees.

Such a large tree that he bit and bit again to get through the dense, burled grain. Twisting his bulk, the branches finally snapped, but by now the burning was so intense he could not see, could not breathe, could not even tell where the shore was. Voices and bipeds exploded out of the bark lodges, and fires bloomed. A hail of arrows and shower of spears barely pricked his old fish hide, but a few hit gill and eye and the old fish turned out to be neither impervious nor immortal.

The village and its neighbors and relatives and all their dogs feasted on the monster, who the shaman had re-defined as a gift, for days. They brought hickory and smoked strip after strip of sturgeon, but still could not salvage it all. Smoke and noise and hordes of children kept buzzards at bay at first, but they began to circle in such numbers that the sky darkened and the ground became covered with their splat. Besides, the bears had arrived and seemed impatient, and there was no stopping the flies. All the fire-makers left except the shaman and his apprentice, whose noses were plugged against stench and flies with rolled tobacco leaves.

Nobody returned that Winter or through any of the following warm moons because of the smell. But as the winds blew colder and leaves shed their green and then their grip, the lure of walnut grove was too strong. Nobody wanted to face late Winter without a store of nuts. So they returned, and found the grove in need of a good harvest and some fire. The shaman drew a circle around the great skeleton and commanded fire not to enter. He pointed to the bones and the colossal mouthful of walnuts among them, which had already sprouted. Squirrels and every other animal had not eaten any, he said, and explained that his guardians had told him that the fish was not a gift of flesh, or one year's feast. The gift was groves. The leviathan belly-full of nuts, fertilized by his carcass, had spit out thousands of baby trees, and now all of the people were to take these seedlings and plant more groves. The ones that remained growing from this great fish, their roots making wood from his bones, could never be harvested for eating, though anyone would be welcome to take nuts for the planting.

Fire-makers brought walnuts from this tree far and wide. In time, nuts from the sturgeon grove became trees throughout the Chesapeake region. People don't depend on them the way they used to, but the civilized ones know that a winter without walnuts gathered and cracked within the family is a bleak one indeed.

***

Like the old sturgeon, no tree lasts forever. Before steel, walnut trees in particular had what it took to persist: offerings of food and wood considerably harder to cut and hew than the human attention span will abide in construction material. Not too long after Powhatan's river was re-named the James, fire-belching creatures dealt with walnut trees by girdling and burning them, knowing that walnuts liked the same rich loamy soils that they wished to transform into tobacco and corn. Eventually, though, the descendants of these folks took to turning the wood of the walnut tree into furniture. Cutting and polishing, the woodwrights would often find themselves looking at a grain that echoed the burly old sturgeon.

One tree, cut in the 1960s or 1970s, and maybe growing back when Virginians felt compelled to throw off British rule, became a plank and sat in a barn until my dad and his double-first cousin bought the wood to use. Other planks became furniture and frames and shelves. But the projects failed to consume the wood before he died, and I inherited some pieces. (By inherit, I mean that I refused to thrown them away.)

A year or so ago, I spotted a sturgeon lurking in one plank. I cut out the shape, but being human, was distracted and did not complete it. This past Autumn, when I should have been cracking walnuts, I got a job at the other end of the country. You may have been subjected to the saga in the critically acclaimed series of emails. In any case, the move forced me to jettison some things. Like most of the walnut boards.

But not the sturgeon. I snuck that into the little U-haul trailer along with some Hawaiian kamani and koa wood and some rocks that mean a lot to me, and high-tailed it down the road before my wife could object. Despite my human attention span, I could not give up on completing the sturgeon. The impracticality of moving a 30--pound hunk of wood, abetting an overland migration of a replica fish, well I have to admit that that aspect also appealed to me. Besides, sturgeons live in the northwest as well as the Chesapeake, so it made sense.

I worked on it some, and then one day it came to me that the migration was not quite done. I had always figured that it would eventually find its way to someone else, because most things I carve end up being gifts of one type or another, and I almost never know to whom when I start cutting. The occasion arose, I spotted it, and offered it as a gift from my employer to a tribe that was helping us out. Just common courtesy, and something for the high mukamukas to exchange.

Only it ended up being me, and not the boss many levels above me, who handed this fish to the leader of a tribe. Too nervous to speak, but pretty happy to see a journey started so long ago
and so far away end up with a recipient whose smile said the fish was home.

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.

Fabricated Rhino Trouble

"Ohh, twas a gruuesome spectacle in doowntoon Oolympia tooday," said one witness to this Year's Procession of the species. Another woman, ipso facto spokesperson for "the Lord," pitched in the opinion that "He hath spoken his wrath. The Lord shall not abide Evolutionists and Abortionists!" imputing a Darwinian slant to the Olympia tradition, and pointing at the Planned Parenthood office near the scene. Numerous onlookers looked on her outburst with everything from amusement to agog-ity, clearly not sharing her view.

Beasts of the serengeti are as much a part of the Procession as pink flamingoes, but this year the rhinoceri went berserk. The first victim, whose identity had not been released, was a woman also participating in the Procession. She was gored in the stomach, an atrocity caught on camera by visiting Baltimoron Lois Waters, who offered these shots as an exclusive to the Mojourner Truth because, in her own words, "The Moewjourner Trewth is the only paper I would subscribe to, if I were gonna subscribe to a paper, but I ain't gonna dew that, hon."

Just a few moments later, a man described by nearby spectators as "European, or something...he had a refreshing citrus scent" was gored by another rhino. As in the first attack, there was no warning, just a sudden narrowing of the eyes and twitching of the ears a split second before the lightning-fast lunge into the victim's gut. The second bloodthirsty rhinoceroid, perhaps twice the size of the first, sent the man flying a dozen feet in the air before landing in a tree.
One observer was nonplussed. "This is nothing. I work near here, and I see them anti-abortion protesters with their posters. That guy's guts hanging out ain't nothing."

Both Rhinos were taken into custody immediately following the incidents, and consensus among eyewitnesses is that both animals appeared dazed, even docile, not drunl, but maybe on drugs. Olympia police have identified the prisoners as Edwin Meese, 34, of Tumwater and Dick Thornburg, 43, of Olympia. Lieutenant Bruce Babbitt confirmed that blood tests had been ordered on the suspects, and surprised reporters by releasing a photo of a masked man identifying him only as a "a person of interest."


"We have reason to believe that the alleged perpetrators may have been under the influence of the being shown in this photo. We do not believe that he is really a biped with a rhinoceroid cranium, but is in fact a human, or maybe some kind of lizard, impersonating such a chimera. We have learned that the intense mojo beat of his drum may have been a factor in the attacks, and have put our most experienced detective-shaman on the case. We ask community members who may see this person call 911 immediately, and do not attempt to apprehend this individual. He is considered horned and dangerous."

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?

Letting Go

The `Opihi, one of Gods most clingy creatures.

When you archaeologize thousands of miles from family, you train yourself to detach, without becoming separated. Walking a Puget mudflat, or Kona pahoehoe, you can be completely in the place. Then at night, talk all you want on the no-limit family cell minutes. Now how you could pull that off a century ago archaeologizing some remote mesa, or cutting cane on Maui, I have no idea.

The family functions fine in my absence, partly because they have each other. I'm solo, though, never really connected to the (current) residents of where I'm working. Paradoxically, it turns out that dealing with this depends on more letting go. Because on your own, after work, the least little thing can get out of hand. The usual addictive threats like TV and beer, for instance. Maybe less obvious: like having a couple issues each of Scientific American and Harpers in various rooms, reading from place to place as the necessities of life occur, interspersed with multi-hour delvings into some novel. Beard cutting, carving, gardening,...any number of things can eat a weekend. You gotta let go.

And when the trip is also a major move, letting go becomes all the more necessary, because you want to throw down roots in the new ground. Probably worth looking into something completely new while you are at it; my dad started snorkeling at 60. I was in a garden community in Honolulu, but maybe in Olympia I will join the film society, or an amateur welding guild, or the League of the Large-headed, or the Rotary. Yeah.

In that regard, it was tragic to have missed the Blintzapalooza recently. But I will for damn sure catch the Procession of the Species parade coming up next week. There are enough strange things here to make for fun. I cannot yet know what the unexpected new thing in life will be, but up here, I hope it isn't snorkeling.

Good night.

Fax you, Mo.

Just the other day I was mouthing off again. This time it was in the midst of closing on a house, and being asked to fax something I could've emailed.

"Fax!? Hell no, I don't have a fax! Why don't I just e-mail
it to you?"

Pause. Maybe conversing beyond phoneshot, or maybe just a pause, and then,
"That would be okay...We could accept that."
The fax was unnecessary, but if I hadn't come on like an angry bear, they would've had me driving to some place and paying through the nose, or poaching on employer machines. It only makes sense if you like crappy image quality.
Or if you happen to be a gatekeeper guarding turf much diminished in the computer age, especially in our sick economy.

Of course the people I'm dealing with are nice, so I just hit send and leave it at that. But fax machines just piss me off, so I stewed until later on when I was talking to my wife, and I made some crack about only old people having faxes. And fascists utterly feckless without faxes, tools of evil. She listened a while, let me vent, and I forgot about faxes.

Until circumstances forced me to recall. The next day it turned out that closing could not happen without an immediate fax. Yep. A signed page just not close enough to a scanner had to get there now. Because sometimes a transaction is so complex it demands the kind of unverifiable electronic simulacric signature that only faxes provide.

Sounds like karma, eh? Act rude, and you get payback.

And sometimes it just keeps on paying. Because remember, I was not only irritating real estate people, I was knocking on oldsters. So who do you think had the fax? Yep. Grandpa (Congratulations on the big 7-0!) has one right in his study.
So I ate crow, which is not so bad fried up nice and crispy in great-Grandma's skillet. Heheee!

But remember how I was ungratefully complaining about fascists, after all they've given us? The next day I bought a lawnmower (an old-school motorless one, because I may hate faxes, but really do love a lot of old technology. I mean, I'm an archaeologist, for fax sake.) Like the autobahn and prompt Italian trains, lawnmowers are fruits of corporate fascism. My getting one that runs without petrol was me flipping a tiny bird at the machine while it made money off me.

So I think it had a lot more to do with revenge than cosmic balance, but payback is payback. ) I started assembling the mower, but confound it if there weren't but half the fasteners needed and no handle at all. The instructions offered a toll-free number for the missing parts to be delivered. And after almost no phone tree (strange) I spoke to a real person (more strange) with a flawless mid-west accent (suspicious), who asked what was wrong, the item number, and said he would ship the parts (obviously some kind of hoax), "As soon as you fax the receipt to 1-904..."

Oh. As in "Boy, if you keep complaining about faxes being corporate BS, and fascists with faxes, you gonna find we don't take too kindly to that. Now you got a chance to toe the line, fax your receipt, and the machine will run just fine, understand? And if you don't, just remember we have vacancies in Gitmo, Mo. He-heh. Fax you, boy."

Yep. Karma and then vengeful corporate fascists both faxed me. Serves me right for getting all worked up and mean about something as trivial, and apparently useful, as a fax

Island Truck Trek

After all the years in Hawai`i, the concept of driving from Island to Island was strange. (I lived there before the Superferry was foisted.) Puget sound's fjording tentacles are bridged, as are some of its island channels. This shot is looking northeast through Deception Pass, so called because Vancouver expected it to be another inlet, but the "peninsulas" on either side turned out to be Fidalgo (left) and Whidbey (right). Fidalgo had gotten there with Quimper a couple of years before Whidbey helped Puget explore while Vancouver attended to paperwork or something. Fifty years later, the American arrived under Wilkes, who tried to rename Fidalgo after Admiral Perry, but it didn't stick.

This shot is from the bridge, where state route 20 crosses at a dizzying height above the pass. Most frightening photo for me in a long time, much sketchier than leaning out of a helicopter over Nu`alolo. You walk out onto this span, cars going by making the deck shake and the railing is below my center of gravity. And then a truck goes by shaking more. I tell myself just to breathe, that if people fell off the bridge that often the access would have been shut off, but the view literally pulls me in, and the wind is at my back, and I walk back carefully.
Because I was too shame to crawl.
Walking back to the truck, a small convoy of semis towing pre-fab homes went by. I would have soiled myself if they had come by when I was on the bridge.

Driving south along Whidbey: cool forested heights, sun-drenched fields, tourist communities, military suburb, farms, RVs. Just seeing the Route 20 strip, with Cypress Island fresh in my head, focusing more on getting to the ferry, I don't do the place justice. Just passing through.
Getting back to the mainland on the Kitsap Peninsula (because no, not all the place names refer to interlopers of European descent), you hop off Whidbey about halfway down at Keystone. I was four cars too late to fit on the 3:00 trip, and so inherited an hour and a half to walk the little beach next to the landing, looking at pretty pebbles. I'm easily entertained that way. This outpost would be a good place for some eats, but a couple of vending machines were all there was to be had. So good thing there were colorful rocks.
The F150 nosed into the front row for the cold, clear passage to Port Townsend. Squeezing out of the driver's side door next to a vanpool of workers headed back to Kitsap, I went to the top deck to look around. Of course I'd forgotten the map, so I really had no idea what I was looking at geographically, but there was an eagle and other birds aflight and afloat. Wind-wriffled water whipped up a haze that rendered my snapshots nothing more than that. Sweet air was reward aplenty, and olfactory memory may yet outlast digital bits.