The trees have become 

suddenly very happy

it is the rain…

–Mary Oliver, from Maples

I didn’t make it here last week. I wrote an article, a paper, I took a midterm, I read several dense textbook chapters. There’s only so much sitting one can do in a week’s time; I can manage about half of that, which was halved again by the warm sunshine and the garden chores that drew me outside between my deskboundedness. 

But the maples are blooming, which brings me back to the page. 

One of the many delights of attention I’ve been gifted by the natural world is the realization that all trees bloom. Not just the showy ones, like the cherries and apples that are covered in powdery pink and white blossoms at the moment or the dogwoods that have only today joined the party. Not just the ones that bear the fruit or nuts that we eat. But all of them. Conifers and alders bloom in cones. And maples bloom in the most beautiful cascading clusters of bright green flowers just before they leaf out.

At the start of last week’s end of term mayhem, Alex cut one forked maple branchlet, dripping with the verdant flowers from both of its ends. I set it in a vase on the kitchen table. So beautiful was the spectacle, I cut a second and third branchlet, each forked in the same proportion as the first with a cluster of blooms at each fork’s tip. I added them to the vase with the first: six maple blooms, each sprinkling their golden pollen onto the table top which, incidentally, is also big leaf maple. 

Between textbook chapters and discussion posts and transcript reading I visited and revisited the blooms. Infant leaves, four per bloom, began uncurling their fists in the warm air and sunlight that visited intermittently throughout the week. The tree’s architecture was made apparent in miniature on the table top: the scaled dimensionality of it all, the counterbalancing of the leaves growing in cardinality to each other, the interplay of clear design rules with the chaos of life’s insistence. It might be my favorite bouquet to date. 

And now onto an equally busy week (though with less sunshine by the looks of it), with finals and more textbook reading, and, happily, a deep dive into Mary Oliver’s psyche. I’ve chosen her as the subject of one final paper, an excuse to dwell in the natural numinosity that is her style, an apt simultaneity to lingering in my meditation on maples. 

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” she concludes in the title essay in the collection Upstream. “Oh, good scholar,” she writes in her poem Mindful from the collection Why I Wake Early, “how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these.”

It’s easy to wish these jam-packed days into the past. To imagine a world in which one could arrive, with a snap, on the far shore of a big task or particularly busy stretch having accomplished all that needs doing without actually having to slog through it, fretting about deadlines and all the tasks that linger, unfinished, on the to do list. But to do so right now would mean to miss the maples blooming. And so they keep me company while I slog and fret away, uncurling their leaf tips, one at a time, reminding me of the temporal nature of it all–the beauty and the burnout. 

Arriving at the far shore of winter last week was a wet affair. It rained on the Vernal Equinox. Heavily. I took a long walk late in the afternoon with a friend and my dog, and after a couple hours we were, all three, drenched and splattered with mud. 

The green was as saturating as the rain on Spring’s first day. We wandered for nearly two hours; I could’ve gone on for two more–feeling the verdure of this place working its way across the semipermeable membranes that envelope me, into my bloodstream. A sense of ease, a slowing down. A bit of it cold induced.

Green is a constant in the Pacific Northwest. It’s likely a big part of what drew me to this place years ago, and likely a big part of what’s held me here since. The cedar, the fir, the hemlock, the sword fern–all green, all year long. The lichen that drips from winter-bare branches of deciduous trees, the moss that grows in tufts of varying densities and hues on their trunks: green. The jewel-tone green and sheen of madrona leaves and evergreen huckleberries. The lime green of the mosses that love the tipping alder and the bare patches in the grass most. 

In a week spent away from home recently, in the Midwest which was still very much in winter, I was struck by the absence of green in the forest, which I was lucky enough to have nearby and be in almost daily. But I looked for green and didn’t find it, except in the expanses of lawn where last year’s grass had been beaten and bruised by winter for three months. What a strange experience–I felt it deeply that week–to be in a place, the woods, entirely without its signature color. 

I’ve come to the sense that I’m not only bathing in but breathing this year round green. I’m realizing that without it I can’t seem to find my breath. 

Life is a green madness just now…

–Vernor Vinge

At home again on Bainbridge Island, the first spring greens are layering into the landscape. The red huckleberry canes have brightened to their seasonal lime. Their first leaves are spreading in the lengthening light. The alder are dotted with fat green buds: on-the-verge, ready to unfurl and get down to the business of photosynthesizing.

The meadow is suddenly lush. New blades of grass poke up everywhere. The ocean spray’s annual leafing out is underway—that same lime green of the other young leaves, peeking from beneath last year’s spent and rusted blooms.

Pioneering sprigs of arugula have taken skyward in the planter on the balcony where we grow our salad greens, safe from browsing deer. Spring is on. Green is off and running.

“Foliage colors improve relaxation and emotional status of university students from different countries,” a 2021 study claims in its title. And the results are interesting: overall, being exposed to foliage in a variety of green tones enhanced feelings of relaxation and calmness in a group of university students. But the specific tones to which the study’s participants most positively responded was a distinct cultural preference. 

Mightn’t this suggest that place plays a role in which green tones we’re drawn to, I wonder? The study doesn’t speculate, of course, it merely suggests more research be done. And urgently: noting that depression, “is expected to be the key driver of disease burden around the world by 2030.” 

I can’t help but muse on. Is it that foliage is green? Or that green is foliage–the color of sustenance, of food security, of life? 

It’s impossible to detach tone from texture from tang. Green is more than just visual stimulation–of a greater variety than any other color available to the human eye. It’s as many tastes. It’s as many feels. It’s malachite and chlorophyll. It’s braille and silk and fuzz. Its textures layer onto its sharpnesses of a thousand delicious varieties: oxalic acid, serrano, pea shoot, peppermint. 

I’m craving green right now. 

I made a soup inspired by it over the weekend, roasted hatch chiles in white beans with an all-things-green emulsion–cilantro, lime zest and juice, jalapeño, olive oil–drizzled on top. 

We talked that night of drinking the spring nettles in tea. I made a mental note to tuck leather garden gloves in my pocket before my next walk in the woods. 

And soon come the fir tips. And soon the fiddleheads. And soon the peas and tender lettuces.

Soothing nervous systems the hemisphere over with the assurance that this weary world is still committed to its enduring cycles, still nourishing us, still lifing out all around us with its signature green on green on green.

On a walk with a friend on Sunday, while circling Blakely Harbor, traversing the top of Fort Ward’s high cliff, dropping to its shoreline and climbing up again, we chatted about the things forty year old women chat about on long walks: the joys and difficulties of partnership, youthful injuries that have become chronic ailments, what we’ve (finally) accepted about ourselves, our aging bodies, areas in which we’re (still) hopeful for change, our tight pelvic floors. All the while I kept my eyes open and a part of my attention trained for Skunk Cabbage. 

Tis the season, after all. Skunk Cabbage is the second native flower to grace our coastal Pacific Northwest forests once Indian plum’s white blooms are replaced by lime green foliage. I’ve felt an expectation verging on impatience for this year’s yellow flares. 

Alternately called Bog Lantern, Skunk Cabbage’s large, canary yellow flowers push up through the mud and decay of last year’s green things. I later learned they do this not because the air is warming (though it is), but because Skunk Cabbage is capable of thermogenesis.

Skunk Cabbage, which are related to taro and were a traditional food source, create their own heat by breaking down the starches in their rhizomes. This heat generation creates a warm pocket of air around Skunk Cabbage that keeps its immediate environment as much as thirty-six degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than the environmental conditions in which it grows. That temperature differentiation allows the plant to bloom in winter, to attract the first active pollinators, and to even melt surrounding snow. 

I didn’t know this on Sunday. I only knew that the bright yellow of this flower was a harbinger of spring. I only knew that my habit of looking for solace in nature has yet to fail me. I only knew that the concept of a bog lantern felt particularly attune with our collective needs right now. Patrick Watson’s Lighthouse lyrics kept coming to mind:

Leave a light on in the wild

‘Cause I’m coming in a little blind

Dreaming of a lighthouse in the woods

Shining a little light to bring us back home

We finally spotted Skunk Cabbage, down along the paved trail that runs the seaside length of the former US Army Coastal Artillery Corps installation. It flared right at the trail’s edge in standing, murky water. A tangle of Salmonberry’s thorned canes, which will soon gift us the next of our wild blooms, surrounded it. I felt a wash of grateful relief.

I came home and, after an evening spent wading through the intricacies of the neurotransmitter serotonin as it relates to inherited predispositions for anxiety that seem to be catalyzed by environmental distress, I crawled into bed with some decidedly lighter reading. Cascadia Field Guide is a poetic, celebratory collection of Pacific Northwest flora and fauna, a guidebook for seekers of a more melodic fluency in natural phenomena. 

“The deep, lush, paddle-shaped leaves of Skunk Cabbage are one of the first greens to green in Cascadia’s spring, pushing up even through snow with a metabolic heat of their own creation.”

—Cascadia Field Guide, edited by E Bradfield, CM Fuhrman, and D Sheffield

I flipped through to the entry and accompanying poem on Skunk Cabbage. I read and reread the passage, a bit gobsmacked. A plant capable of thermogenesis? I always assumed this superpower was unique to mammals. Here I was, plumbing nature for an antidote to existential anxiety, and the message I received, with Skunk Cabbage as a teacher, was that it might be time to dig deep and generate one for myself.

What does this moment call for? This is a question my therapist repeated probably hundreds if not thousands of times in the nearly ten years we worked together. Today, my answer to that question is thermogenesis: the ability to call on the resources within me to stave off the cold in a proverbial winter that is, by some measures, nearly four years out from spring. 

On my walk this morning, I went in search of Skunk Cabbage again. In every place where the land dips and water sits, I crouched down and scanned for its telltale flares. I didn’t see any, nor do I remember finding it here in the past, but I wanted to pay my newly enlightened respects.

I had already turned uphill toward home when I thought of one more place to look. I doubled back, dropped down a steep trail that ends at the water’s edge, and there it was on a flat and watery ledge, a light on in the wild.

If I had to put a date to it, my relationship with Thuja plicata, Western Red Cedar, began on Thursday, October 16, 2008. I had just been hired by Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, an environmental education non-profit that operated an outdoor school from a 1920s era mining camp surrounded by the Opal Creek Wilderness of Oregon’s Western Cascades. I was visiting Opal Creek for the first time, and the executive director took me on a walking tour of the watershed that included a visit to a lowland along the creek called Cedar Flats. 

I was first introduced to the trees I encountered that day in David Seideman’s 1993 book Showdown at Opal Creek. On its pages, George Atiyeh–the founder of the organization that hired me fifteen years later–toured Seideman through the venerable stands of old growth. These behemoths became the hallmark of the entire watershed in the legal and political battle that resulted in the Opal Creek Wilderness designation of 1996.

“Hi guys,” George is quoted greeting the trees. “You’ll be immortal in this book. Of course, you’re immortal anyway. The book is biodegradable. You’ll still be standing here.”

Seideman notes that cedar trunks, this pair ten feet in diameter, can grow to twice that girth, making them the broadest of the famed conifers of the Pacific Northwest. 

George continues, “Some people don’t feel comfortable in a forest. For me, it’s like a security blanket. No matter how bad things are, all I have to do is get here. There’s a spiritual recharging, like those endorphins you get from exercise. They’re far more satisfying than any drugs.”

I was eager to meet the trees I’d just read about, excited to feel for myself the security blanket, the hit, that George referred to in the book I’d just read. It hadn’t adequately prepared me though. Until that day in the autumn of 2008, I had never experienced trees like these. Their size struck me as so unbelievable that I laughed out loud as I circled their swollen bases and touched their alternately smooth and rough expanses. The sound was swallowed in the density of life that surrounded me and a quiet reverence replaced it. 

The smell–a citrusy, musky mash up–left me trying to best each inhalation with my next. I craned my neck to make out the trees’ crowns, some two hundred feet above where I stood. I remembered George’s words: no matter how bad things are, all I have to do is get here. I adopted them as a mantra while collecting, with every sense available to me, the magic of Cedar Flats in that first encounter.

I visited the ancient pair in the watery grove dozens of times in the six years I worked for Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center. I became so familiar with Cedar Flats that it became a fixture in my dreams, the first place I brought visitors, and the quick out and back at the beginning or the end of a day’s work when I needed some time alone to recharge. 

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Ten years later, in a new state and a new job, I encountered the research of Qing Li when I was editing a piece of writing about shinrin yoku. Shinrin yoku is a Japanese term and therapeutic practice that translates as “forest bathing.” Li’s 2009 article “Effects of Forest Bathing Trips on Human Immune Function,” is filled with compelling scientific findings that corroborate the sense of wellness George claimed in Seideman’s book. 

There’s a spiritual recharging, he’d said, like those endorphins you get from exercise. Li’s careful studies have helped illuminate this claim as fact. 

Trees, cedars and other aromatic conifers in particular, are rich in phytoncides. As the suffix -cide connotates, there is a killer quality to these particles. Phytoncides are volatile organic compounds, like the chemical signatures we concern ourselves with when we paint a room or use caustic cleaning detergents. Phytoncides are sensorily experienced as scents. In the case of cedars, they’re in the form of terpenes like limonene, responsible for the citrusy smell we associate with conifers. These chemical signatures are released as defensive mechanisms against harmful fungal and bacterial infections and are beneficial to both the tree and the animals that smell and breathe them in. 

When humans breathe in the phytoncides of cedars, they have the effect of increasing our natural killer (NK) cells. NK cells are an important aspect of immune response, and help us to stave off disease. Li’s studies have shown that phytoncides and the associated boost in NK cells are even capable of killing cancerous and virally infected cells in our bodies. Other positive effects include boosting our endocrine and nervous systems. 

Forest bathing subjects in Li’s studies experienced significant decreases in adrenaline, which is known to inhibit NK cell functioning, and cortisol, which is connected to stress and instability in the autonomic nervous system. Subjects also experienced decreases in blood pressure and increased activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is associated with relaxation and decreases in measurable stress levels. Li’s studies showed these effects had a half-life of seven days for women, and as much as thirty days for men.

“Every part [of cedar] is medicine for the body,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, “from the flat sprays of foliage to the flexible branches to the roots.” To the invisible chemical signatures that rain down from her boughs to protect the tree and the life that surrounds it from disease. What a gift.

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In the community where I live, my husband and I have become the wood people. We heat our little home with a wood stove and we build things–furniture, outbuildings, art pieces–entirely with wood that is gifted to us through a generous island-wide network. When a neighbor cuts down a tree, or one falls in a windstorm, we get a phone call: “Hey, we’ve got a tree down, do you want it?” 

In the fall, we received such a call from our neighbor Lisa who had a line on a massive cedar that had to be taken down because it threatened the house over which it loomed. We drove across the island the next day to meet Fred and the cedar that had grown for over 100 years on his property. The tree was beautiful, he told us as we stood gaping at its fluted felled lengths in his driveway. But where it forked, some distance from the ground, it had begun to rot and fill with water. He had consulted with an arborist, hoping to wire the tree together for an added measure of security, but the extent of the rot made that course of action untenable. He’d brought a crane onsite to take it down safely. The main stem of the tree weighed a staggering 14,000 pounds. 

Some lengths had already been gifted to the Suquamish Tribe and hauled away, but the remaining pieces, the main trunk and the lower lengths of each fork, were too large for their uses. He offered the wood to us. 

We called another island friend, Jerry, who had knocked on our door one day to ask us about our plans for a stack of fir and madrona logs he’d spotted on the back of our property. Jerry had a trailer with the capacity necessary to move a tree this size and a mill to process it. He was as eager as we were to exchange resources. 

And so on Saturday, while I sat at my desk studying for a midterm exam, Alex and Jerry milled the first of the cedar logs from Fred. A few hours after he left home (towing our neighbor Betty’s generously loaned trailer behind his truck), Alex returned with his truck bed and trailer full of beautiful, clear grained cedar milled in one, two, and three inch slabs. 

The smell reached me before I made it down my ladder and through our entry door–that signature cedar scent, chock full of phytoncides, that has since filled our shop and permeated the floor between it and our living space. 

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The thousand year old trees at Cedar Flats that George lovingly greeted in Showdown at Opal Creek were consumed in the Beachie Creek Fire of 2020 that decimated the ancient forest and took George’s life. 

Interestingly, smell is the sense most closely tied with memory. George and Cedar Flats remain with me in this sense, especially today, while the drying cedar stacked and stickered in my shop downstairs releases its beneficial phytoncides in wafts across our property, which we lovingly refer to as the Cedar Draw.

A Bird’s Eye View of Home

I pressed my face to the tiny airplane window in the last twenty minutes of a flight from Kansas City to Seattle. We were just to the east of the Cascade crest, and my seat on the right side of the plane looked north. Lake Chelan shimmered below me, surrounded by the snow capped mountains of the North Cascades.

I spent last week at a camp facility outside of Kansas City holding space with four other volunteers like myself, four clinical providers, and a roster of visiting specialists for a cohort of five, brave and beautiful women who were there to face their post traumatic stress. We began each morning with yoga and ended each day with meditation. In the twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours that stretched between those two practices, we heard each others’ stories, participated in ritual, trust exercises, and equine therapy, and were taught by clinical providers about trauma and the brain, emotional regulation, social styles, and interpersonal dynamics in our families and other primary relationships. 

As the plane banked south for SeaTac, I could see the furry hump of Bainbridge Island rising out of the Salish Sea. The Olympic Mountains stood stalwart beyond it, and a ferry struck out from the downtown ferry terminal, making its way to the island’s terminal at Eagle Harbor. Home. I would be on that very ferry, heading on its next trip to Eagle Harbor, in another hour and a half. It had been a bright, warm day, but as the sun began to set a haze gathered in the sky lending a magical cast to the already enchanting scene that stretched below me. 

Relief gathered in my tired limbs and coursed through my aching muscles. I was ready to breathe the damp air, surrounded again by green. I was ready to sleep in my own bed, to feel held in place. I was ready to move freely throughout my days, sit less, wander through the woods at will. I considered my life, my home, with astonishment and a fresh quality of gratitude gifted by my nine days away. 

It was dark by the time my ferry detached from the Seattle dock, heading west. I sat in the foremost nook on the boat, looking out to where the ferry’s lights made the water visible in glints and glimmers.

Place Attachment and Belonging

“Belonging includes feelings of having roots in a place,” write Environmental Psychology authors Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford. Belonging tops the list of psychological benefits of place attachment–the emotionally based bond we build with the places we love. 

“The need to belong appears to be one of the fundamental psychological needs, and ties to place can help us satisfy it,” write Scannell and Gifford. But how? What do I have to learn from the land? What was I feeling for when I returned home? How do I sense my belongingness to place? 

I considered my roots in this place in my time away. I wondered what I was missing in this dynamic span of the year. I imagined the week like a flipbook; the image collected from one day to the next wouldn’t change all that much, the minutiae perhaps impossible to detect. But I knew that after being away for nine days the differences would be apparent.

I set out first thing Sunday morning to log the changes that occurred in the woods and around my neighborhood in my absence. The hazelnut and alder trees are dripping with catkins, the former golden, the latter rust. Catkins release pollen on the wind ahead of blooms, ahead of leaves. In the case of the hazelnut, the pollen remains inert for the time in which it takes the tree to bloom. Then, in mysterious syncopation, it comes to life to fertilize the fuchsia blooms that will go on to become pairs and clusters of nuts. 

Just before I left, a friend alerted me to the blooming Indian plum, but in the microclimate that is my neighborhood, they hadn’t yet emerged. Upon my return they were the first plant I sought out and sure enough, cascades of snow white flowers decorated their branch tips. 

The currant in our garden has put out leaves. My neighbor’s plant, exposed to more sun than mine, has just begun to bloom in vivid pink. The evergreen huckleberries are covered in fists of blooms. One more day of warm sun and they will flower, and with their bloom the drone of bees will fill the air again. 

The crabapples on the seashore are covered in white flowers. The frogs have emerged from the muddy depths to fill the night air with song. The grasses have put up their first green shoots. The daffodils and hellebore and daphne have come to life. 

In Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, Toko-pa Turner writes, “To belong to a place is to be embedded in it. Its struggles are your contentions, its harvest your wealth, its needs your purpose…There is no separation from the place where we live, except for the one made by our own forgetting.”

I consider Turner’s words, this place’s needs are my purpose. I feel this deeply. Here, in these final weeks of winter, I feel an urgency to tend to the needs of place, specifically to uproot that which doesn’t serve the health of the land I love. To tend the space of belonging for the beneficial plants and everything that depends on them, all that works together for good in this place that holds me so well.

The Work of Belonging

What does it mean to belong? This theme has followed me through life, through a year of writing, through last week’s challenges, both those in which I was interpersonally involved and in the dramas of the lives that played out around me. 

One recurring theme was the insistence that belonging was something we bestowed on or withheld from each other. In my own struggles I’ve learned that belonging is not anyone’s to give, only mine to claim. Claiming my own belonging is perhaps one of the biggest gifts I can give others, releasing them from the overwhelming burden of meeting emotional needs that were never theirs to meet. “There is no separation,” to borrow Turner’s words again, “except for the one made by our own forgetting.” 

“Bring your own belonging,” I want to bark at those who place this burden on me. But, to extend the metaphor of belonging to place to belonging writ large, what are my obligations? Belonging is not mine to grant or withhold, but how do I tend to it? By cultivating safe spaces for growth, by uprooting all that doesn’t serve. Here, too, I have some work to do. 

And so, while the sun is shining and the ground is supple, I set to work, happily pulling and disentangling myself from all that would choke out these tender spaces of belonging. The work never ends, but neither do the returns on the investments made.

Welcome Home

“Welcome home!” Auggie Gleason called to us. He circled the scene with his arm before adding, “Sorry the place is such a mess.”  

My husband Alex and I had arrived at the locked Forest Service gate at the start of Forest Road 2207 just moments before Auggie pulled up on a UTV from the opposite direction. We made our greetings then turned and faced up the Opal Creek drainage. 

“The last caretaker that came to visit me met me here and said, ‘Wow, you’ve really let the place go!’” Auggie laughed. 

The contours of the land, previously obscured in layers of soil, duff, flowers, shrubs, and an ancient forest overcoat, were visible. The whole place was rockier than I’d imagined, flayed to the bone by the 2020 Beachie Creek fire that had kept us out of the Opal Creek Wilderness since. I was seeing it in person for the first time. 

I appreciated Auggie’s light-heartedness, but I wasn’t ready to laugh.

Place Attachment

I was writing a piece for work about the intersection of nature and design in the context of a nature immersion campus when I came across place attachment research. It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but a pair of studies and a chapter from an environmental psychology textbook on the subject were so compelling I compulsively stashed them away in a folder. One that I went searching for three years later, in the winter after the Beachie Creek Fire. 

Place attachment is a field of research interested in understanding the emotional bonds that develop between people and places. It is described as a phenomenon existing across a spectrum with the superficial delight of a tourist on one end, and rootedness — a depth of attachment that comes from the continuity of people in place over centuries — on the other.

Place attachment deepens with investments of time, learning, and attention. The deeper the attachment to a place on the part of a person or a group of people, the deeper the psychological benefits to them. Those benefits include the formation of memories, the sense of self-continuity through time, belonging, relaxation, positive emotions such as love and happiness, activity support such as access to recreation, physical and psychological comfort, opportunity for self-growth, stimulation, solitude, and beauty.

And place attachment benefits both its halves – the attached and the place. Place attachment researchers Robert Gifford and Leila Scannell write, “People with stronger place attachments tend to perform more pro-environmental behaviors, either as a direct attempt to preserve the place and protect it from damage, or as an indirect result of internalizing the community’s values of environmental protection.” 

I worked for Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center from 2008 through 2014. I remember quoting Baba Dioum in our fundraising appeal letter one year – “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” 

In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

—Baba Dioum

I didn’t know about place attachment science at the time, but I can now see that, alongside its curriculum, Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center taught and modeled place attachment for hundreds of outdoor school kids each year. Without naming it, we knew it to be a strong enough force to accomplish the work of conservation in the world. 

I, like so many, learned how to love a place in Opal Creek, and that learning has benefitted me and all the places I’ve gone since. 

In Action

The PVC pipe that had delivered Jawbone Flats’ water supply and power up until camp was evacuated in September 2020 looked like a thick ribbon of toasted marshmallow snaking up the steep creek bed to the intake a mile from camp. Auggie, Alex and I trampled through a thatch of native blackberries so ripe and plentiful that the hot air filled with the smell of freshly made jam. 

In my six summer seasons with Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, we transitioned from dependably squeaking by on Flume Creek’s end of summer flow to dependably running out. But Auggie had built a new intake head in the pool just above the intake we’d always used. This upper pool was deeper and promised a more consistent water volume and pressure, one that lasted through the dry months of late summer. Auggie was eager to test it out.

The intake head dumped its volume into the shallower creekbed below. Auggie stood under it with a twenty gallon garbage can he’d hauled up, catching its contents. He shouted starts and stops I recorded with a phone timer. Alex took a video of our informal test, which we repeated half a dozen times. On average, the twenty gallon bucket filled in three seconds; the outflow was strong.

I watched Auggie carefully as he cared for the burned landscape over our two days of working with him in Opal Creek. He picked up scraps of twisted metal and puddles of melted PVC and organized them into trash heaps to be hauled out who knows when. He pulled invasive weeds that are beginning to pop up inside the gate. He cut back shrubs and dead trees encroaching on the road. He cleared the intake of the flume line and tested its flow. All without knowing the future of Jawbone Flats, without knowing if or when the flume line will be rebuilt. 

He’d oriented us to the weekends’ chore list as we rode into camp with him. “I like to have projects for you to work on while you’re here,” he told us. “I’ve been bringing people in for the last four years, and I’ve seen that it really helps them to process what they’re seeing here, if they have some purpose.” 

And it did. It also underlined for me that Opal Creek needs us as much as we need it, perhaps now more than ever. And the rest of the world needs us to have this orientation toward place – one of attachment that behaves as care. Now more than ever. 

Tahlequah, the twenty-seven year old matriarch of the family of southern resident orcas called J pod, has lost another calf. In 2018, Tahlequah lost a female calf just minutes after she was born. Tahlequah then carried her three hundred pound dead baby throughout Puget Sound in a funereal act of grief that lasted an astonishing seventeen days and covered a distance of over a thousand miles. 

“Confronting so vast and final a loss as this brings sadness beyond the telling.” –Joanna Macy

A male calf born to her in 2020 lived. While any calf born to the resident pods is celebrated, the births of female calves to the endangered residents are especially celebrated; they represent a hope for increased future numbers of the animals, whose populations have been in decline for decades. There are now just seventy-three orcas in the three families that call this region home.

This past Christmas Eve, Tahlequah gave birth to another female calf. While the region celebrated, marine scientists hedged their enthusiasm at the news of Tahlequah’s newest baby. The calf seemed small, appeared to be having some difficulties swimming, and the mortality rate for orcas is fifty percent in their first year of life. A week after she was born, on New Year’s Eve, this female calf was confirmed dead. 

And once again, Tahlequah carried her through the water in an apparent act of grief. She was last spotted on January 10th near San Juan Island, nudging her dead baby through the waves and currents with her nose, pointed toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca with the rest of J pod. 

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the Wendell Berry poem The Peace of Wild Things. I’ve loved this poem since the moment I first read it, seated in a pew in one of the Catholic churches on Whidbey Island at my husband’s grandfather’s funeral. It had been a favorite of Grandpa Don’s and instantly became a favorite of mine. I recognized in the famous lines my own inclination to seek out the solace of nature in times of difficulty.

But recently that inclination has felt…insufficient. 

There is no more “escaping to nature.” Everywhere I go I am reminded of the enormity of the problems faced by the living world. The woodland reserve a short walk from my home is so overgrown with invasive ivy that very little of the natural diversity of woodland plants remains. Ivy covers acres of ground, choking out less tenacious plants, starving them of light and space to grow. It grows high into the treetops and due to its evergreen nature can, I recently learned, create a sail effect that leaves the trees more susceptible to toppling in winter’s heavy winds.

In the upper and wildest reaches of the Olympic Mountains, non-native mountain goats are decimating fragile alpine plant colonies and the glaciers are melting at such a pace that topographical maps can’t keep up with their receding parameters.

And in the briny waters of the Salish Sea that stretch between here and there, Tahlequah is mourning the loss of another calf. The Seattle Times has published nine articles about her plight and public grieving in the last two months, naming a decline in the orcas’ preferred diet of Chinook salmon and the added difficulty of hunting a dwindling food supply in the cacophony of noises created by the large shipping vessels that ply the waters of the region. Ironically, these same articles are peppered with flashing ads for the very goods carried in on the complicit vessels. 

“It is hard to function in our society without reinforcing the very conditions we decry, and the sense of guilt that ensues makes those conditions–and our outrage over them–harder to face.” –Joanna Macy

Berry writes: I come into the peace of wild things / Who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

Perhaps not with the forethought of grief, I think (though truly, who am I to know?), but they certainly are taxed with grief. Tahlequah has made that abundantly clear. The consensus is growing even among scientists, a typically reticent bunch when it comes to assigning human emotions to animals. 

Wild places and wild things have ceased to hold the promise of escape from the cares of life. Rather, they have become yet another source of those cares, of grief, of the sense of impending doom. 

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I’ve read and reread an essay by environmental activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy this week: Working Through Environmental Despair. It’s over twenty years old at this point, an inclusion in the 1995 collection Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. It couldn’t be more timely. 

I read it a fourth time today after reading another Seattle Times article that reported on the abrupt decommissioning of the State of Nature Report–a nation-wide, two year labor of dedication and love, led by University of Washington researchers attempting to amalgamate a comprehensive snapshot of US natural systems and resources. A multi-agency SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of sorts, killed by the Trump administration.

Macy writes about the inclination on our parts to shrink from environmental news. A common response, she says, is the sentiment, “I don’t think about that, because there is nothing I can do about it.” (I am guilty of this. I have said this aloud, probably dozens of times, in the last few years alone.)

But to hold such a sentiment, Macy writes, “is a non-sequitur: it confuses what can be thought with what can be done. When forces are seen as so vast that they cannot be consciously contemplated or seriously discussed, we are doubly victimized; we are impeded in thought as well as action.” She makes a further point that to psychically numb ourselves by shrinking from the pain of the natural world also limits our experiences of joy, “for if we are not going to let ourselves feel pain, we will not feel much else either.”

For Macy, who in this essay names a need for collective “despair work,” once these feelings are brought to the surface they are transmuted, freed from entrapment as individual neuroses, and able to be rechanneled into action. She writes, “To experience pain as we register what is happening to our world is a measure of our evolution as open systems,” that is, as an acting part of a dynamic web of life. From this place, of acknowledging and finding expression for the despair we feel, we are freed, impelled, to action.

Not to get over it, not to move past it, but to move, constructively, through. Like the UW researchers who have vowed to continue their reporting on the State of Nature. Like the regional marine biologists who are finding the tenacity to call Tahlequah’s grief what it is, and are seeing it as a desperate and clear communication, imploring us to do all we can, immediately, to stabilize the population of our region’s most iconic species. Like a friend who is working to bring about an electric revolution in the ways we move through the waters in and around this country, and another who is documenting disappearing dragonflies and butterflies in an attempt to bring our attention to the airborne wonders that once filled our meadows and wetlands. 

Before I can “rest in the grace of the world,” I need to face my despair and then find my way to action. That’s where the freedom from fear of what the future holds that Berry writes about is to be found.

I have a collection of Räuchermännchen, “smoking men,” from the Erzgebirge region in southeastern Germany. An apiarist, a photographer, a mushroom forager, a woodsman, a woodworker–each is handmade of various types and tones of wood and intricately detailed with a cavernous body that detaches from his legs so that a lit incense cone can be left in the hollowed out space. Each holds a pipe in his hand or his mouth, and the aromatic smoke is vented through a mouth hole. Each has been given a German name.

On a recent visit with family, my seven year old nephew wanted to see each smoking man in action. We lined them up on my dresser and carefully transferred a lit cone from one belly to the next. He was delighted. I, who have been long delighted by these kitschy little figurines, was delighted by his delight. 

The skier was the last to be lit. “His name is Fritz!” I said to Jacob, who giggled and grinned. Fritz is my father-in-law’s name, Jacob’s Grandpa–a man who loves to ski, a man who loves to be delighted (a trait that flows happily sing-songing its way through the family). His namesake Rächermann even resembles him a bit, with dark shaggy hair peeking out from under a fleece cap with earflaps.

My husband chimed in, “We light Fritz when we want it to snow, like the night before we’re going to go skiing, or when it’s cold enough to snow down here at sea level.” Jacob loved the idea that this little round bellied skier might actually summon powdery flakes from the ever-brooding northwest winter skies.  

Western Washington sat at the periphery of the path of the recent polar vortex. With air temps hovering around and just above freezing and the returning precipitation after a dry January, the forecast changed every ten minutes from rain to snow and back again. 

I am not a superstitious person, but I love the rituals of superstition. We lit Fritz. We crossed our fingers. Our minisplit couldn’t quite get our house warm in the colder than usual temps, and we kept the woodstove cranking. 

And then one morning last week we woke up to a world transformed by a thin but continuous blanket of sparkling snow.

The snow

began here

this morning and all day

continued, its white

rhetoric everywhere

calling us back to why, how,

whence such beauty and what

the meaning…

So begins Mary Oliver’s First Snow, and with these same questions we headed out–the dog in her thick winter parka–at first light. 

I am lucky to live in a beautiful place. Even in the rain, even under the enduring gray felt of winter skies, there is a vibrancy to the evergreen forests of Washington that defies the connections we make between this season and death. I wouldn’t trade this verdure for anything, but I love a snowstorm as much as the next kid. I can count the number of blanketing snows we’ve had in my ten years living on Puget Sound on one hand. 

As such, I refuse to treat a snow day as any other day. It strikes me as the worst kind of hubris to behave as if a natural phenomena of such rarity and beauty should be unceremoniously plowed through. That there is any such thing as business as usual in such an unusual moment feels to me like a failure on the part of humanity. And still there were things that had to be done urgently (in the maddening way that everything is urgent these days). But we took a lingering two hour walk nonetheless.

In the open places the snow lay two inches deep. The trees were flocked and heavy with it. The sky above them glowed pink. Under their canopies it barely dusted the ground. We crossed paths with a cross country skier in Gazzam Lake. Based on the trail coverage she was doing more tromping than gliding, but a smile was plastered across her face nonetheless. “I had to try!” She was a little sheepish but clearly enjoying herself. 

Wet snow clung to the licorice fern dripping from the maple’s thick limbs, and to the carpets of moss hugging its trunks. It gathered on the bright red of the rosehips and on the furring fleece of the cattails. We weren’t alone in our delight: the redwing blackbirds were riotous in their celebrations of it. They sang and sang, their trills carrying clearly through the air with little else to compete with them. 

Mary Oliver’s poem concludes:

and though the questions

that have assailed us all day

remain—not a single

answer has been found—

walking out now

into the silence and the light

under the trees,

and through the fields,

feels like one.

An answer, at the very least, to the question: What should we do on a snow day?

My work comes right from a visceral place—deep, deep—as though my roots extend beyond the soles of my feet into sacred soils. Can I take these feelings and attach them to the passerby? To my dying breath, and my last tube of burnt sienna, I will try.

– Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, January 15, 1940–January 24, 2025

In pheasant feather hands, the Mother holds God is Red by Native philosopher and theologian Vine Deloria Jr. Smith nestled the book in her lap, where, in the Christian version of this scene, sits the baby Jesus. 

A citizen of The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Smith’s work has palpable presence. I felt this immediately upon entering Memory Map, the exhibit where sat Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974. Not a hint of posturing, the Mother’s seated position suggested a power foundationed with ease, with self-knowledge. She commanded respect.

It was the perfect opener to the exhibit—an experiential palette stimulator that invited me into a reverent mood prepared to follow Smith’s map, wherever it led. 

An opening over the Mother’s heart reveals an ear of blue corn. She wears moccasins on her feet and buckskin leggings over-wrapped in an American flag. Wood and turquoise beads and a shining abalone shell hang around her neck. Thick black cloth braids frame a framed face. Her baby, their face also framed, is worn in a pack on her back. The piece’s dimensionality, both literal and figurative, forced me to examine it from every angle.

I’m embarrassed to admit I had never heard of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith or seen any of her work prior to first visiting Memory Map, a retrospective of her five decade career curated by the Whitney Museum of American Art and brought to the Seattle Art Museum last year. Whether that is demonstrative of a failure on the part of the custodians of the canon of art, my education in art history, or my own depleted attention span in my last semester of college when I took both Contemporary Art and Women in Art & Society, I can’t say. But what a gift to come across her work when I did, in the middle of life, in the middle of an investigation of the psychological concept of place attachment.

I saw Memory Map for the first time a month before it closed. I visited it a second time the day before it closed. I would have gone back five times more had I visited sooner. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith died last week at the age of 85, and I’ve been thinking of the impact of her work–on me, on the art world, on the country–since learning of her passing. Her words are reverberating in my mind, alongside her paintings.

I like to say that my DNA comes out of that land, because that’s where I was born and it comes into the mother’s bloodstream through the food. And in that food is the DNA of, you know, of weasels, and woodticks, and bluejays, and you name it, it’s all there. You figure thousands and thousands of years of our crumbling bodies merging with the earth and then coming back to feed the mother—so that’s what’s in me.

– Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, January 15, 1940–January 24, 2025

Smith’s maps, the paintings for which the retrospective of her work was named, represent her artistic vision and voice at its fullest. In 1992, the quincentennial of Columbus’ arrival in North America, Smith began experimenting with more overt imagery. She had used the word and concept of maps in previous works, but she felt that the message was as yet unclear: “I was thinking how can I make my messages not so incommunicado? How could I make them so that people would understand more about what I am saying? Because I really felt like I had something to say, to communicate, but I wasn’t doing it right,” she said of her work up to this point. 

She began using the highly recognizable geo-political map of the United States as the container for her message, riffing on Jasper Johns work of the mid-twentieth century. Six of Smith’s maps from this period were included in Memory Map, the most recent of which was completed in 2021. 

Where Smith’s first maps quietly depicted Native inhabitation, her 1992 painting Indian Map opted for a louder message. In this the first of her new maps, states lines are blurred and have the appearance of receding. Collaged across the map are newspaper clippings, both of images and words, that acknowledge the first inhabitants of the American land mass and indict the colonization of Native lands and the genocide and erasure of Native peoples, “From Sea to Shining Sea,” as indicated by one clipping.

The maps from this series hung together in a single gallery, offering the visitor view upon view of this country through Smith’s eyes. In Memory Map, 2000, pictographs overlay the map, which is obscured, as if by thin gauze. The iconography is reminiscent of some of the inclusions in Smith’s earliest maps, her signs of human habitation predating colonization. Here they are given the place of priority, they are the representations of the stories of the land. The arbitrariness of state delineations fade behind their presence. 

In Survival Map, 2021, Smith rotates the American landmass 90 degrees until the west coast occupies the top of the canvas. The power of the shape of the American landmass is stripped. “That North is traditionally ‘up’ on maps is the result of a historical process, closely connected with the global rise and economic dominance of northern Europe,” writes Maps are Territories author, David Turnbull. By rotating her canvas, Smith refuses to accede that dominance. 

With this simple reorientation, Smith stepped fully into her artistic voice. The inclusion of Native Plateau inspired patterning around the American landmass further subverts the presumptive power of America, particularly when seen as replacements for the two major fields of the American flag. Smith felt the power of her own work in this instance, “embodied by Indigeneity,” and “too disorienting and subversive for viewers to initially comprehend,” in the words of curator Laura Phipps. In the center of the painting, also rotated by 90 degrees, is the punchline: 

NDN humor 

Causes people 

To survive.

The capstone of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map was another of Smith’s 2021 maps. It hung in the final gallery, also rotated by 90 degrees. A framed portrait of an unidentified Indigenous woman hung separately above the map, recognized as such by her beautiful clothing and headdress. Below her, the reoriented American landmass is surrounded by blue, the states are delineated and painted with dripping tones of orange, turquoise, gold, and green. Layered over the states are translations for Mother Earth in sixteen different, named languages (none of them English): Mattarahkka, Saami; Ka-luahine, Hawaiian; Madre Terra, Italian; Akna, Maya; Tatei Yurianaka, Huichol, to name a few. At the bottom, Smith names the piece: Map to Heaven.

I love art. I love its challenge, its commentary on culture and what it means to be human. I found art as a lens on culture so compelling I majored in art history. And still, I can count on a single hand the number of times art has moved me to tears, touched me with truth so deeply that I felt changed by it. Those experiences—the ones in which something essential is witnessed and recognized, in which an entirely new depth of understanding is accessed—have been few.

From Indian Madonna Enthroned to Map to Heaven, Smith’s message, the memory she was pointing me to all along, came through: we’ve forgotten our Mother—our origins, the land, the quality of care we are called to in our relationships with all of life, the quality of care with which we are Mothered by the Earth. But she is the way forward, it is with her guidance and her wisdom we are to proceed. We are the land, and it is us. We need to live out that memory on this land. 

The knowledge exists. The way forward exists. The teachers are here, they’ve always been here. It requires a reorientation though, a forgetting of the habits of line drawing and place over-naming and maximum resource extraction and militarism. It requires acknowledgement and righting of wrongs. It requires a willingness to be led by the Mother, and by those whose relationship with her is intact, those who have carried this land in their bodies the longest. We need to remember our Mother. 

“Native ideology insists that we are part of the sacred, from the solar dust on this planet as well as our bodies recycling with the ancestors and all other living things,” Smith wrote for the exhibition catalog that accompanied The Land Carries our Ancestors, a celebration of American Indigenous art curated by Smith in 2023 and exhibited at The National Gallery of Art. “We believe that anywhere we walk, and especially in our homelands, we have been here so long that we stir the DNA of our ancestors.”

As she joins the ancestors and is reincorporated into the land she so loved and honored throughout her career, my gratitude to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith wells up within me. May we continue to learn from her. May we uphold her vision and amplify her voice across this sacred land.

Slava

I began adding Avramović, my mother’s maiden name, to my name after my grandfather died in 2007. As my favorite grandparent, and perhaps my favorite person, using his name connected me to him in his absence. He was born in 1919 on a sheep and plum farm in the mountains outside Belgrade in what is now Serbia, a place he left as a young man and I have never visited. 

I loved hearing the Avramović family names spoken aloud when I was a child. My grandfather’s given name, Proka; his brothers, Stojko and Gojko; his nephew and nieces, Milan and Milanka and Yela; his parents, Radivoj and Jedoksija. Somehow these names filled in the blanks of a family and a place to which I belonged. I paused on the pages of my mom’s photo albums that held pictures of the Avramović family–ruddy skinned, broad-faced, light-eyed, the women in babushkas. I saw my own features so clearly in theirs. 

The last Christmas my grandfather was alive, I asked him how the holiday was celebrated in his Eastern Orthodox upbringing. He didn’t have much to say about it. There was another holiday that eclipsed Christmas in its importance and in the festivities that marked it: Name Day. 

As it suggests, Name Day, Slava in Serbian, was a celebration of one’s name, family, and patron saint, observed in January. Opa’s gray eyes sparkled as he recounted Avramović family Slava celebrations. Relatives came from all over and crowded into the farmhouse. A pit was dug in the snow and frozen earth, and a pig was roasted whole–an annual decadence for a family that survived on mutton and potatoes. Sweet breads were made. Slivovitz–plum brandy distilled from the orchard’s harvest–flowed. 

The one bit of ritual he named was the lighting of candles placed on a large tree branch–one for each ancestor whose name was retained in the family’s collective memory and records. Their spirits were invited back to the family’s land, to join in the feasting, to be honored for their role in making such a celebration possible, to act as guides throughout the coming year. 

The Slava celebrations lasted through the night into the wee hours of the morning, when the visiting family members would unfurl their bedrolls and, with their sleeping forms, cover every square inch of floor space in the humble farmhouse. The festivities resumed the next day, and perhaps longer, until the candles burned out, and the roasted pig had been entirely consumed along with every last drop of slivovitz, and the extended family returned home again.

Each January, in some small way, I recognize Slava. I make the Serbian foods my grandfather made for us when I was young–moussaka or stuffed cabbage or gibanica. I invite my closest friends–chosen family–to join me in feasting and observance. We light candles on a large madrona branch and thank our relatives, starting with my grandfather Proka, whose sacrifices have made our lives what they are. I sit with the branch until the candles burn out. 

My name, Avramović, is my tie to my ancestral homeland, and it is dear to me. It’s a reminder that language is tied to place, however distant, however otherwise unknown. 

The Land is in the Language

Right now, it would be an easy time to give up, but we have to be stronger than ever in holding up our languages and what they mean and holding up images that describe, that innervate, that express who we are as Native peoples because it’s directly related to how we, as human beings, might survive climate change shifts, cultural shifts, political shifts. In these lands here, the key to that is in what Native peoples are carrying and have carried from the beginning…the land is in the language.”

—Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee)

This place, the United States, the land to which my grandfather immigrated in the 1950s, is also filled with languages and names tied to place. And unlike our name, which is tied to a language tied to a place, but not a description of or otherwise emerging from that place (Avramović means “son of Abraham”), these names are rich in their descriptions of place itself. 

I’ve long wondered what the original names are for the plants and animals here, the geological formations, the waterways, the natural phenomena. I’ve imagined these beings and places to contain an animacy that eludes all but those who speak these languages and can call them by their ancient names. I imagine them waking to life upon hearing their true names whispered.

Suquamish, the name of the original peoples of the place I live, now called Bainbridge Island, means “people of the clear salt water.” Schel-chelb, the name of a former Suquamish winter village near my home from which shellfish and other seafoods were harvested, means “bringing it home.” Schel-chelb looks east across the Salish Sea, to where Tahoma (Mt. Rainier), “mother of all waters,” stands in the distance. 

Likewise Denali, the Kuyokan Athabascan name for North America’s highest peak, carries in its name its eminence: Denali translates as “the high one.” The Kuyokan Athabascan people have lived as a people in Alaska for over 1,000 years with ancestral roots in that place that go back for thousands more. 

A slim volume from the University of Chicago Press came to be part of my library when I merged my book collection with my husband’s eleven years ago: Maps Are Territories: Science is an Atlas. Its author, David Turnbull, makes the point that it is easy to think of maps as objective, their contents, including the names used to identify places, scientific in nature. However, he argues, this is not the case:  “The mapmaker determines what is, and equally what is not included in the representation. This is the first important sense in which maps are conventional [based on what is generally believed]. What is on the map is determined not simply by what is in the environment but also by the human agent that produced it.”

Were maps to be more objective, and in that sense truer, the names would reflect the qualities of the places to which they were attached: people of the clear salt water; bringing it home; mother of all waters; the high one. To attach a name like McKinley to a mountain like Denali is to say nothing of the place itself, let alone of the people who have lived in its shadow and cast their gaze to its peak for millennia. 

What’s in a name? Place is, in short. Or it can be, if we can set aside our pride, our penchant for making places reflect us instead of letting them work on us, letting ourselves become reflections of them. 

Denali, Denali, Denali. Forever and ever, amen.

On the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan I see 

What is only a lake but an ocean to me. 

My sister Rebekah wrote those lines when she was a kid, maybe ten years old, about the place we were more than lucky to spend many weeks each year with our parents, grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins.  

My grandparents purchased a little mid century ranch in the lakeside village of Harbert in Chickaming Township when I was young. So young, in fact, that I don’t remember not having that place in southwest Michigan as part of my life. The house was tucked into oak and sycamore and pine forests, an eight minute walk from the beach if we trespassed through Prairie Beach Club, the private community of sleepy cabins across the street from us, which we did regularly. 

We had freedom in Michigan that we didn’t have back at home in Springfield, Illinois, four hours south. Harbert was a sleepy community, with potholed dirt roads that discouraged speeding and were therefore exceptionally safe for kids to wander. We did so on foot, on bicycle, on scooter. We befriended other families with kids our age in our little neighborhood. The family that lived across from us–one of the only families that actually lived in their home year round–had five kids; next door to them were two sisters; down the dead end lane were others who were less regular in their visits, but included when they were around. We fell into easy, adventurous company. We formed clubs that mostly involved tree climbing, snack eating, and basketball playing. We’d come home at dinner time, covered in sand, scratches, and mosquito bite welts. 

My Opa, my grandfather, spent long days with us on the beach. He taught us new trails and beach accesses as he discovered them. He showed us where wild raspberries grew, and where the streams leading down to the beach were filled with clay, and where the sandbar had shifted each summer. My cousins and sisters and I would collect the clay in our brightly colored plastic buckets, and he would smear it on our backs, and we would smear it across our faces and limbs, and then we would bake in the hot sun until the clay dried and cracked. We would run into the waves to rinse it off, only to repeat the process.

Lake Michigan is connected to Lake Huron via the Straits of Mackinac. The two together are technically a single body of water and the world’s largest lake by area. The Great Lakes seem to rebut all definitions we hold of lakes: they are so large that they have waves and swells, they can create weather systems such as hurricanes, and they have dangerous currents and subtle tides. The beaches are covered in white sand so fine and deep that walking across it, which one had to do quite quickly in the summer sun, created a whirring noise that locals refer to as the singing sands. 

For us, Michigan was mostly a summer haunt. But each year after Thanksgiving we would go up as a family to rake the oak leaves off the lawn. And sometimes, over winter break, we’d visit again to experience the peace of the forests and beaches blanketed in snow. 

The extreme winter weather created otherworldly landscapes of the beaches. The waves that crashed onto the sand in cold weather would freeze there, creating dangerous ice shelves that extended for feet, sometimes yards, out over and above the lake. When the ice pack was thick enough, we could scoot out over it on our bellies and look down into the churning, slurry water below. 

If the air was cold enough–and it often was–the waves would freeze in their curled forms, creating ice tunnels into which we could slide and exit at the opposite end. The wind had a nasty bite to it, and forays onto the frozen beaches were always brief, thrilling. We would haul our sleds up to the top of the dunes and ride them down on the snow-sand, careful to bail before we got too close to the ice shelves on the shore. When my cousin Alek took up snowboarding, we took his board down the same snowy dunes–the closest thing we had to ski slopes in an otherwise flat landscape that stretched across state lines in all directions. 

Back at the house, we built fires in the flagstone fireplace. From the couch that spanned the west wall of the living room in front of a large picture window opposite the fireplace, we watched the white-tailed deer moving gracefully through the woods in the gently falling snow. 

We loved our family home in Michigan. My sisters and I would watch for the state line on our drive north on I-94. It was marked by a massive sign that spanned the four lane interstate. As we approached we’d all read it aloud together in excitement, “Yes! Michigan! Welcome!” We all thrived there in that beautiful setting, living close to nature, spending long hours outside day after day. We knew it well, better than we knew even our neighborhood in Springfield where the preponderance of our lives were spent. 

Without the words to put to it, I was deeply attached to Michigan. To the sandy soil and stands of oak, the deer, the beaches, the feeling of being wild and free. It was a feeling I held onto, and looked forward to, when I went home again.

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In December, my husband Alex and I visited my family’s home in Harbert as part of our Midwest holiday travels. Two days after Christmas we drove north with my mom and dad and arrived at nightfall to the little house in the woods near the lake. We had just two full days to spend, the first of which was bright and unseasonably warm. We set out on foot from the house on three separate occasions that day: the first to pay our respects to the lake and walk the shoreline south to our favorite bakery in Lakeside, the last to walk the beach from Harbert north to Warren Dunes State Park. 

But on the second walk, which we took with my parents early in the afternoon, we wound through our neighborhood, taking in the changes since we last visited three years ago. We found a trail I had never before seen, and following it, we found ourselves skirting a blueberry farm along a woodland. All of it–the trail, the farm, the woods–was new to me. 

The trail entered the Pepperidge Dunes Sanctuary, a twenty acre parcel of sandy, well drained land on which black gum and tupelo trees thrived in acidic soils. We could hear the waves crashing on the beach half a mile from where we walked. 

Our trail crossed a berm and continued into a different forest typology. This was the Jens Jensen Nature Preserve, signage informed us, another forty-five trail-crossed acres of a different forest composition–oak, sycamore, pine, and shagbark hickory. In nearly forty years of traipsing through the forests near our home, we had never found ourselves in this place. My mom and I were overwhelmed with delight. Just a short walk from home existed this peaceful forest sanctuary entirely unknown to us before that day. 

“Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity,” writes the poet David Whyte. How close we must have come to this place in our wanderings as children. How fortunate we were to love a place so dearly, to know it so intimately, and yet still find ourselves surprised by it. The magic of this discovery is hard to describe, but we were giddy with it. I’m awake now, again, to the wonder of the very familiar. Enchanted beyond words–a feeling I mean to hold onto and cultivate, as best I can, in all the places I think I know. 

When was the last time a place you know well surprised you? When were you last enchanted by the familiar?

In the Bleak Midwinter

Winter’s threshold approaches the northern hemisphere this week, the time of year when the subsolar point–the point at which the sun meets the earth at a 90 degree angle, its greatest intensity–reaches the Tropic of Capricorn at 23.5 degrees south of the Equator. The earth’s tilt in December holds the arctic zone of the northern hemisphere in complete darkness. 

A Midwinter day in Western Washington, at about 47 degrees north, comes with eight hours of low-angle (i.e. low intensity) light and sixteen hours of darkness. An inverse of Midsummer, often paired with amplifying meteorological conditions like the atmospheric river flowing above us this week, this time of year has been appropriately dubbed “The Big Dark.”

Heavy rain is falling now, a staccato on the metal roof. The woodstove ticks along with its own rhythm, like an enthusiastic concert goer who can’t clap to the beat. The dog has given up on outside and has parked herself in front of (and at times, and alarmingly so, underneath) the wood stove. An inch and a half of rain has fallen in the last 24 hours; an inch and a half will fall in the next 24 hours, too.

Stay Social, Stay Busy, Stay Active, Stay Out

Ask a Northwesterner how they make it through a winter, and you’re likely to hear something along these lines: 

“Make plans with friends. Keep them. Force yourself to stay social.”

Or, “Pick a hobby–build a wooden kayak, knit a sweater, take up artisanal bread baking, build a bicycle from parts–and keep busy.”

Or, “Exercise a lot–you need the endorphins, you need to stay in shape.”

Or, “Get outside, as often and for as long as possible.”

All good advice, and I remind myself of and practice these things annually. Especially the last–getting outside for long stretches–for its particular effectiveness at battling winter blues as well as other ailments and illnesses.  

Nadir

nādᐧir – the lowest point; the point on a celestial sphere directly below an observer

The term Midwinter is confusing today because we recognize four seasons. But the year was once conceptualized as halves–summer and winter. The seasons changed at the autumnal and vernal equinoxes; the solstices were the halfway points in the bi-seasonal annual cycle.

In the case of Midwinter, the darkest hour is also the inflection point. The moment in which the earth’s axis reaches its most extreme tilt is followed by the moment in which it begins its slow tilting in the opposite direction. With each degree of tilt, an extra measure of daylight, meted out in minutes over the course of months until we arrive at Midsummer.

Stay Alone, Stay Idle, Stay Rested, Stay In

I have to wonder, considering the rest of the living world in winter, why we pretend as if winter changes nothing. As if we have no excuse to be less productive, less goal oriented, less driven, less social. As if summer was an ideal, one we were obligated to operate from, regardless of the external conditions.

There is less, far less, light in the winter. Every other living thing (though I say this hyperbolically, not definitively) is affected by the halving of solar energy around the Winter Solstice. But when we experience the symptoms of less sunlight–depression, low energy, increased sleep requirements, increased caloric intake, slowed cognition–we pathologize it as seasonal affective disorder. As in, How dare you be affected by the season!

While every other living thing slows or halts its living processes entirely, we fight our inclinations to seek solitude, welcome stillness, rest more, stay in. 

Weird.

I want to practice resilience, not denial. I want to learn how to accept what is, whether that inspires me to tarp up in Goretex and brave the elements or nap under a wool blanket in front of the wood stove. 

(Em)Bracing Winter

I love etymology. I love word families. Like this one, which root derives from ancient words for arms: brace, bracing, embrace.

Brace: noun–a supportive device; verb–to support, to prepare for something difficult or unpleasant

Bracing: adjective–fresh and invigorating

Embrace: noun–a hug, the act of accepting and supporting something; verb–to hug, to eagerly accept

I love to braid these definitions into a wintery mix of an invitation. I love the thought of deriving fortification (if joy is too big a stretch) by facing difficulty with open arms. 

One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji

About a year ago, I attended a Hokusai exhibit at Seattle Art Museum. I waited until the last, maybe the second-to-the-last weekend to go; the line of the faithful, eager to pay homage to Hokusai’s iconic work The Wave in person, began at the second floor escalator. The procession ascended the spiraling escalators to the fourth floor Simonyi Galleries, where an attendant, tracking the foot traffic exiting the show, ushered us in, one, two, three at a time.

What struck me the most about the exhibit, as had struck me while an art history student receiving my education on Japanese art one fall semester years ago, was Hokusai’s series 100 Views of Mount Fuji. I was struck by his daring departure from the school in which he was trained, with its emphasis on portraiture. I was struck by his devotion to this place, this land feature, to showing up again and again and again with the intention of seeing it anew in all its constancy.

Hokusai was on to something. I felt it strongly. I sensed its kinship with the pull I felt toward the mountains here, toward the woods, toward the places I’ve seen and visited a hundred times yet still feel called back to again and again.

Early in the morning, my song shall rise to Thee.

When I was a girl, my family gathered in our living room at six o’clock each morning for devotions. We stood–my three sisters and I in matching flannel nightgowns our grandma sewed for us, my parents in pajamas and bathrobes–and devoted the day to God. Devotions were opened with the singing of a hymn, after which someone read aloud a chapter or a number of verses from King David’s Psalms or King Solomon’s Proverbs. They concluded with prayer. 

I remember always being cold in the winter, drafty as our hundred year old house was, frugal as my dad was with the thermostat. My sisters and I wrapped ourselves in our down comforters (which we called Dicke-deckes–a made up German term my mom coined in her first generation childhood, roughly translating to “fat little blankets”) and huddled over the cast iron grate work of the heat ducts, creating pockets of warmth while we waited for devotions to begin.

When I was older, our next door neighbor Addie told us that she could hear us singing on summer mornings when her north facing stairwell window was open, and our south facing living room windows were too. She’d been listening to us sing at six o’clock on summer mornings for years.

Devotions has been a trigger word, a cringey three syllables for me ever since. Tied up, irrevocably I thought, with all the triggering, cringey lexicon of my childhood in a high control religious group. So I was surprised to find myself again turning to the word last week on Cascade Head.

Eagle Poem 

(part I) by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear,

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

…

Devotions

I think I knew I’d walk the headland each morning before I even left for the coast. I didn’t know the specifics of the trail up Cascade Head–how long, how arduous–nor the weather I would encounter. But I knew I’d want a regular encounter with this place while I was a guest at its base. I knew that, like Hokusai, I sensed a devotional pull, a call to a depth of experience available only with repetition and attention.

So up I went, first thing. On most mornings my friend, host and collaborator, Josh joined me. A couple mornings I walked up by myself. I tried to empty my mind of anything that was not of the place each morning as I walked. I expressed gratitude.

Back in the little cabin at Sitka Center, I thought of the devotions of my childhood. The important thing seemed to be that they happened first thing each morning. Before anything: teeth brushing, dressing. Before everything: caffeine, breakfast. The first moments of consciousness, the very best, those moments were for God. 

I wondered, in the little cabin, what would occupy the overlap in a venn diagram of my childhood family devotions and my week at the base of the headland. Something of both the format and the primacy of devotions; something unnamable but originating in, essential to, the headland itself.

What’s your love language? I wondered of the place one day as I lingered in the wind. Is it quality time? Acts of service? Words of affirmation? Physical touch? What can I give to you?

One morning, alone (which is meaningless in a place like this other than to say without another human around), I read Eagle Poem out loud on the summit. To the summit. Some mornings I wrote. One morning I laid down on the damp ground next to the summit marker and syncopated the pounding in my head with that of the surf that echoed below me. One morning I stared into a fog so thick I couldn’t see anything beyond the line where the summit ground sloped away.

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And one morning Josh and I met up with a pair of conservation technicians with The Nature Conservancy. Together we pull- hack- and chain-sawed encroaching Sitka limbs at the edge of an important butterfly habitat meadow. I’d joined Josh for the week with the hopes of visiting Opal Creek together, but it’s still closed to the public and we were unable to gain access. Then we found ourselves in the company of friends who cared for a different place–the one we were in–who invited us to join them in that care. 

We’ll go back in the summer, when the headland is blooming, to join our new friends and watch for the flashing iridescence of the Oregon silverspot butterfly. We’ll go back to pull blackberries from the headland and Scotch broom from the meadow. 

We’ll keep pulling on the thread of this story until it’s done unraveling. Then we’ll stand in the pile of wonder we’ve co-created and know that this must be the place. Just as we knew it in Opal Creek. Just as is always the case, no matter where we find ourselves.

A pair of eagles circled us on our sixth and final morning together on the headland.

Eagle Poem, continued 

by Joy Harjo

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we 

Were born, and die soon within a 

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.

Cities can crawl over forests…but they can’t sprawl into the sea. Not much. Not yet. And that wildness shimmering at the edge of things, lidded and liquid, how lucky those who live near it are to have such a gorgeous reminder of our connection to the unbuilt world.

Cascadia Field Guide

The Lay of the Land

I arrived here, far from home, at the wild threshold between Oregon and the ocean, an hour before sunset on Monday. I’d been driving since sunrise and I wanted to land a bit upon landing. 

I met my dear friend and photographer Joshua Berman in the parking lot of the Neskowin Beach State Recreation Site. Together we walked along Kiwanda Creek to where it enters Neskowin Creek to where it enters the Pacific Ocean. The air, which had been still and sun-warmed all day, began to cool and move. Gently, at first, and with increasing adamance as we walked north, away from the setting sun behind Proposal Rock. 

Without a cloud on the horizon, the sun dropped fast and without fanfare. We stopped to witness the day’s end, and, in the tidal flux, spotted a gull working hard to wrest something from the surf. We watched as she dragged a fist sized object higher and higher onto the beach. We walked toward her, she stayed her ground. She stayed her ground when the waves lapped at her feet. As they receded again, she worked furiously to relocate and continue hauling her quarry through the sand. 

A crab! As we drew closer we made out ten legs kicking and clawing at the gull’s beak, which pecked back again. We watched, riveted, as the gull’s persistence overpowered the crab’s fight. She pecked through the carapace and gulped its contents as the crab’s legs flailed. The spectacle more than made up for the ordinariness of the sunset.

We made our way back to Sitka Center for Art + Ecology, where Josh is partway through an artist-in-residency. We stopped where the road ended on the edge of the Salmon River estuary in the complete darkness that is the Oregon Coast under a new moon–an entire mountain range and half a lunar cycle away from competing light sources. The Milky Way arced above us and Josh traced Cygnus, Lyra, and Aquila that constellated around it in the southwestern sky. 

Sea and starry sky continued to welcome me through the night. I slept on a window seat next to a window open just enough to admit a cold stream of air, the distant roar of the surf, and glints of starshine through the Sitka spruce branches. I dreamt of waking and dressing in layers and leaving at first light to walk up Cascade Head.

Sunrise

We woke, dressed in layers, and left at first light to walk up Cascade Head. The trail began by  climbing through stout, moss-laden Sitka spruce. We broke out of the trees onto the southern shoulder of the headland just as the sun crested the Coastal Range. It cast its slanting light across the foothills whose treetops raked it into golden rays and shafts. The Salmon River wound its way to the mouth of the estuary below the headland in molten pewter. Waves foamed where river met ocean and splayed themselves onto the sandy spit separating the two. 

We took a little spur trail to a peek-a-boo view of the ocean and the coastline to the north. A Sitka spruce jutted away from the slope just where the trail reached its edge, a continuation almost. A thick arm right at foot level, another a perfect seat–wide, flat, covered in moss, welcoming. I stepped out onto the arm. Hugging another limb with my arm, I tested out the seat. My legs flushed with the precarity of my position over the bank that fell away below me. I sat there, heart racing, legs quivering, until I felt myself recalibrate to a sense of safety. This tree was solidly anchored; this was an exposure to fear, not risk. I lay back, Rockabye, Baby in a treetop cradle.

But it was a cold, clear morning. Too cold to lay there for long. Josh and I continued up the trail, through the wide open, nearly treeless headland, to its summit at 1,217 feet above the estuary where we began.

A few years ago, at a reunion of my Opal Creek community just south of here, we passed Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass around in the evenings, after my friends’ wee ones had gone to sleep. Over the course of two nights we read her essay “Burning Cascade Head” to each other. In it, she recounts the first people of this place, the Nechesne, who, as part of their ritual for inviting the salmon back to their natal river, burned the headland annually. 

“I cannot tell you more of that high and holy place,” she writes of her own ascent on the same incised trail. “Words blow away. Even thought dissipates like wisps of cloud sailing up the headland.”

We began our descent. Back on the shoulder where we first broke through the trees, we encountered a pair of hikers bundled in gear embroidered with The Nature Conservancy’s logo. They carried a chain saw, a pole saw. A bow saw and hard hats were strapped to their packs.

I smiled and walked by. Josh, a decidedly different creature than I when it comes to encounters with strangers, stopped and struck up a conversation. At the click of his camera I turned around to see him snapping shots of the pair–Catherine and Chase, they told us when I backtracked, reluctantly, to join the conversation. 

They worked for The Nature Conservancy and they were pointed toward a meadow on the north slope of the headland, just off its summit, where they were limbing the encroaching Sitka spruce. The meadow, protected as it was from the summer’s north wind by the Sitka, was important habitat for the threatened Oregon silverspot butterfly. 

“She’s a conservation writer,” Josh said, nodding toward me, “And I’m a conservation photographer. We’re here for a residency at Sitka, collaborating on a project that responds to this place.”

“Well, if you want to join us tomorrow, we’ve got two workdays planned up on the headland. We could use a couple volunteers,” Catherine invited. 

“Yes!” I blurted out, responding for us both. “Where? When? We’ll be there.”

Sunset

At the end of our day, after descending the trail and touring the 80 acre Grass Mountain conservation project the Sitka Center manages, we again climbed the headland for sunset. We ran into Catherine and Chase at the end of their workday and confirmed our plans for the morning.

“Did you see any elk this morning?” Catherine asked.

“We did!” I said, excitedly. “Just a rump, through the salmonberry thickets below us,” I added, pointing downtrail. “But I’ll take it.”

“They’re up on the headland now,” she reported. “You’ll see more of them, just up the trail.”

The very next stretch of trail and there they were, grazing above the pounding surf. We walked by slowly. Josh’s camera clicked away, and I tried to keep up with it, taking as many mental images as I could, hoping they’d take purchase in my mind.

I climbed back into my tree cradle. I laid there long enough to feel some ease, which came more quickly on the second visit, and the roar of the surf in the hollow cavity of my lungs. I laid there reflecting on the enormous gift that my first 24 hours in this place had been: this tree, our encounter with Catherine and Chase, the opportunity that stretched out in the days ahead, the generosity of my friend to let me crash his residency, his studio and cabin spaces, the elk that seemed unperturbed by our cohabitation of this place. 

We watched the sun drop into the ocean. Another quick, clear, affair. We began our decent. 

The elk had moved farther uphill and now straddled the trail, glowing in the golden light that lingered. I counted thirteen of them, one with two-points on his developing antlers. They watched us with placid curiosity, and we matched their energy and watched back. 

Day one, I thought to myself. Holy wow. (My favorite prayer.)

Time Immemorial

I’ve always loved the poetic phrasing time immemorial. Somehow its lyricism fits with the spiritual dimensions place takes on through the lens of eons. 

A decade of experiences on the Olympic Peninsula, most recently a foggy visit to the mouth of the newly undammed Elwha River, have left me deeply curious about the story of this place and the people who have lived here for time immemorial. 

Lest that phrasing feel too nebulous or clichéd and for that reason difficult to appreciate, Washington’s Olympic Peninsula has been occupied by the ancestors of today’s tribes since the Cordilleran Ice retreated. 

A great flood tradition exists across Olympic Peninsula native cultures, one that, according to oral histories, covered all but the tips of the highest mountains in the range. 

“It is possible that some of these [great flood] accounts relate to the retreat of the continental glaciers about fifteen thousand years ago,” reads Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We Are, a slim volume published by the Olympic Peninsula Intertribal Cultural Advisory Committee. “Geologists are currently conducting research relating the oral history of this region to earthquake and tidal events.”

In Elwha Klallam tradition, Mt. Carrie, in the northern reaches of the Olympic Range and visible from parts of the Elwha River Valley, was the high ground above the great flood’s reach. Those who took refuge on this 6,935’ peak lived to tell the tale. 

The Elwha Klallam People–themselves formed of the riverbank’s mud and then delivered by a mountain peak, bound and rebound to the land in their creation cosmology–have stories that place them here continuously for a duration so vast it fails to have meaning to my imagination of time entirely.

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“Every river has a people.” 

Ron Allen, Former Chairman Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe

Native historian and theologian Vine Deloria Jr. writes, “American Indians hold their land—places—as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind.”

What is the reference point from which my statements are made, I wonder. Is it the microcosm I think of as me? Is it the constructs of religion and culture I was born into? Or is it the place in which I’m held? What will it take to make that shift?

In 1974, the Boldt Decision–a pivotal court case in continuing jurisdiction for fifty years now–upheld Washington Tribes’ 1855 Treaty rights to harvest salmon and other seafood. These resources were historically abundant in the waters of and off Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean, and Pacific Northwest Tribes thrived because of them. 

Per Judge Boldt’s ruling, Washington fisheries are now managed collaboratively by the state and Tribes, and habitat mitigation work is on-going. Dams have come down; culverts that block the upstream migration of salmon are being redressed across the state. The salmon runs today are only fractions of what they were pre-colonialism, and climate change has further stymied recovery efforts, but where restoration work has been done, the salmon are returning.

“I often wonder what standing we would have to protect the natural world and our environment if we did not have Judge Boldt,” Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians is quoted in Charles Wilkinson’s Treaty Justice. 

I often wonder what standing the natural world and our environment would have if we did not have Indigenous peoples.

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How Can We Celebrate Thanksgiving?

In a colonist society the ceremonies that endure are not about land; they’re about family and culture, values that are transportable from the old country. Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed there, but it seems they did not survive emigration in any substantial way.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Part of me loves Thanksgiving—the opportunity to be grateful in ritual. It feels so necessary, so welcome. But the origins of Thanksgiving haunt me as I confront what it means to be the descendant of colonists on stolen lands. Despite the historic feasting in 1621, the good will between the Puritans and the Wampanoag People–likely fabled to begin with considering the Puritans stole Wampanoag corn in the winter of 1620–lasted less than a generation. By 1637, these same colonists went to war with and ultimately massacred the local Native people.

Today, many Indigenous Americans observe Unthanksgiving Day, a day of mourning and remembrance of what was lost with the arrival of the Puritans in Massachusetts. Many other justice minded Americans struggle to know how to observe the holiday in a meaningful and honest way. But holidays and observances are mutable expressions of culture—I’ve wondered this week what it could look like to reimagine this one.

God was the recipient of the Puritans’ thanks per the story we’ve all heard, but in another view, Thanksgiving’s origins are held in place and in American Indigenous peoples’ deep knowledge of and intimacy with the land. If any part of the first Thanksgiving tale I was told as a child is true, then this week commemorates the feasting that was the result of the Wampanoag Tribe’s generosity in sharing their place-based knowledge and abundance with the European colonizers. 

When we go around the Thanksgiving table to name what we’re thankful for, it tends to be for our and our family’s good health or fortune in the past year. The origins of this being a celebration of land and a bountiful harvest are there in the feast, but otherwise invisible, forgotten. What if Thanksgiving was reimagined as an opportunity to give thanks for the land and these Keepers of Place? 

How do we honor the truth of the past and begin to make amends? What role might Thanksgiving play in reconciliation? How do we bridge the divide between our day of feasting and Indigenous peoples’ day of mourning? 

My family eats salmon each year for Thanksgiving, and we visit a nearby salmon run together. I love these traditions, and I think they’re a step toward the right relationship with this place and its people I long for. What more can I do?

These are the questions filling my thoughts this week. These are the inquiries I’m packing up today, along with dinner rolls and persimmons, mushroom gravy and a pumpkin cake.

And this poem.

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Remember

Joy Harjo

Remember the sky you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is.

Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the

strongest point of time. Remember sundown

and the giving away to night.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled

to give you form and breath. You are evidence of

her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life, also.

Remember the earth whose skin you are:

red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth

brown earth, we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their

tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,

listen to them. They are alive poems.

Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the

origin of this universe.

Remember you are all people and all people

are you.

Remember you are this universe and this

universe is you.

Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.

Remember language comes from this.

Remember the dance language is, that life is.

Remember. 

Super Moon Cold Plunge

“Fuck it’s cold!”

The only way I enter the Salish Sea in November is by making an offering of expletives, focusing on the delivery of said expletives, and running – not wading – into the water. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Goddam, it’s fucking cold!”

It goes like this every time. Last Friday night it went like this. A few strides into the salt water I stacked my hands one atop the other, tucked my head, and dove. I forced one, two underwater strokes with arms and legs, then surfaced with a gasp. Euphoria tinged relief flooded me. Spotlit by the pale yellow of the newly risen super moon, a stillness settled in. 

I’d had a hard day. Not for any specific reason, not for any particular stressor or misfortune, I was just off. Agitated. I’ve spent entire winters feeling this way, so the arrival of these feelings – vague unease, the inability to focus, disinterest in nourishment of any kind – set off alarm bells. How long is this going to last? I wondered. It’s not even winter yet, what do I do?

But I know what to do. I felt the restlessness sluicing off my head and hands along with the streams of fifty degree salt water. 

I found Alex, who’d entered the cold water with considerably less fanfare, bobbing serenely up to his neck. We soaked for just a few minutes, hands and heads above the water’s surface, everything else below. The afternoon’s king tide – an unusual high created by the gravitational pull of the super moon – was ebbing again. 

A sea lion snorted from somewhere in the nearby darkness and I whirled around looking for the moon’s reflection off a domed head. I could see nothing beyond the path of moonlight on the water.

“That might be my cue to get out,” I said, warily.

Sea lions are friendly, curious creatures. An open water swimmer I met in the spring showed me pictures of a threatened steller sea lion swimming below her in deep water on a sunny day. She gushed about the experience. Still, they’re the size of grizzly bears with as many teeth. That, and my own teeth, far fewer in number and blunter of tip, were beginning to chatter involuntarily.

We waded to shore and scurried back across the road to the 200 degree heat waiting for us. “There’s a sea lion out there!” I reported to Mikal, our host and owner of Fire + Floe, the mobile sauna parked near the Shel Chelb estuary at Pleasant Beach on the south end of Bainbridge Island. 

“Do me a favor and don’t mention that to the group of women who just showed up?” she requested, smiling. I pulled my thumb and forefinger across my lips and slipped back into the blissful heat.

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Depression + Inflammation

Katherine May’s 2020 book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times first tipped me off to the effects of cold water immersion on depression. There, I encountered mention of the work of Cambridge neuroscientist Ed Bullmore, who is interested in the connection between inflammation and disordered mental states. 

Dr. Bullmore’s exploration of the prevalence of depression in patients with chronic inflammatory diseases has led him to an interesting hypothesis. In a 2019 article for Psychology Today he writes, 

Physicianly disengagement from psychological symptoms is not surprising in view of the mind-body split of Western medicine, but it is surprising given that most physicians have some first-hand clinical experience of the mood-boosting effects of anti-inflammatory drugs… An antidepressant effect of anti-inflammatory drugs in patients with comorbid depression—that's exactly what you'd expect if their depression was directly caused by their inflammation.

In other words, one way to think of depression might be as inflammation of the brain. And like inflammation of the body (which, after all, is not separate), it might respond well to decreases in systemic inflammation. Anti-inflammatory drugs, the focus of Dr. Bullmore’s research, are one way to decrease systemic inflammation. Cold water is another.

“I’m treating my brain like an inflamed joint,” cold water swimmer Dorte Lyager tells Katherine May in the pages of Wintering. 

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If You Can’t Get Out of It, Get Into It

I first heard this aphorism from an ex-boyfriend who was a wilderness guide. He claimed it was the prize catchphrase in a guide’s toolkit, effective at getting clients to find and meet their edge within difficulty. It’s become my mantra for the seasonal shift from the light to the dark half of the year. The way through is in.

As air gets colder and wetter, and days get shorter, and moods grow darker, I turn to the wet woods, I witness sunrises and sunsets, and I cold plunge. This place holds exactly the medicine I need. When I welcome it in, in all its briny chill, my capacity for it all – the cold and the depression – increases. 

Contrast therapy is not new. People of northern climes have exposed themselves to cycles of extreme cold and heat as a matter of health for centuries. Our relatively recent sophistication in understanding and communicating the effects has spotlit the practice though. Among the benefits of cold water immersion listed on Fire + Floe’s FAQ page are increased focus, lowered inflammation, and a 250% increase in dopamine lasting 4 - 6 hours.

Alex and I cycled through the sauna and salt water three times that night, chatting with new friends and neighbors about building projects and raising chickens and personal plunge records. One woman stayed in the water for every bit of ten minutes and reentered the sauna, visibly moved by having felt the pull of the outgoing tide on her legs. Yes, I thought, admiring her glow. If an openness to feeling deeply lets me feel that, then yes. 

The Bigleaf maple in my neighbor’s yard is ablaze. From where I lie in bed each morning, looking south through double doors, the maple glows in early sun. On gray mornings and in the fading light of late afternoon, the leaves seem to be illuminated from within. 

The dance of falling maple leaves has long enchanted me. The ballast of their knob-ended petiole, around which they whirl and twirl on their way to nourishing the soil with their decomposition. The breezes that blow through after rain, such as they did this morning, launch the leaves on lateral trajectories, wind and gravity and the structural properties of the leaf in a beautiful collaboration we call fall.

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Maple Phenology

Phenology: the timed response of plants and animals to the cues of natural conditions, such as day length, temperature, precipitation, and other atmospheric conditions. From the Greek phaino, “to show, to bring to light, to make to appear,” and logos, “study, discourse, reasoning.”

Cued by the diminishing light, the leaves of a Bigleaf maple begin preparing for flight in early autumn. As daylight decreases, the veins transporting water and nutrients to a maple’s leaves close off, ending the process by which its chlorophyll is synthesized. Chlorophyll, the most abundant pigment in leaves, absorbs red and blue wavelengths from the sun and reflects green tones. Within a leaf, chlorophyll attaches to chloroplasts, aiding in the process of photosynthesis. 

As chlorophyll breaks down, other pigments, present to lesser degrees all along, can be expressed. Carotene – the same pigment that colors pumpkins and carrots and sweet potatoes – turns a maple’s leaves yellow. The intensity of that yellow is acted upon by temperature and rainfall. Warm daytime and cold nighttime temperatures combined with a good balance of rain and sun create the most vibrant hues.

When the breakdown of chlorophyll gets underway, maples prepare to offload their yellowing leaves – no longer capable of food production – to conserve their precious sugars in preparation for winter. A maple leaf’s petiole, or stem, is attached to the tree at a junction called the abscission zone. Abscission (a word related to scissors) is the process by which hormones cause the line of cells in that junction to burst, severing the petiole’s attachment to the tree. The leaf now needs only a bit of encouragement – by breeze, by rain – to launch on its journey.

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The Holiness of the Liminal

I love to imagine a maple leaf in flight as nature’s scribe, each of its points a stylus scribbling secret incantations in invisible ink on the slate of sky through which it falls. 

I love to catch a maple leaf in its fall, to hold something that hasn’t touched the ground since it was the stuff of soil, slowly gathered up by fungal hyphae and delivered to root tips, then drawn up through the tree’s xylem to again become its leaves. There’s something of the holy in it.

As on the Indonesian island of Bali, where the belief that a baby’s connection to the spirit realm from which it emerged remains intact for a time after birth. This connection is holy and protected by a custom of keeping a newborn from touching the ground for her first 105 days of life. Then, in ceremony, she is set on the ground for the first time, her soul having finally adhered to her body – no longer a flight risk.

The magic in a maple leaf, falling and caught in midair, has something to do with the baby in Bali – a soul that has yet to succumb to gravity, suspended for a time in a liminal place. What’s in that liminality? I have no idea, but I sense it so deeply that, when I catch a maple leaf in flight, I bless myself with it. I hope to absorb some of that holiness in doing so. I brush myself with the leaf, that already smells of the earth to which it’s falling, from my crown down my face. Then my dog, if she’s with me, gets the same treatment. I pray that some of the tree’s holiness will sink into us both. That something of its belonging to place will be transmitted.

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“A Bride, Married to Amazement”

The age-old criticism of science is its displacement of mystery, its explaining away of a sense that might otherwise lead one to deem something holy. But the understanding science has gifted me – the phenology of maple trees in this instance – has only deepened my sense of wonder. The flight of the maple leaf is more miraculous to me for having names for and descriptions of the structures and processes at play. 

To begin to understand the symphony of factors and their orchestration, that these processes are not intrinsic to the tree but to the whole place – including the atmosphere, including the earth’s position relative to the sun, and that position’s effect on our days… My head swims through the cosmic soup of it all, in Mary Oliver’s words, “a bride married to amazement,” the maple blessing our union by showering us – my amazement and me, and my dog, Maple, if she’s with me – with golden leaves.

Remember you must die. These words have trailed my attention as I’ve wandered through this seasonal transition. Death is all around in early November. It’s the focus of cultural observances – Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, Samhain. It’s also in the mushrooms that bloom and rot back into the humus again, in the golden maple leaves that pirouette from upper limbs – the act for which the season is named, in the drooping flower heads followed by the fading seed heads. 

These words come up for me each year this time, a throwback to a survey course in my early days as an art history student. The memento mori trope gained popularity in European art of the 17th century. These still life paintings contained any number of symbols – nearly burned out candle stubs, rotting fruit, hour glasses, skulls, wilted flowers. There was nothing subtle in the imagery. The successful memento mori refocused the gaze of the beholder from the fleeting pleasures of earthly life to the eternal rewards of the afterlife. 

The origins of memento mori go back even further though, to the time of the Roman triumph, a civil ceremony commemorating a successful military endeavor. According to the second century writer Tertullian, a victorious Roman general was shadowed throughout the celebratory procession in his honor by a slave whose job it was to hold a crown over the general’s head while whispering in his ear, “Look after you and remember you’re a man.” In other words, “Don’t forget you’re going to die.” 

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The Holiday Farm Fire | McKenzie River, Oregon

The still life masters of the 17th century have nothing on Oregon’s 2020 wildfire scars. Driving up the McKenzie River Valley is an experiential memento mori. 

Past Springfield driving east, highway 126 begins its gentle climb into the Cascade Mountains. Wide flatlands slowly give way to a forested river canyon. The western boundary of the 173,393 acre Holiday Farm Fire intersects with the highway just miles beyond the historical covered Goodpasture Bridge in Vida. The 2020 blaze burned downriver from an RV park in Rainbow, erasing the town of Blue River, wide swaths of mature forest land, and most of the scattered development along the river corridor for thirty miles from the outskirts of McKenzie Bridge to Leaburg. 

Most of the trees are standing dead. We drove through them in heavy rain, peering as far as low hanging clouds allowed. Most of the development is brand new. The houses that have been rebuilt in the last four years share a number of design features, lending them a uniformity at odds with the burned landscape: brightly colored hardiebacker siding, metal roofs, the absence of all landscaping and plant material from their surroundings, much of which is paved or graveled. Gone is the character, the sense of time’s depth in this place.

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The 10 a.m. Policy

On August 20th in the summer of 1910, a year after the US Forest Service was established, drought, wind, and lightning conspired to burn 3 million acres across 1,736 fires in Montana, Idaho, and Washington. The catastrophe was dubbed The Big Blowup and incinerated 7.5 billion board feet of timber. All told, 5 million acres burned across the US that summer. In the following year, the federal government passed the Weeks Act, outlawing all cultural burning on Native lands and setting a precedent of total wildfire suppression across the country. 

In 1935, the Forest Service issued the 10 a.m. Policy, another fire suppression directive that ordered all wildfires, regardless of origin, be extinguished by 10 a.m. the morning following their report. Lives and livelihoods were at stake. The war waged on fire by the US Forest Service over the next century had behind it all the zealotry of a Crusade. As if fire were an emissary of hell itself.

Fire terrified colonial settlers, perhaps rightly so. But in fear we flattened a cycle by oversimplifying the equation: fire = death = bad. In our hubris we took control of nature, imagining an end to wildfire entirely. Imagining, wrongly, that our places would be better off without this element in play. 

One-hundred years of these fire suppression policies later, fuel loads in western forests with historically low burn rates have accumulated dangerously. This kindling pile up is now colliding with shifting climatic conditions – warmer winters with less snowpack, hotter springs that melt what snowpack there is, longer periods of drought in the summer, hotter temperatures for longer stretches of time. Ultimately, the once in 100 years wildfire season that burned 5 million acres in 1910, sparked policies that resulted in a 10.2 million acre fire season in 2020.

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Prescribed Fire, Do Not Report

A highway sign alerted me to activity on the McKenzie River Trail: Prescribed Fire, Do Not Report. Small bundles of thick smoke announced about a dozen brush fires along the riverside path. A hard, cold rain fell, more or less containing the fires to their intended parameters on the forest floor. They burned directly under massive trees, some of which bore scorch marks on their trunks but were otherwise unharmed by the flames.   

This section of the popular recreational corridor, just miles east of the Holiday Farm Fire’s boundary, passes through mature stands of fir and cedar draped in thick moss. Water stood inches deep in the trough of the trail. Every part of me untarped by Goretex was soaked through within a mile. I walked around the smoking remnants of the fires thinking about memento mori. The solemnity of the trope appeals to me, the elegiac quality, something of the preciousness of life. But something else in the moralizing, in the conclusions drawn, feels off. 

Memento mori’s finitude is the part of the construct that doesn’t sit well with me. Death in this imagining is an ending, conceived of as a final point on a linear journey. But death is part of life’s cycle, and a cycle by definition is circular and dynamic. What kind of solace might that fact provide while I move through the rites of autumn? What happens when death is recognized as a necessary threshold within the life cycle, over which life passes, rather than an obstacle it must confront, the end of the road? 

I wondered at what scale the application of prescribed fire measures was effective. Would the dozen ladder fuel fires along this mile of river trail be enough to keep the next wildfire from reaching these trees’ crowns? Probably not, but this was the first time I’d encountered intentional fire applied to the land for its benefit, and I grabbed hold of it, a hope I can carry with me into the dark.

Hope is the spell my parents cast on me when I was born. 

My first and last names were already chosen for me before I arrived, two weeks late on a blistering Monday toward the end of August. Hope is the word my parents sandwiched between the two and whispered over me upon meeting me at birth. I don’t know why. I don’t know how they knew I’d need it, or if they knew I’d need it, but they gave it to me all the same: a word for a name. A talisman perhaps. An invitation for sure.

The Salmon Know Where Home Is

In mid-October, just days after the last of four dams on the Klamath River was removed, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists identified a fall-run Chinook above the last of the former dam sites. A press release from ODFW on October 16 noted that the fish became “the first anadromous fish to return to the Klamath Basin in Oregon since 1912 when the first of four hydroelectric dams was constructed, blocking migration.”

“The return of our relatives the c’iyaal’s is overwhelming for our tribe. This is what our members worked for and believed in for so many decades,” the article quoted Roberta Frost, Klamath Tribes Secretary. “I want to honor that work and thank them for their persistence in the face of what felt like an unmovable obstacle. The salmon are just like our tribal people, and they know where home is and returned as soon as they were able.”

The most beautiful expression of place attachment I’ve come across in my years of searching for it emerges from the relationship between Pacific Northwest Tribes, this place, and salmon. Nothing is immovable in the face of hope like this. Not even hundred year old concrete edifices precisely engineered as blockages.

(This is my prayer in an election week.)

This Room is on Fire. We Can Put it Out.

Look, in talking about the downsides of cynicism and the upsides of hope, I am in no way wanting to paper over the real harm and destruction and corruption and pain that saturate our world. Hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will be better. I think of that as rose-colored glasses and something that can make us even complacent. 

Hope is the notion that things could get better. It often coincides with a lot of dissatisfaction with the way things are now. I think that hope can be a feeling that inspires us to challenge these structures, to challenge the forces in our culture that are doing harm. I think of hope as a fiery and often radical emotion, something that’s not saying, ‘This is fine,’ in a room that’s on fire, but rather, ‘This room is on fire. We can put it out.’

—Jamil Zaki, Professor of Psychology and Director of Stanford’s Social Neuroscience Lab, in an interview with Shankar Vedantam for Hidden Brain.

Second Ceremonial Salmon Harvest to Happen on Undammed Elwha River

The stories live on of salmon, barred from all but the bottom four miles of a river system a hundred miles long, battering themselves to death on the concrete of the Lower Elwha Dam. 

In the autumn of 2023, the Elwha Klallam, who’d agreed to a moratorium on fishing the Elwha River in the years immediately preceding and following dam removal, were able to fish for coho in their usual and accustomed places on an undammed waterway for the first time in a century.

Just before the ceremonial fishery opened, I attended an event where Vanessa Castle, Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Member and fisheries and wildlife technician, spoke of what the forthcoming harvest meant to her. The short film Wild Hope was screened, a documentary about the regeneration of the river system featuring Castle. “Fighting for dam removal was a long and grueling process for my ancestors,” she said as the film opened. “I wish they could see it now. See what has happened here and how our lands have been healing.” 

A week later, an article in the Seattle Times quoted Castle from the riverside where she cast for coho: “This completely filled my spirit to be back on the water again, to be able to exercise my treaty rights just as my ancestors did and fought for,” she said. When the ceremonial fishery closed, 177 coho had been harvested.

Another limited ceremonial fishery will open to tribal members on the Lower Elwha this year. Recovery efforts and monitoring continue with the hopes that a commercial coho fishery will be possible in the next year. Chinook have been slower to repopulate and remain threatened in the Elwha River system and throughout Puget Sound. 

E.O. Wilson on Hope

“Everything in life depends on how well the future is conceived,” wrote E. O. Wilson in a 1999 essay for Orion Magazine entitled Hope and Mystery. He conjectures that “if even one person in a thousand survives because she had the genetic predisposition to persevere against discouraging odds, then natural selection will install hopefulness as a hereditary quality, as a necessary companion of intelligence.” Life is more likely to find a way to survive when hope foundations its intelligence. What a beautiful thought.

Wilson concludes, “Humanity’s relation to the rest of life is unimaginably complex, and includes the deepest of all mysteries on this planet. Those who embrace it own the gift of a bottomless well of hope.”

What’s in a Name?

Hope is the spell my parents cast on me when I was born and I am beginning to embrace it. I am beginning to recognize it in the insistence of life, despite discouraging odds and mean conditions. I am beginning to see it in the ways people are adding their energies to life’s insistence. I am beginning to understand hope as a disposition toward action born from a keen attention to what is and a wild imagination as to what might be. 

“Seeing this ecosystem come alive again is a beautiful thing and rewilding this territory from the removal of these dams is a step in the right direction for our people to heal,” Vanessa Castle reflects in Wild Hope. In the coming scene she leads a group of tribal children through an outdoor classroom, “the first generation in over a century never to have seen the Elwha dammed.”

In September, a Seattle Times article tipped us off to a chum run in Puget Sound’s Hood Canal that was having a record breaking year – “the largest run here since counts began in 1975.” On a Sunday we headed out to see for ourselves. 

Kitsap Peninsula’s Union River runs south into the tip of the hook shaped Hool Canal at Belfair. A few blocks off the main drag a sandwich board announced the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group’s (HCSEG) counting site and we pulled over. 

The board noted the tally – reported at about 10,000 in the article – had risen to 12,631. A volunteer greeted us as we strode toward HCSEG’s tent at the river’s edge. The run was nearing its end, she told us. The weir was quiet for the time being. 

We scoped the operation: panels of close-spaced metal rungs spanned the narrow, shallow river, blocking upstream traffic for the chum. On the far shore a crate of the same metal rung construction was open on the downriver side. It was here that volunteers and researchers, who staff the counting station night and day for the duration of the two month run, identify the species and sex of each fish before releasing them on the upstream side of the trap. A chain link panel could be lowered over the top of the trap to protect the temporarily stranded fish from avian predators. 

A week later when HCSEG’s 2024 salmon census ended, 12,689 chum – more than three times last year’s returning population on this same run – had passed through the metal weir to be counted. A number of coho and chinook were also tallied bringing the Union River salmon total for 2024 to 13,098.

This year’s record chum count on the Union River has a lot to do with favorable ocean conditions, but local conservation efforts have played a supporting role. Hood Canal chum were classified as threatened in 1999 under the Endangered Species Act. Their numbers in some years dwindled to double digits, “an experience shared across Pacific Northwest streams where salmon are struggling to persist amid habitat loss, warming waters and low flows,” reports Isabella Breda. 

Conservation efforts to support Hood Canal chum focused on habitat restoration. The Skokomish Tribe led the effort by restoring 1,000 acres of the Skokomish River estuary where it meets Hood Canal. The land, like so much critical juvenile salmon habitat throughout Puget Sound, had been diked and farmed for generations. 

Chum, like all salmon, begin their lives in freshwater rivers and smaller tributaries as alevin – hatchlings with the egg yolk sac still attached. This yolk sac is the alevin’s food source until it matures enough to leave the gravel redd where it was born. Each salmon species spends a certain amount of time in its natal waters before heading for the sea. In the case of chum, this transition occurs almost immediately. 

The amount of time a salmon spends at sea also varies by species. Chum spend three to five years in salt water before returning at their lives’ end to spawn. Imprinted scents draw them back again. “Remarkably, almost all the individual salmon in a given population are synced to the same timing,” reads Kitsap County’s Salmon Field Guide.

A chart in the Field Guide indicates the incredible odds of a salmon egg reaching maturity as a spawning adult, having survived predation at every phase of life from the redd where they hatch as alevin, out to sea and back again to their natal river. From 3,000 eggs, only a pair of fish will survive to spawn again. 

In 2000, HCSEG began supplementing the stock with an artificial spawning program on the Union River. This effort, combined with restoration work on the river’s mouth, was the boost the salmon needed to make their comeback. After just three years of the spawning program, the chum numbers on the Union River rebounded so well that the organization was able to redirect the fry stock created by the spawning program to the nearby Tahuya River, where chum had been listed as recently extinct. Stock supplementation ended in 2015 when both river systems’ chum runs were recovered enough to self-sustain.

As far as salmon species go, chum are among the least celebrated. They’re also known as dog salmon, both because the males grow teeth on their hooked jaws in their final life stage to fight off contending spawners, and because they were once used to feed Alaskan sled dogs. When discussing the state of Pacific salmon we tend to focus on chinook – the species that we prize most as food, the historical heart of the Pacific Northwest fishery, the ones that feed our resident orca pods, the ones most endangered. 

It’s fair to consider that recovery efforts might be better aimed elsewhere. In terms of Puget Sound salmon, there are bigger (and tastier) fish to fry, so to speak. HCSEG’s website carefully and repeatedly makes its case for supporting local chum runs – it’s clear that the organization has to defend its focus regularly: “Chum are the first run of ‘fertilizer’ for the Hood Canal during this time of year, keeping the biodiversity of this watershed high,” reads the webpage discussing their restoration and research on the Union River. “Many species of fish depend on nutrients brought in by Chum during summer, including Chinook, sea-run cutthroat, steelhead, and young coho. Summer Chum bring marine derived nutrients back to the trees, shrubs, insects, birds, and other creatures as well.” 

And later, “By saving Summer Chum, you are really working to protect so much more. You are helping all other species of salmon, trout, and native plants. They are a keystone species just as much as Chinook – and in fact, chum support the culturally and economically revered Chinook. Summer Chum are important, providing vital fertilizer, nutrients, and supporting our unique ecosystem when no other fish can.”

We wandered downriver from the weir and spotted three fish slowly advancing against the gentle flow. The irreverent sounds of cars rushing past us at forty miles an hour contrasted with the effort of the chum, the holy murmur of the river, and the stunning interplay of the October sun, the maple canopy, and the water’s surface. Dead fish rotted on the low banks. Each of the fish counted had or would turn into such a smell I considered as I took it all in. The smell of the release of nutrients into the riparian ecosystem, feeding everything from black bear to cedar.

In an instance of childhood dogma transforming with time into a beautiful truth, Jesus’ words from Matthew keep surfacing for me, leaving concentric rings in the river of thought through which these chum have swum since I witnessed them in early October at the edge of the Union. Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

In other words, the health of the whole cannot be separated from the health of each of its species, from its most celebrated to its least. And I, we, have a place in that wholeness. Just as our culverts and dams and dikes have led to the threatened status of these fish, our removal of those impediments has led and is leading to their recovery. That recovery, in turn, promises to positively affect the whole of the place – Chinook included, Orca included, us included.