Smells

J and I arrive a bit after nine on a day of expected showers with some wind, but the temperature will be typical for spring...not a bad day to be caught in a shower.

The cottonwoods are beginning to leaf out, the grasses are just a step ahead and all the shrubs just a bit more so.  Once again, Smoke Farm is intensifying the greenness of it all.  In winter, it was the forest with its cedars and firs that kept that color, which can be almost overwhelming here in the Northwest.  But with spring, everywhere, everyplace will take that tone.

But, as strong as that single color can be, today it is the smells that we comment to each other about.  There is the most wonderful scent drifting through the cottonwoods as we walk towards the river.  It is a complex mix that we don't recognize in its additive combination.  There is citrus and cinnamon and mint and pepper.  We sample different plants as we walk, finding a hint on this shrub, and a hint on that tree, but never finding any one of the culprits to be the majority.  On past trips, it has been the view, or the sounds of running water, or the sight of salmon or birds.  But, today it is the sense that is most difficult to describe.  It is the sense that must be experienced.

We check out the beaver activity at the creek, where beaver are doing what beaver do, cutting trees and eating bark, and leaving the leftovers as a sign of their mostly nocturnal work.  The creek is running good and full, and the restoration is coming along.

Walking up the river, we find that the guy across the river is building three cabins in the most insane of locations.  Neither J or I can figure the thinking that must have gone into (or not gone into) the location.  He is right at the edge of the gravel bar, not more than 6 or 7 feet or so above the current water level.  He is not building in a 100 year flood plain, he is building in a once a year flood plain.  I comment how it should only be a couple of years until the cabin floats off down the river like Huck Finn's raft.  It makes no sense...none at all.

I take J up to the squatter's cabin, which he finds fairly fascinating...as everyone does.  The floor has been pushed up more since I was here last.  The gradual slide of the hill with gravity and the wet of winter and spring are pressuring the cabin more and faster than I would've expected.  I am glad that I have documented it carefully.  It begins to rain in earnest while we are there and once we leave the cabin, only the cedars provide shelter for us.

We finish our trip by working our way in a circuit out through the lower beach.  I point out the pear trees and 3 maples that stand close to where the Baker homestead was.

All through that rain, we could still smell the citrus-pepper-mint-cinnamon of the spring forest.

The magic jacket

J and I get to the farm some time around 9.  There is some wind, but the temperature is comfortable.  Rain will come at some point today, that is certain.  J joins me on a trip to climb the upriver end of the DNR hill.  I've explored the bottom up there, but wanted someone along for the steeper sections.  At least I have figured out the easiest path through and around the blackberries that guard the bottom of the hill.  If all works out, we will cross over the hill and descend to the squatter's cabin.

We walk up and through the north fields to the river, which we can follow a hundred yards or so over to the top end of the slough.  During high water, the river runs into the slough.  Today it is a shallow creek.  But, it is choked with logjams and is only the preferable route because it avoids the blackberry tangles.  We make the final crossing where a creek enters from the hillside.  There is a fine beaver dam right there and from my past trips I know that it is just one of many.

Mother and Sons

The bottom of the hill is not too steep and we pick up a good trail that follows the state property line.  I suppose that I don't take the shallow slope as the warning it should be.  We soon find ourselves in some of the steepest terrain that I've seen on this hill, just as the first rain comes, bringing with it some small ice pellets.  It is a very strenuous section, made especially pleasant by the 25 pound pack on my back.  But, face down sucking breath like that, J finds a beautiful bird nest on the ground.  I don't have a box to save it in, so after we look at it some, appreciating the delicacy, I set it under a downed log so that it will last as long as possible...for whom, I don't know.  I pull my rain jacket out of my pack and the rains soon stops.

J thinks that it is made of cedar roots

Once past that grunt, the hill gradually relents and the sky shows more and more through the trees.  A last push through new alders, a sign of cutting, brings us to a logging road that has a fine view.

From here, we follow the road around and up to the top of the hill, which is just a bit over 1000 ft.  The weather has closed the view in some, so we drop down into the forest, stopping to listen to a chorus of frogs in a small pond.  When they spot us, they stop as quickly as if they had taken their cue from a conductor.

The descent goes well.  While often, the descent is more difficult than the climb, this time it seems almost casual...which I know is not true from past trips.  It is the brutal climb on the other end of the hill that has made it so.  I pick the route by feel and by sensing that things look right.  There is nothing tangible for me to key off of, and I often wonder how the human brain can pull off such complexity.  Eventually, I look down through the trees and see the boulder and roof of the squatter's cabin directly below us, and I wonder how often I would be able to do that.

 

squatter's cabin

We spend some time examining the cabin and then take our last hour and walk the lower farm, checking out beaver drags and lower beach.  One last rain shower brings my magic jacket out of the pack.  The rain shower stops. 

New Terrain

I needed to write, today.  I don't remember ever feeling that I needed to write, even after a couple years of writing my journal from the inside of a canoe or while in the forest.  I was a creatively bad English student, unable to comprehend the passion for words that my teachers had.  When I think about it, it was that their formula for writing was not the one that I require.  They succeeded in a system where people sit at a desk and write creatively.  I sit at a desk and, at best, I doodle - more likely, I just fidget.  Movement triggers the stuff that I put into words.  Even as I drove the car up here to the farm, a 100 thoughts about my beautiful wife went through my head, thoughts that could not be written at sixty miles per hour, and as with thoughts that come while moving, they are fleeting thoughts.  Even unwritten words have value.  If only she knew.  Maybe she does.

I plan to head up valley and around the east side of the DNR hill, where I haven't been, yet.  Dense brush and blackberries have turned me back twice, both times with hiking partners that didn't need to abuse themselves that much.  The water in the slough is down quite a bit and where it was thigh deep on my last trip, it is just ankle deep.  The winter seems to have pushed the blackberries down to a level where I can strategically dance step them to ground...I just walk on top of most of them.

I find a witness tree with its shiny aluminum plate.  It was placed on August 22, 1996 and notes that I am on the line between sections 9 and 16 of Township 32N, Region 6E.  It is unusual in that the surveyors have listed their names - Olsen, Herrick, Carlson, and Lonpher (hard to read that last one).  I cross the slough nearby near a silted in beaver dam.

There is a nice game trail climbing cross slope and easterly.  Soon, it coincides with the timber boundary, so it may be a man/animal mutual trail, although I doubt anyone has walked this in a couple years.  I stop to photograph myself with a couple of fine old cedar stumps.  I also grumble silently about the ridiculous amount of stuff that I have put in my field pack today.  I move on.

Squirming through brush and fallen alder, I dream of "losing" the damned machete that keeps hanging up on everything (because it strapped to my pack - useless piece of shit tool that it is, unless you want to open up your shin, of course).  I talked myself into taking the hazard because of the blackberries, but it has to be a lot worse than this before I start swinging a rusty dull samurai sword with only me in killing range

I come out to an amazing cedar stump.  She is thoroughly wrapped in the roots of her offspring and leans out over the hill above a sandy depression left by the falling of another tree.  Parts of her, huge red-brown blocks, dangle in the air like jewelry suspended by thin strands of root.  I feel something off.  There is a sense of something amiss here, something dark that I do not want to know about.  She is not to be photographed, and it is not a place to linger.  I'm not one for spirits and ghosts, but I came to the forest to feel, and it is only foolishness to deny a feeling, even if it doesn't figure.  I circle up high and wide around her.  She disappears in the brush not too soon.  I will avoid her on the return, I am not supposed to be there, and I don't know why, but I don't want to be there.

logjam in the upper slough

I drop down onto the slough and follow it up river.  This might be the most interesting terrain that I have seen in awhile.  One branch is a series of beaver dams and ponds.  I think it leads to a drainage coming off of the hill.  The main channel is broader and shows frequent high water.  It connects to the river farther up.  It is choked with log jams, but the going is relatively easy.  It takes me to a fine gravel bar in the Stillaguamish where I sit for a time and end the days exploring.

Just as I near the log bridge while returning to the barn, I hear frogs and frogs and frogs singing out in the wet field under the hill.  I am watching a snipe when the frogs all go silent, all at once.  I take a knee and wait, wondering what has scared the frogs.  I wait for a 1/2 hour.  Still the frogs are silent.

When you see bird poop, look up.

The day is cloudy, overcast and still with the sound of running water all around.  The previous few days were heavy with rain and that rain has not yet left the valley.  It hangs in the air and runs down the sides of the hills, it is everywhere and in places that I am not used to seeing it.  The river gauge had pulsed up several feet in just a few hours, and then retreated part way in just a few more.  The North Fork of the Stillaguamish does that with heavy rain and part of my motivation is to witness the change on the gravel beaches and see what new heavy items the river has left behind.  I don't even bother with my hiking boots, going straight into the knee length rubber ones.  The lower farm also holds the rain for some time.

A lot of water is flushing out of the creek today.  It has overrun the road near the barn and the old creek bed has a current in it today.  It is a maze to get up to where the creek comes from the hillside, a serpentine route to avoid stepping into a channel that is more than boot deep.  The gravel bar created by the USDA restoration is now doing what a gravel bar does, dissapating and absorbing the energy of the stream flow.  I try to walk out to a couple of my favorite cedar stumps, but the field that appears to be "just wet" is actually mid shin deep at its shallowest.  The long grass that grows here in the summer is floating on top, an illusion.

The lower beach is narrow today and in places I am right up against the brush line.  I notice that the rocks have been shingled - with my back to the river I can see that all of the rocks are tilted downstream.  I'm not sure why I never noticed this before, but maybe it is something that is most noticeable right after high water.  I find a plastic tag with the number "108".  It is attached to a short length of nylon rope.  It looks like it might have been a livestock tag.


I can't get to the upper beach without getting very wet.  The ford to the north fields is mid-thigh deep today and I'm not going to brave the high log alternative while carrying my camera.  As I sit to figure out my next direction, the coyotes let loose unseen out in the north fields, yipping for a minute and then going silent.


I take a meander up the creek that drains the DNR hillside.  It's easy uphill going for a little while if one knows where to start.  On my way back out, I notice bird crap on the ground and I look up, as I always do.  A growth on a tree branch looks odd.  It looks odd because it is a bird butt.  It is only 8 ft away and so still that it might be a stashed kill.  I walk back under the branch and look up to find a tiny owl staring back at me.  It is a Northern Saw-Whet owl, only 7 or 8 inches in size.  It tolerates me to no end as I walk back and forth and all around trying to get the best photograph.  I'm there for some time.  Then I go.

On the way out, I stop in the fake shelf fungus cedar grove to check the mud for tracks, of which there are none.  But, tap, tap, tap send my eye to a red breasted sap sucker, which is almost as tame as the saw-whet owl was.  It is working a cedar tree, the tell-tale holes of its mission clear all up and down the trunk. 

The day has been everything that I needed.

Finding the edge

"A" and I arrive at the farm on a quiet and cloudy morning with just the lightest touch of wind, a day for shirtsleeves as long as one is moving.  For all her time at the farm, A has not yet seen the squatter's cabin and she is eager to find out what this is all about.

We stop once, as I always do, near the river gauge.  There is a fine sand shore here that records particularly clear animal tracks.  But, this time, we find nothing new since Monday when I was last here.  Rain has eroded the sharp edges of the old tracks, including my own.  We can move on.
 

To find the turn into the woods, I tell A how many strides to count.  It will be close enough, even with our different pacing distance.  We hear a woodpecker before we leave the road.  I let A continue up ahead of me so that she can have the cabin emerge from the brush as her own.  When I catch up, she is standing, watching.  A pileated woodpecker is down low on an old alder working away.  Thunk thunk thunk, a colorful crow sized bird throwing large chips of rotten wood.  It seems unworried to our presence.  We watch.

When our movements become too much, it leaves, flying directly and closely over A and nearly crapping on her.  Then we examine and discuss the cabin.

When we move off, we bushwack in a clockwise direction around the DNR hill.  I don't expect to get too far, but I want to see the lay of the land farther in this direction.  We have a lot of salmon berry thrashing to do, but it does go easier when we can stay under the cedars.  Eventually, we begin to follow deer trails up the side of the hill, getting higher than planned, probably within 200 ft of the hilltop.  But, we also find that we have an excellent view of the first valley north of the Stillaguamish.  It is a perspective of the land that will anchor the wanderings with a reference to the planned world.

We make our way home.  We are both tired, but more than that, we are relaxed.  We talk about naps, when we talk at all.

I'm not there

Today, I'm down in the shop building boxes to hold more of the specimens that I've collected wandering through Smoke Farm.  But, sometimes the specimens transport me to the farm and things that I should be thinking about while I'm there arrive here. Specimen 61 is a no trespassing sign that I found half buried in the cobbles of the lower beach.  It is scratched, bent, and has a good dozen BB marks from someone's shotgun.  I'm pretty sure I know where the obnoxious thing came from, and he's not getting back - it is a specimen.  It's currently one of my favorite finds.  It brings to thought the connections that people form.  In this case, the connection with property, which is dramatically different than a connection with land.   One thing that I detected very early on at Smoke Farm was that the people here had a connection with the land and while they do own the property, they seem to own the property because of the land that it is.  The land is not fenced, it is not signed, but it is carefully maintained, watched over and respected - more than anything, it is respected.  I've met people from three different government organizations on the property.  They show up to do restoration, or to verify that the river gauge is working, or to look for spawning salmon.  They are looking out for the land as well.  I've talked with them and walked along to see what they do.  They know where that sign comes from too.  They know because they aren't allowed on that property (see - it is no longer land).  Having and owning might not be the same thing.

Artwork and that neighbor kid, again.

Until March 24, the first 39 specimens and some other stuff are on exhibit at the Anchor Art Space in Anacortes.

Searching

My good friend KF meets me at the farm in the morning.  She has been here once before, but has never wandered farther than the lower section of the farm.  While I waited for her to arrive, for as I suspected, she was trying to find her way here by 6 month old memories, a hawk slope-soars back and forth overhead, its' screeee call coming out each time it wheels to change direction.  A cool wind comes down the valley, putting a temporary chill on a sunny day that will be unseasonably warm.

squatter's cabin

Once we pass the shop building, it is new country for KF.  We stop at the small beach near the USGS gauge finding it reconfigured, a new channel cut through by recent high water.  I find an especially good raccoon track and pour a casting that we can retrieve on the way out.

I take KF up to the squatter's cabin.  She is familiar with some of the artist shacks that were built at Fish Town near the mouth of the Skagit.  KF finds the cabin fascinating, a seemingly excellent spot for a person to do some writing and an improbable location for a prospector.  I know that she will think it over.

After some time there, we head farther up the diagonal road to the area that K and I passed through a few weeks ago when we missed our descent route off of the DNR hill by a couple hundred yards. I continue making family portraits with the forest women....Mother and Son...Mother and Daughter....Mother and Children.  I go through a lot of pixels.

When we feel the need to do a bit more walking, we head up to the upper beach.  It is interesting to see how the river's gravel bars have changed - some changed shape, some changed texture.  Places that were cobbles in the summer are now smoothed over in pea gravel, as are some of the sand patches that I used for finding animal tracks.  KF finds a coyote scat pile on the way across the fields and I carefully collect it as it has many bones from a recent meal that should be identifiable.  I find an aircraft fragment in the gravel of the upper beach.

Today, I collect a good number of specimens. It was a fine day any way you cut it.