Relentless Green

I drop from my perch later than usual due to late night social activities and I find only a few of the earliest risers.  I fumble myself into organization for a morning stroll.  I decide to follow the creek up into the hills just to see how the restoration is melding with summer growth.  New vegetation is taking over the bare gravel bars of winter.   Perhaps the roots will keep the ground from shifting so much next winter.

I find one of the forest woman off to my right.  Understated, she stands somewhat hidden by boulders that have come to rest on her upstream side. The boulders are decked in moss.  Ferns and salmon berries grow from between the boulders.  A 50 or 60 year old cedar, just a toddler of a tree, grows from her top, the roots wrapped in a tight embrace.  In higher water she might be an island, but she is not alone.  (Only later when I look at my photos do I recognize this one as the same stump that has been the header for this blog.)

I don't go far before I spot a majestic on the hillside.

She stands there, eighteen or twenty feet high with her crumbling red sister above her.  The majestic grows two cedars, 15 inches and 2 feet in diameter from her top.  I'm no longer interested in following the creek but instead turn to cross the hillside to see what stands behind this tallest one.

I find wet and brush, a swamp on a 20 degree slope.  But, coming out of that tangle I find a major game trail and follow that until it until it fades away into a new tangle.  I cross two small streams that I did not know about.  I find familiar ground at the grave of Vitus Bering.  It has been awhile since I felt that I explored something.  I find myself thinking about it.  I find myself in tears as I walk back.

"A" and I put a deck on one of the double log bridges.  One more sometimes slippery as heck bridge to go.

It was kind of nice to stand comfortably in the middle of the bridge and look around.

June 2 - Work

Light comes to the tree house before 6.  I leave my perch and head to the kitchen to brew coffee.  Others have arrived although they came late last night after I was asleep.  Sharing the farm always requires an attitude adjustment on my part.  Most of the time I am here alone.  I've also noticed that I stay in a camping mode that comes to me through many years of climbing, backpacking and wandering - it is sparse.  Most of the others will be here in a "cabining" mode.  They nest, they spend time cooking great meals (which I do enjoy for sure), they just take care of business.  For me, time spent not wandering is time lost.  "Burning daylight" - I probably would've made a good cowboy.  I itch to move.

Red breasted sap sucker

This morning I am rewarded.  I find a tiny egg, alabaster white with a few brown speckles.  I place it in my compass case for safe keeping.  As I walk up river three female common mergansers take flight from the branches of an alder tree.  I had no idea that mergansers would perch in trees (they probably only do this at night).  I find the slough knee deep so I turn back not needing to start the day any wetter than necessary.  Two of the mergansers are back in the same tree when I return.

My friends are up and moving when I get to the kitchen.  One crew takes over the kitchen.  They will make the meals for everyone.  Smoke Farm is always a feeder and a good one at that.  K is cooking pork bellies for tacos.  Most of us then drop down to the barn.  It is in need of cleaning and organizing.  A few others pull blackberries farther off.  By lunch the barn looks good.  A dumpster has been filled with metal recycling.  After a great lunch people split up into groups.  Some attack the overgrown garden which seems to be retreating to a state more wild than the forest.  I lead a team up to the north fields to open up a half mile of trail, because I'm supposed to know where the trail is/was.  The five of us swing machetes for the distance.  We break on the upper beach and then head back the same way.  This is when I see how good my team was...the trail is wide and clear, blackberries, tall grass and thistles sliced away.  You could follow it in the dark.  We return for dinner and find the garden looking as if it was in a nursery.  This is how Smoke Farm survives, by the enormous heart of those that keep returning.

June 1 - Escape

A work party starts tomorrow at the farm, but I needed to escape from my recent routine of sorting, packing, sorting and fixing as we prepare to sell our house and move a couple thousand miles.


I don't know that escaping to a place is any better than escaping from a place.  For my time here at Smoke Farm, the farm has never been a place to escape to.  Rather, it has always been a place to explore.  I come here to find something new, I keep coming because I keep finding new things, sometimes about the land, often about myself.  As long as that happens in any facet of my life, I find purpose and satisfaction.


The potters are here today preparing to fire their wood burning kiln.  It will run for 50 hours, tended constantly by a few of them.  They will sleep in shifts.

 I set my tent up at the top of the tree house.  It always seemed like a good spot to spend the night, 30 feet or so up among the trees.  I would sleep in the open, but the clouds and unusual high humidity signal rain.

With my tent up, I change into the worn wool trousers that work so well when walking in the wet grass.  They dry fairly fast and they also are thick enough to fend off most thorns.  I head out to my installation to continue tying little white rocks to long strings.  My supply of cobbles is safely hidden beneath the high water of the Stillaguamish, so I can walk up river when I am done with my supply of little white rocks.

Thursday, January 12

I drop A at the kitchen.  It's a quiet day for her - a day away from the computer and distractions.  I continue on out to my installation where I tie little white rocks to strings for the next couple of hours.

Rain, and especially yesterday's thundershowers has brought the river up a few feet.  It runs brown with silt and the gravel bar where I have been fetching my cobblestones is well under water. 

I retrieve a downed cedar fence post from the brush to use as part of a bench that I am building.  Then, I head upstream for a walk.  Curiosity draws me up to a bench of land on the hillside that I've wondered about for some time.  From below it looks like it could be an old road bed.  As I make my way up the hill I flush a barn owl from a large Douglas fir snag.

 It perches 50 yards away and watches me for a minute or two.  There is a large cavity in the tree and this is likely the owl's nest site.  I find egg fragments on top of an dead leaf at my feet.

The bench could be part of a road, but if it is it was a road a long time ago.  I find two ripe salmon berries and I eat them.

I sit in the shelter of a cedar while rain drops strike the canopy making the same sound on that roof as if I was in my house.

I look at my watch to check the date.  My watch says it is Thursday, January 12.  It makes no difference.


notes:  the slough ford is waist deep today.

Memories

I slept out under a clear sky once more.  A siren up the valley  sounded and the coyotes sang back, beginning with one very long and even howl.  When I opened my eyes, it was to fog.  Dew had formed on everything, including me.

I slip my feet into boots still wet from yesterday's wading.  Memories.  Cold wet boots are the Kuskalana Glacier, where cold wet boots were actually frozen boots that only became wet after being worn a few minutes.  Wading in hiking boots is always a stream near Engineer Creek, where my friends followed caribou trails, while I, after too many miles of punching scrub willow, retreated to the openness of the river, preferring wet feet to be really wet, and not minding cobbled bottom.

Some thing or some occurrence at some later place and some later time will undoubtedly be Smoke Farm.

Walking into the wind, back towards the barn, I look up to find something out of place.  As still as stumps, what they are doesn't register immediately.  My brain lags in adjustment behind my eyes...a doe and a fawn are doing the same with me.

 

Castoreum

It doesn't take too long.  Castoreum comes to my nose just as I begin the walk up the road from the barn.  Three years of tracking and observing the habits of beaver has left my nose unusually keen to the musk that they spray to mark territory.  In the still air, in the shelter of the cottonwoods, odors linger.  It's possible that I am catching the scent from the trees themselves because what they eat does affect the scent.  It's hard to say.

At the double log bridge, I pick up the scent again.  Here, I expect it and a newly felled cottonwood overhanging the bank of the creek confirms.  This has been a regularly used feed zone all winter.  As I move towards the bridge, I flush a few baby ducks.  They swim upstream into the protection of the brush.


The river is higher today.  The unseasonably warm and sunny weather of last week has increased snow melt somewhere.  It might be a foot or so higher than on my last visit.  Today, I have to wade shin deep out to the gravel bar to collect rocks.  I didn't expect that and left my rubber boots at home.  But, I find something pleasant about hiking boots full of water.

the grass is higher too

"He was a newcomer to the land...  The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.  He was quick and alert at the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances."  
Jack London - To Build a Fire

Just something I read over dinner.

Belonging

I am up early again as is my new friend A, who slept not far away.  I heard her move in the night and she tells me that her sleeping bag was not quite warm enough for open air.  We make coffee and while others sleep, we take a hike and find a couple of our friends awake when we return.

Since things are off to a very leisurely start, I head off to move some rocks.  But, I run into S coming the opposite direction up the road and she asks to go for a walk with me, so we do.  We visit the squatter's cabin first.  I lead until we are close, then I point towards the last stretch of trail and stop talking.  I follow a short distance behind.   When we are done exploring and discussing that interesting structure, I ask, "what next?" - my way of politely giving a person a way out of a long hike.  S surprises me some by wanting to push on farther away rather than head back for breakfast.  In fact, I notice that if I stand still, she will walk farther into the forest.  It is a good trait and one that many of my artist friends have...their curiosity drives their creativity.  "Let's head up the road, I have a cool stump to show you."  I tell her that I pose my hiking partners with stumps and that some of them have a wonderful ability to look like they were born there and that they belong there.  I talk of them as matriarchs and how they guide me back out of the forest when I wander.  We get to that tall stump, and S climbs to the top of it.
She asks, "have you been up here?"
I respond, "That is not my relationship with them."
And she does something gentle that I've seen no one else do, and she looks like she belongs there.

May 12, 2012
Night was just cold enough to reach through my sleeping bag with only the stars as the skin of my tent.  Sometime in the early morning night, a half moon rose and drifted sideways across the sky.  Wind came sometime early also, with a breath of chill touching my side with each gust.  When it woke me, I had a starlit sky above and fuzzy in my nearsighted vision.

I rose before sunrise, made breakfast, and headed out to continue work.  As the sun rose and arced through the sky, the half moon disappeared.

Site visits for prospective Lo-fi artists begin today.  I knock off and wait for people to come at noon, but they are more casual and leisurely than I am about time.  But, they do arrive, and each meeting is a good experience with the possibilities of lasting friendship.  We have fine discussions, we tour the landscape, we eat an excellent dinner, and when all have retired to various buildings and spaces for the night, I lay down under the stars once more.

A slug

May 11, 2012

It is as much a summer day as one can expect - warm and sunny, the farm is green with new growth, the cottonwoods all leafed out and the grass in the meadows is somewhere between thigh and chest high.  My days here, the past few months, have been ones of exploring, days of finding new things and days of finding the outer edges of what I can call the farm (it does go beyond the legal edges of the farm).  But, today is a work day.  Familiar with the area, I decided to make something for others to find, an installation that will do no harm, but perhaps cause people to pause and think.  I've been told and seen that one of Smoke Farm's best traits is the exchange of ideas that occur when people come together here.

So, I move rocks.  Lots of rocks.  2 buckets at a time, 6 buckets to the wheelbarrow, 3 wheelbarrows before a rest.  The red breasted sapsucker that likes the cedar tree where I work returns.  It is unafraid of me and we look at each other from 6 feet away.  When I move, it just sidesteps a bit further around the tree.  As I collect rocks, I spot a mule deer on the far side of the river, a 100 yards downstream.  It looks back and spots me, watches me, and then takes its time walking further downstream.  I return to moving rocks.