September 30

 

Start building a box for the partial skeleton.  It will not be a specimen box.  Instead, it is a die-orama.  You look at it through a one inch hole in one end.

I walk out to check the first beach.  There is a good set of coyote tracks...among the smell of a few dead humpies. 

Coyote came upriver
to where I am now
two claws protrude on one foot

He followed the shore
and I followed him
separated by eight or twelve hours

Coyote stopped to smell a dead humpy
maybe he took a taste
now, it is a story

At the beaver drag
deer tracks, coyote tracks
I stop my pursuit
The beaver have not been here in days.

It is and is going to be a fine early fall day.

At 1:00pm it starts to rain, although, for me, this does not change my forecast one bit.

Two guys from the USGS drive up.  They are going to check the river gauge and I hop a lift with them because I want to see what is inside those concrete towers on the river bank.  I also want to pick their heads for data.  The Smoke Farm gauge dates to the mid 1930's.  It is the only gauge on the N. Fork of the Stilliguamish that reads level and stage (which I just muddle together when I am worried about water levels - one only needs to know that the river is too high, too low, or just fine).  They come to do this every 6 to 8 weeks.

I work on specimen boxes until the rain runs itself out.

When it is dark, I read poetry by Robert Sund while the neighbor shoots his gun.  If I was a good poet I would sound just like Robert Sund, because when I read his stuff it sounds to me like it is coming out of my head, although it is not (it is going into my head, oddly enough).  I generally do not like poetry.  I recently said that to a poet...it was awkward (her poetry was pretty good...it reminded me some of Robert Sund).  This paragraph is going in circles.

A poem by Robert Sund -

In the world of men
centuries go by leaving
little trace.

A blossom in men is
like a cathedral,
seldom built.


It must be that in schools
when a blackboard is being erased,
under the sweeping hand,
    some words
   disappear forever.

September 29

I start by taking my sweetheart to the airport.  We will be apart most of the coming year.  It is purely economics...she has a job to do, I have a job to do, and they are not in the same place.  I do not like to think about it much.


At the farm - I hear ATV's and find pick-up trucks parked near the barn.  No one has told me about this.  I call S. and find out that it is a work crew, which is a relief...nuf sed.  I head up to the north field to continue the map project and to meet the crew.  But, it turns out that they are spraying invasive plants to give the newly planted trees a fighting chance.  It is best that I am not in the fields for 24 hours or so.  So, after picking their brains for background information about their restoration work, I head back downriver.

I stop where the road is 20 feet above the river, where one can look straight down into the current.  The shadowy shapes of humpies - salmon also called pinks, are flitting...no flitting is not the word.  Salmon move with power and swiftness...not sure what word that is, but it is impressive...they do it on an empty stomach also as they are swimming upstream to spawn and then die.  They do not eat once they head upstream.

I stop and do my stump research for an "in-the-head" project.  I find that the project is feasible and only slightly altered than what is in my head.  Now, I can write a grant proposal and pretend that I am a grown-up and all that shit.  But first, I collect 10 pieces of a skeleton and a tin from the top of an old oil can.

I finish reading the Te of Piglet, eating lunch and nodding off, nodding on, nodding off - I did not sleep well last night.  It is a good book although at twenty years old it shows that our society has completely wasted about 20 years. 

I sit and do bead embroidery on my field pack... a thoroughly mindless task with no point other than to put a decent looking pattern on the black fabric.  But really, beadwork always was about status...mine says that what I am doing with that field pack is important enough for me to spend hours decorating the pack.  Sometimes people figure that out.

My wife calls while I am making dinner and it makes me very happy.

Re-search

I do not like to look at existing maps before I begin a map.  The discoveries that happen while in the mode of hyper-alertness required by the ground survey are too special to tamper with.  But now, familiar enough with the farm and knowing the general lay of the land, I take time to look at earlier work.  My discoveries are no longer threatened, and it is something I can do on days that I can't be on the farm.

Topographic maps have little to add at this point.  The early 20th century one that I found has a few details that might be interesting, but not much more.  The newest USGS map is amusing because of an error.  I am finding errors more often in satellite made maps.  There is a road on their map that I am pretty sure does not exist.  There is also a road that exists that is not on their map.  In the marsh where I canoe frequently, Google Maps claims dry land where there are only lily pads - and only in the summer months when the satellite took the photo.  It is sloppy work to make maps and not have someone walk the ground.  It's like telling someone that you know something when you really are quite clueless.

I spend my time with the BLM survey records.  They come from the 1890's.  The surveyor's notes are neatly hand written.  The map is an odd thing to wrap one's head around.  It is not a topo map.  It was not intended for that purpose.  It is a map for people who will claim, buy, section, subdivide, mine, log or farm the land.

follow the link at the bottom of the blog to get this in a zooming version

The farm lies in Township 32, Region 6, Sections 16 and 17, mostly.  The surveyors walked the edges of the region noting the forest and soil and hills, creeks, rivers.  Everything is in chains - that is a unit of length...rods, chains, links...if you need to know, you'll look it up.  A section is a square mile, 640 acres.  They did not walk the section boundaries.  But, they did go back and walk the entire Stilliguamish River, carefully plotting it so that they could figure out how much land was left in the section for the farmer, logger or miner.  They called that walk a meandering.  I like that...meandering to make a map.  The river has not changed its channel much at all in 120 years.

The map is cryptic. There are odd numbers noted on the map that have a reason I do not know.  Baker had a house on the farm, not far from where SK made a braided grass installation a month or so ago.  It is not far from where the beaver are taking cottonwoods and dragging them back to the river.  Youst (that might be wrong - it is hard to read) had a house in the north fields, at a place where I tripped over some barbed wire.

I go back to putting the maps and notes on a canoe paddle.  I am joining my last project to this one.

Here's the link to the map- BLM  You can zoom in on this to see the details.

North Fields

I make coffee and pick up where I left off reading 'The Te of Piglet', which I found in the desperate book collection up in the sleeping lofts, having forgotten to bring my new book of Robert Sundt poetry.  It is 7:40 when I notice that the sun has crested the ridge on the far side of the valley, burning through the bad mohawk of trees left by the lumberjacks...as if it is not a clear cut when you leave a couple stragglers.  It is breezy and it will be a sunny day.

The radio drones on, I'm always torn whether to use it or not...there is nothing there except stories about people who are caught on an inertial ride to one sort of collapse or another.  There is a noticable lack of creative...creative anything.  No creative solutions, not even a "thinking outside the box" (I hate that phrase) idea.  There is a bit about the retarded presidential candidate, Rick Perry (I know that retarded is offensive, but I know no better term for his ilk - he is offensively stupid, if you don;t mind me saying).  Maybe I should have left the radio off.  Creativity requires a dropping of the ego, an acknowledgement that one does not know everything, or much of anything for that matter.  Only then does the good stuff float to the surface.

I head up to the north meadows, stopping to cast a mule deer track along the way.  I can pick it up on the return when the plaster is well set.  I map north of my datum that I set yesterday.  I plot a wooly caterpillar, I note a snail and a line of deer tracks.   After a few hours of pacing back and forth, sighting, pacing more, sighting.... I start to make minor errors.  It is a sign that the days survey is near and end.

Returning, I find a research team working its way down the river measuring the depths of side channels.  I would normally badger them with questions, but I continue on...I'm tired.

September 19

I arrive and once I get my gear organized, I head up to the north fields.  When I wandered up here a few days ago I felt something very old - something historical in the landscape.  Clouds were low that day with the mist in the tops of the trees and it rained on and off.  The mowed  field, the forest backdrop, and the light seemed to be a summation of the Mathew Brady Civil War photographs that I used to stare at for hours.  Something here was caught in time.

I decided to come back here and work my map, catching the north fields in detail.  They have been planted with new trees and in a couple years, the opportunity will have disappeared.  It will be a young forest.  It is an easy survey, almost like shooting sights over water except that I get to go anywhere that I want.  There are discoveries - deer beds at the edge of the field, and a whole field that I didn't know existed, hidden by a wall of somewhat taller cottonwood trees. 

When I do enough for the day, I return to bunkhouse for a quart of lemonade and a short nap.  Then I drop down to the milking parlor (workshop) to continue putting specimen boxes together.

Rain

Yesterday was cloudy with a thick overcast and I wake today to more of the same.  The clouds are just mixing with the ridge top on the far side of the valley.  It might rain.  It might not.

After breakfast, I finish up on my box building - the first seven specimens collected in my wanderings.  I don't have the sheet copper that I need to finish them, but they are sealed.  It begins to drizzle while I work, the tiny droplets striking the metal roof and making noise that is far out of proportion to the amount of wetness.  I will probably not map today as the paper on the plain table will suffer during the work.  But, more to the point, there is the nagging superstition that if I begin mapping, it will rain for real.  I explore instead.

I find deer tracks and a set of fisherman tracks at the river.  It is the flat bottomed wading shoe prints that give the fisherman away.  Two killdeer complain at me and I flush a sandpiper that I really should have noticed earlier.  I feel clumsy.  Fish are rising at the eddy on the far side of the river.  I have yet to come down here and not see fish rise in that spot.  I head up river and after just a few steps I shake a bald eagle from its perch.  It too heads upriver.  I begin to find beaver sign - pealed cottonwood limbs.  With each few steps, the number of limbs increases until I reach the end of the cobble beach where limbs are strewn all over.  This is a feeding spot.

There is a well used beaver drag leading up the bank.  A drag actually looks like someone swept a dirt path with a push broom, the only difference being that whoever made the path did not show much concern for headroom.  The beaver that come here live somewhere else on the river swimming in and head inland to get food.  The branches are dragged back to the rivers edge where the bark can be pealed and eaten in relative safety.  I follow the drag until about 150 feet from the river, I find a minor clearing in the cottonwoods.  The beaver have taken down at least six trees and hauled away almost every bit.  Other stumps show that they were here last year as well.

It begins to rain in earnest.

I walk down to the quarry and follow a road up the hill through the forest until it comes to a gate and someones house.  I quietly turn around and return to the river.  It has stopped raining.

Then, I head upriver again to wander the north meadow and the old homestead site.  There is an old feeling about it today.  I don't know what that means.  I collect a few things as specimens plus a mangled sheet of metal that might be more suitable on the boxes than the copper that I envision.

September 14

I get to the farm in the late morning.  Map gear and recent specimens along with a selection of tools necessary to box those relics are in the car.

So often, we find ourselves thinking of things that seem to have nothing to do with what we are doing.  A photograph of my wife comes to mind and I find myself on a new path.  I have had the photo since the time when we were dating, now over half a lifetime ago.  It is a photograph taken, no doubt, by some guy who had a crush on her.  I remember hearing some story about that.  She is no more than 18-years old, her hair done in long braids - a length that I have never seen, and she is crouched, studying something, but momentarily disturbed by the photographer just long enough to look partially in that direction.  It is an extremely fine portrait.  The photo became mine when I rescued it from the trash, my wife announcing that she didn't like it.  I took it and put it in what I thought was a safe spot not knowing at that time that we would still be together over 30 years later.  No one who knew us would have bet on that.


As time went by, the photograph became water damaged, and one day I tore it opening the safe place where I kept it.  For a while I forgot where it was although I would occasionally wonder about its location.  Over thirty years, I suppose I lost and found it several times.  Then one day, while setting up my studio (pronounced "shop") I found it again and tacked it to the wall.  To me, that photograph always reminds me of the first time I saw my wife - at a bus stop in Minneapolis.  It would be at least a year before I would have a chance to talk to her, so I have no picture of the first sight, but the photo seems to do.


Now, the photograph seems to be so much more.  It is analogous to our relationship.  The tear and the water damage have turned a good portrait into something so much more.  The photograph now bears character and story that the original image had no chance of capturing.  It breathes the experiences of life.  It is a far more beautiful image than the photographer ever knew.


And then, I go back to my work, building little boxes and putting little things inside them.  And, M shows up, a welcome break, and gives me my first lesson in chicken tending.