August 25 - Lo-Fi

It is the day of the festival.  I am up at 6 am.  All year, I have woken up when the light arrived in the valley.  I head over to my Guiding office and brew cowboy coffee and make waffles - I have brought my waffle iron as a luxury for the weekend.  I take a short morning walk and find Mimi Allen laying limp in an upholstered wheelbarrow reciting poetry.  I move her 50 or 60 yards enjoying the poetry and thoroughly strange experience.  I leave her sideways in the road where no one can avoid her.  Lo-Fi is off to a fine start.

My friends from Eugene, C and J, arrive early as I told them to, because they did not have advanced tickets.  I give them a little run-down on how the event works as they find that the planned information is a little too little (which is not necessarily a bad thing). After setting up their camp, they return to become my first guiding clients for the day. 

We head up the creek as I had done yesterday,  and we bust the brush, as I had done yesterday, but instead of a cross slope hike, we turn uphill.  It is a deeply cut deer trail, almost as incised into the hillside as if it had been done with a shovel, that turns us onto ground that I am not familiar with.  We find a nice nurse log that is near 6 feet in diameter at the base.  It is a place for a mossy rest.

 Higher up we hit more dense brush, a bit of a crawl with a bit of swearing on my part, but one complaint on theirs'.  Finally we come out on the diagonal road near the great twin stump.

We take in the squatter's cabin while we are in the area, and then drop down the diagonal road to the river.  I point them upriver toward some art installations and then I head back to my desk to wait for more clients.

I find myself sitting alone at my desk for some time.  People are more leisurely about arriving at Smoke Farm than I am.  My specimen wall has few visitors, so far.  I would like to see the other art, but I feel that I have to be here for anyone that wants to go into the forest.  Very very few people that come to Smoke Farm for any reason ever go off the beaten track, and I am aware that I am a rare opportunity to see something that almost no one else will see.

Notes from Smoke Farm - 68 specimens and 4 photographs

Eventually, visitors begin to find the wall.  They spend time with it and it works.  My artful insecurities disappear.  I wait for clients.

I have also been incorporated into Tess Hull's Questing box project.  She has seven chapters of a story hidden in boxes that people must find.  Each box tells you how to find the next.  Chapter three sits on one of my specimen boxes.  It tells you to find me in and that I will take you to chapter four in exchange for a story about being lost.  I have hidden the box up the creek on the prettiest of nurse stumps, but no one will ever find it without me.

It isn't until about 5 in the afternoon that someone comes to me to find the box.  I take M on the walk.  He is having a great time.   It is a good two hours after sunset when the next person finds me. They worry that it is too late to bother me, but it is not.  I ask and they both have flashlights, so I we head out into the forest and up the creek in the dark.  I stop in the creek bed and make them tell me their "lost" story.  Then I point to the box.  Like M, they are having a great time.  This is Lo-Fi...you have to take part, you have to play one of the games to really appreciate the festival.

August 24

It is the main artist set-up day for the weekend's Lo-Fi Arts Festival.  A few dozen artists will be here installing artwork and installations throughout the 300+ acres of Smoke Farm.  I have just a few minor things to do having installed my work earlier in the week.  I walk out to the Grave of Vitus Bering and build a bench of split cedar fence posts that I have found lying in the forest.  I set up my desk for my Guide Service to Wilder Smoke Farm.  Then I have little to do.  I can't deny that seeing all the people here is a bit uncomfortable for me.  Watching them, I know that they have a different relationship to this land than I do.  It's not that one is better than the other, it is just different.

So, I have time to do something I have not done in too long.  I have time to explore the forest one more time.  This is what my Smoke Farm year has been.  Wandering with purpose.  Thinking about what I have found.  I pack my gear and head up the creek.  When I turn more north I plow through the densest of brush for 50 yards.  I have forgotten how tough this spot is and wonder about my plans to guide people through here.  But, the forest opens up soon enough.  I find the big logging pulley and soon enough I find the broken bottle that lies under a fern.  I've been here before and it amuses me that I can re-find such insignificant objects in the darkness of a rugged cedar forest.  I hit the diagonal road not too far uphill from the squatter's cabin, which I continue on to.  There is always a distant creative feel to the cabin and whether that feeling comes out of me, or goes into me from the site, it makes no difference.  It is just so.

Tomorrow, I might lead someone here.  They will earn the visit.  They will remember the better parts of the work.

Fortnight Camp

It is day 3 of the Smoke Farm Fortnight Camp.  This year, fifteen or sixteen high school students are building a fire watchtower in one end of the first meadow under the tutelage of a small army of adult builders and counselors. It is an impressive group of kids, and an impressive group of adults.  I think back to my summer camp experiences and while I wouldn't want to change much, to be involved building a complex structure like the tower would have been something big, for sure.  One thing is for sure, these campers eat better than we ever did.  The kitchen crew consistently makes food that one would be happy to find in a restaurant.

 

 

 

A lunch time walk up the creek to the tall ones with V and A

Today, with the project well in progress, we break into teams to work on different parts of the structure.  I work in G's team, which is laying out and preparing the upper deck so that it can be carried out to the site and assembled tomorrow.  Everything has to be demonstrated to the campers, but it takes more understanding than patience.  The automatic of the experienced tradesman is not automatic - I guess it never was.  It goes to holding a tape measure properly and keeping the carpenter square "square" and making pencil marks that everyone else will clearly understand.  But with each task, everyone comes along - they're less intimidated by the circular saw and when we double check the measurements, they're more accurate.  I find it particularly interesting to watch them learn things that I learned so long ago that I've forgotten how I learned them.

After lunch, I take two of the campers and A (who I'd hiked with up here during the winter) on a short hike.  We don't get nearly as far as I thought we would (because walking through dense brush without futzing is also a learned skill) but we do get up to a beautiful spot on the creek where two very tall cedar stumps overlook us.  Good enough.

Thimbleberry walking

We arrive on a fine summer day, one where morning clouds were burning off and a nice breeze kept the air moving as the temperature climbed to meet the arriving sun.  My hiking partner for the day was my mother-in-law, S.  She is always interested in what I am doing and wanted to see this place where I have been spending so much time.  When we arrive there are many volunteers cleaning up after yesterday's Burning Beast BBQ festival.  It is a major fund raiser for Smoke Farm, a barbeque cook-off with 15 different types of meet for the guests to sample.  The tickets for the event sell out very very quickly every year.

We walk up river on the rough grassy road that passes through the new cottonwood forest.  The new deck on the double log bridge makes the route passable for S and we spot tiny salmon swimming in the creek below.  We stop at the Grave of Vitus Bering, which also gives S a good feel for a cedar forest.  I talk about nurse stumps.  I point out all of the different plants growing from the tops - that cedar tree, that evergreen huckleberry, those ferns.  Then we continue upriver.

There are more thimbleberries than on my last visit and they are right at their peak of flavor.  S eats as many as I can pick and they are her first thimbleberries.  It is a good place to have your first thimbleberry and I tell her where I ate my first one - on a mountain road in the Bugaboos of Canada.  I imagine that a lot of people can remember where they had their first thimbleberry. 

Berries, Frogs and a Hint of Rain

I move one of my projects out of the way of this weekends festival.  I figured it to be a 4 hour job, but it goes in one and a half.

I have been building, making or moving for what seems like a solid month and today I feel most like doing nothing.   I sit under the tin roof of the shop building until the lightest of rain showers begins to tap away.  The thought of rain raises my interest in taking a hike.  Everyone has a different idea or a different identity for what Smoke Farm is - rain is one of the strongest of markers in how I identify it.  For myself, Smoke Farm rises to its full potential when it rains.

I head up river stopping at the bridge over the creek to make sure that it is as fine a place to sit as I keep telling people.  It is.  My ears catch a purring in the tall grass behind me.  I freeze and wait.  A few moments pass and a large dragonfly rises up and heads off down river.

I walk up the river road picking thimbleberries as I find them.  The wet spring has made them unusually juicy this year.  I think that they are best eaten by using the tongue to smash them against the roof of the mouth.  This way none of the raspberry sherbert flavor is wasted, it all ends up on the taste buds.  It is a delightful burst of one of the best tasting berries ever.

There are two frogs and a dozen tadpoles in the longest of the road puddles - it is 50 yards long and thus, perfectly good frog habitat.

I see many fresh deer tracks and a few raccoon tracks as I walk the road.  But, when I get to the upper beach, I find an unexpected track, one that takes a few seconds to recognize because it is unexpected.  In the silt, up under the first edge of brush where the river lets the well rooted plants stay, is the track of a small child.  I find myself thinking that it is a very fine spot to bring a small child.

bird sign

Decking the other bridge

It was just a work day today at the farm.  O, A and M came up.  O is one of the kids from M's microcamps, which unfortunately got canceled this summer due to a shortage of available volunteers.  Since O likes to build things, and I have plenty of ideas for building things, and little time to get it all done...it's perfect.

We all take a walk out to my installation to start with.  To get there, we cross the log bridge that me and my friend A put a deck on.  All winter long I had to inch across the deck with my camera and field pack, the logs slippery with frost, or if it was warmer, just wet and slick.  The bridges have been a way to cross the creek.  They've been an obstacle themselves - only preferable to a waist deep ford in cold water.  When we finished that first deck, me and A marveled at how the bridge had now become a place to stand or sit and just enjoy the clear open view of the creek.  We got a lot of positive comments from people about the improvement.  We've noticed that snakes like to sun themselves on the new deck.

photo - May Ackerman

We return to the shop and set up a production line.  I brought a good amount of wood from home that I had saved for building doors and windows but don't need anymore.  O runs the chop saw while me and A feed and stack the decking.  We are going with a half-chevron design and we joke about people getting dizzy and falling off of the bridge.  With everything pre-cut, we head out and begin nailing the deck.  It is almost 80 degrees today and we complain about the heat never forgetting that everyone else in the country is dealing with triple digits.  But, with us not used to the heat it does sap our energy.

photo - May Ackerman

I tell O that he will be a popular guy when people find the new bridge deck.  It was a good day to sit on a bridge.

Child's play

My hiking partner for this day at the farm is B.  She is 5 years-old.  I hitched a ride with B and her mom who is busy collecting cobblestones from the river for an art project. 

B and I head up river picking the occasional ripe salmon berry or thimble berry as we go.  The thimble berries have just started to turn and I suppose that in a week one might just spend an hour picking and eating one berry at a time.  No one collects thimble berries because they are too soft and won't survive the carry back to the house.  But the tart raspberry sherbert flavor makes them worth eating when one finds them.  Only the high mountain huckleberry is better in my mind.

We stop at one of the usual spots to check for animal tracks.  But, it appears that yesterday's rain has washed all away.  So, the two of us continue up to the slough, which is running just a bit deeper than the ankles.  B splashes and walks in the water until she finds a spot to stand in that is deeper than her boots.  She doesn't complain.

Mother and Daughter #35

I don't have kids of my own and I watch how B sees the forest.  When I take adults out, they often fail to see the individual tree instead grasping the forest as a vision - which is why they often don't know where they are when we wander off trail.  I don't know if B sees the forest, but she sees the details.  A red berry steers her off route, a splash of a creek turns her left, a long muddy puddle slows her to a crawl as she inches through until she slips and falls, refilling the boots.  She doesn't complain.  Her idea of where she is does not go too much farther than her fingertips - There's so much to see and so much to do right there.