Category Archives: Natural World

The Whole Picture

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A few weeks ago, this scene caught my eye as I drove along Upper Klamath Lake. The mountain’s reflection and the line of trees in the evening light conveyed a Zen-like simplicity that made me want to pull over and rummage for my camera. I thought I might stop by the side of the road, snap the shutter, and drive on but that’s not how it happened. It got complicated.

When I noticed the picture, I couldn’t find a place to pull over, so I turned onto the first road heading toward the lake. I rattled across a set of railroad tracks, descended a short hill, passed through a scattering of old houses and bounced down a rutted track to a chain-link fence that corralled towering stacks of 55-gallon drums. On foot, I found a trail that led to the shoreline. I could see my picture, but an industrial-looking metal dock jutted into the foreground. Slogging back to the car, I noticed I could see the image through the chain-link fence, so I cradled my lens in the diamond-shaped opening and made another exposure past the scattered debris.

When I got home, I loaded the images into the computer and started cropping out clutter, trying to recreate the dreamy atmosphere I remembered. I eliminated the human-made foreground until what remained came close to my original idea — but I had a nagging feeling there was more.

Eventually it dawned on me how the creative process often exposes us to the messy context of natural beauty. If there had been a place to pull over along the highway, I would have made the pristine picture that I first saw and continued driving. Instead, I was forced off the high road into the heavily altered environment of the Klamath Basin. As I bumbled my way around houses, muddy ditches, gates, fences, trucks, docks, and fuel tanks, I bemoaned the hodgepodge of my species. But working on the photographs from that outing, I began to appreciate the interaction of the human and natural scene. If I could be less obsessed with capturing my vision of an untarnished natural world, I’d be more willing to take in the whole picture. After all, humans have lived and worked along the shores of Upper Klamath Lake for thousands of years. Why pretend otherwise?

So I ended up with two very different photographic versions of my experience. The first is of Upper Klamath Lake — beyond time. The second is a snapshot from our time, framed by feral junk and the rumble of a passing freight.

Ski Mail

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What we communicate in seconds on our smartphones used to take days. For instance, skiing heavy packs of mail over Western mountain ranges in the dead of winter could take the better part of a week. The most famous mail carrier of the pioneer era was Snowshoe Thompson. Starting in 1855, he skied the mail ninety miles over the Sierra Nevada from Placerville to Carson Valley. The route took three days there and two days back. Snowshoe did this twice a month for twenty years with a hundred pound pack! Of course, he was originally from Norway. Unlike mere mortals, Norwegians are born to do stuff like that.

But Snowshoe was not the only one. In 1880, there were fifty skiing mail carriers in the state of Colorado alone. With mining camps scattered across the tops of the Rockies, these guys regularly braved blizzards, snow blindness, and avalanches to get the mail through.

The most famous skiing mail carrier of the Cascade Range was John Craig. Sadly, he’s remembered less for the amazing feats he did accomplish, than for the one he didn’t. In December of 1877, Craig set off to ski the Christmas mail from McKenzie Bridge to Camp Polk (near present day Sisters) over McKenzie Pass. He never made it. In the spring, his frozen body was found in the cabin he had built near the halfway point. Apparently, Craig reached the cabin as planned and built a fire, but due to illness or misfortune, couldn’t keep it going. He crawled into the warm ashes, drew a quilt over himself and died.

Craig’s tragic end inspired an annual ski event that has persisted, off and on, for eight decades. The John Craig Memorial Ski began in 1934 over the same route pioneered by Craig. Since the historic McKenzie Pass road is closed to vehicles in the winter and left unplowed, it’s possible for cross-country skiers to imagine what Craig experienced. In fact, in some years, the memorial has even included a nineteen mile race during which the racers carried bags of mail.

Fortunately for me, this year’s memorial ski was less ambitious. Participants skied a thirteen mile tour to the pass and back from the east gate. Still, the almost two thousand foot climb to the summit was tough. I wasn’t carrying a heavy pack of mail, but I did have one letter from a friend I’d received the day before. It seemed fitting to carry a letter in my pack. It served as a reminder that staying in touch as easily as we do in the digital age is something I shouldn’t take for granted.

 

Horticultural Espionage

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I was once a spy. I guess that’s what you’d call it. I agreed to smuggle seeds. This wasn’t contraband. These seeds weren’t illegal. It was more like a hostage situation. These seeds needed liberating, and I was just the person to do it.

My mission? Obtain a dozen chestnuts from two venerable trees growing along an obscure back road in California’s Mother Lode. I was to locate the sixty-foot-tall trees and keep watch on the ripening nuts so I’d be there when they plummeted to the ground.

Why? Back then, a large commercial nursery claimed to be the exclusive source for ‘Colossal’ chestnut trees and charged exorbitant prices for their nursery stock. A handful of scrappy organic farmers decided to bring ‘Colossal’ back to the people. It’s what Felix would have wanted.

Pioneer horticulturalist Felix Gillett birthed the ‘Colossal’ chestnut in his Barren Hill Nursery in Nevada City, California. A French immigrant, Felix began importing plants from Europe around 1870. He undertook an ambitious breeding program in which he crossed the best of European and Asian varieties with native North American stock. The results rocked the early California agrarian world. He’s been called the father of most of the perennial crop agriculture in the western United States. But unlike his contemporary, Luther Burbank, Felix Gillett’s contributions were largely forgotten. Which is ironic considering that hundreds, if not thousands, of his trees continue to produce fruit in backyards and backwoods to this day.

Just ask organic farming guru “Amigo Bob” Cantisano who, for the past forty years, has searched old homesteads and mining settlements for hardy survivors of the plants Gillet offered. Amigo Bob found so many of these heirlooms that he created the Felix Gillet Institute to document, propagate, and sell again Barren Hill Nursery’s hardy stock. (I suspect Amigo Bob is channeling Filex Gillet.)

The parent trees I gathered chestnuts from thirty years ago are still alive and healthy. They still drop seeds so hefty that a tree squirrel would be advised to wear a helmet during harvest season. I didn’t think my efforts to get those chestnuts into the hands of budding agricultural preservationists was any great feat, but recently I noticed ‘Colossal’ seedlings available from at least a dozen nurseries in a wide range of prices, coast to coast. What do you know? Our grassroots horticultural community is keeping Felix’s vision alive — and I was a small part of it.

Mission accomplished.

Wassailing the Orchard

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There must be thousands of ways and reasons to light up the long dark nights of winter. In the western islands of Europe, where most of my ancestors hail from, they lit bonfires in the orchards and wassailed the trees. Wassail comes from the Old English meaning “to be hale” or “be whole”. The islanders toasted the health of the trees and asked for an abundance of next year’s crop.

Unfortunately, my ancestors didn’t do a good job of keeping this tradition alive when they came to America several centuries ago. But why should that stop us? Wassailing is too much fun to lose in the dim recesses of our ancestral past. How does one go about reviving a vague agricultural tradition? Well, there’s quite a discussion about wassailing on the web. We are not alone! It’s ironic and encouraging how well modern technology works to preserve archaic practices.

So, we cobbled together a wassailing ceremony to bless our little orchard of apples and apricots here in the high desert. We lit a fire, ate popcorn, drank hot spiced cider and shared it with the tree roots. Each person thought of a blessing or a wish as they visited each tree and tied a piece of yarn to a branch. We sang wassailing songs, and made noise to drive away any bad spirits. Finally, our youngest family member climbed the strongest tree and left a piece of toast dipped in cider high up in the crown. Afterwards, we huddled around the fire as the cold night settled around us. No one wanted to go inside. We couldn’t stop watching the sparks drifting up toward the crisp stars.

Next morning, I crossed the frosty grass to admire the trees festooned with scraps of yarn — the cheery affirmation of our relationship. We take care of the trees, they take care of us. I thought about how every bright strand secured a wish. The orchard will glow with our benedictions until spring birds take the faded yarn to build their nests.

 

The Archive of Voices

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A mature forest absorbs sound. The bark, the leaves, the duff, the moss, the needles … don’t bounce sound waves along — they consume them. The hush of a dense forest can be thick with centuries of voices left by passersby. Walking along a trail near Santiam Pass, you might not hear those ancient voices but you can sense they’re there; the laughter of native children, the singing of shepherds, the newsy gossip of women picking huckleberries …

Whoa. Hold up there. It wasn’t all that warm and fuzzy.

For all their deep green beauty, I sensed a minor chord in these woods cloaking the Cascade crest. This section of old Indian trail made me uneasy. At first, I chocked it up to my “pronghorn” personality — I like wide open spaces. But maybe I was sensing some dark aspect of the human history of this route?

When I got home, I researched the Indian trails in this part of Oregon. No surprise that these paths were used for commerce. Everyone wanted to trade for something they didn’t have. During the 1800s, the Pacific Northwest offered everything from salmon to buffalo hides, obsidian to trade beads, horses to slaves.

Wait. Slaves?

Yes. As it turns out, the native people of this region practiced slavery among themselves long before Lewis and Clark showed up. The Corp of Discovery passed through the “greatest emporium of the Columbia” between Celilo Falls and The Dalles where slaves were a high ticket item. Other slave trading centers existed at Willamette Falls and the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers.

The trail I followed near Santiam Pass fed into a network of tracks the Klamath people used to bring slaves to the Willamette or lower Columbia markets from the south. Once the Klamath people acquired horses, they were a holy terror when it came to raiding Northern California’s Pit River and Shasta area tribes and carrying off their women and children.

Since slaves often try to escape if they think they can make it back home, the Klamath marketed their excess captives as far away as possible. Who knows where you’d end up if you were “sold down river” on the Columbia? Back then, you might as well have been shipped off to another continent. How many people trod north with little hope of returning?

Next time I walk that trail high in the Cascade range, I’ll understand better where the melancholy notes come from, now that I’ve roamed deeper into the archive of voices.

Tumbleweeds in Bloom

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Tumbleweeds and I don’t get along. It all started when my daughter got bucked off her first bike and landed hands first in a pile of dried tumbleweeds. I lifted her from the prickly thicket and pulled dozens of tiny thorns out of her palms and fingers. Even after we got all the prickers out, their sting lingered. It was a long, tearful ride home. Since then, it’s been war between the species.

Later we moved to a place where tumbleweeds are the dominant plants. They form six-foot-high windrows against backyard fences. They lodge under cars in dense, impenetrable mats. They spread summer wildfires across miles of rangeland. I spent hours uprooting them; extricating them from flowerbeds; smashing their remains into trash cans; yanking them out of bushes at the end of a pitchfork … all the while, hating them with an irrational passion.

But last week I saw a side of these noxious weeds I’d missed. Walking along the edge of a parking lot in Central Oregon, I noticed a scattering of tumbleweeds glowing magenta in the filtered sunlight. I knelt to investigate. Their tangled purple stems sported tiny papery flowers in screaming shades of crimson and pink — each blossom no bigger than a lentil. This fragile beauty nestled in a den of nasty spikes, protected from adversaries like me. Because tumbleweeds are wind pollinated, they don’t need to create an inviting environment for pollinators. In fact, they seem to go out of their way to create uninviting environments for everything, including each other.

Which is why the brilliant jewel-toned flowers were all the more amazing. Why splurge on the frivolous party colors? I don’t know the botanical answer, but for me those blossoms are the counterpoint to the tumbleweed’s spikes — the yin and yang, chasing each other endlessly across the West’s wide open spaces.