Endings and All

The Cottonwoods are floating again.  Floating, fragrant fluffs of feather-light fancy, dancing in and out of my path.  There will be days when I don't see any little puff-covered seeds hovering, swaying, and slowly swooping back out into the open.  Then I will be walking on a trail, deep in a wood, on my way to the lake nearby - hoping for a Green Heron - and I will walk around a corner and gasp into a snowstorm frozen in time.  Well, almost frozen.  Falling ever so slowly and diagonally on the barest breath of air is a sea of cotton.  The scene is too picturesque, too golden in the afternoon light.  Too still to step, too quiet to breathe. 

It has been quiet around here these past few weeks.  Graduation happened.  The school year is over and my new friends and family have left.  Most of them.  Not all. 

So where to begin?  It has been months.  It has been eons, actually.  Epochs have risen to thunderous heights and fallen beneath the ocean floor in the time since last I blogged.  That's a grandiose and self-important enough statement for me.  Universes have continued to rotate solely around my inflated sense of importance in the time since last I blogged!  Yes, well.

So.  Where to begin?

I am tempted to list the schedule of classes at Alderleaf in prose form and call it done.  We did a lot this winter, this spring. 

It turns out I am a basket maker.  Really.  I love it, and have made seven different baskets of various styles, sizes, and materials.

I have returned to the world of artistic realism, drawing plants, animals, and skulls for our respective journal assignments.  I am more surprised and pleased that I am actually good at this than I have been about many things in my life.  I stopped trying to draw anything from life (or even outside of the second dimension) in middle school.  It has been an educational journey back into the Realm of the Real.  Did you know, for instance:

It is very hard to draw things realistically.

Pencil smudges.  Especially by accident.

It is infinitely easier to imitate someone else's drawing than draw the object itself.  I'm drawing the objects now and actually learning something.

There is a lot of erasing.

Lynx rufus, bobcat

I went outside a lot.  When I talk to my parents on the phone I don't know how to pare this down to a meaningful statement, but it is perhaps the most meaningful thing to do here.  Go outside.  Do whatever it is you do.  Just keep your eyes open, your ears perked, your nose tilted to the breeze.  Touch things.  Taste them.  It'll happen.  The last time I went out I pulled two dead kingfisher babies from a burrow while listening to the surviving sibling calling, calling, calling from within the river bank nest.  

Megaceryle alcyon, Belted Kingfisher, juvenile, never flew.

An hour later I had crawled under and bushwhacked through too much blackberry thorns along a fresh beaver trail.  It led me straight to their bank-side den along a still inlet of the river, where I watched the three swim, nuzzle, and feed for another hour.  The large male slapped his tail on the water in warning as I approached through the brush, but once waterside I remained crouched, partially concealed behind grass.  The female pulled a long stalk of Japanese Knotweed up onto the bank and set to clipping the leaves off and eating them.  Periodically the large male would glide over and steal a leaf of his own.  He was met with a cross between a snarl, a hiss, a groan, and a glare from the female.  This didn't seem to stop the male from enjoying his snack as he floated away, holding the leaf between his hand-feet as he nibbled.  

On the walk along the river between these two spots I was beset with flycatchers, swallows of various kinds, cedar waxwings, and goldfinches.  The swallows would dive and glide past me, sometimes even circling me slowly at a distance of only a few feet.  Walking through a trail well overgrown with five to seven foot grass does certain things, you see.  Like stirring up flying insects.  (Birds really like to eat flying insects.)  The result was me standing still, watching the gentle arcs of expert aeronaughts at work, resplendant in irridecent blue/green/purple, glowing browns, and canary yellows.  Sometimes I would simply turn in a circle, keeping the swallow in sight as it made three or four circuits around me, seven feet away.  My mouth would generally hang in disbelief as this happened. 

So when I talk to my parents and my Mom says, "So what else?"  I say, "Well, I've been going outside a lot.  So...I could tell a lot of stories..."  And they'd mostly sound something like that last day at the park by the river.  Some would sound like a boring, wet day, sitting, not seeing a damn thing.  That happens, too.  But more often than not, an animal comes by wherever you are if you simply sit there long enough.  Walk with a quiet step and light presence.  Or stir up the bugs.  That works, too. 

Steve asks important questions.  He generally doesn't waste breath on small talk.  He takes his time and wants to talk about the good stuff.  So, he asks one evening, taking a pause from making his dinner (which he will almost surely eat standing at the same counter as he is making it), "What are the things...that make you happy?  I don't mean that you like or you think are good or make you feel accomplished.  I mean happy.  Genuinely happy."  We housemates dickered around for a minute about the difference between happiness and accomplishment, the fine line between success and satisfaction, the delicate distinction between pleasure and philanthropy.  Philosophers may take years, but we handled it in mere moments.  And it is a hard question to answer, I think.  I enjoy many things, but I am a very cool, detached person in many ways. 

The consensus of happiness-bringers rested heavily on a few things(there were others, but these were repeated by multiple people in different ways): 

Playing music with others when it is working and there is a sharing and growing

Other people and good relationships (there are a billion variants of the hows and whys)

and the doozie that had us all going:

Direct observation of any animal, be it bird, mammal, reptile, bird, or insect.  The more wild the animal, the more the happy.  The closer the animal, and the happiness grows in orders of magnitude. 

We concluded that not only was this the most sure-fire way to get surprised into happiness, but it had some of the best long-term return on the emotional/endorphin feedback loop.  After watching a deer for a half hour at a distance of twenty yards, one could fully expect a night and a day of flying high, hoping to encounter others to share the story with time and time again.

Case #4536, or What I Did The Other Day:

Yesterday I went on a walk around the Alderleaf trail loop.  I do this a lot, you can imagine, so I don't expect to see something new and exciting every time.  It could be a boring walk, for all I know.  On the very end of it, I noticed a bird spook from the Salmonberry at the edge of the field by the classroom.  It flew up to an Alder tree and alarmed once at me, looking like a pretty cross between an Oriole and a Towhee.  Black head, orange chest, black wings with white spots.  A songbird.  This was a bird I had seen before, generally in the same spot.  It was even remarked at by other students during walks back from the woods, as it would sit prominently at the edge of the field.  This time, I noticed another bird up a few branches.  It had the same beak, short and quickly thickening towards the head, and muted coloration, drab and tawny.  I realized they were a mated pair, standing offended at my passage.  

My passage was too close to wherever the male had just flew from.  The Salmonberries were right by the path.  I looked carefully and continued down the trail for ten feet or so, just around a slight bend and more foliage.  I waited ten seconds, then came right back, making straight for the spot I thought the colorful male would go back to.  And I saw its head, hiding in the Salmonberry, sitting in an ovular mass of sticks.  The male was sitting on the nest.  As I came closer, he watched me carefully, hoping that I wasn't doing what I definitely was: coming to look at whatever he was doing.  When I was merely four feet away he exploded up and out again, trying to draw my attention away with him.  I was too curious to know if there were eggs or chicks in the nest, though.  I listened and didn't hear the calls of young, so I reached in and picked up one of four very warm, blue and green speckled eggs.  They were as big as my last thumb segment.  (By the way, it is a myth that touching an active bird nest, egg, or live young will lead to parental abandonment.  They will care for that young come hell or high water.)  Feeling the warmth radiating off of the egg, I realized how dangerous it could be for the parents to be off the nest for any significant amount of time.  I begged off and verbally apologized to the birds, thanking them for their lessons. 

The point of this little encounter, which happened when I was hardly expecting it, is what happened next:  I went straight to the classroom and looked up the bird.  I didn't know what it was.  I thought it was similar to a Towhee but not quite right in a few crucial ways.  I found a couple similar looking specimens in a couple guides, but it rang true when I spotted the Black-Headed Grosbeak.  Textbook male sitting on the nest, with a classic female watching nervously from the tree.  The next half hour consisted of my looking up the Grosbeak in every guide and handbook we had to learn its habits and characteristics.  And now I know a little bit more about the real, live world that is sitting right outside the window that you can probably see from the screen you're reading.  In those moments of seeing another animal, of watching its behavior and the weaving of its life, there is an inspiration born to know the why, to know the how, the when, the where.  This drive to research, to understand is not one of guilt out of ignorance, but the high of discovery, the happiness in finding a deeper connection with the Real.  With the World. 

So I went outside a lot.  Want to hear about it?  I won't know where to start, but I'll be happy to try. 

The year went on with different classes every week.  Sometimes it was Permaculture with Jenny Pell, who is in charge of the Permaculture Food Forest being created in Seattle.  This project has been getting nationwide attention due to its scale and the fact that it is a public project.  That means that the homeless will get to eat the food, too.  It's causing a bit of a hullabaloo, though Jenny is tickled about it all. 

Sometimes class was Bird Language with David Attenborough videos and an hour-long group sit on the property.  We would reconvene and document by the ten minute intervals, often punctuated by planes passing and the train in the distance, who we heard and what they were doing and why we heard what we did.  With groups spread all over the property, we could sometimes connect events over a great distance, which was good.  We would also get to hear the incredible stories of birds landing a foot away from heads, of mice running by, or of plant-based epiphanies.  This was great.

Sometimes it was fire-making.  Frog showed us a great, efficient way to make a one-match fire that could withstand the elements.  It could withstand five gallons of water being dumped on it.  Yep.  Five gallons of water were dumped on his unlit pile of wood.  He put in his one match and walked away.  It lit, it blazed, and it stayed.  We got warm. 

Sometimes we went on ridiculous trips.  Ridiculously good.  The trips alone make Alderleaf a serious contender for the best way to spend a year.  I know I never got around to writing about the Winter Trip.  We built snow shelters and slept in them, snug, warm, and surrounded by the deadening silence of thick snow.  Except for the snores.  We climbed a mountain.  We made a fire in less than five minutes at the top of that mountain.  We looked at bear scratches on Ponderosa Pine.  We harvested cambium and ate it.  We sat in a circle and shared deeply of the things that most people never speak about with others without years of history to insulate them from the fear of naked emotion and the perils of reciprocation. Also, the wind carried away some tents that we used for the first night.  It was particularly stunning and beautiful to make a flying leap for my tent only to watch it arc out and over the field some hundred feet below.  It spun, lazily, like a bored dreidel getting ready to fall over, and spun out of sight.  Remarkably I found it down the hill after a search.  Then I rushed to get it before it blew away again.  I say rushed, but I really mean I crushed a trail through four plus feet of virgin snow while watching my tent rock back and forth seventy feet away, flirting with the idea of flying off again.  I would like to say that I was quick.  I would like to say that I did not have to stop and rest for a moment, eyeing my tent with silent pleas to just sit still for a few more moments.  I would like to say that it was easy.  I cannot say these things.  I can say this, though.  My tent was gracious enough to wait for me, and I was a good piece luckier than Kelly, whose tent blew away with her car keys in it.  The tent was recovered.  The car keys were no longer inside.

We went on a trip to the East Side, which is the East side of the Cascade mountain range.  This is a high altitude sagebrush desert that is intoxicating in its beauty.  It is the land of stunted trees, mountain goats, lizards, rubber boa constrictors, kangaroo rats, and so many hawks.  We spent most of this trip tracking, both animals and each other.  The scouting games were really fun.  They always are.  Hide and seek for adults with more expensive clothing.

Survival Trip was the last real week of the program.  It was what we'd been building up to all year with our skills of edible wild foods and medicines, primitive shelter-building, primitive fire-making, ethnobotany plant utility, animal tracking, and naturalist knowledge.  We were not allowed to have knives.  We were allowed the clothes on our backs, so most people layered well for the cold nights.  As we were much of the year, we were blessed with an inexplicable amount of sun during survival week.  We had no right to expect that.  It would have been a very different experience.  As it was, within four hours we had fire, we had water purifying, we had food waiting, and our shelters were nearing completion.  We nailed it.  Granted, we used shoe string on the bow drill and boiled water in a few cans we found.  We would have had a natural cordage drill after a couple hours, and a burn bowl a few hours after that.  We made the decision to use what we found to get ourselves set up first.  My next trip, I'll be a purist.  I was thinking about group dynamics, needs, and morale that first day.  We needed a fire, and we needed water.  As fast as we could. 

The week was an exercise in self-control.  Prime amongst these was telling myself the truth.  No, I would have to tell myself, this body is not tired.  There's no need to trudge through the woods, acting the part of a zombie because that is what your brain thinks should be happening.  These legs can be lifted just fine.  No, I would have to tell myself, this body is not hungry.  Take it to drink some more water.  The truth was, I wasn't really hungry.  I'd eaten plenty of knotweed, snake, nettle, oyster mushrooms, and hemlock tips.  Yes, the diet was monotonous.  No, it was not as satisfying to many, but it was more than adequate.  Water was always boiling, safe and ready for drinking.  Or if you were at the other end of our camp area, strung through the woods for a few hundred yards, there was always the sand-filtered well we dug in the dry stream bed.  This was the good stuff, cool and clean.  The significant danger with surface water is Giardia, a gut-destroying pathogen found wherever rodents and mustelids find water.  Drinking surface water can earn you weeks of diarrhea and years of complications.  It's not worth it for a sip from a stream.  The dry stream bed, however, provided an incredibly efficient sand filter, which is what we would have built ourselves if needed.  We dug a couple feet down to the ground water and let it slowly filter in.  We sucked the lifewater out through knotweed straws with bandanas on the end to keep from swallowing the sand.  No one got Giardia. 

So things were fine, really.  Our basic needs were more than met.  Our shelter was actually pretty nice.  Like everyone who makes their first few primitive shelters, we could have made them better, warmer, with more insulation.  Most of the class made single shelters or smaller ones for a few people to share.  My group banded much larger, even gathering a few extra souls as the week went on and individual efforts were not as warm or fun as they'd thought.  We slept twelve split between two lean-tos at 90 degree angles to each other, connected at the angle.  The firewood storage was in between them at the corner and in the middle was our fire pit, a trough with a reflecting backdrop of stones and scrap salvage metal.  During my shifts as fire tender I sat back to the firewood, creating an even spread of fire along the three foot trough, warming as many angles of our tired bodies as possible.  It could get cold too far away from the fire or from another person.  I was lucky to sleep next to either Shaun or Haley, both of which were happy to spoon, trading roles of big spoon and little spoon.  I stayed on the end, farthest from the fire, but with a little extra room at the end of the shelter where I could put my contacts and glasses.  I was very conscious of the precariousness of my sight unaided on this trip, so I always saw to the health of my eyes and the safety of my correction tech.  The weeks leading up to Survival Week, my battle with Grouse Eye had me very alert to the precarious preciousness of sight.  (Grouse Eye is pink eye caused by handling Grouse poop.  Impress your friends and neighbors with the Tracker Vernacular!)  Sleeping on the end was the coldest spot, but I felt the most prepared with layers of wool clothing.  I was never kept awake for more than a few minutes from the cold at night.  Cuddling does wonders.

So with our deluxe moss motel, our cool well, constant soup available if we wished, we encountered the hurdle of the well-prepared survivalist:  nothing to do.  Nothing that had to be done, that is.  Firewood always needed gathering (until we had too much), food could always be gathered (until we were full and sick of knotweed, nettle, mushrooms, and hemlock tips), and water could always be gathered and boiled (but who wanted to now that we had the well?).  So we made excursions.  We found an abandoned squatter camp a half mile away and spent the better part of the day bushwhacking the way there, fishing for minnows, looking for snakes, and coming back. 

Leah found a Pacific Wren's nest.  There were two baby birds inside, mostly featherless and generally wretched to look at.  We dropped them in boiling water, then ate them.  They shake and scream silently when they are dropped in the water.  It is rather horrible to watch, but it is quick enough.  I ate snail, snake, baby bird, worm, ant, and minnow.  It was more kinds of meat than I've eaten in the last five years.  It was all delicious. 

We made a fish trap one day and spent that night using liberated hobo candles to lure fish into it so that we could spear them.  It didn't work, but it was a good way to spend an evening. 

We made rounds of the rocky shore, looking for useful items or snakes to eat.  It was rarely successful, but it was a beautiful, sunny day for walking by the river.  All week long.

We would walk back and forth between the deeper forest and our camps, gathering moss daily to further insulate our sleeping area, to add new loft and put ourselves farther from the heat-sucking ground.  We saw evidence of deer in these trips, but never the animals.  They were not used to human presence, likely, and stayed far enough away.  It was a difficult forest to move through silently, though my favorite morning was spent doing just that, taking a few hours to move into the heart of the older growth.  I was looking for deer trails to deer beds, with the far-off possibility of using a spear there.  It was a great excuse to cover myself in moss and move slowly, taking breaks to become part of the environment, exploring the land in detail and as a part of it, not a busy-bodied thing buzzing through too filled with thoughts to hear a breeze.  It is that silence of the land and the close comfort of my friends that I will take from Survival Week. 

I shouldn't sugar coat the experience.  Some people got sick.  The oyster mushrooms were pretty old and hard and I wouldn't have eaten them, personally, but they were put in the survival stew that we brewed in our long log burn bowl with hot rocks.  They gave the broth a great taste, and became much less rubbery after cooking.  After the first night of this, three people had some kind of stomach ache for the rest of the week.  It turned out they had little experience with mushrooms, much less wild ones, never mind old, hard wild ones reconstituted in survival stew filled with wild greens.  Constitution is everything. 

Another student threw up.  Twice.  This was the most serious situation, as it was a potential for evac.  I was one of the emergency contact students, trusted with radio and first aid kit, as well as the mind and body to deal with a group crisis.  Mark, the other such trustee, and I talked for a while with the student, then decided with him to wait it out and see.  He got better and we all got lucky.  This was the first survival trip for Alderleaf with a group anywhere near as large as ours that there was no evacuation needed.  Normally something goes wrong. 

We talked about food a lot, and planned extensively the meals we would have on Friday and even the weekend.  Anyone could enjoy talking about food, and we did.  A lot.  Some new dishes were invented in our overactive imaginations.  I can't tell you them because they could be the next big thing.  You'll be hearing about them from some gourmet spoon in Seattle. 

The food became one of the more amusing and lasting parts of Survival.  For our celebratory meal, my housemates and I went to the Curry Cabin, a lunch buffet filled with delicious Indian fare.  It was perfect.  I ate one plate. Shaun ate three. I was perfectly satisfied.  Shaun was overly satisfied, as he had somehow avoided ever eating Indian food before.  He loved it.  For dinner, however, we met up with a few others from the class and went to Golden Coral.  This was the opulent American buffet experience.  It is exactly what you think it is.  Everything deep fried is available.  Every desert is there.  It was the What-The-Hell, Why-Not? celebration of food freedom.  

So we load up our plates and sit down to feast.  I put a fried mushroom in my mouth.  And it tastes like nothing.  A garlic biscuit?  Baking Soda.  Nothing tasted like anything, or if it did, it was the less-savory ingredients.  Absent completely from my palate was the taste of sweet and the taste of salt.  Incredulous, I asked others about it.  Roughly thirty percent of us couldn't taste a damn thing.  The others laughed and looked at each other as if we were a little off.  The word psychosomatic was clearly heard as they talked amongst themselves.  It was, however, tragically real.  We had come to the Mecca of American extravagance to find out that our senses were not capable of taking in the excessive absurdity of the chocolate fondu fountain, the temptation of the caramel dispensary, or the delicate donut dessert.  If it was sweet or it was salty, we couldn't taste it.  And that's all there was.  The American Dream made fried.

So the dinner was a texture experiment and a fascinating exploration of our taste buds.  I lined up item after item simply to find out what exactly I could and could not taste and what the texture had to do with it all.  We racked our brains trying to figure out what caused it.  We isolated variables as best we could and were left with nothing but a predilection towards a specific allergy of a specific plant that we ate.  Because we all ate the same things, the cause must have been within us rather than solely with the plant.  After a few days and much searching, an obscure post led to correspondence with a researcher in California who had observed temporary taste-loss from patients using Japanese Knotweed for lymes disease treatment.  We had eaten a lot of knotweed.  Raw and cooked.  It has very juicy flesh in its tube walls (it has tube segments like bamboo), and sometimes those segments contained sitting water, purified and flavored.  I ate a good bit and drank my share.  Luckily, the patients reported the loss of taste for no more than a month.  Within a couple weeks, all of us had regained full taste, though we now have a finer appreciation for taste and texture.

The last night, we stayed at the communal fire late, singing songs and savoring the last moments together.  Survival week was more than a tough experience, it was the last trip of the class and the last significant time we would have together.  It was bitter and it was sweet.  We sang rounds and listened to Irish brogue.  We told stories and grew closer one last time.  Bitter and sweet.

The takeaway for Survival Week for me is pretty simple:

Spend more time on the shelter. 

Know the plants better.

It is easy with simple determination to be comfortable and successful.

I love my friends. 

I have no tidy, clever end for this right now, but I'm sure that I will wax poetical upon waking.  There are still more things to talk about, and to not talk about.  One of them is the very end of school, another is the Track and Sign evaluation, the other is Scout Camp.  I will talk about some, and I can't talk about the other.  You'll see why, I hope.  I will also talk about my plans for the immediate and foreseeable future.  For now, this is hello again, and goodbye again. 

The lesson of survival, I think, is the lesson of life:  you can't do it alone, but you should probably know how.

Happy Gemini, 2012.  Say happy birthday to the Geminis in your life.  They're probably some of the best people you know.  The ones I know sure are.  

The week of snow that precedes the week of snow

It doesn’t snow here.  This is not to say that there are not cold nights and freezing condensation.  That happens.  But it doesn’t snow.  It rains, and it rains a cold 35 degrees to soak right through if you’re not careful.  The condensation hangs in the air for most of the day, possibly being blown free at some point in the afternoon, but often enough the mist sticks around all day.  
     But not all night.  


There is this phenomenon that happens between midnight and two in the morning where the temperatures actually drop below freezing, stranding all that mist and fog and NorthWesty breath.  It falls as it freezes.  It attaches to the first surface that grabs it.  And this is how the ice palace is made.  
     Everything is covered.  Every branch, every blade of grass, every shingle, every needle, every cone, and if you are there for it, every human, too.  The clouds clear, the moon shines down in a glory of white that Glows through millimeters of iced glass wrapped round the entirety of the everything.  Feet crunch on the shimmering ground cover and the still air fails to whisper a chill word.  It is so dry.  It is so still.  It is so sparkly.  
     That’s our ice.  That’s our cold condensation, normally.  It is gone by noon or so the next day with the mild mists settled back in their normal place - everywhere.  This is the norm.  
     Which is why the week before last was such a blast.  

A night without ice, without snow, with a long exposure on the PentaxK2 

There was a warning, come Tuesday or so, from Jake, the skier, the snowboarder, the active active active lover of sport and fun:  “Snow is coming on Sunday!”  Really, Jake?  I don’t think so.  I probably told him something like, “They don’t know what’s going to happen five days from now, Jake.  If anything happens, it’ll probably be a flurry on Friday or a sleet shower next Wednesday.”  I didn’t have much faith in the prediction, though I felt like I was bringing my heel down on a beetle, squishing the primitive, pure joy in the coming of snow.  
     His shell was hardy, however, and every day that week I heard the growing weather report.  “They’re saying it will last a couple days!”…. “They’re saying we could get eight inches!”…. “They’re saying it could last three days and we could get two feet!”  And my ears started prickling.  I began to believe.  It was coming.  
And then it came.
     In the morning there was rain.  Cold rain, but rain.  The house was in its normal state, with morning weekend routines going about their business, carrying the bodies along with them, some thinking, some unthinking.  I looked up from a book and saw the wet sheep in the field.  I wondered if they missed their recently departed ram (he had a run-in with a rifle and found his way to the Alderleaf meat freezer the week before).  They looked wet and not at all bothered.  I read some more.  I looked up again and the snow was beginning to cover the sheep's head.
     It snowed for four days.  

photo by Jess

The first day was wet, thick flakes that by the next morning left nearly eight inches on the ground.  That morning the news spread through the farm like a something that spreads fast - cougar tracks, right through the main trail.  A trailing expedition set out immediately to see if they could catch up with the animal.  This might sound ludicrous, but it is more or less what we do here whenever we can.  The idea is that we will learn more from the experience than there is uncontrollable danger.  A cougar is much more likely to move away from humans than attack them, especially if the humans have the wherewithal to keep from doing something exceptionally stupid.  Jason, Michelle, and Vita were off in a flash after the trail.  Some of us were less than enthused to shoot right out of the house into the wet snow after a top-shelf predator.  It seemed.  As soon as they were out the door, I looked at the others left in the house and asked, “So you guys want to scout them?”  We were ready in two minutes.  
     As far as scouting stories go, it is much less exciting to retell than to have experienced.  We followed them down to a stream crossing and lost their trail.  The snow was coming down thick and the rotted out log bridge was slick under our boots.  After crossing, we saw the trackers up on the hill side, heads down or looking ahead (not to us on their side), following the footfalls closely.  One of our number was looking for a different way across and found instead an unsteady limb.  We all heard the gigantic CRACK as he almost fell into the rushing creek when the wood gave way.  At that point we gave up the chase because our surprise was lost.  I also felt that the trailing crew may be upset that we’d caused such a ruckus when the cougar could be so close.  So we retreated to the meadow and made a snowman.  Then we made other little snowmen.  We made an epic battle scene where the native tribe of spear hunters misunderstands the abominable monster who just wants a hug.  It was poignant and tragic.  We had a snowball fight.  I convinced Shaun to do a naked snow angel.  It left a funny impression.

The Battle Scene

And now, as with most things here, the other half of the story.  The half we were blind to:


     Shaun had been at his Sit Spot in the woods, enjoying the snow, the quiet, the newness of the day.  He watched a black-tail deer over the course of ten minutes as it walked carefully through his area, passing within twenty feet of him.  After letting the deer saunter off at its own pace, he thought he should go get ready for work.  He drives a WRX, so he was probably excited to play in the snow on four wheels.  Having returned to his cabin and changed clothes, he left to go to his car.  As he left his cabin, I walked by, briskly, putting on my gloves.  “Shaun!  Cougar tracks!  Jason, Michelle, and Vita are trailing them, we’re scouting them!  You can catch up!”  I ran on.  And Shaun, bless him, darted back inside and changed clothes.  
     Two minutes later, jogging down the trail following the human tracks following the cougar tracks, Shaun caught up to me.  “This is going really near my sit spot..”
     And then he broke the branch and we were found out and we went back to the meadow and played in the snow.  You know all this.  
     When Jason, Michelle, and Vita got back from trailing we were all still in the field, marveling at our creations, happy and warm as the snow continued down and down and down.  They had trailed the cougar to the end of the tracks.  They led into a dense thicket, one that could not really be seen into safely.  This is a rule of tracking carnivores or dangerous animals:  don’t go somewhere dangerous.  Circle it on foot to see if the animal leaves from the other side rather than going through a possible ambush.  The cougar tracks did not come out.  They found it.  The place they found was Shaun’s sit spot, twenty minutes after he'd left.

This is the kind of ridiculous stuff that arthropods do around here.  They persist.  This is, in fact, a spider, and it is actively building its web in the middle of a five-day snow storm.  Really.  Photo by Jess.

     We learned trapping.  There are a few different types of trap that we became familiar with over the next two days.  The figure four deadfall, the spring deadfall, the ground snare, and the spring snare.  Basically the deadfalls involve setting up a rock or heavy piece of wood with two or more sticks with carved notches.  These notches allow for great tension in the support of the heavy object.  That tension gets popped or sprung when an animal comes up and feeds on the bait on one of the sticks.  The stick pushes out of its notch and the weight falls.  Plop.  Snares are cordage in a loop that is generally triggered to quickly shoot up after the animal has reached its head through the loop to get at some bait.  Strangulation, suffocation, neck-breaking, or simple incapacitation until the return of the hunter.  These are the goals.  I don't think they are my goals yet, but they are that of the trapper.  
     We set these traps up in the snow, looking for Aplodontia rufa, the Mountain Beaver.  You can remember the Aplodontia well because it neither lives in the mountains nor is a beaver.  Common names.  So we set these up at entrances to their burrows.  We pacified the traps by putting sticks in the ground that would divert the weight from falling on whatever tripped the trigger.  The point was to find out if they worked, not kill poor little misnomers.  (Poor Little Misnomers would be a great band name)
    After setting our traps there were many minor skirmishes with snowballs along the return trip.  When we got to the hill down to the creek, hell broke loose for about fifteen minutes.  Everyone was involved, some better than others.  Diving behind trees, sneaking around corners, and trying to ambush as many as possible, I crashed and dashed and snuck and struck.  And was struck.  It was amazing.  
     The next day we continued our trapping practice, this time with snares.  We checked on our traps from the day before and found them, for the most part, untriggered.  When I removed my support sticks, the weight stayed exactly in place, held up by the night’s snow.  Lesson learned.  

Trails in the snow.  Photo by Jess.

     Class was flat out cancelled Thursday as the snow turned light and the ground cover became more and more icy.  
     

The battle continues...a slight impaling! (and Vita ate his nose at some point)

In the next days, the occupants of the West House became stir-crazy.  We staged a dramatic walk into town, the first leg through the woods and forestry land, post-holing most of the way.  If only we’d had our snow-shoes at this point.  Our main destination was the Grocery, but activity and adventure were serious considerations.  The snow was still light at this point, falling from trees in cascading layers of cotton white like the floating mists of a waterfall in the distance.  The entire expedition was a joy.  Strenuous and rewarding, it showed us red-tailed hawks, eagles, tracks of weasel, cottontail, and squirrel.  

Intrepid Travelers in search of Civilization (sans Jess, photographer) 

     By the last downhill trek in the return trip five hours later, my knee began to hurt.  The snow had turned to a wet sleet, beginning to cover snow with ice.  We returned to the house to find a Locust tree in our Edible Forest Garden.  This might not sound like a bad thing, except for the fact that we did not previously have a Locust tree in our EFG and this one was decidedly horizontal and crushing two Apple trees, along with a whole lot of ground cover.  This was about the time that trees began to come down.  This Locust obliterated two Apple trees and brought down our power line.  In the night the Locust right next to it fell into our sheep pen, crushing the fence.  Opposite it, a Big Leaf Maple snag (in which woodpeckers galore gorged daily and in which we had a bat box) fell across a different section of sheep/llama fencing.  Along Ben Howard Road, the bluff-hugging twist of a strip that connects us with the towns of Sultan and Monroe, we found at least five instances of downed power lines and innumerable trees on the ground.  
     So the power was out.  And it stayed out.  Candles were lit and the woodstove stayed cranked, radiating an orange glow through the front glass.  The first night without power, having just gone to the store, I had the fixings for quesadillas.  It took about two hours to make them on the wood stove, cooking the veggies together and then each tortilla separately.  We listened to poetry of the divine feminine and ate in the flickering light, finding the wonderful silence that comes in a house that suddenly has the power cut.   During the days that followed we spent a lot of time outside or if inside, reading, always close to the stove surrounded by hanging wet clothes drying in the warmth.  We worked on our Tree Journals and readied ourselves for the upcoming trip to the North.  Whenever a car was taken out, to get to the store, to get someone to work, it could make it back about as far as the driveway.  Then the shoveling inevitably began.  We dug out our drive about five times due to stuck vehicles over the week.  It was just another part of our routine.  

Tree Journal:  Quercus alba, White Oak

Tree Journal:  Quercus alba, White Oak

Tree Journal:  Juglans nigra, Black Walnut

     Jess and I went sledding at the neighbor's hill and brought back a bale of hay on a tarp for our sheep and llama, slip-sliding down the hill.  Jake built a giant snow pile for his snowboard to have a jump from.  And limbs kept falling, snow kept falling.  And then finally, the rain.  
     Sunday morning at 5am the power came back on. In time for Gordon to come back from his exile in Redmond (where he could actually get to work), in time for us to clean our long-wet and well-used clothes, in time for us to pack, in time for us to make the sojourn to REI to get the last minute supplies for our regularly scheduled week of snow.  Skalitude.  North Cascades.  Mountains you can see Canada from.  Five feet of snow to walk through.  For miles.  We departed at 8 on Monday morning.  And it was so much wilder than the week you just read about.


Love, 
Ted

the Oregon Dunes -9-24-11 --> 12-5-11

Here is the long-awaited Dunes Dissertation.  Long-awaited by whom?, well, me I suppose.  And SO MUCH has happened in between then and now.  But what that is is not what was.  What was was Dunes and here they are:


Dunes - Travel Monday - 0630 meetup, loadup, vans roll out at 0700 sharp.


     In the dark of 630 we met in the parking lot at the farm: bleary eyed excitement and bushy-less tailed sleepiness.  Three vans, two trailers, one SUV, and 40+ humans rolling down the road.  Forty minutes in the brakes started wobbling in our van.  We stopped in Issaquah to get them looked at.  Useful detours like this give the chance to learn new people and their ticks and tocks.  It creates the space needed between people to grow.  The hour wandering the town with a few students created some of that space.  After an hour we found out that we got another hour to wait.
This time Steve and I set off together since we didn't feel the need to get food just yet, as the rest of the group did.  We found the bike trail under the highway overpass and in that towering shadow spied tracks, feathers, and owl pellets.  Pellets are fluffy fur leavings regurgitated by raptors as undigestible.  They were full of curved, yellow rodent incisors.  Remarkable and awing, to find those remnants that so clearly described a story of life and death in the underpass zone, the same place where bums shelter in the night mists, where the deer tracks and the human tracks run together in the back yard of a bustling town mostly unawares of the drama played out each evening.
     Nearby, Steve showed me the difference between Queen Anne's Lace and Poison Hemlock.  Queen Anne's Lace has veins in the small leaves that terminate towards the tip of each lobe, whereas in hemlock those veins seek the crotch of the lobe.  A fine distinction, to be sure, considering the small size and detail of such a difference.  The more gross distinction is to be found in cutting the plant down at the base, right above the ground.  Say thank you, then split the stalk about 3-4" up and examine the interior cross-section.  A hollow stem shouts hemlock while a spongy pith whispers lace in your ear.  If it's Lace, eat the carrots underneath!
     On the road again with new brake rotors, our van group gelled.  We spent another 12 hours together today and meaning was found and had.  Disturbing family history, the path and dividends of meditation, meaning of names, communal story-telling, and tangible feelings of a coming together - Communitas - was shared in the back corner of our van.  The other two vans probably had a similar experience, but maybe they were just smelly and sleepy.  It's a toss up whether any day could be smelly, sleepy, or intimate.  Sometimes it's all three, but not today.
     Views of Mt. St. Helens and Hood faded to the sentinal pines of Pacific sunset and hours ran along behind us before we found the campground.  The journey was more arduous for others (one car broke down) and more dangerous for others (one student fell in a rest stop parking lot and had to go to the emergency room to get her leg stitched), but the worst our van had to deal with was the brakes.  The rest stops in Washington even have nice old ladies serving coffee, cookies, and chocolate.  For free.  What a world.  At any rate, the trip was now behind us and the Dunes ahead.
     The stoves came out while our tents went up.  Spaghetti and salad were served up in the new dark of night.  The stars.  A splatter of paint thick across the sky.  An old story of how the North Star came to be (a billy goat reaching for the All-Father), and sleep to the sound of the ocean, two miles away, roaring over the as yet unseen dunes.  Tomorrow we track, tonight we dream.


Dunes Day 1: Tuesday


     Today we split into our smaller groups and set off in different directions across the dunes to begin the exploration of and introduction to this new, alien, environment.  {Our group, consisting of 9 amazing people (plus an incredible instructor and a stupendous intern), is called the NitroBacterRaptors.  That means we are nitrogen-fixing bacteria raptors.  I take that to mean bird of prey rather than dinosaur, though our group call is definitely a dinosaur screech.}
     The dunes are immense.  Describing this environment is daunting.  The tallest ridge ripples at 200 ft and the low points touch the water table near sea level.  The layout of this ecosystem is unique and changing.  It is changing because of invasive beach grasses that were purposely planted decades ago.  They have taken over and are restructuring the entire dune system.  In sixty years there may be no more dunes due to the rooting and stabilizing effect of the invasive plants.

These are my notes from our morning briefing on Tuesday.  Follow along in the next, highly informative and now illustrative, paragraph!  (not to scale, to sheaves)

     At the beach  the phenomenon starts.  The shore line is prograding, which means it is pushing in and building up, quite the opposite of what most are used to - a shore eroding and losing sand.  This beach is expanding.  It's how the dunes got here in the first place.  First comes the Fore Dune.  In my picture I made it taller than in really is, but it is the initial separation from the beach and the dune system.  It would look familiar to you from any beach on the East Coast.  The thing is, it is entirely a phenomenon of the invasive grasses.  And so is what comes next as we move inland.  The Deflation Plane is a thick band of trees and grasses that are low enough to be marshy during the wet season and impenetrably thick during all seasons.  Next comes the Transverse Dunes, the foothills, so to speak, where gentle hills undulate and flow, creating pockets and hamlets and swirls of sand ridges.  Finally, farthest inland, come the sleeping monsters of blowing sand mass, the Oblique Dunes.  These dwarf the dunes at Kitty Hawk, and are generally stupendous.
     Among the Oblique and Transverse Dunes there are small, seasonal water depressions that allow for some folliage and animal habitat to grow.  These were mostly dried up for us, but provided wonderful habitat for frogs galore, and the host of shrubs and small trees that broke up the sandy stretches.  There are also Forest Islands.  They are even cooler than they sound(which is pretty cool) and more intimidating than you might believe.  They are just as impenetrable as the Deflation Plane, though they are made up of very different species.  After the dunes comes the Precipitation Ridge down to the forest, practically at sea level.  This is where our camp was made, in the shelter under the sand.  Then comes the road and the rest of the world, a thousand yards and eons away from the world of the Dunes.

     All of this takes place in the span of two to three miles.  It is many more miles long, and we did not explore it all.  One day I will take a week (one week I'll take a day?) and solo the dunes and take my time and track and watch and... and I don't think I can convey to you the shivver of anticipation I get thinking about it.  Not yet.  Let's see.
     On the first day we wandered, travelling over the largest dunes and down to the smaller water and plant oasises.  In the open dunes we found tracks of gray fox, coyote, lots of deer mouse, the occasional porcupine(which drags its spiny tail), and on that first day, the lizard.  This was our first experience with the elusive art of Trailing.  Trailing is when you find fresh tracks and follow them to the culprit.  It is not the most common practice (because it is hard to do) and it is even less commonly successful(because it is friggan hard to do), as most tracks are made very early in the morning and we humans are lazy risers who are following hours behind the animal.  We got lucky early on, though.  This track confounded us for almost a minute.  Then someone looked about ten feet to our right.  A lizard!  Right there!

     And indeed, there it was, scrambling up this steep but small sand hill.  It was going directly up and it was going absolutely nowhere, spewing sand behind it as it gained an inch and lost it, falling backwards in a flail of limbs - over and over and over again.  It was likely freaking out trying to get away from the loud, bumbling group of mammals clammoring and exclaiming at its backtrail, but all the same, it was being remarkably ineffective.  After a minute the group moved on, but I stayed with one other to watch it.  My friend wanted to pick it up.  I remembered my childhood vacations in Florida and the quiet fraternity I found in the small skink lizards there.  Handle them enough and they stopped going crazy and would sit near you quite comfortably.  My friend in the Dunes picked it up and soon found this much larger lizard hanging out easily on his hand.  I will spare you the details of the face nuzzling and arm-crawling, but know that it was there and it was beautiful and ridiculous.
     When our group returned to camp for the night ahead of some others I realized I had a chance to do some very fun scouting.  In the sand environment one can throw the body and experience minimal repurcussions.  It is also a wide open landscape with a few tufts of grass among the hills.  It is not a place that people are expecting to be scouted.  I was also excited to be wearing my new thrift-store acquired tan pants (which matched the sand exactly), desert cammo shirt, and a SaraBalz-given brown scarf.  I was a smudge stain on a tan land and it was beautiful.  There were a good few times that I laid in open sight of the weary returning travellers to have them pass right by.  Judging someone's trip behind a hill and using that interval to sprint to the next grass tuft and throw yourself behind it just in the nick of time:  that's also very fun.  Very, very fun.  I was spotted by some, but I had a great time covering 500 yards to get within 20 before being spotted.  I wasn't the only one who thought this game was fun, though.  I'd find out tomorrow.


Note:  I need to make clear that the method for descending a dune is to jump, tumble, fall over, or slide.  This highly specific method fills your clothes with sand and feels incredible.  This kind of body-throwing levity dominated our whole experience.




Dunes Day 2: Wednesday
[notes from the tent before bed]
Every movement gets sand everywhere.  I unzip my soft jacket.  Sand falls out from under my shirt.  I pull my waterbottle from my pack, sand falls out of my pocket.  Tent floor, sleeping pad and bag, head, hair, and butt crack.  Sand.  This is as good as it gets.  Joe Mason, prophet and emotional human, made the assertion earlier today that the feeling he was having, the feeling of warmth and contentment in his chest: the feeling caused by a day of crawling hand and foot through dense, sharp, dense, scratching, dense forest, of miles of sand and sun, of the ocean roaring the background of our every breath, and finally, of laying face down on the sun-warmed dune slope, cradled at a loving angle by the Earth: he said, "This feeling..." he put his hand in front of his chest sideways, palm wide and facing him, "...is really all life is about."  I smiled, and Vita, a little way farther down the dune, smiled her full mouth, closed-eye agreement, and slowly lowered her cheek back to the sand pillow.
This is how we finished today.  How we started and everything else is a longer story.


     Today we traveled with Jason Knight.  Jason is the cofounder of Alderleaf and is an incredible Tracker, among other titles.  He lights up on the trail and shows us a story in the sand that we might never guess at otherwise.  Early on we encountered a coyote with a dragging claw on its left side.  It made it rather easy to keep track of as the day progressed, which was neat.  At one point we saw a side trot, which you've probably seen a dog do before as it slows down running up to you.  The rear legs bump out to the side as the front slows faster than the back.  This creates a slightly odd, diagonal pattern in the track with the front and hind sets running parallel.  Frogs and birds and lizard and beetles and centipedes and millipedes and gray fox.  Sometimes red fox.  Red fox is super rare out here so the good trackers freak out when they see it.  I, on the other hand, see them all the time in Virginia, so I am slow in getting the contagion of excitement.
     Mid-morning we arrived at our first destination, a Forest Island.  This oasis is a bundle of conifer spears thrust from the middle of the giant's sand box.  We understood that it was to be slow going, bushwacking, and intense.  Our group split in two, some choosing to go around with Jason, and the majority wanting to blast through the thick and find the secret spots.  It did not prove to be a blasting.  It was, however, a blast.  
We scaled the fifty foot ridge to enter the forest and our progess immediately halted.  It was more than thick, it was a tangle of every hard plant I'd never seen before or heard of.  The limbs went everywhere, spun through one another, and back again, locking us in place and giving us nowhere easy to go.  We pushed, crawled, climbed, and fell, and after ten minutes we were one hundred feet further.  The Forest Island was not round, and had a little spit off to one side that was much thinner. It turned out this was what we had crawled through initially.
     We emerged on the other side onto the sand with the main part of the island still looming in front of us.  But it looked different.  We found ourselves at the base of a hill, looking up into a moss-covered forest just like our home biome at Alderleaf.  This was the East-facing side of the island, and was most protected from the winds.  We were awed and climbed through it feeling suddenly less confined.  We stopped at the top to catch our breath from the first foray, and then continued into the thick.  The forest changed almost immediately back to the dune thicket.  It is hard to convey the difficulty and perseverence necessary in our arduous journey through the heart of the Forest Island.  One of our group, whom I followed for twenty minutes immediately behind, would smile and grunt and say, "you just have to see the path when there is no path at all!"  Wise words.  When I say that I followed "immediately behind" him, I mean that I was head up his you know, hugging him like something that hugs something else tight in fear of losing it forever.  Sometimes he found it easier to climb up onto the long, horizontal limbs and move above the thicket.  Often this meant suspending our bodies across several small twigs that would not normally support us at all.  The density of the growth, however, could support us somewhat.  This imitation of floating was one of the best ways to fly.
     Most of us were barefoot, and it led to some difficulty.  It was to be a day that would leave my body injured for the coming weeks, and I would not trade those injuries for the experience at all.  It was worth it.  First, I cut open my foot pad while climbing a sharp-barked tree.  There was a small, broken limb nub on the trunk that I did not see before putting all my weight down upon it.  Bleeding and pain began.  Soon enough we stopped, resting under the tiny cave-like branches of the thicket.  By thicket and cave-like, I hope you get that we are not able to sit up straight here.  We are crawling, we are resting on our elbows, and we are now contemplating first aid.  I bandaged my foot as we discovered a bird kill site.  The feathers were cut and slightly chewed, indicating a mammal's kill.  A bird would have pulled out the feathers, while the mammals will cut them off with their teeth.
So we journied on.
     After much more arduous crawling, sliding, scraping, falling, and who knows how many times nearly despairing, we came to the edge, high above the dunes below.  The ocean was palpably closer, though not visible through the low forest of the deflation plane.  On my way down the slope I found a coffee canister that initially outraged me.  I thought it was discarded trash, partially buried, albeit in an unlikely location.  I opened it and discovered that it was a geo-cache, a marker that is generally left with a bagged paper and pencil, allowing humans to leave record of their presence for the next.  I read that Wilderness Awareness School(another local Naturalist school) had been there the previous year, having tracked a fox to the hillside.  I wrote, with not a small amount of pride in my group clamboring down the hill near me, that Alderleaf students had been here and had gone through the heart of the Forest Island.  WAS went to the dunes the week after us.  I wonder if they revisited the coffee can.  
     We rendez-vous'd with the group and ate lunch, basking in the sun and appreciating the warmth of sun and gentle support of laying in sand, not scrunched into a thicket.  We continued on towards the ocean.  Mark this point.  It is the point after which we were seen.  That is to say we were observed.  I mean to say that we were scouted.  Until we get to the ocean, know that everything we are doing is known and we are none the wiser.
     We moved down to a low point, gathering around a small pool of water.  It is fascinating to us, as we've seen no standing water yet in the great dunescape.  There were tracks of many sort coming to the water, though of greatest interest to us was the salamander.  Past the pool we found ourselves in the deflation plane, near the line of trees but walking South through the scrub, paralleling the trees waiting to get to a trail so we could cross through them.  To bushwhack through these trees, we were told, would take even longer than the Forest Island.
     Remember, I'm limping on a bandaged foot.  It hurts.  I put on my flip flops after the initial injury in the Forest Island, but broke one of them in half about ten minutes later.  So no more flippies.  Bare bandaged foot.  In the brushy parts of the dunes there are certain plants to watch out for.  They are called Death Stars.  They are tiny and they hide in the small planty bits they come from.  And there are a lot of them.  Now watch my foot.  It is coming down.  It is resting gracefully, lovingly, casually even on the sand.  It looks like it is having a great time.  It's my right foot.  Now watch my left foot.  It's coming down.  It is resting gra--WHAT THE HELL?!


Now I'm on the ground, having thrown myself down to the side.  My foot hurts even more.  The group has stopped and is looking down at me.  I turn my foot over, cradling it in my lap, revealing,
"Oh my God, Ted!"
"Ouch!"
"Oh wow..."
I hear as I reveal approximately 14,387 Death Stars, each with multiple spines stuck in the sole of my foot.  It took a while to pick them all out.  Minutes.  There was bleeding.  After reestablishing control over my foot we continued on, my limping perhaps becoming more exaggerated.  In minutes we found the trail through the wood and soon enough we were on the raised boardwalk that covered the last stretch between wood and ocean.  Over the last dune (the first dune) and we were there.  The Pacific rending the world in two, crashing over itself, eating its way into itself, terrifying in its immensity and raw power.  The mist and scale made my mind collapse a little trying to comprehend.  And soon there were stripped clothes flying and bodies running into the 180 degrees of gaping maw.  And soon enough mine was following them.  I had never submerged in this ocean.  Once, when I was 13 I touched it, but that was it.  I bounded into it, skipping over it before throwing myself flat and slamming into and through the wall of lifeblood.  It was cold, of course.  It was more than frigid, it was almost mind numbing.  My bathing suit was the underwear I'd worn in expectation of meeting the sea today.  They were no match for the ceaseless, enormous waves.  They slipped and slooped down over and over again, though I managed to hold on to them by my ankles each time.  Next time I'm not worrying about it because it feels so damn good.  
     A few minutes later, some of us drying off in the cool breeze, some of us eating another snack, we saw figures walking down the beach towards us.  They were coming from the North.  It was another group, having just bushwhacked through the Deflation Plane.  We were impressed.  They walked up and asked casually (oh so casually), "Seen any other groups today?"  No, we hadn't.  That was all.  We shared some tracking stories and went our separate ways.
     The day ended for us relatively uneventfully.  We were far enough away from camp that our return was a nearly uninterupted straight hike.  We were tired anyways, and I was grateful for the time to walk relatively silently among the dunes.  When we returned to the last giant dune before the camp, many of us stayed out, laying on the slope, basking in the glory of an exhausting, rewarding day.  We rolled and spilled ourselves this way and that, some of us filling our pants with sand (because it felt good!), others trying backflips off the crest.  This was when Joe found his words on the feeling of goodness that he had.  It was a shared sentiment and helped us slip down to the deep relaxation of a day well spent.
     That evening I injured myself a third time, though not in the foot this time.  I was laying next to my friend in the evening, tired and happy.  She had been doing The Worm down the dunes, where you whip your body, stomach down, up in a swoop and slide down the dune as you go.  It looked super fun and I wanted to try it.  I dropped my body from about two feet onto the sand and landed on my right front ribs. I immediately thought I'd caused a cramp but the feeling would linger for days afterward. I can only describe it as a mix between a bruise and a strain, though there was no visible bruise. It felt slightly swollen, almost like some connective tissue got dislodged.  All told, the discomfort from that one insignificant action lasted a month at least.  I am now recovered but can still feel a slight difference between my left and right ribs.
      During Story of the Day, where we all gather around the fire and share as a group our favorite events of the day, we listened to the group that we encountered at the beach share how they scouted us for about an hour, staying just the other side of the nearest dune, laying flat often and sneaking about us as we wound down from the Forest Island to the ocean.  It felt violating and at the same time was hilarious.  We got scouted good.  It was deserved.


Dunes Day 3: Thursday


     Today I went with the Scouting group, led by the likes of Frog and Moon Snail.  You might know the Frog.  We looked at our different human gaits and patterns of movement in the sand, noting the ways we ran, walked, skipped, and differed.  This relates to Search and Rescue tracking of humans, which would probably be a lot easier than tracking just about anything else.  We make big trails.  And clumsy trails.  And we break things in our way.  
     We then practiced Human Trailing.  One would run off over a dune and be given a couple minutes to make a trail, then hide.  We'd take turns leading the group in finding the person.  It was very fun and sometimes very hard.  Finding the Frog proved impossible, as he was sideways in a tree that was too thick to see into easily.  I was probably closest to him in our search and I never looked in his direction.  Awareness fail.
     For lunch we hunkered down in the fringe of a Forest Island.  We hid from a random hiker by sliding down the hill into the Island.  It was the first group stealth movement we'd done, and it took a surprising amount of time for the entire group to catch on to what was happening.  They were eating and talking to each other, not paying attention to their surroundings.  After enough hissing at them to get their eyes and ears we all sank down the hill into the forest island until the hiker passed.
     Perhaps the most fun part of the day was practicing Sink and Fade.  This is used when walking along a path and becoming aware of someone coming that you wouldn't particularly like to be seen by.  So you Sink (crouch down and move to the edge of brush) and Fade (move as quickly but silently as possible into that brush and hide).  We practiced this by walking in small groups along the trail through the Deflation Plane to the Ocean.  
     Frog and Moon Snail would walk along the trail, talking loudly.  Two groups would be walking towards them, about 100 ft apart.  When we heard them we would Sink and Fade, and they would look for us as they walked along.  By this method we were supposed to make our way to a rendezvous point.  When our group, the first group, got to the rendezvous, we did the only thing that made sense - we hid.  A few minutes later, the second group made it to the rendezvous.  They looked around wondering where we had gone, then concluded that they too should hide.  I was laying in the middle of a grass patch at the very edge of the wood, and could see a couple of my fellows already tucked into the underbrush.  The second group spread out and quickly found their own hiding spots.  I held my breath as they sneaked, crawled, and eventually hunkered down right next to two others from my group.  When Frog and Moon Snail came to the rendezvous they looked around and asked the woods if they knew where everyone had gone.  The second group got up piecemeal and came out of hiding.  They were happy they'd been undetected.  My group didn't budge.  After another minute of everyone else wondering where we were, we all got up from our different places and walked out.  The surprise on the second group's faces was priceless.  This principle of scouting has been reinforced to me many times since - when scouting, it is easy to be scouted unless you go slowly and carefully.  These students had hidden, in some cases, less than two feet from other students, and been none the wiser.  It happens here all the time, and it could happen to you, too.  Watch out kids, listen to McScout, the sneak dog.   


Dunes - Travel Thursday


     Today we woke and packed it in.  Tents, kitchen, trinkets, bones, feathers, mushrooms, sand, and all.  We also said goodbye to Joe Mason.  He was a late arrival to the program last year and had only the first month to take this year to complete it.  The Dunes was his last stint.  He was a major force in my experience in the program thus far, being much more experienced with the skills but also being an incredible individual.  Joe just wants to be comfortable being Joe, and the way he expresses that is heartening.  So we said goodbye to him.  I'd see him later, and I'll see him later again, I am sure.
     On the lunch stop I got a chance to clothes-pin a new target.  Frog and I had been exchanging missions - either individuals to pin or special circumstances surrounding them - such as that guy there on a shirt pocket or underneath a leg.  Mature and useful growth tools, here.  By completing a mission you get to assign a new one to the other.  It is really fun.  My new target was an intimidating one.  He's one of the older students and he is a ninja.  Literally.  Or literally enough.  He has taught different martial arts for something like eighteen years and could kill me.  Many ways.  I pinned him between his legs from behind on a hole in his pant leg.
     If that seems like bragging, here's more information:  I have been caught laying on my stomach on a dirty, dirty floor with my body wrapped around a couch.  I have been caught reaching out from underneath a table.  I have been caught after scouting for three hours - and caught at such a distance that I couldn't even see those I was scouting.  I have been caught so many times, and a little success is a wonderful thing sometimes.
The van ride back was less problematic than the ride down, though it seemed to take just as long.  It was, perhaps, even more important of a ride for all of us crammed in together for hours and hours and hours with nothing to do but talk, look, read, listen, and talk.


And that's what we did.  All the way home.




Moral:
There is no moral.


Point:
There might be a point, and it might be this:  I love the Dunes.  I don't think there has been a single place in this world that I've gone that I have felt such an immediate and complete Love for.  It is beyond words because it is beyond intellect.  I get the dunes.  I grok.  It feels intuitively like somewhere I could live, even if practically that makes little sense.  I have never felt so instantly at home throwing myself upon the Earth and crawling.  I think it is because of the absurd amalgam that comes about from having a huge pile of sand in the Pacific Northwest.  There is nothing like it and it might be the most spectacular thing to ever fall between your fingers.  I will be going back there, and hopefully to spend a good deal more time.  And maybe you will, too.  I highly recommend it.  


I have a lot more of these blogs written.  Most of them, like this one was until minutes ago, are half-finished and insufficient for sharing.  But know that they are there, and if I can keep things moving, will be shared very soon.  I know that I offered up a fat communication sandwich a few months ago and have since been claiming that there're just not any greens in stock.  The greens are there, and like prolonged, unfortunate metaphors, they are not quite ready.  But they are quickening.  I promise that much, at least, and thank you for your patience with that.  Again and again.  


My Love, 
Ted