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

What, you think I'm getting lazy?


Well fine.


I've been doing things, you know.  Like being lazy.
I've been doing Sit Spot Field Journals, Plant Journals, playing guitar, bass, dulcimer, drum kit, and less kalimba than ever in the past few months.  I am constantly on the lookout for work, which is difficult to come by in this economy, and even more difficult when a bicycle is your only means of rural transport.  On weekends we go to the Food Bank (because we're poor) or Food Not Bombs (because we're community participators that are poor).  Food Not Bombs is neat, since there's no pyramid structure, legal entity, or judgement.  It's food provided by local stores, it's all organic, and it's all brought to a central location and at approximately 130pm it is fair game for everyone there.  Today we also dumpster dove a lot of chocolate out of the Theo brand chocolate factory.  They leave that dumpster unlocked with the perfectly edible (but broken and therefore unsalable) chocolate.  They do this intentionally because they want us to be happy.  We know this.  I've been going to thrift stores and actually succeeding in finding the right wool clothes for this wet season.


And that's really what's been going on.  It's the wet season now.


The way the forest speaks so gently through the rain is a gift.  I have been spending time at my Sit Spot, crawling over moss and under tree stumps and laying in the drizzle filtering slowly through the trees.  Walking these woods in wool in the rain is not cold, is not wet, and is utterly enchanting.  Water droplets hang pregnant on the moss edges of logs and mushrooms rise in colonies of hundreds, creating domed cityscapes along the moss carpeted canyons.  When I return to the farm after my roamings, the crossing of the creek feels warm to my feet.  


So, one fanciful day, while poring over the fallen logs in layers, I spied some interesting mushrooms.  I crept closer and began to detail them in my notebook.  Size, color, gill or ridge shape, bruise color (if present), substrate & location.  You know, ID specs.  [Brown cap 2-6 cm, yellow/brown gill-ridges, no bruise color, fiberous, thick (not hollow) stem.  Spore print (from after I got home) is White! Growing on moss, attached to dead wood underneath]  So there I am, looking at these mushrooms very carefully, noting with chagrin that someone has placed one on the log next to them.  This mushroom is obviously human picked and placed.  While writing I see movement over the edge of my page.  Two feet away from me there are two logs crossing the one I am sitting on.  A chipmunk jumps up onto the far log and looks.  It is very close to me and hops towards me onto the other log.  This chipmunk is reddish/grey, with black and white stripes down its back.  The stripes were very beautiful and dramatic.  This was a dark animal and the prospect of it continuing its hops right onto my foot, leg, or arm was pretty exciting.  In the one second or so that it took before jumping, I took in its features and shot a thought like a bullet through the otherwise calm, quiet environment (that had led it to so casually jump up onto the log and expose itself to long sight lines):
"HOLY CRAP THIS THING IS ABOUT TO JUMP ON ME!!!"


The chipmunk halted IMMEDIATELY as that thought was processed, turned, fled over the second log, hooked around the first, and ran away behind it, hitting a fern which shook loose water.  It was gone.
I never moved.  I didn't even breathe.  I did nothing other than think as loudly and abrasively as possible right at it.  I will endeavor to not make that mistake again.

Not my photo.  This Townsend Chipmunk is lighter than the one I encountered, though it is cute. 

This is a highly detailed and easy to understand diagram of my encounter, recorded immediately following(wrinkled paper from raindrops).  Note mushrooms to the left (and one on the log, picked), note the chipmunk's visible movements (shown by dots) and its hidden flight (shown by dashes).  My perspective does not include my arms, hands, shoulders, face, hair, nostrils, or eyes, as that is getting entirely too metacognative for a Sunday night.

So that was a piece of the kind of observation and detailing that I do often, and honestly it doesn't scratch the surface.  There is so much I have written that I will not transcribe here.  I may start scanning pages and describing them so that more specific wonders like this can be detailed here.  It is so easy to be overwhelmed at the amount of information that could be shared.  I also grapple with sharing the practical, tutorials I could produce here.  Realistically, I'd rather point you to a book or online resource (for something like friction fires, shelter-building, herb harvesting, tincture-making, permaculture design, mushroom hunting, etc. etc. etc.) rather than rewrite something that has already been done so well elsewhere.  We'll see.


So, goodnight from Sunday land.


Oh, and here's the update from the dunes and two weeks of class since then:  I cut my foot open, separated some rib cartilage, submerged in the Pacific Ocean, made new friends, ate wild mushrooms, played horseshoes, and learned everything about permaculture I need to know to know that I know very little, mostly recovered in the foot department, then I mostly recovered in the ribs department.  There it is.  Three weeks of school.  That's all.
I am working hard on my Plant Journals, due Tuesday, and will be attending to this blog in the break time on Monday.  The dunes writeup is pretty much done(like it was a week ago).  Subsequent weeks are close.  There will be more, and I have been railing against this medium in favor of more experience (and private decompression) time as of late.  Things are about to even out again.  We have all been talking about how since the Dunes trip we've felt crazy and perpetually active and scattered.  There is ALWAYS something to be doing here, and the persistent feeling that one could be more productive all the time.  The rains are cooling me down and evening me out, though, and I find that encouraging.
ps
I rode my bike into Sultan yesterday.  Thanks, Joe Mason.  Your bike works great.


happy monday, everybody.

Class: Week Two

Tuesday: Tracking


The morning was spent in the classroom going over slides of different tracks and learning the basic questions to be asking when tracking.  These are the normal questions we are taught to ask when doing any sort of critical thinking:  Who, What, When, Where, and the big one, Why?  Doesn't this sound thrilling?  If it seems a little bit dry, understand that this topic is really better served when delivered from the mouth of someone who cares a lot about it.  Jason Knight (founder of Alderleaf) is such a person.  He has dedicated the larger part of his life to this, and other, naturalist study.  He is normally a rather reserved individual, and frankly, not the most emotive.  And that is okay.  Everyone expresses themselves differently.  But today was his day to teach, and he was lit up.
     The simple excitement of discovery was in his voice and a shine in his eyes as he described both the technicalities and the raw wonder of encountering a track.  He used his body to show us different gaits and movement styles, which is funny to see, but profound when you start to do it yourself.  Getting down on all fours in the woods and bounding makes much more sense than walking above the tunnel of animal paths.  This was morning.  This was classroom learning.  We took to the three Alderleaf vans for the afternoon, crammed in and expectant.
     We arrived at the river, the intersection of rt 522 and the Snohomish River.  The class ate lunch while the interns and instructors struck out to find the tracks we would learn from.  It is funny looking back at this memory, thinking about the groups of people sitting, talking, still feeling their way in the new social order.  This being nearly two weeks ago now and before 5 days of travel together, it is fairly ludicrous how stilted and uncertain these interactions were to me now.  We didn't yet know how much we loved one another.  Or at least respected.  Or any number of things.  The Dunes were great.
     We split into our groups and moved between stations manned by interns and instructors, each focusing on a specific piece of the silty mud plain between the river and the vegetative shore.  It is still dry season here, and looking at this spot on the map, I did not recognize it.  There is such a strong and wide river on the map, not the thin, shallow, and marshy overgrown piece of water we traversed so easily.

froggy (the line in the middle is added)

     Tracks dotted the entire landscape, some easy to recognize, others, many others, entirely foreign.  The easy ones to see were the familiar - deer, dog, and even a great blue heron (it is the only thing that big hanging out in a river bed most of the time).  The unfamiliar was quite.  Frog tracks are hilariously baffling until you imagine the frog sitting right over them.  Then they make perfect sense.
Beaver drags a heavy tail, Bobcat is a cat (of course), and the mystery bird is a hopper and skipper.  All of us left with a track unidentified that we are to look up.  I have yet to, so the mystery can be revealed here sometime soon.  In the mean time, see if you can figure it out.  I'll give you fifty pesos if you get it before I do.  For real.  I have it at home, hiding behind the picture of me kissing dad by the side of the pool when I was tiny.  Seriously.  It's waiting for you.

mystery track

mystery track with Jason and a ruler for scale!

what do you think?

     So, we are kneeling in the mud, crawling over one another looking at these tracks, listening to the more knowledgeable elders give us clues and guidelines to move by.  Some people are starting to get excited.  Others are just trudging along with mild curiosity.  It is an overcast day.  Some of them are probably just sleepy.  Soon enough, though, they will know that something started here in the first track that they figured out themselves.  I live with one.  She's a quick study and a quicker nut about tracks.  It starts in places like this, where no one is looking for it.  This was just the first day, too.


Wednesday: Leadership and Awareness


Today was a touchy feely day, and that's not a bad thing.  The instructor, Darcy, is our Leadership guide, soft of touch and gentle heart.  We began the day outside, sitting in the meadow, and everyone took turns saying exactly how they felt at that moment.  It was a nice bit of honesty among ex-strangers, future friends.  We went over the basic teaching model that we will be using to create our own growth and development program here.  It is familiar to me from my Education education.  So this was a re-education of Education education.  Got that?  The difference here is the subject matter and the attention to the process.
     Today was also about Awareness, which we tend to refer to here in terms of knowing the bird song of an area and what it means, of knowing who might be sneaking behind you, of knowing what species to expect in an area at a given time.  Awareness also fit nicely as an all-encompassing aspect of Education.  In a circular flow chart of a learning plan (Assess-->Develop Outcomes-->Design Education Plan-->Excecute-->(re)Assess), Awareness is the cloud that surrounds each step.  Awareness of what is being assessed and the lenses being used to see it, awareness of the outcomes desired and their realism and use, awareness of the plan itself and its many facets and repurcussions, awareness of the method of excecution and its progression, and definitely, definitely, awareness of reassessing what worked, what didn't, and WHY.  There.  Now you've had your pedagogical moment for the month.
     We met Hawkeye today.  He runs OWLE, Outdoor Wilderness Living Experience, for 6-16 year olds.  It sounds incredible, as they are learning much the same sort of thing as we are, only they are younger, more impressionable, and destined to be much, much cooler individuals.  We'd all like to believe we'd be much better or smarter or more skilled if we were only exposed to the things we like now back when we didn't like them enough to care.  Or were young and lazy.  But maybe we would have turned out better and different and all the more powerful in terms of creating consciously the version of ourselves we know is waiting under this unhewn block.  Maybe.  Or maybe not.  I stopped my piano lessons as soon as I was told that I wouldn't really advance much more unless I put my mind to it.  It was also when music theory got introduced to me.  I wish I'd stuck with it, but I still don't have much of a stomach for music theory and I still don't sit and practice the piano.
     Hawkeye is in his sixties and looks like you might expect:  wavy dark hair streaked white like his slightly tamed beard.  He wears camouflage and speaks deliberately and lovingly of the children he has helped bring to maturity through his love of the outdoors.  (By the way, do you realize yet that everyone here wears camouflage and those who don't silently lust after it?)  His is a story of a childhood without modern amenities where he lived and learned in the lap of the mother woods.  He became a teenager and lost it, absorbed in the normal absorbsions:  cars and girls, and probably drink and drugs, based on the When of his teen years.
     After an early adulthood of the Civilized sort, he reconnected with the ground from whence we came.  He gradually came to be the only male daycare provider in town and made weekly field trips to the Outside.  These trips became so popular(over the course of years of organic development) that he was able to start a school where primitive skills and time in the outdoors was the norm.  We Alderleaves will be going to this school multiple times this year to observe and eventually help participate and teach.  This is very exciting.
     In the discussions that followed, led by Darcy, we shared the piece of ourselves that we think is our greatest gift to the group, which is not an easy thing to do - to go beyond one's strengths, to admit and embrace one's Gift.  I honestly don't really remember what it was that I said exactly.  It was something about compassion, and how I feel like I have a heightened awareness of the need for its giving and receiving.  The interesting part about this was that I believe I act on that awareness less than I should.  In admitting the Gift I was immediately spurred to both the awareness that I should be more compassionate and simultaneously created the expectation in others that I would.  Neat trick, Darcy.
      Darcy had another contribution that was a gift, though I did not know it at the time.  She simply outlined the difference between Primary and Secondary Perception.  Primary Perception is what we perceive.  Right now.  You are looking at a screen (or maybe a piece of paper).  Secondary Perception is not what we perceive, but the store of all our past perceptions that we tend to project on our environment.  You might be seeing this text as black, (but it might be dark green or even white) you might be reandig thsee wodrs jsut fnie because your brain can put together pieces of information from prior experience.  This is very important when it comes to the Outdoors.  Letting your Secondary Perception tell you that those Dog Tracks are from some German Shepherd would leave you feeling silly when you scare away the wolf before getting the chance to see it.  And let's not even talk about getting cocky and picking Wild Carrot.  Poison Hemlock is real.
     Primary Perception is crucial in spotting a well-camouflaged animal that is banking on your Secondary Perception filling in the blanks of the green mass of forest in the periphery.  Then there is human interaction.  Paying careful attention to the genuine state of things rather than one's projection of past events is going to make all the difference between habituated, comfortable but shallow interactions and deeper, meaningful and earnestly truthful ones.  After the week at the Dunes this distinction between perceptions is a profound one.  But we're not there yet, are we?


Fire Keeper


     The most "fun" thing we did Wednesday was a game.  It is an awareness game, and it is a good'un.  One person sits blindfolded on the ground in the middle of a circle of people.  There is a set of loud, jangly keys on the ground in front of them.  Your task is to get those keys.  The catch is, you have to do it silently.  The FireKeeper, blindfolded, can hear a lot, and if they point to you creeping up to snatch those keys, it's back to the edge of the circle for you.  It is best to have someone moderating to both signal to only a few to creep up at a time and also to judge whether an individual has really been pointed out or is scraping by slightly to the left.
     The interesting and infuriating part of this game for me was not getting caught, but getting caught when I wasn't even moving.  Not making a sound, not doing anything.  Sometimes people would just get pointed at for no good reason.  It was certainly a random chance sometimes.  There were multiple groups playing the game nearby, so one FireKeeper sometimes pointed at another group's sounds.  It is also not out of the question that some of the FireKeepers would guess...maybe even flicker their eyes under the bandana in hopes of seeing some sort of movement.  That is possible, and I suspect one of our FireKeepers was a little bit of a stinker, but I'm over it.  I'm over it because I think there was another thing going on, too.  They called it carnivore energy, how an animal will sometimes get a Feeling because it is being watched when being focused on so intently.  I assure you, we were all focusing very intently on the FireKeeper.
     We've all felt it at some point, that feeling that there is something Over There, and sure enough, there is.  It can be a combination of senses, of course.  You know when there is a wall near you because it feels different on that side.  Air moves differently, sound bounces off of it.  The same is true for people when they get close.  They radiate heat, make internal noises, block wind and sound, and create a detectable energy space, even to someone with their eyes closed.  That all certainly played into those silent pointings during the game.  But that's not what I'm talking about right now.  I'm actually talking about Morphic Fields.
     It has been a few years since I have read up on them (and by that I mean it has been a few years since my friends read up on them and told me about them), but they are simple to sum:  When an individual is regarding something, it is essentially sending perception energy at it.  This is what makes hair stand up on end when someone is behind you, and believe it or not, there is a lot of research about it.  You know, science and stuff.  It's real, just so you know.  When it comes to hiding in the woods, those who are well-hidden and stare at the person looking for them thinking, "I hope they don't see me over here under this fern," get spotted a lot more often than those laying next to the fern with their head on the ground thinking, "I am the ground and I have roots and bugs in me."  Morphic Fields.  Awareness Games.  School is fun.
     At the end of the day Jason showed us his pack for the Oregon Dunes trip.  He took out everything and even showed us his undies.  There was some silent cackling by me.


Thursday:  Ethnobotany and Fall Wild Edibles


Karen Sherwood was our guest instructor for this day.  Karen is a master orator.  She uses her arms, her legs, her eyes, and her heart as she speaks and her words fly straight and true.  She immediately struck me as of a kind with Lincicome and Gilespie, the high school Giants of Oration from my past.  The difference here was merely subject matter.  Today was all about plants.
     Ethnobotany is the study of plants as used by native peoples of an area.  This includes food, tools, and anything else you can think of.  If it is a plant and it is being used by a native, it is Ethnobotany.  Karen stirred us up and got us ready to pick douglas fir needles and dandelion leaves for tea and pesto.  She had us get rocks for crushing acorn shells so we could make acorn muffins.  She had brought a kitchen and we were going to make some food.  Did everyone love class today?  Yes, we did.
     Dandelion leaves should be harvested when not in bloom.  It is nutritionally dense and can easily be considered the foundation of any diet (good source of Folate, Magnesium, Phosphorus, and Copper.  Very good source of Fiber, Vitamins A, C, E, K, B6, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Calcium, Iron, Potassium, and Manganese).  The simple Pesto that we made (which is bitter, don't kid yourself, though still very palatable) used 3 cloves of garlic, 1/2 tsp salt, a lot of dandelion leaves, and enough oil to get the blender going.  Experiment!
     The Acorn Muffins are a little bit more of a process.  We didn't use the fresh acorns that we broke open, as they still needed to be leached of their tannins to be palatable.  She brought her own flour so that we could participate in the first part of the process and still have the ready flour to make the muffins.  All acorns of Oak Trees are edible, they just vary in taste and the amount of tannins.  The tannins can be washed out in a stream over time or briefly boiled in almost none at all.  Once leached and ground to a flour, these are some (delicious) muffins that can be made: (mix dry and wet separately, then combine.  Banana is wet, silly.)
2c Acorn Flour
1tsp salt
1tsp vanilla extract (or more, go for it!)
1c honey/brown sugar/agave
1/2c oil
3/4c milk(almond or rice milk work great)
2 bananas
red clover flowers (because they're awesome)
3tbs baking powder
3tbs cattail pollen (because IT'S awesome)
Bake at 425 for 9-12 minutes


These were minimuffins, so vary that time based on a larger pan.  These were really great and I highly recommend them.  It's also a fine muffin base receipe if you're feeling muffiny.  You could stick in sliced carrot and raisins and end up with a good breakfast food, too, even if you don't have acorn flour available.  Just use wheat flour or pork (it's a party).
     After Karen gave us the instructions and ingredients we set about making the meal.  The pesto went on pasta shells, and she brought her own jams and seaweed pickles to compliment the muffin/pasta meal.  The tea was simply made with the Douglas Fir needles, and doesn't really need explanation.  It was light and pleasant.  We sat on the grass outside and revelled in our stomachs' education.
     Karen teaches at EarthWalk Northwest, a very well-respected school for traditional skills, from bow-making and hunting to foraging, and everything you can think of in between.  I look forward to learning with Karen again and her husband later in the year when he comes to Alderleaf.  Their web site is http://www.earthwalknorthwest.com/history.php
     At the end of the day we were well-fed and oriented towards the 630am departure on Monday.  We were going to the Dunes.  (And now I'm going to bed.  The Dunes will wait one more night.)

A Photo Essay without the Essay

These are shots from all over the farm and campus.  If anyone wants to get me a fancy, expensive camera, I will put it to good use.  I grow tired of the lousy focusing of both my camera and phone camera.  Enjoy the visuals (and stay away from the last photo unless you like seeing skinned animals).

This is our front yard.  See our fancy sheep?  They are making lots of noise at you. BLAUUAAAGH. 

Our back "porch," archery target, shed, a cabin, and a little garden.

Our chicken coop and large garden.  (and two animals!) You can see two cabins in the back ground.

A fairly representative path on the South Trail - our side of the creek.  Lots and lots of Salmonberry and Trailing Blackberry shaded by Ceder and Hemlock.

Medicine Wheel and Altar. More on them later.

The Outdoor Classroom.  Can you imagine Frog on the far side hiding for an hour?

The wood shed behind the ODC. I am partly responsible for the pile on the left.

Inside the ODC. 

The mushrooms are coming. 

An old shelter built a few years ago.

A blurry example of Vine Maple being ridiculous, as usual, and growing horizontally like crazy, right across the entire creek bed, over 40 ft wide. 

Having crossed the creek the land changes.  Mossy trees have fallen and ferns abound.

Soft earth, lots of roots, trees and moss.

Oysters!

Monster Oysters!

This summer's primitive shelter.  This is a debris hut. 

This is the debris tent that I helped build.  Where the hut is round and can fit four or five around a fire, this is made to fit one or two laying down.  

The other group built this lean-to with a fire reflecting wall.  It would sleep two comfortably.   

When I look down this is frequently what I see:  bare feet on mossy logs with mushrooms over mossy ground that is impossibly soft.

This may or may not be my sit spot.   I'm not telling.

Delicious Oyster Mushrooms.  

If you have no desire to see the deer that was mentioned in the previous post, then enjoy the mushrooms and check out now!

(Week Two coming soon)

This is the aforementioned deer, sans hide, with a broken foot from the car that killed it and a lack of head from where we removed it ("we" is used liberally here). 

And you  might be able to tell that there are two people standing casually in the background, maybe carrying on a conversation, maybe drinking a beer, and perhaps even behaving as if this sort of thing is hardly out of the ordinary at all.  Just maybe.  

Class: Week One

Tuesday: Orientation and Introductions


The class opened up the way most classes do - with students milling nervously, some awkwardly, mingling with the other nervous, awkward students in the air thick with potential.  We are informed that class will meet in the Outdoor Classroom and that our journey there will be in silence until the interns, graduates of this class last year, light a friction fire to start the day.  We made the trek of a couple minutes, all backpacks and summer tans, some outfitted to the teeth in woods camouflage, many others in the barest threads of clothing, soaking up the unusually warm and sunny end of season.
     The ODC is a gazebo-like structure, only instead of walls there are benches, instead of flooring there is a fire pit and log stools, and the roof has a smoke hole among the sky lights.  We crowded in, almost 40 students and 10 interns and instructors.  It was tight but cozy, not uncomfortable.  In silence, two of the interns started a fire with a bow drill.  This fire blazed hot and high, perhaps more dramatic than intended, but impressive nonetheless. PS: Gordon was not present for any of this.
     We started this day (and all those to come after) by Bringing our Minds Together.  This was done with the Words Before All Else.  This is a universal thank-giving that begins with the smallest of the small and ends with the largest of the large (before entering into the unnamable all).  We were taken from the air we breathe and the waters we drink to the plants and animals to the sun and moon and beyond then back again.  Then came naming.
     We each shared our story, as brief or long as we pleased, in terms of Why We Are Here.  Then we picked a name out of a hat.  This name was to be the first thing we researched, learned from, and got to know intimately.  It could be taken as our name, if we identified with it.  The sharing of almost 50 people takes a while.  What I was impressed with the most was the genuine reflection most seemed to give this normally banal part of class beginning.  After speaking my piece, I picked a name that made me laugh on the spot.  I thought it was a bird, but I have found out that it is not.  Blue-eyed Darner.  I found them a couple days later, and I think I like them a lot.  
     When the naming and sharing was almost finished, one of the instructors (who is also a house-mate of mine), asked us if we had heard a Frog on the roof.  I should mention at this point that throughout the entirety of the proceedings thus far my attention had been split.  I knew that Gordon was nowhere to be seen, but that he was surely nearby.  There had been one point during the naming that I had heard a sound on the roof.  I had thought it possible he was up there, but heard nothing more.  So, when Steve asked, "Has anyone heard a Frog up on the roof?" I spoke up immediately, "I thought so!" as everyone looked at each other or Steve with vague uncertainty.  (In retrospect I should have left that moment silent for greater effect.)  Then came loud, clomping footsteps across the roof and down fell the shadow of a gray hoodie and a camoflaged face.  Off came the hood and there was Frog, introducing himself as one of the students from last year who had specialized in scouting.  The rest of the day was spent learning our smaller group's members and touring the grounds in our small groups, which we will keep to often for the rest of the year.  It all took a while, and as far as first days of class go, it was a good one.  The day ended with us Bringing our Minds Apart, where we reflected on how we started the day and brought the energy full circle.  


Wednesday: Introduction to Naturalist Skills


When I was in 10th grade, my biology teacher gave us the Alien Test.  It is a series of identification questions that would be logical for an Alien to ask you if they came to you seeking an explanation for the various species on Earth.  The questions are actually all pictures of animals, field examples of plants, and a few sound clips.  I remember doing terribly on this test in high school (as did almost all my peers) and being told by my teacher that we must surely all be aliens to know so little about our surroundings.  The outcome of this go 'round was a little bit better, but not a lot.  I broke 50% on the animal portion and almost 20% on the plant section.  Granted, these were all Washington native plants, which I feel slightly reasonable in not knowing very well at this point.  I can tell you that I know them a lot better in the few days since taking this embarassing test.  The funny thing about the Alien Test that I took in high school(and here) is this:  it was created by John Young, who helped create the school where Jason Knight (the director and co-founder of Alderleaf) learned and taught for years.  It is amusing to me that I am interacting with the same lineage of knoweldge years later in vastly different circumstances.
     After lunch we learned the basics of plant identification and prepared to begin our Plant Inventories, a process I will describe in detail a little later (after I've started mine tonight or tomorrow).  Then we went out to look for our Sit Spots.  The Sit Spot is the focus of a program like this.  Instead of concentrating on a wide range of knowledge and going only so deep, by sitting in the same spot a few times a week (or even every day), one learns intimately that area and everything in it.  The trade is quality over quantity.  
     By sitting in one place for at least 40 minutes at a stretch, the land is allowed to come back alive and out of the hiding that occurs whenever a human tromps through.  That pretty bird singing as you walk down the woodland path?  It is telling everyone in earshot that there is a THREAT on the ground moving around loudly and unpredictably.  That cute squirel chirruping away in the tree as it flicks its tail?  Same thing.  By sitting still those alarming animals are allowed to come to rest and the forest (or meadow or mountaintop or mudflat) slowly comes back into itself, back to baseline.  This is the way to witness the world as it is moving, just outside our peripherals, all the time.  Slow down and become part of the landscape.  Put in the time and the animals will get to know you.  There are incredibly inspiring stories from those who have given their sit spot enough time.  I wait with expectant patience.  Thus far my times at my sit spot have been peaceful above all else, but each visit yields at worst a single new insight, and, even better, ten more questions.  
     The best place for Sit Spots are places away from human activity if possible, on the edge of habitats, where there is like to be more diversity and activity, and most importantly (yes, MOST), easily accessible.  If you won't go there frequently, it doesn't matter if it is in the most magical place on the planet.  For a great introduction to viewing your boring back yard as a phenomenon outside your imaginings, check out, Tom Brown's Field Guide to the Forgotten Wilderness.  It's about your yard.  It's as worthy a spot as any if you'll simply go there.  
     I will talk about my sit spot a lot in the time to come, so I'll spare an elaborate description of it here other than to say that it is full of moss-covered hummocks which I like to lay on and is criss-crossed by fallen trees that form a highway anywhere from two to ten feet above the ground.  Ferns, huckleberries, and salmonberries abound, nestled into the undulating moss carpet.  This place is beautiful.


Interlude:  Life on the Farm


By living on the farm I am being afforded some unique opportunities that I wouldn't have if I were a commuter.  Today, for instance, I fed the chickens and earned a share of their egg output.  Likewise, for garden work.  Sometimes, though, the opportunities come unasked for, and very unexpected.
     Before class began on Wednesday, there came word that a fawn had been hit and killed on the road very close to school.  Because it would be used for education, an instructor was legally allowed to collect it and use it for demonstration.  That evening after almost everyone had left, a few of us helped (I helped mostly by watching) in the skinning, gutting, and butchering of the young deer.  It was altogether a bizarre experience from start to finish, and left my instructor housemate covered in blood almost everywhere.  I am glad to be surrounded by such interested and capable people.  I watched with a mixture of amusement, awe, and horror, as my friend and housemate squelched her hands into the severed head cavity to pull out, bit by pulverized bit, brains for tanning the hide.  The brains are an incredible variety of colors, by the way, a mess of pinks, reds, whites, and anything else gory you can think of.  With very little exception, all of the animal was used, from sinew to spine.  This is extracurricular activity around here.


Thursday:  Introduction to Wilderness Survival


This was a cool day.  We began with the theory of shelter building and some of the fundamentals of wilderness survival.  Shelter, water, and fire are infinitely more important than food.  Staying warm, hydrated, and safe is the priority.  After an hour or so of information, we went to the woods to be taught how to build a shelter.  Practically speaking, shelter building should be limited to situations of need, I think.  The amount of debris that it took to make two shelters that could house a total of five people left the better part of 3000 square feet pretty bare of leaf litter and dead fern fronds.  The result was impressive.  The shelters are sturdy and would insulate individuals well for many nights.  Once the process began, however, so many of us were scavenging for debris that few got the chance to really have a hand in the creation.  There were just too many of us, and not enough land for everyone to make a shelter at the same time in the same place.  
     In the afternoon we moved on to fire.  We went out to look for our bow, a piece of sturdy wood about arm-length with a slight curve and diameter around 1 1/2".  We strung twine between the two ends and wrapped a spindle(that we carved from red ceder) in the string.  Working that spindle back and forth vertically between two pieces of wood(one hard oak, the other the softer red ceder) fast enough creates friction enough to create a coal.  That coal is then gently tipped into a tinder bundle which, if blowed upon lovingly, spurs to flame.  This works easily for some, and not at all for others.  I was lucky and fortunate and made fire three times.  Between my first and second fires, though, I had an interesting sidetrack.  


Segueway:  Blue-eyed Darner


After my first sucessful fire I was counselled to start Wilding my fire kit, by replacing some of the provided materials with those that I find myself.  So I wandered into the forest looking for a piece of oak.  What I found was the little pond to the right of the South Trail.  It caught my eye with twitches of movement across the water.  They were too big and sinuous to be appropriate for the normal water skimmers, but as I crept closer I could not find their cause.  Then I saw it, a snake, about two feet long and quite thin, weaving back and forth, seeming to chase large tadpoles.  I was rapt, seeing this snake swim around and around.  I'd only ever seen a snake in water a few times before, and never so close.  
     As I crouched, I saw there were many dragonflies buzzing about, chasing flies and dipping in and out of exposed root crevices.  I knew at once what they were: Blue-eyed Darners.  Their blue eyes glow and their bodies radiate color in segments that look like black and blue tie dye.  Exactly like tiedye.  Of course.  I let them flutter around my unmoving form before I saw another snake in the water.  I eased out onto a log in the water and found to my amusement a third snake poking from under a submerged root.  Only the inch or so behind its head was out of the water.  It was like a new grass shoot, bobbing expectantly in the pond.  I almost fell off the log laughing at it.  
     In the end I did not find my piece of oak.  I did catch the attention of a passing student, who I had remembered mentioned missing his snakes back home.  He and I shared a good piece watching the garders spinning their ripples about.  That student then showed me the moss (right next to me) that I could use as a tinder bundle all by itself.  Fire kit Wilding: 1/3 complete!


Potluck:


Thursday nights, all year long, are potluck nights.  I made a demonslayer salad (constituting either 10 or more ingredients or at least 5 avocadoes.  I went the avocado route this time) and was not disapointed in the spread.  Everyone brought amazing things, not least of all was the liver and heart of the fawn we had come by the day before.  I ate a small piece of the liver, and it felt good.  The festivities devolved into a riot of clothes-pinning (as a lot of the new students became aware of the game for the first time as they discovered themselves to be pinned) and a lot of musical jamming.  There is a lot of joyous culture here to be shared in.  


Friday:  Workday


Every friday is Farm Project Day, where we work to actualize the permaculture vision of this farm.  This time I worked in weeding a bed and preparing it for our winter crops, mostly brassicas.  The other team worked on splitting firewood.  More on this as I become more familiar with the Permactulture in action here.  I know that the brain-squishing girl is the kitchen right this moment working, as ever, on canning of the fresh peaches from our trees.  She's been in here working so long on it.  I'll find my domestic stride around November, I expect.  


After lunch Gordon and I hopped in the bug and zoomed down to Olympia to visit a friend, but while there were many adventures to be had there, I don't think they need to trouble these tired fingers today.  I have resolved to not let a whole week of class pile up at once, now.  Pictures to follow, too.  Love to you all.