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.)