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.
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| 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) |
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.
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!
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
