Endings and All

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

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

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

So.  Where to begin?

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

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

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

It is very hard to draw things realistically.

Pencil smudges.  Especially by accident.

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

There is a lot of erasing.

Lynx rufus, bobcat

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

Megaceryle alcyon, Belted Kingfisher, juvenile, never flew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the doozie that had us all going:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The takeaway for Survival Week for me is pretty simple:

Spend more time on the shelter. 

Know the plants better.

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

I love my friends. 

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

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

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