I want to say more about environmental writing, about what I’ve learned, but I feel it’s been already been covered in discussions and this blog well. I was disconnected, but now I’m not. I’ve come to value passion, again, as much as I do clarity. I took things for granted, but not anymore. I have little else to say now, as this class comes to close, but I would like to share what I’m doing in the next couple of days, as it speaks to my experience.
On Tuesday, my sister and one of my closest friends will be taking a drive to Lake Chelan and the Columbia River. We’ll be waking up early, having breakfast at our spot, and heading through Highway 2, better known as the North Cascades Highway. We’ll pass through an Indian Reservation, the Cascade Mountain passes, and through mineral-turquoise Diablo Lake. We’ll get higher in elevation until we see the mountains get snowcapped, the valleys daunting, with the air becoming light. But soon it will flatten out and we’ll go through Methow Valley, through Winthrop, Washington’s infamous and gaudy “Wild West” town and subtle, dusty Twisp. When we reach the Columbia, we’ll be heading north to the Okanogan Highlands, to see that steppe I’ve been dreaming of seeing all year. What was I thinking? That I could go without this? The primitive roads, the sagebrush, the signs for rodeos and stampedes, and all the forever blackened firs.
I don’t really have time or the money to be meandering. But I tell myself this is research, that now that I know what I’m identifying, it’s valid research. When the sun goes down, we’ll hit my cousin’s campground at the Falls, where Chelan meets the Columbia and have beers, yell and sing, and feel cool water.
The next day, we’ll wake up early with black coffee and pan-fried eggs, and take the rural route out to Spokane, dip down into the rolling clay fields of the Palouse, back west through the Basin and Yakima, our baffling “The Palm Springs of Washington.” We’ll go through vineyards, orchards, hops, through all the little towns along the highways of the Inland Empire that are little else besides a church and a gas station. I don’t know what we’ll do on this day. I just know it will end in Crescent Bar, watching the sunset over our dammed, but mighty Columbia with both Pittsburgh and Seattle feeling equally apart from me.
My time with friends and family will be shortened, and neither of the bunch will understand why this is so important for me, why it’s necessary to see what’s inland. To echo my first entry, they’ll never understand that this place is a crossroad to me, the place where I first became intimate with the land as much as people, the outer limits, the unknown of my home. I’ve lacked the tools, the eyes, the age and wisdom to look at this place and meditate on it. I’ve lacked them up until now.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
Final Place Entry: Thursday, July 28th and August 8th. The Ravine Trail and Confronting Solitude.
People here still ask me why I chose Pittsburgh. They probably always will. My answer will always be distance. How well can somebody write about a place that they’ve never seen from the outside? I write about my home now with passion, but that wasn’t always the case. I couldn’t wait to leave it after college. I’ve never forgotten how close I was to never coming back.
Today, I’m at my mother’s house, sitting outside on her deck. The weather is cool, in the low sixties, and a wind is lifting the smell of saltwater through the hemlock and strawberry trees to where I am. Right now, there is where I want to be. I want to be here with my dogs, my coffee, and even the crane flies. But I know the novelty will where off, I will grow restless, and crave Pittsburgh again, even though I was so happy to leave it behind the remainder of the summer. The Northwest is a funny place. It’s a great place to be from and it’s great place to end up. As for all that life between, Pittsburgh has served me far better.
On the Ravine Trail, I think of it as a city, a work in progress, a place reinventing itself. It’s me. I’ve become rather fond of it, even at times become defensive. Pittsburgh is like my sister. I can insult her, but no one else can. Soon, I’ll be leaving it on the Empire Builder.
There is little wildlife to be seen today in Frick Park, all of them certainly aware before I was of the coming storm and rainfall. It’s darker than it should be at this hour.
In this blog, I’ve portrayed this place as a poor substitute for my home, but that’s really no longer correct. Becoming somewhat frayed by living in a city, it’s honestly become a bit of a refuge.
I need distance from my home to write about it, but I need reminders, too. In everywhere else I’ve lived, I’ve neglected that, even avoided parks, and tried to go hard without. In Pittsburgh, I wasn’t doing so well with urban living and needed that hike, with that person in April. I can’t remember a time in all my travels where I just went into the woods and thought about my life. Not until now.
Standing here in the Ravine Trail, I again think about my life and all its comforts and distractions. I’m afraid of nature because of the silence and the deeper thoughts and reflections that usually go in hand with it. Maybe that’s why as much as I miss Washington, I’m always ready to leave it with difficulties such as someone I don’t want contacting me on my birthday, one less dog, a dinner table missing someone, suddenly all coming to the forefront, all now unavoidable.
I hear birds now, the static of cicadas high in the oaks. The clouds are getting darker, but the thunder and lightning has yet to begin. Their air is again stagnant, near tropical, although a cool breeze moves through the woods. I can feel the soft dirt through my shoes. Everything is okay. The trail is empty today. The solution to avoiding your own thoughts is to keep moving. But that’s not a sustainable or happy life, is it? Graduate school has decisively put me in place for two years. This class has had me coming here every other week to confront solitude.
One result: On the Empire Builder, I fall asleep at random intervals. Cat naps. My laptop is closed and my headphones are off. The first time I was on this train, it was an adventure. I didn’t want to miss a single unfamiliar landscape or any town. But now I know the route. I’m left with only my thoughts. I’m okay with that.
Another: I first became intimate with nature in the Inland Northwest, but Frick Park, of all places, appears to be my reacquaintance. The morning we arrive in Spokane, I notice maple trees. I realize that I learned how to identify maples from the Ravine Trail.
Today, I’m at my mother’s house, sitting outside on her deck. The weather is cool, in the low sixties, and a wind is lifting the smell of saltwater through the hemlock and strawberry trees to where I am. Right now, there is where I want to be. I want to be here with my dogs, my coffee, and even the crane flies. But I know the novelty will where off, I will grow restless, and crave Pittsburgh again, even though I was so happy to leave it behind the remainder of the summer. The Northwest is a funny place. It’s a great place to be from and it’s great place to end up. As for all that life between, Pittsburgh has served me far better.
On the Ravine Trail, I think of it as a city, a work in progress, a place reinventing itself. It’s me. I’ve become rather fond of it, even at times become defensive. Pittsburgh is like my sister. I can insult her, but no one else can. Soon, I’ll be leaving it on the Empire Builder.
There is little wildlife to be seen today in Frick Park, all of them certainly aware before I was of the coming storm and rainfall. It’s darker than it should be at this hour.
In this blog, I’ve portrayed this place as a poor substitute for my home, but that’s really no longer correct. Becoming somewhat frayed by living in a city, it’s honestly become a bit of a refuge.
I need distance from my home to write about it, but I need reminders, too. In everywhere else I’ve lived, I’ve neglected that, even avoided parks, and tried to go hard without. In Pittsburgh, I wasn’t doing so well with urban living and needed that hike, with that person in April. I can’t remember a time in all my travels where I just went into the woods and thought about my life. Not until now.
Standing here in the Ravine Trail, I again think about my life and all its comforts and distractions. I’m afraid of nature because of the silence and the deeper thoughts and reflections that usually go in hand with it. Maybe that’s why as much as I miss Washington, I’m always ready to leave it with difficulties such as someone I don’t want contacting me on my birthday, one less dog, a dinner table missing someone, suddenly all coming to the forefront, all now unavoidable.
I hear birds now, the static of cicadas high in the oaks. The clouds are getting darker, but the thunder and lightning has yet to begin. Their air is again stagnant, near tropical, although a cool breeze moves through the woods. I can feel the soft dirt through my shoes. Everything is okay. The trail is empty today. The solution to avoiding your own thoughts is to keep moving. But that’s not a sustainable or happy life, is it? Graduate school has decisively put me in place for two years. This class has had me coming here every other week to confront solitude.
One result: On the Empire Builder, I fall asleep at random intervals. Cat naps. My laptop is closed and my headphones are off. The first time I was on this train, it was an adventure. I didn’t want to miss a single unfamiliar landscape or any town. But now I know the route. I’m left with only my thoughts. I’m okay with that.
Another: I first became intimate with nature in the Inland Northwest, but Frick Park, of all places, appears to be my reacquaintance. The morning we arrive in Spokane, I notice maple trees. I realize that I learned how to identify maples from the Ravine Trail.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Prompt #5: Fire Ecology and the Serotinous Pine.
I love it when life has long arcs. I know, I know. Dramatic unity is best saved for fiction and creative writing, not real life. Janet Burroway devotes a significant section of her seminal Writing Fiction, to cement this difference in the novice writer. Still, I love it when it happens.
The element of nature I found myself most attracted to was always right in front of me, one of those things that sounded, as a kid (maybe even as an adult), too crazy to be real. I was drawn to it for that, never researched it, and just let it be.
Metaphor and symbol. Ugh. I compare handling them to handling live explosives. Simile is fine. They’re funny, light-hearted, and safe to use. Just noting a casual similarity that evokes. Metaphor is a stronger statement. It is. Not like. Is. I never go looking for them. If they’re in my writing, I’m usually using them by accident. I feel as if they’re too obvious, too unwieldy. They seem incompatible with minimalist writing, an enemy of word economy.
But on rare occasions, metaphors do just simply arise. When they do, they’re usually within nature. I remember a story I wrote about a man repressed, drying out near the Columbia River, reflecting on a member of his family who was far more wild and savage. I didn’t know it then, but the Columbia was perfect for it, really. Long, surging, originally mistaken for the ocean, but now dammed in fourteen different locations, now suppressed, suffocated.
The element I found myself drawn to was two particular kinds of pines, the lodgepole and the ponderosa. When I was with my father, watching the Tyee Creek Fire of 1994 level the North Cascades, and I fretted about the loss of trees, he told me not to worry. He said that the fire caused by lightning was a good fire and that the trees needed it. I was in disbelief, of course, watching firs being set ablaze that fire could give life to the forest. The next year, when we returned to the site of the fire, there were certainly charred trees, specifically firs. But next to them were, what I realize now, were lodgepoles, smaller, but radiant green, and ponderosa, gleaming orange, having shed their old bark.
Trees that only flourish, replicate, and/or reproduce in fire. I mean, that sounds absurd, right? I was obsessed with these trees for years, never knowing their names or how they really functioned until, well, nineteen years later when I had to do research for an environmental piece.
Lodgepole and ponderosa are different, but related. The lodgepole pine is what is called a serotinous tree. The seed release of a serotinous tree is triggered by environmental factors compared to maturity. The American Heritage Science Dictionary gives a slightly different definition: “[A serotinous tree is] late in developing, opening, or blooming. For example, serotinous pine cones may persist unopened on the tree for years and only burst open during a forest fire. Serotinous flowers on trees develop only after the tree has produced leaves.”
Huh. A tree that is late in blooming, only reaching maturity when exposed to an environmental trigger associated with destruction rather than any sort of birth. No, that’s not a slap to the face or a functioning metaphor at all.
The ponderosa is not serotinous the way a lodgepole is. It’s much more adamant than clever. Whereas the Tyee Creek fire consumed the fir, leaving their remains for more than a decade after, the ponderosa stood. Unlike the lodgepole, the ponderosa seeds, their resin containers, don’t need fire to be released. Between 45-60 years old, the cones drop, and the pollen spreads in a golden dust. Fire clears the thicket, the invasives, the squirrels and jays, and the ponderosa, last man standing, blushes orange and is free to reproduce unmolested.
Metaphor for patience and endurance? Nah.
Last thing: My thesis director has noted that of my collection, the one linking theme in every single one of them is fire. Whether it’s a wildfire, explosion, an act of self-immolation, or whiskey spat on embers at a campsite, there is just fire everywhere. I’m still working on it. Fire is still associated with destruction most ways you slice it. But with serotiny? Not so much.
The element of nature I found myself most attracted to was always right in front of me, one of those things that sounded, as a kid (maybe even as an adult), too crazy to be real. I was drawn to it for that, never researched it, and just let it be.
Metaphor and symbol. Ugh. I compare handling them to handling live explosives. Simile is fine. They’re funny, light-hearted, and safe to use. Just noting a casual similarity that evokes. Metaphor is a stronger statement. It is. Not like. Is. I never go looking for them. If they’re in my writing, I’m usually using them by accident. I feel as if they’re too obvious, too unwieldy. They seem incompatible with minimalist writing, an enemy of word economy.
But on rare occasions, metaphors do just simply arise. When they do, they’re usually within nature. I remember a story I wrote about a man repressed, drying out near the Columbia River, reflecting on a member of his family who was far more wild and savage. I didn’t know it then, but the Columbia was perfect for it, really. Long, surging, originally mistaken for the ocean, but now dammed in fourteen different locations, now suppressed, suffocated.
The element I found myself drawn to was two particular kinds of pines, the lodgepole and the ponderosa. When I was with my father, watching the Tyee Creek Fire of 1994 level the North Cascades, and I fretted about the loss of trees, he told me not to worry. He said that the fire caused by lightning was a good fire and that the trees needed it. I was in disbelief, of course, watching firs being set ablaze that fire could give life to the forest. The next year, when we returned to the site of the fire, there were certainly charred trees, specifically firs. But next to them were, what I realize now, were lodgepoles, smaller, but radiant green, and ponderosa, gleaming orange, having shed their old bark.
Trees that only flourish, replicate, and/or reproduce in fire. I mean, that sounds absurd, right? I was obsessed with these trees for years, never knowing their names or how they really functioned until, well, nineteen years later when I had to do research for an environmental piece.
Lodgepole and ponderosa are different, but related. The lodgepole pine is what is called a serotinous tree. The seed release of a serotinous tree is triggered by environmental factors compared to maturity. The American Heritage Science Dictionary gives a slightly different definition: “[A serotinous tree is] late in developing, opening, or blooming. For example, serotinous pine cones may persist unopened on the tree for years and only burst open during a forest fire. Serotinous flowers on trees develop only after the tree has produced leaves.”
Huh. A tree that is late in blooming, only reaching maturity when exposed to an environmental trigger associated with destruction rather than any sort of birth. No, that’s not a slap to the face or a functioning metaphor at all.
The ponderosa is not serotinous the way a lodgepole is. It’s much more adamant than clever. Whereas the Tyee Creek fire consumed the fir, leaving their remains for more than a decade after, the ponderosa stood. Unlike the lodgepole, the ponderosa seeds, their resin containers, don’t need fire to be released. Between 45-60 years old, the cones drop, and the pollen spreads in a golden dust. Fire clears the thicket, the invasives, the squirrels and jays, and the ponderosa, last man standing, blushes orange and is free to reproduce unmolested.
Metaphor for patience and endurance? Nah.
Last thing: My thesis director has noted that of my collection, the one linking theme in every single one of them is fire. Whether it’s a wildfire, explosion, an act of self-immolation, or whiskey spat on embers at a campsite, there is just fire everywhere. I’m still working on it. Fire is still associated with destruction most ways you slice it. But with serotiny? Not so much.
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