One More Holiday in York, Pa

Mexico is already a dream the Christmas season has fuzzied up. I was very excited to return to my family, friends, and the land, so when I saw my best friend waiting patiently in a chair for me in the airport, I felt content to be back. I came home with a debilitating cut on my foot that laid me up for several weeks, making me a little more sedentary, which isn’t much a problem in itself, but now, with two days left, I feel I am just once again settling into myself – walking in the fields and forest with dog and friends.
Listening mainly to her nose and occasionally my voice, our pointer, Sierra, runs through the fields with a directed abandon that brings me liberating delight. She circles back around to me from time to time, breathing heavier than I can imagine doing myself. She’s a huge pointer. As she runs past, a rooster tail of mud sprays behind her, her feet pounding the ground like a horse.
For a few minutes as the sun rises on Little Conewago Valley, everything is cast in a warm glow. The glistening cornstalks throw long shadows across the crunchy soil, and ice crystals form on the hairs just below my nose.
Watching Sierra run out ahead of me, my eyes follow the land to the north towards the hills where our burnt house waits to be demolished. I know I am home here, but don't always feel it with the people. My wanderings and lifestyle have brought me to appreciate a calm and welcoming demeanor. However back in Pa, I often pass awkward and cold conversations with most people. I try to remain warm and welcoming, but jeez is it ever tough to do so with someone so gruff and short as a clerk in a super market or a nine-fingered man cutting trees off his land in the woods I grew up hunting on.

Last week my sister and I took a walk in the woods. I don’t know the last time we walked through these woods together, but it is highly likely that neither of us were yet into our teens. We walked up the deeply rutted jeep trail that served as a perfect luge track for us in the snowy winters of the 90’s, and passed the rusty refuse fridge – a well-known landmark on these trails that has been there my whole life. We spliced together a walk of several miles between jeep and deer trail, circling the land we know, sharing stories of the places we passed.
Approaching our favorite hunting spot, we diverged to the trees we spent so much time in. The triple tree, a spray of three oak trees where Tiff and my dad used to hunt across from me, was now a triple stump with sprays of new growth coming up around it. The double tree where I hunted the most was now a single tree, its sibling just a stump as well. Standing directly beneath the tree I could see the black hook sticking out from the main trunk about 25 feet up where I used to hang my bow in waiting. Tiff and I pointed out some of the spots Dad used to position scent canisters around the deer trail that passed between our trees, and then waded through the next generation of head high saplings towards the jeep trail. Much of this land was beginning to enter a rather mature status as a mixed hardwood and hemlock forest. However, these woods are also quite valuable. Each year I come home, I find freshly cut stumps in some section of forest. The briars thicken for a few years as the saplings race skywards and then take over just in time for another round of their larger contemporaries to disappear to the needs of humanity.
Watching the forests change like this has made me quite sad in the past, but I am beginning to feel rather numb to the whole process. However, this scares me more. Nonetheless, there is much to enjoy.

Standing beneath a small hemlock I once sat under for a whole day during college, I told my sister how I feel there are these pockets of time and place in these hills that make everything hum in an almost silent unison. It is then I feel the quiet I seek. I would love to have a minimal shelter here in this one spot, so I could watch these woods change more closely.
Even better yet, I like to envision a small environmental education center here where the local school students come and learn about the forests, their history, and their heritage. I like to tell myself, if I had a place like this here in Pa, maybe then I could return with ease.
For now, it is back to the magic of the Pacific Northwest, the Olympic Mountains, Lake Crescent, and LeSage for another year in paradise. I can’t say how excited I am to return to what is for now, undeniably my home.

Mexico

Well, I intended to write a whole lot more on my blog during this trip, but the days have been so distracted by so much else, I haven't even written much. This has been an awesome trip. I still have about 10 days to go. Here is a glimpse at the two most memorable moments of the trip thus far.

From the beach:
I have always loved coconuts, and when I was in Australia I climbed the trees every chance I had to get some fresh ones. Feeling satiated by some fresh coconut milk immediately after arriving to Playa de los Muertos, I set up my hammock and settled in. In the shade of some whispering coconut trees, I had one of those moments that you know will stick with you.
Pelicans were sunning themselves atop the rocks overlooking the waves reeking havoc on the otherwise quiet beach, fragile frigate birds cruised high above the trees on thermals, occasionally bombing into the surf for small fish. Drifting in and out of sleep, at one point I remember looking around at the few other lucky people who had found this small beach and just thinking, "Wow, I have three more weeks to do nothing but this if that is what I want. Dis is a good life."

In the City:
On the subway one afternoon in Mexico City on my way back to Lindsey and Carolyn's apartment in Tlalpan, I was impressed by the diversity of ways people cruised the subway cars scraping out a living, or maybe not. People with speakers in their backpacks played homemade mixes of anything from salsa to Christmas carols, classic rock to classic orchestral. Other people walked around selling small bags of candy or packets of gum. The going price for most items was rarely more than 5 pesos, that's less than 50 cents. Some played beautiful songs on a guitar then walked around asking for spare change. Others took it to the nth degree, circumventing a 'fair' exchange or even guilt, and moving straight to shocking pity with self mutilation.
As one guitarist made his way onto the next car, I watched a boy and a girl about my age walking towards and past me as I clung to the railing over my head. The black wife-beater the girl was wearing said 'Puerto Vallarta Pirates' in faded white letters. The boy wore a white wife-beater and held a flannel shirt with some contents in it like a sack. I noticed huge, fresh scars on his shoulder, some with dry beads of blood still on them. The girl started spouting out a well-rehearsed pitch, and the boy dropped his sack to the ground with a clinking sound. I looked over, and there were some coins in the sack, mostly mixed with a pile of glass shards. I then realized where the scars had come from. As the girl told a story I mostly didn't understand in Spanish, I did manage to understand something to the effect of, "We have nothing else to do, all we have left is our body, and we are willing to cut it if you will help us." The boy sat on the subway floor and slammed his shoulder into the pile twice. It seemed a solemn shutter pulsed through the onlookers. As the car came to a halt, they picked up the sack of shards and coins, and walked around with their hands out. A lady my parents age dropped a 10 peso coin in the sack. That's about 80 cents.

So, sorry folks. I haven't been as diligent or inspired lately to write as much. I have been working a lot more on spending time with the people in my house, and I have been trying to work on some art skills as well, oh which I have few.

So, here are two photos that I thought were rather awesome the other day. I was hiking with a group of Seattle kids, and this buck walked up to us, and I saw I could frame Olympus in the background. The quality isn't the best, but it is pretty cool!

Scarcely a Moment at All

7/22/09

A momentous occasion last night – the northern lights. A group of us sat around a small fire on the lakeshore, picking out constellations, satellites, and shooting stars. As the sun passed barely beneath the horizon to the north, green bands stretched out tendrils reaching skyward. They were subtle in presence and motion, undulating faintly, and flowing like a creek across a beach. As one tendril would diminish into the horizon, another would rise at its side. After less than ten minutes they subsided, leaving just the faint luminescence of the lurking sun, teasing the night of its ensuing return.
And now this morning, things are distinctly calm, or perhaps it is just my mind that has subsided into the current of the life around me. I sit in the middle of the field here at work, nearly surrounded by forest, the lakeshore glassy-calm in front of me. A doe picks her way through the salal along the edge of the field. The voice of a brown creeper falls from the heights of a doug-fir like a lazy clump of moss. Various crossbills pipe away atop the conifers, and I strain to decipher their distinct calls. There are possibly four subspecies of this bird here, each with slightly distinct vocalizations, and each with a slightly different crossed bill, which is specialized to prying open the differently sized cones of the various native conifers.
As I stare into the treetops, picking out, identifying, and observing birds, at moments it becomes silent enough that the faint tapping of the tiny white flower petals dropping from the wilting bush fifteen feet away is all I hear. Like most things so delicate, the silence is ephemeral, and seconds later it gives way to the restless crossbills. Only hours after watching the northern lights dance below Polaris, the silent sunrise explodes across the mountainside, welcomed by an awaiting chorus of birds. I can feel time dissolve into a stream of unimportance. I watch the sunrise drift down towards the lake. My eyes wander to the swallows as they swirl around. Orange ripples dance across the lake, and soon a soft breeze accentuates the crisp turns in the swallows’ flight.
Once the sun peaks above the mountains on this side of the lake and washes the field in daylight, the birds quiet down and focus on foraging. Once again time slowly precipitates upon the day as people emerge from their cabins full of sleep and wander to the dining hall for coffee.
Regardless of their duration, experiences such as these remind me that so much endlessly awaits us. I believe I can find no better way to find the power latent in each day than to seek these moments, for once they have passed, it seems only then we realize they can scarcely be described as a moment at all.

The Olympic Park Institute Mission

I recently produced a video for my work's website, Olympic Park Institute. Enjoy

Summer Alpine Excursions

A friend and I headed out for a short overnight in the area of Obstruction Point to go on a ridge run out along the division between Lilly and Grand Valley. We camped up high, watched the sunset, and slept under the stars. While we were packing up after a bland breakfast, we spotted two nice size black bears skirting the ridgeline where we had come from. Once we were all packed up we headed off in their direction. One took off down the mountainside, while the other waited until we were much closer to take off the other direction across the meadows.






Mid summer. Sheesh, where is the time going?


Hiking out the valley we stopped to watch trout in the alpine lakes while picking out the songs of many birds around us. Our conversations were punctuated by moments spent in silence listening to the ethereal water-like song of the hermit thrush. To me, there is no sound that compares to the song of a thrush in the mountain meadows amidst the wildflowers of the summer.

Life Everywhere on Lake Crescent

Well, it is already the middle of July. We have days where I can lay out in the sun at our house and bake on our deck at near 90 degrees, and then days that feel like March, just a little warmer.

This morning I went through my usual routine. I woke up in the twilight to the soft keeer of an endangered Marbeled Murrelet filtering down through the blanket of clouds hovering halfway above up the mountains. The reflection across the lake was so still I could make out individual trees in the calm.

After a breakfast of barley, quinoa, oatmeal, goat yogurt, honey, apples, currants, and mate, I stretched out with some yoga, and hopped on my bike to head down the road. I pedaled slowly down the gravel road, across a steel bridge, and then up into the forest, along the Spruce Railroad Trail. This is an old railroad that was built during WWI to transport spruce from the coast so it could be used in the planes that were in high demand in Europe at the time. The war ended before the railroad was finished, and now the tracks have been removed and a small overgrown bike trail exists in it place. Along the five miles I bike on my way to work, I pass through forests of doug-fir three and four feet wide. From time to time the trail descends to the emerald lake shore. The water quickly drops off into sapphire depths.

Once I get to the canoe that is hidden under some trees directly across the lake from OPI, I usually just stop and lock my bike, but this morning as I was slowing down, a bird of prey dropped out of the trees and glided directly in front of me for awhile, before curling up into the trees above. It was a Barred Owl fledgling! It landed maybe thirty feet from me up in the trees, and let out a little wispy squeal like I have never heard. Another one answered it from further in the forest. I watched them fly around for awhile, eyeing me up from time to time with bobbing heads, and finally after they made their way upslope and out of sight, I hopped into the canoe and headed across the lake.

On my way across the lake I watched barn swallows swirl around above the water. A kingfisher made a lazy arc up in the air, and landed up higher in a tree along the lake shore, while a deer reached up high with hits neck outstretched to graze some doug-fir buds. What can I really complain about?