Category Archives: Nature

Firewood

14 trees have been taken down on the property I inhabit.  All of them dead, but still full of moisture.  We’ve been cutting and stacking and splitting, then covering with black plastic weighted down with empty 2 liter (?) soda bottles filled with water and hung by ropes across the stack.

When those trees hit the ground, the earth shook. They must’ve been 80 – 100 ft tall. Making firewood sounds like a bland, benign event.  It is an all encompassing, vital engagement with Nature.

Oh Deer!

Here on Whoopie (Whidbey) Island, I have no garden space.  It’s the first year in 25 years I haven’t actively lived and breathed through my garden.  I finally decided I HAD to have something, so I planted about 10 containers, with just the right (researched) soil mix, planted and waited through the weirdest summer weather I can remember in my adult life.  Finally, after way too long, it produced…beans, sunchokes, leafy chard, peas, herbs, and the tomatoes were hanging off the vines…and all of this was on my deck, not 3 feet from my front door.

Went to work one Thursday morning and visited all the plants on my way out the door. They were lookin’ good — full, lush. I was finally going to get a harvest!  Came home that evening and everything, and I mean everything (except the sage, rosemary and parsley) was eaten down to about 3 inches of stem.  All the beans, chard, peas, tomatoes and plants, chokes…the whole shebang…chewed off by a mamma doe and her two frisky fawns who’ve been hanging around, and who I NEVER thought would come within 3 ft. of the front door to steal the garden goodies.  Sigh.

With nice summer weather being so sporadic and fall already beginning, and no harvest, I feel like I’m in some kind of time warp.  Leaves are already turning on the maple outside my window.

Over the Moon

Grandmother Moon and The Ferry
Grandmother Moon and The Ferry

The moon is my Grandmother. When I see her round and glowing face, I greet her.

I breathe in connection to all that is as she passes over me each night.

Sometimes I dance and twirl and my moonshadow twirls and dances with me.

When I wake up in the night, I know she is with me.

When Grandmother Moon is hidden and away, I wish her well on her journey and then I make my prayers for the coming month.

I have a special prayer that comforts me: “Moon’s changing face, heal me.”

It means as we move steady in the sky through time and space, my connection to all that is will grant me the time and space to correct my ills, my wrong doings, my wrong actions.

They bombed the moon last night. They attacked my Grandmother.

I pray they will remember that they, too, are connected to all that is, and that they will have time to correct their ills, their wrong doings, their wrong actions. That we all will.

E-e-e-gads! Snakes…

Popeye
Popeye

We have a snake. Rattler. 5 tics. Molly pointed it out last night as it was lounging beside the deck. She was rather emphatic that we had a pending emergency and that we should move very quietly but somewhat urgently to remediate the situation. Her expression was unlike any I’ve seen her wear. I walked over to where she was pointing in kind of a Lassie sort of “Look, Timmy! Look! Look what Lassie found. Careful, Timmy, Careful!”

So I checked it out. And then I got a rake with a LONG handle and a 40 gallon garbage can and scooped the snake into the can, set the lid on it and set it on the tractor. In the morning, my friend Betsy and I went about our chores and after loading the truck with garbage, we placed the snake in his can on the back of the load, secured all, and drove a couple of miles down the road where we stopped at a pull-out, tipped the garbage can over to release the snake… and never saw it hit the ground.

Where the hell did that snake go anyway?????!!!!!

We looked around (somewhat passively) and decided it must have gotten away undetected.

Or it was still on the truck somewhere.

In the garbage? In the bumper? On the differencial?

So off we went to the dump. No snake.

And then we went to the Post Office. No snake.

And then to Nultons where we loaded 60 feet of squiggle black 10 inch irrigation tubes into the back of the truck. We never heard a rattle.

But then, hours after we got home, we heard a strange sound, a sort of chittering near the rabbits. We wondered if they were feeling threatened about something and went to investigate. Armed with a flashlight with a failing battery, we climbed into the rabbit pen. We flashed all the rabbits. All were fine. We climbed out of the rabbit enclosure and heard the distinct sound of a rattle. And there, beside my truck was our snake.

After locating the rake and shoving another garbage can my way, Betsy retreated to the bow of Calypso, my truck. She shined what pathetic beam streamed from the flashlight onto the snake while I tipped the garbage can over and flipped it in. Then with the can right-side up escorted the snake to his quarters– the bucket of the tractor where he spent the previous night in deja vu conditions: in a 35 gallon garbage can suspended above the ground in a nook created by a tractor’s bucket with a lid inverted on top of him.

“I’m Popeye the Sailor Man,” sang Betsy, “I live in a garbage can…”

Molly (short for Molecule) is my Jack Russell terrier who has more energy and curiosity than any life form ismolly entitled to.  Here’s a picture of her, focusing on small game.

Alaskan Forest Fires

Rain. Our communal prayers released a few drops from the heavens, then a few more
here and there. What an odd sensation! Now for several days it has increased to a
non-stop downpour. Forest fires in Alaska are out, thankfully, the garden is sweetly
bathed, but after several days I’m ready for it to stop. The dust has turned to
muck, the horses slipping in their now sludgy corral. Feel like such a whiner this
summer, I think because nothing has been in moderation, weather-wise. Whatever it
does, it does and keeps on doing it. The balance is missing. I’m on a see-saw — being
slammed up and down between extremes. Hang on!

Lake Superior

Hi Everyone,

I’m writing from the shores of Lake Superior…well not exactly on the shore right now, rather at the local wifi hotspot, the Ontonagon Township Library.

Lake Superior copyThis area is exquisitely beautiful; remote, simple — it’s like stepping back in time.  Lake Superior, in all her grandeur, is just about the most beautiful body of fresh water I’ve ever been privileged to love.

I heard an interesting rumor that a number of years ago, Dow Chemical and some other companies dumped 55 gallon drums of waste into the Lake near Duluth, and that the drums are decomposing and release toxic substances into the fresh water.  There are a few folks that are calling Washington about it and some have been told that cleanup was ‘on their list’ and others have been told that no one had heard a thing about it.  I’m going to try and find out more.

I came back here for a memorial and spent the day yesterday talking with dozens of people from all over the country.  I was amazed at the similarity of stories relating to unemployment, confusion and breakdown in the existing systems of this country, deteriorating infrastructure, need for sustainability, etc.  Things are much more dire than I had imagined.

I am so glad this blog is up and beginning to plump out.  It’s a premier resource in the making.

Fires in Alaska

Kathy here.  The smoke from the two major fires in our area in the interior of Alaska, the Wood River and Minto Flat fires, rolled in last night so thick the wilderness was like a packed bar loaded with smokers. Visibility down to less than 100 feet, this in a land of broad vistas and big sky. Continual dry days (.44 inches of rain in July, driest on record) and high temperatures, in the 80’s and sometimes 90’s, and no end in sight, have fanned the flames of these fires, one within 20 miles of Fairbanks, to immense killers. The Minto fire, as of a few days ago, was already 350,000 acres, or 600 square miles, across the Nenana River from the small Athabascan village of Nenana where I spent 26 years. The effects on wildlife are  incomprehensible: birds too young to fly away, moose calves too small to run through the thick brush. Fox,lynx, wolves, bears, squirrels, all with young. The beavers can at least dive down into the lakes, but their lodges, their protection, could catch fire. And no rain in sight.

But the wild blueberries and raspberries are ripe and ready early, an important part of our food supply, Mother Nature’s yearly  free giveaway. Yesterday afternoon friend Pam and I went into the hills north of here and found large patches, but the odd thing was that the ground was so dry it broke off the branches of the berry bushes and lichen as we searched with our little buckets. Instead of a moist sponge, the tundra crackled with every movement. Uncovered ground was hard and split open like the photos of African droughts I’d seen in National Geographics.

Horrified I apologized to the little plants that should have sprung back, never having seen this in 35 years in this country. Many of the berries were small, after sitting in the hot, relentless sun and 24 hours of daylight since they formed. But our buckets were full when we left. Kept our eye out for a large black bear seen in the area, my .44 strapped to my hip, but he was thankfully feasting elsewhere.

Without rain the few hay farmers in our area are suffering, along with the horse owners. Each horse up here needs about 3 tons of hay per horse for the year. The oil based fertilizer they use cannot disintergrate and nourish the grass plants without water, which has never been a problem in the past. So no one uses irrigation. At the first cutting in July, bales per acres was about 20 % of the normal amount. I was shocked when I took my flatbed trailer into my favorite farmer’s fields and left with 15 bales instead of 65. The grass was just too short.

The changes we are seeing here are extreme, as last summer with constant, record rain and finally flooding. My life depends on the weather: hay for horses, salmon for the sled dogs, adequate snow for sled dog tours in the winter, and for the last12 or so  years we have seen changes beyond what is considered normal for this far north. Excessive snow this past March closed many of the trails to even snowmachines.In the backcountry snow would be up to the top of my legs in many places, and I am 5’10” with my boots on. On one trip I had to turn a 10 dog team around in a narrow trail, and found the leaders on top of me as I stepped off the trail and fell into the deep snow, my legs cemented into place. Chaos !

All of this tells me to be flexible, do not assume and predict. Just when I am at that age when I would like to settle back a bit, cozy in my knowledge of a land and it’s rhythms. But the dance has changed, and I better learn some new steps.

Living on the Edge on the High Desert of Washington

Tara Here. Now how I got here… That is a direct result of Intentional Manifestation.

In 2001 I ventured to North Dakota to try to “do life” with a man who represented himself as “a rancher.” All was not quite as he presented it during our courtship that began as an Internet romance. But oddly enough, I fell in love with his life and his ranch and his child and the man. I am writing a book, the working title for which is 48 Days in North Dakota in which I discuss small-scale ranching and the challenges presented when one tries to get into farming or ranching–having the passion but not the family experience.

Four years later I found the land I call The 3-Bell Ranch. It is everything I “put out there” almost ten years ago, even before my journey to North Dakota. There are acres and acres of pasture for my horses. I’m flanked by State land. The views here are absolutely breath-taking. The energy of the land soothes the soul and heals the body.

But it didn’t feel like that when I landed here a year ago!

The house was a ramshackle shack suffering from years and years of neglect from owners whose love of the land and passion for being orchardists led them to a life of the edge– the plight of small farmers, orchardists and ranchers all over this country. It took only two years of being paid late by the Gold-digger Co-op to launch the snowball of financial ruin that smashed them flat;  they were forced to rip out their cherry trees and apple trees –for here, in Central Washington, if you don’t maintain your trees (i.e. spray them), you must remove them. With the trees went the irrigation. Without irrigation, noxious weeds took hold. And without income from the land, the bank foreclosed.

I bought the land at auction – gambling that I would find water when a well was dug for household water. The well turned out to produce 35 gallons per minute, and was 180 feet deep. In a conversation with Fred Cook, of Cook’s Irrigation, I learned that 20 years ago, a well at this location would have only been ten or fifteen feet. The water table’s receding. Water rights are at risk. Without water the Okanogan Valley will consist of sagebrush, a bit of bunch grass and an array of noxious, invasive, non-native species such as hounds tongue, Russian and Diffuse Knapweed, Baby’s Breath, Dog Bane, Saint John’s Wort, and so on and so forth. Without irrigation it will take 30 to 40 acres to feed a horse or steer during the growing season, but there would be no way to grow hay here except on small areas where the water table is so high that “sub-irrigated” grass will grow.

There is so much to learn about living in this country.

Water is precious. Every drop is precious. Without irrigation there would be no apple trees, no cherry trees, no pear trees, or hay crops or tomatoes or lettuce or any viable commercial crop.

People are on the edge here. When the recession struck the U.S., not many people  here felt it; they were already dirt poor. If you look at the second hand shops you see it. People use things far beyond their “worn” status; they use them until they’re spent– beyond thread bare– beyond “worn out.” They’ve been sewn, glued, welded, mended time and time again until there’s just nothing left to mend.

—  LIVING ON THE EDGE, PART II —

Years ago I was part of a cadre of teachers in Washington who had been selected to teach other teachers how to use technology to improve student achievement. In our State-wide meetings, those from Eastern Washington used to complain that Western Washington controlled the State and that their needs were neither understood nor adequately addressed. They were so right. Eastern Washington is a different world. It’s beyond Beyond. People here are honest, true, and friendly. They take care of each other. There’s an unspoken pact of reciprocity.

In July 2009 I had the opportunity to spend several weeks in the company of some really amazing young men who installed permanent irrigation sets on the large, unwieldy portion of my land I refer to as the “back 40”– a 12.5 acre field that has been fallow for seven or eight years now. “We’ll get her done,” they’d say. “Don’t worry; you’re in good hands.”

A rational person would look up and exclaim, “No one can do that!” but here, everyone does the impossible. They have to. They have to rise to the occasion, to step onto that frayed tightrope believing that it will not snap under their weight, knowing even if it did, someone, a neighbor, a stranger, God perhaps, would catch them before they hit bottom.

“We’ll get her done,” is the ‘signature quote’ for the Okanogan. It’s a hard life. A life on the edge. There is a daily reminder that we are fragile, interconnected beings.

I feel at home here in this place where the word “impossible” does not exist. And so here I am with my horses, mules, pony, dogs and rabbits, living close to the land, documenting this existence through video and digital photography– my passions. Each year I share some of my favorite images of horses in a calendar I call Horse as Horse in Okanogan County. The calendar features my herd shot at liberty in wild areas of Central Washington. And my next project will be to create brief videos documentaries about agriculture in the Okanogan as well as training videos teaching people skills such as selecting irrigation systems, strategies for installing them on large tracts of land, repairing lines, sprinklers, etc. as well as instructing people about using horses in small scale farm operations.

A Story About Jane

Jane the Gentle Leader
Jane the Gentle Leader

Jane is a blue-eyed beauty, an awesome lead dog that was sold for $4,000 4 years ago from a retiring Iditarod musher to another. She was run too hard and injured, then traded to a veterinarian for vet work. She was made to run 60 miles at -65F
without conditioning and collapsed on the trail. She was then given to me (because it was figured she would never run again I’m sure.) Her original owner was stunned when he heard this story.

She had a slight shoulder injury when I got her. She is a gem, one of those rare leaders you can trust your life to…she is now 11 and in semi-retirement, relaxing under a shady tree as I write this. She is a gentle soul, and I shudder to think what she has been put through.

Last winter, after a huge snow, about 2 ft, our trail was obliterated. The snowmachine guy couldn’t find it in many places, which meant we would sink and flounder  without a base. We had guests, so I hooked up Jane and nine others, put the guests in and off we went. She found the original trail under all that snow.

I was screaming her name and yahooing and tears ran down my face. How these dogs do such things is nothing short of mindboggling.