The trail up to Angel’s Rest

The View from on top of Angel’s Rest

From Angel’s Rest up to Devil’s Rest

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Snapshots of our recent trip to San Francisco, CA via I-5. I’m yet to drive the 101 from coast-to-coast (which is on my short list of things to do in the next couple of years), but the view from I-5 is still quite spectacular.

Previously, we had driven from San Francisco to San Diego and from Portland to Seattle, so this connecting trip helped put the last of the puzzle into place. Next stop, Vancouver BC!

Just over the OR boarder

Mt. Shasta

California Flora

The Sutro Baths

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Venerated by early environmentalist while disdained by liberals and conservatives alike, the late Edward Abbey was never a man to go with the flow. In this excerpt from the 1980 novel Good News read how Abbey foresaw many of the environmental problems we are facing today and what, if anything, we can do about them.

“It may have been, as the man on the Tower would say, a failure of courage. Or to use his preferred cliché, a failure of nerve. It may never have happened at all. There was indeed, in those fading years of the doomed century, a sense of overwhelming illusion in the minds of men and women. The cities became unreal. Not so much unbearable as unreal. To the millions crowded within them-for it seemed they could not live elsewhere, in a landscape owned by corporations and dominated by gigantic machines-the ever-growing cities assumed the shape of nightmare. Not a nightmare of horror but a nightmare of dreariness, a routine and customary tedium. Reality became personal, individual, limited to the walls of a room in the center of an enormous hive. The blue eye that glowed from the center of the wall opened only into deeper realms of loneliness. Friends clung together, then were torn apart. Men and women feared one another and searched for safety in isolation. Families withered, scattered across a continent, attached by the thinnest strands of brief, tenuous, one-dimensional, and unreliable communication. To leave the illusory safety of the room was only to find oneself in a corridor without windows leading out into the corridor of the streets, where the walls were of glass and steel, the floor of concrete and asphalt, and the ceiling a dense umber haze through which a pale sun, ever more feeble, shone rays without warmth and little light. At night the layer of smoke and fog and industrial gases cut off all view of the stars, reflecting the vast illuminations of the cities, which extended for hundreds of miles in all directions. The streets were jammed with clamorous machines, crowded with endless hordes of silent humans, most of them wearing air-filtering masks; one saw only the eyes of others, and all eyes were wary, alert with fear, or blank, withdrawn into the inner space of abstraction. A terrible restlessness infected every movement, every gesture.

The disintegration was personal and, at the same time, international. The fear that paralyzed the emotions of men and women in their lonely rooms also poisoned the reaction of nations to one another. As each solitary human sought to preserve his own integrity, so each nation strove to ensure its survival at the expense of all others. The fragile webs of a planetary economy frayed apart in an ever-intensifying struggle for the resources to support a worldwide industrial system. One breakdown in a small Midwestern nation led to massive dislocations, anger and panic in great nations thousands of miles away. War became continuous, limited in scale but never ceasing, breaking out in a new locality as it subsided into chaos and civil war in another. Nuclear weapons were used, as they had been used once before by the first nation to develop them, not on the grand and universal scale envisioned by the most fearful, but in local and regional strife, a practical application of means always available, for ends deemed reasonable by military and diplomatic minds. The unthinkable had always been thinkable. In the effort to compensate for losses abroad, each industrial nation attempted to supply its needs by exploiting to the limit-and then beyond-its own resources of land and forest, water and metals and minerals. The fuel needs of the machine were considered paramount, but the effort to keep the machine operating led to destruction of basic resources needed for the production of food. agriculture itself had long before been mechanized, industrialized, assimilated into the corporate empire, the farmland submerged beneath the growing cities or minded and stripped to produce the power needed to keep the cities functioning, the machines in motions, agribusiness alive. The immediate result, as certain cities vanished, was the economic strangulation of others. Religious fanaticism joined with nationalism and secular ideologies to destroy and sometimes to self-destroy the sources of power on which the overindustrialzed nations depended. Invisible poisons spread through the atmosphere, borne by the winds from the guilty to the innocent. But all were innocent, all were guilty.

The majority of nations had lost the ability to be self-sufficient, even to satisfy the elementary needs of their people for food. Now every nation was losing this ability. The cities could not feed themselves; they were largely abandoned as urban millions spread into the countryside in search of food. Those who suffered least were those accustomed to poverty and hunger; those who suffered most were the inhabitants of the rich nations. And in the richest nation of them all the harshest changes came to the few but precarious, monstrous cities that had once appeared, briefly, in that nation’s arid West; in those desert lands where, as the cautious had foreseen, “cities were not meant to be.” Most of the people had disappeared, fleeing to the greener regions from which, as everyone knew, their packaged food came. But even in the most desolate and devastated of the remote cities a few men and women survived, clinging to the ruins, trying to rebuild the simple farming and pastoral economy that had been destroyed by the triumph of the city, trying to re-create a small society of friends in a community of mutual aid and shared ownership of land. For a few years they were left in peace, forgotten by a world that seemed, for all they could tell, to have forgotten itself-and then the gates of the citadel were opened and certain men came forth with aspirations far more grand than those of farmers and herdsmen and hunters. The oldest civil war of all, that between the city and the country, was resumed.”

NOTES: Cross posted at the mindfulparadigm . Photo courtesy of Combusean

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In 2008 the economy crashed and all around the world markets fell as scientists screamed about the Earth’s demise to no avail. The American Consumer wasn’t listening and chose instead to go on wrecking the world.

As the Bush era ended, John McCain tried to charm the nation with his hot-headed ways and Sarah Palin became the white-trash butt of a dangerous national joke. Crowds gathered in Minneapolis shouting “Drill Baby Drill!”, but there was a bigger crowd in Denver who spoke of responsibility, dignity, and hope.

That sound is America turning on a dime again, just when we all had stopped believing that we could turn away from our own selfish aspirations and entitlements. Here we go again, turning, voluntarily, back towards progress.

We are still awash in ignorance, greed, lack of responsibility, and mis-infotainment, but now the numbers are getting close to even. Every small-minded, scientific-revisionist dogmatist is matched by an open-minded, aware, and cynical idealist.

This year there was a word, a reticent but solemnly felt word that was on so many lips whether we uttered it or not. The word was revolution .

We are living through the change so many of us have conjured for so long, a cultural re-alignment, a great crash and a reckoning.

How much longer can any of us go without our hands in dirt, without our lungs inhaling all that clean air that we can restore with a little care and planning. How much longer can we distract our bodies with newer, flashier toys before our mind revolts entirely?

For many decades now we have watched the world change before our eyes. Our forests have disappeared, as have the farms, clean water, and our national will and dignity.

No animal can live far beyond the degradation its environment. Humans are animals; the same rules apply to us. This truth we know instinctively in our bones, down beneath the product placement and preemptive war, down father past the segregation and the legacy of tyranny, beyond the preciousness and the righteousness, beyond the certainty of the truth, we sense that we have failed our environment and now the environment is turning its back on us.

Our current financial crash is just the price we must pay for our greed. Unfortunately, there are decades of greed to atone and the planet is yet to cash in all of the debt that is due to it. Before the reckoning is through there will be much to dismantle and much to repair.

Only our hands can do it. Only our minds can steer the craft.

Hope is only hope. Action makes it real.

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This weekend the husband and I went camping for the first time in Oregon. We drove about 60 miles southeast of Portland to the McNeil Campground in Mt. Hood National Park (you can see some awesome pictures from our weekend here ).

After a day of hiking we came back to the campsite, read until dark, cooked some delicious food on the fire, and sat by the campfire as night fell, talking until the firewood was used up and it was time to go to sleep under the stars.

I was mesmerized, this weekend, by the campfire. In this enclosed space, outside in the middle of the grand Oregon woods at night, it was easy to forget about the rest of the world. All of the debts and bills and deadlines and obligations just slipped away, and I was left with only the fire before me and my husband.

Our conversation this weekend was easy and deeply personal. Effortlessly, we were separated from the relentless nagging, complaining, and petty, loving bickering that too often finds its way into our daily life. But the connection I felt this weekend was more acute than simple escapism.

I believe that what I came to this weekend was a tactile, rather than a merely intellectual, understanding of how our ancestors lived and just how profoundly detached our modern world has become from the natural cycles of our world. For six years I lived in a city where you could barely see the sky at night; I had not realized how profoundly this disconnection had affected me.

In sitting by the campfire I reconnected to a sensation that is very old, very basic, and deeply revelatory. I have a couple of small things to share with you that have helped me to understand this feeling. The first is a short video that I made of the campfire. Watch how the flames emerge from the wood, how it flickers, and how it consumes with a devastating energy that is essential to our survival.

Second, I have been intrigued since moving here by the Native American mythology of this land. The tribes that lived in this region had a deep connection to the land, and it seems that every mountain, lake, river, and gorge here has a creation myth attached to it. Below is one of these myths, shared by several of the indigenous tribes of the area. Unlike our Western myths, which are hierachical and rigid in their construction, these Native American myths focus on community and collaboration with the natural world. In other words, man is not the overlord of nature but merely a small part of the natural cycle.

HOW COYOTE BROUGHT FIRE TO THE PEOPLE
from INDIAN LEGEND OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST by Ella E. Clark

…[This myth] was known all the way from the Karok along the Klamath River in northern California to the Plateau tribes of northern Washington.

At the beginning of the world, people had no fire. The only fire anywhere was on the top of a high mountain, guarded by evil sprits, or skookums. The skookums would not give any of their fire to the animal people. They were afraid that if people should become comfortable, they might become powerful—as powerful as their spirits.

So the people had no heat in their lodges, and they had to eat their salmon raw. When Coyote came among them, he found them cold and miserable.

“Coyotes, they begged, “bring us fire from the mountain, or we will die from the cold.”

“I will see what I can do for you,” Coyote promised.

When the new sun came up, Coyote began the long climb to the snow-covered top of the mountain. There he found that three old, wrinkled skookums watched the fire all day and all night, one at a time. While one guarded, the others stayed in a lodge near by. When it became another’s turn to watch, the ones at the fire would come to the door and say, “Sister, sister, get up and guard the fire.”

At dawn, when the air was chilly, the new guard was slow in coming from the lodge. “This is my time to steal a brand of the fire,” Coyote said to himself. But he knew that he would be chased by the three skookums. They were old, but they were very swift runners. How could he get away from them?

Though Coyote was very wise, he could not think of a good plan. So he decided to ask his three sisters who lived in his stomach in the form of huckleberries. There were very wise. They could tell him what to do.

But at first his sisters in the form of huckleberries would not help him. “If we tell you,” they said to Coyote, “you will say that you knew that yourself.”

Coyote remembered that his sisters did not like hail. So he looked up into the sky and called out, “Hail! Hail! Fall down from the sky.”

His sisters were afraid and cried, “Stop! Stop! Don’t bring the hail. Don’t bring the hail. We will tell you whatever you need to know.”

Then his three sisters told him how he could get a brand of fire from the three skookums and how he could bring it down the mountain to the people.

When they had finished talking, Coyote said, “Yes, my sisters. That is what I thought. That was my plan all the time.”

When Coyote had come down from the skookums’ fire, he called all the animals together, just as his sisters had directed. He told each animal—Cougar and Fox and Squirrel and others—to take a certain place along the mountainside. Each place was in a line between the people’s lodges and the fire guarded by the skookums.

Then he climbed the mountain again and waited for the sun to come up. The skookum guarding the fire saw him, but she thought him just an ordinary animal skulking around the lodge.

At dawn, Coyote saw the skookum leave the fire and heard her call, “Sister, sister, get up and guard the fire.”

As she went inside the lodge, Coyote sprang forth and seized a burning brand form the fire. Down across the snowfields he ran. In an instant the three skookums were following him, showering ice and snow upon him as they ran. He leaped across the huge cracks in the ice, but soon he could hear the skookums behind him. Their hot breath scorched the fur on his flanks. One of them seized the tip of his tail in her claw, and it turned black. Ever since then, coyotes’ tails have been tipped with black.

Panting and hot, Coyote reached the tree line and sank to the ground, tired and out of breath. There Cougar jumped from his hiding place behind some little fir trees. He seized the burning brand and ran down through the scrubby trees and the rocks. When he came to the taller trees, Cougar passed the fire to Fox. Fox ran with it until he came to the thick underbrush.

Then Squirrel seized the hot brand and leaped from tree to tree. The fire was still so hot that it burned a black spot on the back of Squirrel’s neck and made his tail curl up. You can see the black spot and the curled tail on squirrels even today. The skookums, still chasing the fire, hoped to catch Squirrel at the edge of the forest.

But under the last tree, Antelope was waiting to run with the brand across the meadow. Antelope was the fastest of all animals. One after another, the animals carried the fire. All hoped the skookums would soon be tired out.

At last, when only a coal was left, it was given to squatty little Frog. Squatty little Frog swallowed the hot coal and hopped away as fast as he could hop. The youngest skookum, though she was very tired, was sure she could catch Frog. She seized his tail, and held tight. But Frog did not stop. He made the biggest jump he had ever made. And he left his tail behind him in the skookum’s claws. Ever since, frogs have had no tails.

Still Frog did not stop. He made a long, deep dive into a river and came up on the other side. But the skookum leaped across. A second time she caught up with Frog. He was too tired to jump again. To save the fire, he spat it out of his mouth on Wood, and Wood swallowed it. The other two skookums joined their sister. All three stood by, helpless, not knowing how to take the fire away from Wood. Slowly they went back to their lodge on top of the mountain.

Then Coyote came to the place where the fire was, and the people came close, too. Coyote was very wise. He knew how to bring fire out of Wood. He showed the people how to rub two dry sticks together until sparks came. He showed them how to use the sparks to make chips and pine needles burn. And then he showed them how to make a bigger fire from the burning chips and pine needles.

Ever after that, the people knew how to use fire. With fire they cooked their food, and with fire they heated their homes.

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8/02/08
Today we drove 50 miles southeast of Portland to visit Mount Hood. You can see Mount Hood from the city, and from here the mountain is a mysterious site to behold. From the summit, however, Mount Hood and the Cascades are a revelation.

I was not aware of the car’s stress as it climbed to the Timberline Lodge (a fantastic old WPA lodge where they shot “The Shinning”). So I was shocked to get out of the car to air thin and cold, and pockets of snow clinging to the ground on this, the first week of August.

With a summit at 11,249 feet, Mt. Hood is the highest peak in Oregon and the third highest point in the Cascade Mountain Range. The mountain is home to 12 glaciers and stands on over 1.06 million acres of National Forest. For more info on the mountain click here

Mt. Hood is also the mountain in Oregon most likely to erupt, though the likelihood of that happening in the next 30 years falls between 3 and 7 percent.

Here are some pictures from our day:


At this point, we are 6,000 ft. above sea level and the mountain’s summit seems like a short hike from where we are. But distance has a different scale up here, because that summit is still another 5,249 feet above where we’re standing.

The view looking south from Timberline Lodge.

The forests at this altitude have a distinct character that is barren, alien, and quietly calm.

I love these weekend hikes because they clear my mind of the week’s clutter and the city’s noise. It’s also hard to take yourself too seriously up here, given how comical a human body seems in comparison to the mountain’s scale.

Entering the wilderness. I look forward to camping here soon.

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Our first weekend in Portland, Brandon and I hiked to the top of Multnomah Falls just outside of the city in the Columbia River Valley. Multnomah Falls is a gorgeous drop, the second largest year-round water fall in the United States.

At the top of the falls, we hiked back a ways from the other tourists and found a quiet little creek and some rocks where we could sit and read, write, and snap photos.

This little video is a meditation compiled from the pictures we took that day. It isn’t profound, but it’s my first attempt at such a project. The background music is I Ghost 1 by Nine Inch Nails.

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For the past week I have not felt like myself, and not in the ways that one would suspect when packing up their lives and moving two time zones away from anyone you know. No, the feeling of “not self” that I have experienced is more primitive, more innate.

Walking through the park after diner tonight I began to grasp part of what has brought this feeling on. I am living farther north than I have lived before (by my amateur calculations, Portland seems to be about 4 degrees latitude north of Chicago). Because of this, and because we moved here the week of Summer Solstice, we are having the longest days of the year right now. The sun seems to be on the horizon until nearly 10 o’clock here. Even as I write this it is 9:04 and the sun has another good thirty minutes before it begins to set. My circadian rhythms have gone awry. Join this with the loss of 9-5 servitude, and the freedom to be creative at any point in the day, and suddenly it seems as though I am a different person, that I have a different purpose and flow than I did before.

Of course, when you feel you have all the time in the world it’s also easy to not achieve much, and much of the resistance I felt to working last week can, I believe, be linked to this phenomena.

So, to counteract this confounding paradox (more time to create=decreased creativity) I set myself on a schedule today.

My day is now broken up into digestible bits, with time for exercise, eating, reading, emailing, and doing basic household chores all given a fragment of what would be my 9-5 work day. I’m sticking to the schedule this week to see how it goes.

Today, I still found it difficult to completely concentrate and most of my writing did not happen in the allotted times. Yet, tonight I’ve been working more than on recent nights so I think that subconsciously I may be compensating for the time I missed.

Physically, I feel really good today and my running this morning had a tranquil, purposeful ease about it. My writing, as tough as it is right now, seems to be coming along and a “narrative” is arising that seems like it may be the start of something longer. I should know more by the end of the week, when on Friday I stop to take a brief account of the work that I’ve managed to get done in the last two weeks.

For now, Over and Out.
JHW

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