Citizenship, Rules, and Human Relations

            When the organizers of a music festival called Apple Jam chose, for their next venue, a piece of property eight miles up the road I live on (and two miles from my house), the residents were alarmed. We signed petitions to ask the county not to grant the permit, and we filled the courthouse at the hearing.

            That is the citizenship part: that so many of us were willing to take the time and the travel to come to town for a hearing that concerned us, and that the governmental process permitted that kind of citizen involvement.

            At the hearing, the parliamentarian explained in detail which laws were relevant and how the applicant had met those requirements. Then, one by one, people came up to speak for or against granting the permit. We residents talked about the dangerous situation with traffic on our narrow, winding, two-lane, shoulderless road, with 2500 Apple Jam people going up and down it in RVs, camping vans, pick-up trucks, SUVs, and other cars. We talked about the difficulty of getting emergency vehicles, either to the site or to residents. We talked about fire danger, drugs and alcohol use, people turning up the wrong driveway looking for the event or asking for water or gas, the creek as prime habitat for the endangered coho salmon, and so forth.

            Then things took a surprising turn, and this is the human relations part. The man who had submitted the permit and who, it turned out, had started the Apple Jam several years ago, asked, at the end of his testimony, whether, if he withdrew his application, he would get back his deposit. He said that the festival people had already listened to the community and didn’t want conflicts, so they had found an alternative venue and would withdraw their application if they wouldn’t lose their money.

            Suddenly we didn’t dislike the Apple Jam folks, after all. Suddenly they were just musicians who wanted to have a festival. Suddenly it sounded like a good idea, nothing different from hippie festivals I myself attended back in the day. But we had never thought the Apple Jam itself a bad idea, only that the chosen venue was unsuitable.

            Then the rules. The parliamentarian suggested that the applicants, instead of withdrawing their request, could continue the process and let the permit be either denied or granted, after which they could, if they so desired, not use the permit. The money, he said, was only a deposit, so the part which had not been spent already in putting forward the process would be returned. The applicant agreed to continue with the process, though it seemed superfluous now. I don’t quite understand why the parliamentarian didn’t just let the applicant withdraw the application, as he had expressed his willingness to do, and let the process be at an end.

            But the process ground on. The three county commissioners spoke to the issue, a motion was made to deny the permit, and a vote was taken: two for the motion, one against (on the grounds that the applicants had met the criteria as specified by law). The permit was denied.

               The residents were relieved. They excited to have won.

            As I left the courthouse, I met the organizer who had offered to withdraw the application. I shook his hand, thanked him for his generosity, and wished him luck with the festival. Then, as a reciprocal gesture of generosity and thanks, another of the neighbors on the road suggested that we would take up donations from residents to help defray the costs the festival people entailed for having to go through the application and hearing process. We all smiled, shook hands, wished everyone well, and went home.

            During that short time we had had to notify everyone on the road about the proposed event and to organize our protests, there were mumblings about getting a lawyer to help us stop the event from happening here if the permit had been granted, a lawsuit that, I think, would have gotten nowhere, since everything was done legally.

            No one during that time mentioned talking directly with the Apple Jam folks themselves. It seems like such an easy solution, now. We know, now, that they were receptive to community relations. It was they, not we, who looked beyond the rules.

            What I am left with is a feeling of gratitude, not just for the outcome of the citizenship process but also for the lesson the Apple Jam folks taught me: that while citizenship is a good thing and rules are necessary, human relations based on genuine respect and generosity of spirit trump everything else.

Paean to the Madrone

            When I first came to the Siskiyou Mountains, almost fifty years ago, I, like everyone I know who first comes here, marveled at the beauty of the tall, red-trunked trees throughout the woods. I thought them so beautiful! But I quickly learned that long-time residents didn’t think so highly of them. “Madrones,” I was told dismissively, “– they’re weed trees.”

            Now I, too, am a long-time resident, and I see that madrones do sprout around cut trunks like weeds and that maybe if you’re in the timber business, you think they take space in a forest that would be more useful for growing Douglas fir. Some people think the only good madrone is a dead madrone, since it makes the best firewood – longer burning than fir, pine, or cedar; cleaner than oak (less ash); less deadly hot than manzanita. Nonetheless, I love madrone trees, with their four-star beauty – visual, tactile, olfactory, and audial.

            No tree trunk in the forest is more beautiful the madrone’s. The shaggy old bark, found mostly at the lower end of the tree, dark brown, sometimes almost black, contrasts with the smooth skin growing under it that is replacing it, pushing it aside, leaving it behind as the tree stretches upward.

This new skin is orange-red in one tree, orange-green in another, pink in another, sometimes almost white. The old bark splits and recedes to make way for the new, a woolly coat over silky-smooth shoulders. To run your hand down a madrone trunk is a journey of textures: smooth as silk, scaly as a lizard’s skin. Some new skins blend pinks, oranges, reds, browns, and greens so thoroughly they run together as in an oil painting. While hiking, I entertain myself for miles trying to find words for these colors.

            The madrone is the ballet dancer of the woods. Its elongated trunks dance around other trees and themselves; its sinewy limbs stretch into pliés and arabesques. 

Sinuous limbs bend with ease and grace into chevroned shapes, stretching for the light (scientifically) or for the joy of being alive in the forest (anthropomorphically). Sometimes the skin of the madrone is stretched so tight, I can see the muscles underneath, sinewy and rippling. Sometimes the tree demands ritualistic homage for its shape, its color, its textures.

  

            In early summer Madonna-white blossoms on female madrones emit a tropical scent. By autumn those blossoms have given way to Christmas-red berries. I have decorated a holiday table with madrone berries. I have strung madrone berries as beads. I have seen bear scat on the trail full of seeds of madrone berries.

            Many trees produce music when the wind whistles through them or rustles their leaves. Sometimes on a windy day, the tall firs and pines seem to talk to each other with their creaks and squeals as they rub against one another. But the madrone is the only tree I know that produces music all on its own.

            I heard this delicate serenade one hot, dry day in September, when I was standing in a wood of mixed conifers and madrones and heard a thin crackling, like a shower of very fine, broken, crystal glass or the violins at the beginning of The Rite of Spring: ch-ch-ch-ch. If the crows’ feet that break out around smiling eyes made sound, it would be like that. But nothing was moving. As though in an enchantment, the tiny music seemed sourceless. Suddenly, then, I broke through the veil of mystery as my eyes focused on the madrone trunks in front of me, with their layers of older, darker bark, shaggy and brittle, curls that had dried and hardened, and the newly split, green bark beginning to curl back, exposing the beautiful red underneath. What I was hearing was the tinkling music of madrone bark splitting.

Spring Snow Surprises

              I awoke this morning to a beautiful snowfall whitening the world outside my window. Snow had been predicted at 5000 feet, but here I am at 2600 feet, surprised and delighted at this last gasp of winter.

           However, it hasn’t made me recite the Lord’s Prayer, as another mid-April snowfall did, in 2007. I was in graduate school then, and I was driving across the mountains to Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast, to give a lecture for the AAUW. As bizarre as it was to be making a slow and treacherous way through a snowstorm in April, it was equally bizarre, to me, to be reciting the Lord’s Prayer as I did. My professor in Old English had given his students an assignment to memorize the Lord’s Prayer in 10th century English. He wanted us to learn to pronounce Old English with the inflections and rhythms of native speakers, as though Old English were still the living language it once was, with all the beauty of its intonations and vocabulary. Memorizing the Lord’s Prayer, with its gracious prose, he thought, was a good place to begin.

            The Lord's will, which I had asked to be done as I drove over the snowy hills, must have been that I arrive safely at my destination, but not necessarily that I arrive on time. I was supposed to be at the meeting place at 6:00 for dinner, but the program chair had estimated I would begin my talk around 7:15, so it wouldn't matter if I were a bit late, or so I told myself as I watched the minutes click by faster than the miles. Later and later – past 6:00, past 6:15, past 6:30, 6:35, 6:45, 6:50. Finally, at 7:05, I walked into the meeting. People were so relieved to see me they broke into applause. With that sympathetic an audience, my talk went well.

             I stayed the night with my host that night and awoke the next morning to a thicker snowfall and three inches of accumulation. I left early, anxious about treacherous roads and about arriving in time to teach at Rogue Community College, but not so anxious about the roads that I couldn't enjoy the beauty through which I was driving and not so anxious about the time that I couldn't stop at a viewpoint to stand in the snowfall and watch the ocean foam white onto the beach. With the rocks and seaside vegetation also white with snow and a white sky hulking overhead, I was looking on as monochrome a landscape as I have ever seen. But the roads were as dangerous as before and the hills as steep, and, again, as I drove, the Lord's Prayer rose to my lips:

            Fæder ure, thu the eart on heofunum. 

            Si thin nama gehalgod. 

           Gewurthe thin wylla on eaorthan 

           swa swa on heofunum. 

            Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf sylla us to dæg. 

            And forgyf us ure gyltas 

            swa swa we forgyfath urum gyltendum. 

            And ne læth thu us on costnunge, 

            ac alys us of yfele. 

            Sothlice.

The Cliché of Spring

            Spring is a cliché. Spring is such a cliché it makes me laugh, makes me shake my head in wonder that it happens every year the same, as though Nature has no tricks up her sleeve (the wily old woman; she has plenty): nothing new for this year, just the same old beginnings to tell us again that life is new.

            First the manzanita begins to bloom – tiny snow-pink bells ringing their silent peals between the evergreen leaves of the bushes: spring is coming, spring is coming, spring is coming; take heart, take heart, take heart. Winter and spring have been playing hide-and-go-seek for a month or so, but spring, inevitably, will win the game.

            Then the frogs begin to sing. Sing? Croak, crrrrreak, rivet, beroomp. Is that a song? Call that monotonous, unoiled, joyful croaking a chorus, maybe, a choral reading, the rhythmical combination of voices, but there is something undeniably unmusical about it. Far from the sweet strains of the violin, far from the dips and flights of the flute, far from the primitive evocation of the drums, this music can surely only be music to the ear of the frogs. But they revel in it, and so do I, so I’ll take their part and call it a song.

            And then, a few days ago, to complete the cliché, I saw lambs frolicking in the pasture – lambs, the tried and true symbol of spring, life recurring, life recycled.

            Clichés became clichés because they are true, because they hold in their almost hidden depths some essential truth of life, of human nature, of the quality of being and living. And so it is with spring. Summer, autumn, and winter are accepted as they come, one after the other, as the inevitable recurrence of the seasons, but somehow with spring the very cliché itself is that we are startled anew each year. The stillness of winter gradually passes into the activity which is the trademark of spring: bears begin to stir into life up on the ridge, sap rises in the trees, and my own blood runs with renewed force, my senses awaken to some primitive stirring of life in nature to which my being responds. My eyes look up. I stretch my muscles as I crawl out of hibernation and step outside the house into warm sunshine. I come to life. My heart expands with the warming weather like the swelling willow branches. My spirits rise with the new bird song, and I laugh at the frogs. I sing with them. I burst into life with the cliché of spring housecleaning. I wash the windows and beat the rugs. I bring out the shovel and the wheelbarrow. I put peas in the ground. Renew, renew, renew; the cycle has begun again.