Being the Consciousness of the Universe

          What a beautiful autumn it's been!

I've lived in the Siskiyou Mountains for almost fifty years, and every year I forget how beautiful autumn can be. Now that I'm half a century distant from my childhood in the Appalachian hills of north Georgia, too, I've forgotten how gorgeous the Appalachians were. I just don't think autumn could be any more beautiful than it is here.

          When I expressed this thought to a friend who grew up in Pennsylvania, he gently reminded me that with the Appalachians in full autumn glory, entire hillsides are ablaze. Here, the hills, covered in evergreens, are ever green, year-round, and are autumnally dull in comparison. And, of course, it's true. I've just forgotten.

          But that autumn in the Rogue Valley is not as spectacular as it is in north Georgia or Pennsylvania doesn't mean it isn't mouth-agape beautiful here. The hills might be green, spotted here and there with the deep, butter-rich yellow of maples, but to hike on trails studded with viny maples, dogwoods, and big-leaf maples in and around the firs and cedars

is to come to a standstill with awe in front of now one tree and now another. It's the individual tree, in the Siskiyou autumn, that astonishes, not the broad, sweeping panorama. It's the blazing red maple at the bottom of Thomspon Creek Road that I call my favorite autumn tree in the Applegate. It's the canopy of big-leaf maples so yellow I stop the car, get out, and slip-slide down the hill just so I can stand under them, where the air itself has turned yellow, and absorb that color through my skin. It's Lithia Park in Ashland, where autumn-rich trees are reflected in the pond,

and Riverside Park in Grants Pass, with its tall, magnificent yellow, orange, and red trees. It's this tree of umber, that one of scarlet, the next one of bronze, the next of pink.

         Earlier this autumn, when I was walking up a trail on the mountain, I stopped in amazement before a glowing big-leaf maple at the edge of the trail. I gawked for a long time, awash in the colors of that tree, and I wondered if the deer and cougars who walked this same trail were aware of that beauty, whether the tree itself were aware of its own exquisitneness. Could the creatures of the woods walk through autumn's glory without noticing? It seems impossible, but it also seems true that all that beauty was just there for its own sake, whether I was there to see it or not, whether any being was there to appreciate it. 

          Thomas Berry tells us, in his wonderful book The Dream of the Earth, "The human is that being in whom the universe comes to itself in a special mode of conscious reflection," or, as physicist Brian Swimme puts it, "The universe shivers with wonder in the depths of the human." That, I think, is what I was experiencing as I absorbed what I was seeing in the maple tree and its surrounding mountains: myself as the consciousness of the universe. It is a responsibility of all of us as we walk through this world. 

         

Harvest: Picking Apples

          The day after I helped crush grapes for wine in Seattle, I went to an orchard on Vashon Island, off the coast of Seattle, to help harvest apples for cider at Dragon's Head Farm. If at T2 wine cellar I was transported to the Middle Ages of France or England (see last week's post), here I was transported to the mythological land of Hera, whose golden apple tree was guarded by the Hesperides, nymphs of the evening. Since even nymphs can't be trusted not to taste apples, Hera hired the dragon Ladon to guard the guards, so to speak. Ladon is often depicted with multiple heads; thus the name of Dragon's Head Farm. Although none of the hundreds of apple trees in the orchard seemed to be entwined by a dragon—the only creature in the orchard was a large and very friendly dog—I did keep my eye out for Ladon when I snuck an apple into my mouth.

          Actually, there wasn't much time to eat apples because there was so much picking to do. The dozen or so adults and six or eight children who had come to harvest the apples were given small light-weight bins, like milk cartons, to put the apples in, as well as apple-picking aprons for a couple of people and one rolling scoop, with a long handle like a rake, that rolled over the apples on the ground and scooped them into its wire net with efficiency. When our bins, aprons, or scoops were full, we poured the apples into one of the two large bins that Wes, orchard owner and cider maker, drove between the rows of trees and then, when they were full, to the cider yard.

          The trees were small and the apples were small, so if you had an apron and could stand and pick, the picking was fast and easy, but most of the apples were already on the ground, where the picking was also fast and easy. The best method was to squat and scoop all the apples you could reach, three or four at a time, into your hands and toss them into a bin, then crawl a few feet forward and do it again. Wes, with his big hands, could pick faster than any Ladon could have seen. After emptying a bin into the wagon, the picker would leapfrog over other pickers to the next tree with apples on the ground and work there. Every once in a while someone would give the whole tree a good hard shake, bringing apples down like rain. When the squall stopped, pickers would move in and start picking apples off the ground again.

          Although the sky was cloudy and the air chilly, we warmed up with our exertion, and it wasn't long before coats and jackets littered the row. We chatted companionably as we worked. When I picked on the other side of the tree from the children, I caught snatches of their 'tween-age conversations: "Sandra didn't study at all for the history test." "Did you know that the sun is going to explode? Maybe not for millions of years, but it is going to explode." The children picked apples for a good long while before they lost interest and wandered off on their own.

       In late afternoon, with both sides of two rows of trees harvested, the day's work was done. Dragon's Head Farm owners, Wes and Laura, were ecstatic. "This is the best way ever to harvest apples," Laura declared. I thought so, too. We had picked 9000 pounds of apples for no telling how many gallons of cider. The work had been its own reward, but we were also well rewarded after the harvest with Laura's good salad and coconut-lentil soup, eaten around a beautiful walnut-slab table. As we left to return to our respective homes, Laura and Wes gave us paper bags and told us to fill them from a bucket of their best eating apples on the front porch. Ladon, they assured us, was nowhere around.

Harvest Season: Stomping Grapes

        As soon as I stepped into the bin of grapes in the big winemaking warehouse of T2 Cellar in Seattle, I felt like one of the peasants depicted in Medieval illuminated manuscripts: stomping the grapes in large barrels, dancing a jig to the lively tune of fiddles while brawny lads haul more bins of grapes from the vineyard and everyone—men, women, youths, and children—enjoys a festive harvest on a sunny autumn day.

        It wasn't quite like that, especially because in those days the men did the stomping because women, of course, wouldn't be lifting their skirts and showing their legs. Also, although it was a sunny autumn day in Seattle, we were indoors, in a very clean warehouse where T2 Cellar makes its wine. There wasn't a speck of dirt anywhere, and my son, Ela, and I cleaned and sanitized our feet in four sequenced buckets before stepping onto the grapes.

 (I wondered what kind of sanitization the peasants did to their feet.) Everything else was pretty much as it was centuries ago. We were stomping on the grapes because the grapes needed to be pulverized, and, as in days of yore, there was no better way to do it than with the feet. 

        This being the era of machines, however, and hand (or in this case foot) labor being more costly for the winemaker than machines (unless the winemaker has willing friends to come and help for the fun of it), winemakers now use a machine, called a destemmer, 

Todd Threlkeld, with Grenache grapes, destemmer in the background

which does the work of foot-stomping for the Granache and Sangiovese grapes T2 Cellar uses for red wine. The destemmer will juice the grapes and send them through tubes into storage jars in one smooth process. The foot-stomping was for the Marsanne grapes, a white-wine variety, which weren't numerous enough for T2 Cellar's large press and unsuitable for the small basket press, which doesn't press white clusters very well. Therefore, Todd Threlkeld, head winemaker, told me, "the stomping was not a lark but the most efficient and effective way to process a small amount of grapes"—fortunately for me, because it was a lot more fun to squish grapes with my feet than to pour grapes into a machine.

          Just as in Medieval days, there was music, if not fiddlers on the ground, then contemporary rock music on the stereo, that had us jumping and dancing like the peasants, at least for a while. 

Pretty soon I began thinking this was a lot of work, after all, until an experienced wine-maker told me it wasn't necessary to jump. We just had to squeeze the grapes until no more balls of grapes rolled under our feet. After that I stepped firmly but quietly onto the grapes, pressing hard, taking small steps, chasing with the next step the grapes that escaped towards the edges of the bin.

          When all the grapes had been brought to submission, when there were no more rolling balls of grapes underfoot, 

we poured the resulting pulp into a press, another ancient piece of equipment, and turned the crank to press pulp into juice, which we then poured into large jars.

 Now I was catapulted not into the Middle Ages but to my father's basement, where I used to help him bottle his wine when I came to visit from Oregon. He would have enjoyed this day with me.

          After pulping, pressing, and pouring, the six of us working on winemaking that day had delicious dolmas and falafels from a near-by Greek deli, washed down with some tastes of T2 Cellar wine. Good wine. The next time I go to Seattle, I want to go to T2 Cellar and have some white wine from Marsanne grapes. I'll lift my glass to the light and squint, seeing in the wine my bare feet stomping the grapes in the bin like a peasant at harvest in a vineyard.

          

          

Inside Things

          Take a child to an apple tree and pick an apple. Cut it horizontally and open the broken halves. Look! Do you see the secret star inside? The child's delight will reinforce your own sense of wonder at the beauty inside things of nature.

         Beauty, of course, is everywhere in nature, but the hidden beauties—the patterns and surprises inside things—are the best of all. When I was a child, my father cut a pine cone lengthwise. Look! Inside! Another tree, with a trunk tapering towards its top and branches to the sides.

          A geode is boring on the outside—rough in texture, dull in color, interesting only in being unusually round. Break it open and find purple crystals rising like teeth in the mouth of a sea monster or clustering like petrified forms of the swaying tentacles of an anemone.

          The wonder elicited by the beauty of crystalline teeth inside a geode is enhanced by what the imagination does with the slightly menacing image of a sea monster, but when my leg slipped into a crevasse when I was mountain-climbing in the Alps and I looked down into the inside of a glacier, the danger was real but the beauty so surprising it blinded fear. The depth was unimaginable. As it plunged, the inside of the glacier echoed a deeper and deeper blue, from light-brightened turquoise to light-deprived turquoise and on beyond where I could tell what color it was. The color inside snow was as surprising as crystals inside a rock or a star in an apple, so surprising and so beautiful I never thought of the danger I might have been in. But maybe I had the luxury of not paying attention to the danger because I was roped to my companions. Or maybe I saw only the beauty because I was twenty years old and unaware of mortality. Whatever the reason I was able to concentrate on the beauty inside a glacier, I am grateful for it.

          Everything has something inside. Inside a seed is a tree; inside a bud is a flower. Inside a raindrop is a rainbow. Inside your eyes is your soul. Maybe a bear becomes angry if you look him in the eye because he doesn't want you to see inside his bare soul. A dog, on the other hand, has such confidence in his dogness he will beg you to look inside his eyes. When I looked at an owl through my binoculars, straight into his big owl eyes, he stared back into mine, then flew away and didn't return to the tree outside my bedroom for years. Was it what he saw in me or what he didn't want me to see in him that kept him away? His privacy? Or my rudeness?

         I could, if I wanted, reveal what's inside my heart, but how could I even know what's inside a bucketful of stars? What wonders of color or pattern might be inside a grain of sand? Look deep, look deeper, look deeper still: the beauty inside of things has no end.

Hemp Galore

          To drive through the Applegate this late summer is to be deluged with the odor—the stink, some say—of cannabis. For some people the smell evokes those times, in days of yore, when someone wafted a bud under our noses before rolling it into a joint. In this case, though, the marijuana smell doesn't come form the smoking variety but from hemp. The Applegate is awash in hemp.

          To the astonishment of Applegaters, hemp fields sprang up all over the valley this summer (hemp is planted late in the season), stretching on both sides of the river to the hills. The first signs were the ugly strips of black plastic covering the fields. From hiking trails above the valley, they looked like shimmering lakes. Then the seedlings went in. Signs went up: "Hemp. No THC." This was not marijuana. It would not make you high. No use stealing it. Hemp grows fast, like the weed it is called. It grows short, bushy, and sticky (with CBD: cannabinoids). It emits a strong odor.

          Hemp has a variety of uses. It makes a great fabric. I can't wait till enough of it is grown to put hemp clothing on the market. Of course, everyone talks about hemp rope, but the main, maybe only, purpose for the hemp grown in the Applegate is medicinal. There seems to be a good market for CBD oil, made from the stalks, leaves and flowers of hemp, and for hemp oil, made from the seeds. Some Applegate hemp fields have already been shorn to the ground, but carloads of harvesters are working in others, so maybe both products come from Applegate hemp. 

          My visitor from Tennessee last month bemoaned the legalization of marijuana because it took a source of income away from the small-time growers (mom-and-pop, he called them, apparently without noticing the irony) and put it in the hands of Big Industry. I don't particularly think it's a good idea to make one's living through illegal means, either, so we disagreed on that topic, but apparently even the hemp grown in the Applegate is already in the hands of Big Industry, whoever they are. The fields of hemp we see so extravagantly spread throughout the valley are mostly on leased land, which, though probably leased for a pretty penny, are no doubt making a ton of money more for the grower than for the landlord. Some hemp money does, of course, trickle down into the hands of local field workers, baristas, and other merchants. 

          Everyone is talking abut boom and bust. There is no way, the argument goes, that the market can sustain so much product. Oregon's marijuana is a case in point. The large backlog of unsold marijuana has caused the state to put a moratorium on further licenses. People clack their tongues and say the hemp crash is sure to come. There is much head-wagging and tongue-clacking in the Applegate these days. 

          I miss the innocuous and uncontroversial hayfields in the Applegate, but I like seeing our valley kept agricultural, whether with hemp, grapes, or hay. Tomatoes were once the major crop; the air then was redolent of ketchup. Now it smells like cannabis. In some places, if the sun is hot, it might smell like grapes. Sometimes you can still catch the odor of fresh-cut hay. The Applegate is a beautiful place, partly for its mountains and forests and partly for Oregon's wonderful land-use laws, established in 1969, requiring comprehensive land-use plans for every city and county. These laws have helped us keep agricultural lands for agriculture and forested lands for forests, preventing unsightly sprawl  in our beautiful countrysides.