Our perfect summer days, such as I wrote about two weeks ago, have come to an end. Now our skies are white with smoke. Visibility is diminished to my closest trees, and Humpy Mountain is obscured behind a veil of smoke. 

Humpy Mountain yesterday afternoon

Humpy Mountain in the idyllic days of summer

    But smoke is not as bad as fire. Although we suffer the lung-stifling effects of the fires in other places, the Applegate itself is not on fire. At least, not yet.

    It would help if we would roll back climate change. Get busy, damn it, all you politicians and lawmakers and industry CEOs who could be making a difference! 

    According to some thinking we should be thinning the forests of their century of fuel build-up. But there are problems there. One is that BLM, at least around here, seems to be taking advantage of "thinning for fire" to do some pretty damaging logging, taking large trees that are both carbon storers and fire resistors. Another problem is that logged-over land, often the result of "thinned" forests, is seemingly more susceptible to fire than our old-growth and large-tree forests. A third problem is that even if forests thinned of small trees (leaving big trees) would create slower and cooler fires, who's to say that those areas would be the ones to get the fire, so was that a good use of money? I'm no expert on fire or on forests, but I do see that if an agency says "for fire protection," the public falls right into line with whatever the proposal is and that not all such proposals are either especially for fire protection or actually protective against fire or, even, good for the forest.

    A couple of years ago the Devil Fire burned not too far my house. It was a ground fire, burning low and slow, doing the good work of forest health that fire does. So why didn't the Forest Service let it burn? If this is a fire-dependent ecology and if a century of fire suppression has put us in this quandary, then why put out fires that pose no danger? 

    Experts speaking in the documentary film Elemental (see if if you can) and elsewhere are advocating defensible space around structures as the only sensible way to approach fire preparedness. Fire prevention, of course, is preposterous, and fire suppression has been disastrous, but protecting homes and other structures from fire seems sensible. I love my trees, but I am ready to do what I have to do to defend my house from the fire that is as likely to be here as in Lahaina or in Paradise, California. I can only hope that the fire that is sure to come will hold off till I get that work done.

Hiking in the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area in the Wallowa Mountains of Northeastern Oregon

                                                                                            photo by Scott Mattoon

     After seven days in the mountains, the twelve of us on this Sierra Club backpacking trip hiked 2 1/2 miles to the trailhead, found our cars, then reassembled for lunch in Joseph. Then we hugged good-byes and headed back to Pennsylvania, New York, California, Missouri, Illinois, and various places in Oregon. I drove to a sub-par Motel 6 in The Dalles, took a shower, ate some dinner, and lay down to sleep in a real bed again.

    But I couldn't sleep. I missed the hum and thrash of the river outside my tent. I missed the chill of the night and the warmth of the sleeping bag. I missed the other hikers who had been sleeping in their own tents near me, those eleven good friends who had been strangers to me only a week before. The mediocre dinner from the Indian-cuisine food truck had left me missing the amazing camp-food dinners Leah, trip leader, had prepared for us—risotto with three kinds of cheese and tuna, noodles with Thai peanut sauce, curry-and-rice. And I knew that whatever I found for lunch on my way home the next day couldn't match Nutella on lavage bread with dried bananas, mangoes, and turkey jerky. Such imaginative meals Leah had planned!

    I missed the mountains. Several days before, as I was hiking the 1000-foot elevation gain up 8540-foot Glacier Pass, then down the other side along the West Fork Wallowa River—

                                                                                            photo by Gabe Oprea

the steep slopes streaming with wildflowers, the river cascading white through black rock, the peaks rugged and stark above the narrow valley—I thought, "I have hiked in the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy, in the French and Swiss Alps, in the mountains of Costa Rica and Corsica, in the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and the Appalachians, and I can say that this is world-class hiking." 

                                                                       photo by Mark Dumont

    Everywhere wildflowers amassed in stunning arrays—purple asters splotched with scarlet firecracker flower and Indian paintbrush, sunshine-yellow groundsel, sunflower-bright arnica—occasionally a rein orchid, catchfly, pearly everlasting. Horse mint scented the air. I grew dizzy trying to name all the flowers and finally gave up.

                                                                                            photo by Gabe Oprea

    We saw picas and mountain goats. At one campsite we were awakened by a large herd of horses galloping past camp. When it rained (and it rained a lot), we just donned rain gear, covered our packs, and kept on walking.

                                                                                        photo by Mark Dumont

    Was the best day the day we hiked up to Ice Lake, a good steady climb from camp at 5500 feet to the lake at 7849 feet, followed by a beautiful long swim,

Swimming in Ice Lake. I am behind Leah.    photo by Mark Dumont

lunch lakeside (watching mountain goats descend to the lake), then a walk halfway around the lake to a remarkable white-sand beach, where I swam again? 

                                                                                    photo by Mark Dumont

    Or was the best day the day we climbed Glacier Pass (where I sprinkled some of Mike's ashes; see post on June 21, 2020, for an explanation), then hustled down the other side through that gorgeous scenery, on and on until it was starting to get dark and Leah and John, our leaders, found a possible campsite ("It would be miserable, but it would only be one night of misery"), which we rejected in favor of walking another two and a half miles in hopes of finding there a better place to camp? What a fast walk it was! But we got to a large meadow and threw up our tents just before dark.

                                                                                        photo by Mark Dumont

It had been a long, beautiful, and exhilarating day.

    The lakes were superb. I loved my swims, and the stream crossings, too, which I usually did barefooted. 

I am about to cross behind Traci, my boots in my hands. photo by Mark Dumont

    Have I mentioned the food? Did I say the leadership was great? Did I say the scenery was breathtaking (to say nothing of the breathtaking hiking)? Did I mention the company? We were teachers, a pianist, a farmer, an engineer, people who worked in tech, in non-profits, in academia. We spanned the ages of 39 to 79. Phenomenal hikers all.

                                                                    photo by Mark Dumont
Everyone is in this picture but Gabe, who is taking it. Note Leah, our leader, far right. She and John, assistant leader (4th from left), carried enormous packs.

    No wonder I had a hard time going to sleep that first night off the trail. My body was there in Motel 6, but my spirit was still in the Wallowas, among those wildflowers, in those lakes, with those friends.

                                                                                            photo by Gabe Oprea

On a Perfect Summer Day I See My Fox

    Our summer days lately have been as beautiful as they come—warm but not overly hot, balmy, gentle, smoke-free. In fact, it has been something close to this all summer—no smoke, no triple-digit temperatures. I have been hiking a lot, with a 30-pound pack, training for a six-day backpacking trip in the Wallowa Mountains, in northeastern Oregon, but today I took a rest day and sat on the deck in my new swing, now my favorite place in the house, reading some, writing some, swinging gently.

    I looked up at a strange scraping sound in the yard in front of me, on a bare, flat bit of ground downhill from the house, between the woods and the apple tree . 

    It was my fox, rubbing his back on the rough ground. Then he sat up, glanced at me when I made a slight noise, then sat there, looking around, attentive but at ease, before loping off down the hill towards the woods.

    I see this fox from time to time, and I often hear him at night. Sometimes he stops twelve or fifteen yards from the house and barks his saw-blade-sharp arf. If I come out the door, he looks at me and barks again. I greet him with a few words, then go back inside.

    He is a gray fox, very beautiful in his red-and-gray lush fur coat and long handsome tail. 

    I know it's the same fox I see every time because he is lame in one foot. He limps on his right front foot, lifting the paw off the ground and trotting angularly, though swiftly enough. I thought at first the paw might have a temporary injury, maybe a thorn in it, and I imagined myself playing the part of the mouse who took the thorn out of the lion's paw in Aesop's fable. But I have seen the fox often enough that I think the paw is permanently injured. I doubt that it was caught in a trap; trapping isn't usual around here. I wondered if it were a birth defect. Maybe the mother fox sat on the foot when the kit was born. That happens sometimes with domestic animals.  

    I know better than to be sentimental about wild creatures, and I feel strongly about the wrongness of making pets of wild creatures. But I do love my fox. We are cordial, if distant, friends. It is between us as Emily Dickinson said:

            Several of nature's fellows

            I know, and they know me

            I feel for them a transport

            Of cordiality.

    So it is with my fox. 

Running a three-day festival

  I apologize for having neglected my blog for the past month. I have been organizing Celebrate the Siskiyou Crest, a three-day festival of art, science, and culture, which took place last weekend.

    I fell into the job at a meeting of the Siskiyou Crest Coalition last fall when someone (I was told it was I) suggested an art show to bring attention to the Crest, since it is the goal of the Coalition to find ways to protect the public lands on the Siskiyou Crest. I enthusiastically suggested adding a day of poetry readings from local poets. Someone else suggested having panels of scientists speaking about the ecology of the Crest. The whole thing mushroomed. Keynote speakers. Well-known musicians. A day of hikes on the Crest. Everything free to the public.

    But no one was saying, "I'll organize it." If it were going to happen, someone would have to do that, so I said, "Okay. I'll do it." 

    Actually, though, I didn't organize everything. Someone took over the science part. Two people found business sponsors. Someone organized the art show. Someone coordinated the venue and found food trucks. Someone organized a raffle. Someone organized a reception for donors and participants. We wanted tribal participation, so someone secured a traditional ecologist from the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians as a speaker. 

    I wrote a grant proposal from the Carpenter Foundation. I worked on the art show. I wrote press releases and secured donated lodging for out-of-town participants. I asked David Rains Wallace, author of the award-winning book The Klamath Knot, to be our keynote speaker. I created a schedule of events and, in general, acted as coordinator and point person.

    To my horror, it fell to me to see that we had no tech problems.  It was a steep learning curve, but between the tech help at the public library and the folks at Best Buy, I learned. 

    In the end, it was all a huge success. Lots of people. Lots of excitement. Our food trucks bailed on us, but everyone stayed cheerful, and the snacks booth did a great business. We got great press coverage, including three articles in the Oregonian.

    Our goal had been to raise awareness about the special nature of the Siskiyou Crest—its amazing biodiversity, its special flora and fauna, its recreational opportunities (all those hiking trails!), and its beauty, which is both inspiration to artists and poets and economically important to the valley's wineries and other businesses. My sister Sharon, who came from Georgia to be at the festival, indicated the success of that goal when she told me, before she left for home, "Now I understand why you love this place so much." 

    

The Birds at Dawn

     Every morning I wake up at 4:30 and listen. Within a minute or two the first bird begins to sing. Then another joins, then another until there is a swell of loud and joyous choral rapture. The birds sing their melodious and varied tunes; they whistle and chirp and tweet and fill the woods with happiness. After an hour, the songs diminish, and the birds, well satisfied with their morning hymns, go about their day.    

   It is said, of course, that birds sing to woo mates and to defend, or maybe announce, their territory. These songs bring such happiness to me I can't imagine they aren't born of the happiness of the birds. Birdsong can't be just mechanical, no-emotions-attached. honey-look-at-me stuff. It is beauty! It is music! It is joy! 

    Scientists don't like to talk about happiness. They call such attitudes anthropomorphism. Literary critics call them the pathetic fallacy: just because we feel in sympathy with a bird's song doesn't mean the bird is expressing what we would feel if we were singing like that.  

    But if even fruit flies can feel depression (fruit flies?), then it seems reasonable that birds feel joy when they sing. (And, yes, scientists have determined that fruit flies can die of depression, or something like it. Check it out on jpr.org or in the Guardian.) 

    It would also be reasonable to speculate that if fruit flies can be depressed, so can birds. 

    Birds learn singing from their parents, so one could postulate a scenario.:

    "You must sing, little one." 

    "Mommy, I don't feel like singing. I hear chain saws in the woods."     

    How long will the birds fill our woods and fields with the happiness I hear every morning when I wake up?

Hike to Grayback Meadows

    What a hike it was!

    I and four other hikers started up the O'Brien Creek trail, which is very steep, but I was hiking well enough even with a 25-pound pack. (I am training for a backpacking trip in August.) After about a mile and a quarter we took a side trail to a cabin erected in 1944 for emergency use for hikers and, more probably, hunters. We rested there a while, then followed a sort-of path up the hill through the beautiful Grayback Meadows to some rocks overlooking the snowy peak of Mt. McLoughlin, where we had lunch and looked at flowers and admired the view.

Just before leaving the lunch spot. Note the snow.

When it was time to go, Cheryl suggested it would be easier to continue up the slope to meet the Boundary Trail and return to the trailhead that way than to slip-slide down the meadow the way we had come. So we started up.

    7000-foot Grayback Mountain, where we were hiking, still had thick banks of snow above us. That much snow in June is a gladsome sight, but, of course, the snow is melting fast, and the slope we were climbing had turned into a steep marsh with rivulets of snowmelt gushing down in sheets. So it was both a steep and a slippery climb. Oh, my God, it was hard to get up that hill! And me with a 25-pound pack. Thank goodness I was hiking with poles. They pulled me up the mountain.

    When we finally got to the Boundary Trail, we took a moment to congratulate ourselves,

then turned right to go back to the O'Brien Creek trail.

    I thought the hard part was over.

    Not true! The storms of last winter had hurled winds down the mountain, toppling trees in a long, wide swath. We clambered over big logs, trying not to scratch bare legs on broken knobs. We walked down logs like walking tightropes, then had to jump off at the end. Maybe the hardest thing was climbing through tangled branches of two or three trees that had fallen together. What a mess it was! We would get through one net of tangled tree trunks and branches and find, just ahead, another mess. It didn't end until we were almost to the side trail to the cabin.

    The only treacherous thing after that was a steep section where the trail was covered with slippery pine needles. I went down once, as my right foot slipped, but I half-stood again before I hit the ground, only to have the weight of the pack push me down again, and my left foot slipped. Once again I righted myself before I hit the ground and this time managed to stand. The hiker behind me said it looked like I had done telemark turns on a ski slope.

    It was a hard day's hike and a barrel of fun. And the wet meadows and gushing streams—more full than I had ever seen them—seemed to refute drought and filled my heart with gratitude.

Approaching O'Brien Creek

    As we drove together back to my car, I asked my fellow hikers, who hike together weekly, if their hikes were always like this. They laughed. "Yes," they said. "There's always an adventure."

   

In Search of Cosmo the Crow

    Samantha Swindler, a features writer with the Oregonian, visited me last week. She thought I could provide some background about the Applegate in connection with a podcast she's producing.

    The story concerns Cosmo, a pet crow of a woman in a small Applegate neighborhood. Cosmo slept in the house, asked to be let out in the morning, came when called, and was as beloved a pet as any dog.

    But one neighbor (we'll call him Neighbor B, to distinguish him from Cosmo's "owner," Neighbor A) said the bird terrified his children—swooped down on them, attacked them, even drew blood. He said Cosmo terrified and chased his dog. This man grew so irate he called the cops, who told him that he could, legally, kill an annoyance animal. Neighbor B threatened Neighbor A to do just that.

    Instead, he and Neighbor C, who also considered Cosmo a menace, managed to capture the bird and take him to Wildlife Images, an organization that takes in injured wildlife. As soon as the folks there determined that Cosmo was neither sick nor injured, they released him, whereupon Cosmo flew to an elementary school and terrorized the children on the playground.

    Somehow Cosmo got back home (I'm fuzzy on the details here), where he slept in the house of Neighbor A and terrorized the neighbors' children, as before. Not much later, Neighbor D, who liked Cosmo, saw him at her house at about 4:30pm. At 6:30 Neighbor A started calling Cosmo to come home. No Cosmo. 

    No one has seen Cosmo again.

    Neither Neighbor B nor anyone else will admit to having killed Cosmo. 

    There is no body. 

    It is an unsolved murder (seemingly) of a pet bird, as there is no evidence of foul play by a dog or another wild creature or of collision with a moving vehicle.

    At first I thought the story was petty—fun for an amateur sleuth like Samantha, but not important. The more we talked, however, the more I changed my mind. 

    In the first place, it's a good parable for why we shouldn't make pets of wildlife. No matter how friendly they become, wild animals are still wild animals.

    In the second place, it's a parable for human relations. The four-household neighborhood is now rife with suspicions and accusations. For instance, when Neighbor D's dog went missing, then came back wounded, she accused Neighbor B of having shot him. (The vet said it was not a bullet wound.) 

    It's also a classic example of the importance of empathy. Cosmo's "owner" couldn't see that her pet was a horror for someone else. ("Not my sweet-tempered Cosmo!") Neighbor B couldn't empathize with Neighbor A's love for her pet. ("It's just a damn bird!") No one apologizes to anyone because no one tries to step into someone else's shoes, and anger and suspicion fester.

    Samantha is willing to arrange a mediated meeting among the neighbors, but that doesn't look likely. Neighbor B won't talk to "that lady from the press" any more. At this point, Samantha doesn't have an answer to her murder mystery, and in the neighborhood hatred and distrust live on. 

    How are we ever going to make this a better world?