The dictionary tells me that “connect the dots” can be used as a metaphor to illustrate an ability (or inability) to associate one idea with another, to find the “big picture”, or salient feature, in a mass of data.

One of the most famous quotes in this regard came from Steve Jobs, who claimed: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.”

I guess he, too, was caught in our eternal, psychologically driven search for meaning, since it is too hard to give in to a vision of pure coincidence.

I want to do the opposite this week – instead of focussing on the big picture, I want to draw attention to the little details, particularly as they exist in nature, where they are often overlooked.  Random dots, beautifully configured in my eyes. And non-randomly linked to insights by various thinkers.

Happy Thanksgiving from me and the Swedish Chef.  He holds a special place in the heart of this household simply because I used to try and imitate him to the unending mirth of my progeny.  And not because I was successful at it, either….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-OFXUaMIv8

I am grateful for my family, my friends, the readers of my blog, all those who fight for our water rights, our civil rights, our constitution; and I am grateful for the fact that we have food on the table which is not true for everyone.

Why would I possibly think about poison? Could it be those poisonous voices spewing their brew of racism, anti-semitism, sexism and bigotry?

Why do I possibly think about mushroom clouds? Could it be those voices bent on war and domination?

Antidote urgently needed. So today we focus on comfort food – and here is a delicious instruction for mushroom soup (though you should not pick the ones show in the photographs….)

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/mushroom-soup-231145

Guten Appetit!

We started the week with a poem and we’ll end it with one by the same author.  I read this one as an inescapable call to action, to plunge into resistance; unfathomable, indeed, that it’s needed in this country at this time.

Here is a spreadsheet that could be helpful for calling your representatives and other types of action:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h1TAErnqRmad04_stKyw0W_qGYB_G1d6iYLzeB4Knqo/htmlview

Utopia

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

By Wislawa Szymborska
From “A large number”, 1976
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

Copyright © Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

If Mendelsohn could have Lieder ohne Worte, I can have  Bilder ohne Worte. How they relate to this week’s topic of “bright spots” is hopefully self evident. All photographed in the last 10 days – somehow the brightness of nature seems to challenge the dark visions in my head.

Enjoy them while you listen to the magnificent Gieseking play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BFGi80d91A

Ok, anything, ANYTHING, to get out of this funk. Let’s look at the bright side: What would a summary of local history and geography be without mention of that most Oregonian event of all, the Oregon Country Fair? The annual three day festival takes place in the shady woods of Veneta, OR, slightly South of Eugene. It is a place of magic, costumes, liberated manners and consumption of – now legal – substances. It features music, jugglers, magicians and fairy tale creatures on stilts; it is the best place to photograph portraits since everyone is friendly, relaxed and quite uninhibited. It is also an opportunity to photograph delightful curves – they will speak for themselves below.

One of the times that I cried this year, prohibited to photograph due to eye problems from April until basically September, was when I could not go to the fair.  Expect me back in 2017, come hell or high water.

PS: Could you detect the men among them?

Lest you think it’s all voyeuristic whimsey – I have been using these materials to deal with the ogling/grabbing issues so prevalent in the news about political candidates.  Here are two examples.

On a day where an armed militia, with tens of thousands of rounds of live ammunition, who destroyed a community, vandalized Indian artifacts, interfered with wildlife management, and cost taxpayers millions of dollars, is declared not guilty of conspiracy and firearm charges, I need to flee. Here is where I go……..

Did you know that the largest island in the Columbia river, a piece of land the size of Manhattan, lies 10 miles north of Portland? Yep, you do: you know it as Sauvies Island, bordered by the Columbia river, the Multnomah channel and the Willamette. It is an easily accessible paradise for bird watchers, bike riders, nude bathers, kayakers and the rest of humanity that wants to hike extensive loops, admire the smallest light tower in OR, or go for u-pick bounty from spring to fall.

It was, however, no longer paradise for the Multnomah Indians after they greeted the George Vancouver expedition in 1792 only to be wiped out subsequently by small pox, syphilis, measles and tuberculosis. The island was originally called Wapato Island after a potato-like plant that grew there in abundance. The name was changed to Sauvies after an employee of the Hudson Bay Company, Laurent Sauvé, started to operate the first dairies on the island in 1836.

It is still rural today, with a few large and many smaller farms working the land; large portions of the island are closed off during many month of the year to guarantee safety for thousands of migrating and/or nesting birds. Hunting is part of life on the island, as is training of hunting dogs. Again, partial closures enable these sports and keep he rest of us safe. You need to have daily or annual permits to park anywhere, which is money going into preservation of the island, well spent.

Here is what the NYT had to say: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/21/travel/an-island-world-next-door-to-a-city.html almost 20 years ago. Not much has changed other than a new bridge.

The land is flat, rich, crisscrossed with lakes and small streams, a haven for large stands of oaks, that are slowly dying from diseases we don’t know how to treat.  The sky is low, and ever changing, just like the skies back in Holland. Two tiny convenient stores, a few farm stands and no gas station make life only possible for those who plan and organize and don’t forget half of what they meant to buy every time they visit a grocery store…    

Let’s move on from mountains, desert, and the Gorge to the Pacific Coast. Today’s photographs cover a range of places that I frequently go to: hiking at Ecola, hanging out at Manzanita, admiring the authenticity of Newport, still a working class town despite the seasonal tourism, visiting Lightbox Photographic Gallery in Astoria, and climbing down strawberry hill to find the seals. And, of course, Gearhardt for the elk herds that can be frequently found roaming the dunes.       Or not.

The coast is a jewel and offers astonishing variety depending on where you land. It is also under siege from climate change and reckless development. If you are interested in more information look at this book:

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/3914974         

Paul Komar’s The Pacific Northwest Coast: Living with the Shores of Oregon and Washington teaches everything about natural hazards, coastal management, and coastal geomorphology.  It was published in 1998, and became a prescient, instant classic.

We moved from New York City to Portland in 1986. 30 years later I still cannot wrap my mind around the diversity of our environment and the luck that brought us here. We had one week to decide if we would come here, given a job offer from Reed College. I had never seen the West coast, had no prospects here, and come from Germany to the US only five years earlier. Was I ready for yet another big move? Exhausted from discussing the pro’s and con’s we went to a small movie house in Brooklyn, buying tickets for whatever played that evening to distract ourselves. It was Short Circuit, an inane movie about a robot coming alive. But the scenery was gorgeous, and when the credits rolled we learned it was filmed at he OR and WA coast.  That sealed the deal – we took it as a sign and committed to the move.  I have never looked back.

Between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams lie 108,096 acres of Goat Rocks Wilderness, a portion of the volcanic Cascade Mountain Range. The Goat Rocks are remnants of a large volcano, extinct for some two million years. You find snow there up until July, meadows of wildflowers, small lakes and pools filled with glacier water in all shades of green, turquoise and blue.

Crisscrossed by numerous trails and the PCT, it is heaven for those who are fond of marmots, picas and goats, not necessarily in that order. Volunteers maintain the Pacific Crest Trail. 

You can camp there in the wilderness as long as you observe fire bans, and you can thank your prescience that you invested in stocks of band aid companies, since you will need a million bandaids for all the blisters from steep climbs on uneven trails. Man, is it worth it when you reach the top and see the blessed land.                

The goat rock area is located within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, named after an extraordinary individual, really the father of the conservationist movement. Think rich East coast kid, Yale-educated, interested in forestry in the 1880s. Since that field does not exist in the US he goes to Nancy, France to study it and then comes back here to found the Forest Service under Roosevelt’s protection. The link below describes his life and accomplishments.

http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/People/Pinchot/Pinchot.aspx

Here is a quote from him:”

“When I came home not a single acre of Government, state, or private timberland was under systematic forest management anywhere on the most richly timbered of all continents….When the Gay Nineties began, the common word for our forests was “inexhaustible.” To waste timber was a virtue and not a crime. There would always be plenty of timber….The lumbermen…regarded forest devastation as normal and second growth as a delusion of fools….And as for sustained yield, no such idea had ever entered their heads. The few friends the forest had were spoken of, when they were spoken of at all, as impractical theorists, fanatics, or “denudatics,” more or less touched in the head. What talk there was about forest protection was no more to the average American that the buzzing of a mosquito, and just about as irritating.”

(From Breaking New Ground, Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998, page 27.)

Individual people can make a huge difference, we should not forget that. That is true for Pinchot’s wife, Cornelia, as well, who was an ardent feminist and radicalized her husband in the 1920s. Yeah for those nasty women!

I never thought I would see the words Ronald Reagan and rebel in the same sentence. But he declared himself a rebel, in an August 1980 campaign speech in Salt Lake City, telling the crowd, “I happen to be one who cheers and supports the Sagebrush Rebellion.” The National Wilderness Preservation System, opposed by the Reagan administration and a loose coalition of sagebrush “rebels,” grew out of recommendations of a Kennedy-administration Presidential Commission, the Outdoor Recreational Resources Review Commission (ORRRC)chaired by Laurence S. Rockefeller. The goal was legislation to protect recreational resources in a “national system of wild and scenic rivers,” a national wilderness system, a national trails system, the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, and recreation areas administered by then-existing public lands agencies beyond National Parks and National Monuments.

The whole issue of public land use and federal vs. state legislation is complicated. The “sagebrush rebellion” was a concerted effort to make land available for resource extraction, private use, grazing and water exploits, rather than protection. A truly interesting history, friendly to environmental concerns, can be found here:

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32199

James Morton Turner’s book The promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 analyzes the state of affairs ( it was published in 2012) but also has almost lyrical descriptions of the landscapes under siege, capturing the beauty that is out there.

I think I have said it before, but the rolling hills of the Eastern end of the Gorge always remind me of gigantic, alien sea lion backs. The sky over them changes hourly, and if there is wind there are so many sounds that you usually don’t hear, as if the sagebrush comes to life and whispers. A ravishing landscape during all seasons.