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Nature

There will come soft rains

I meant to brighten your Thanksgiving weekend with imagery of beautiful nature, all kinds of appealing fauna I came across during my southern California sojourn. Alas, I can’t stop my brain and keep my mouth shut. Nature, its lasting beauty and seeming resilience, as well as its wrath, was linked to destruction in my war-preoccupied mind. Thus a poem and a short story derived from the poem, that depict post-apocalyptic nature with us humans no longer playing any relevant role, really any role at all. The way we’re going, that might not be too far in the future.

If you prefer the tranquility of a post-prandial daze, stop reading here and just look at the pictures! No offense taken. My gratitude on this day of Thanksgiving, however, extends to all those refusing to be indifferent.

“There Will Come Soft Rains”
(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

by Sara Teasdale in Flame and Shadows, 1920

Teasdale (1884 – 1933) was an American poet who won the first Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918, a prize that would later be renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, yet she was marginalized as a second-rate poet by next generations. Depressed, ill and isolated, she took her own life before she even turned 50 years old. The poet was highly educated and deeply influenced by reading Charles Darwin and thinking through the implications of his evolutionary theory regarding the centrality – or absence thereof – of human kind in nature. A personified Spring and the rest of nature’s representatives in the poem couldn’t care less if we self-obliterated.

She was also a pacifist, whose views had to be carefully phrased into the framework of a pastoral setting in her poetry. After all, this poem was first published in 1918, two months after the Sedition Act of 1918 was enacted. The law made it a criminal offense to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States.” It still theoretically exposed her to criminal prosecution – and if she had the courage to speak out against war, we should have the decency to bear witness.

Fast forward to the 1950s, we have Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) expressing his fears of nuclear war in a short story, August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains’, published in his Martian Chronicles. The setting is a house filled with technological gadgets that continue their daily routines and tasks, when the world and all its inhabitants have been wiped out by nuclear war. The house in Allentown, CA, and a badly maimed dog, are all that remains. There is cooking, cleaning, laying the table and reading a daily randomly selected poem to the extinct inhabitants – Teasdale’s poem, as you might have guessed. Random debris is pushed down the incinerator, called evil Baal, a reference to the praying at the altar of false gods, our belief in the gifts of technology that prove futile when they are made obsolete by even more powerful technological inventions like the atomic bomb.

Ironically, nature has the last word: a violent wind lights a fire in the house which burns it down, the last vestige of human habitation. Only a ticking clock survives.

The worry about nuclear arms has resonated across the media during the weeks since the war started. Really years, since it is a topic for both the ongoing war in Ukraine and the bombardment of Gaza by Israel. Focussing on the latter, I found that a recent essay by Roger Cohen in the NYT is required reading, spelling out some of the causal mechanisms that have led to the chasm now impeding any hope for peace.

“Almost forgotten are the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition in 1993 of Israel’s right to exist in peace, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s determination to pursue that peace, a decision that cost him his life in 1995 at the hands of an extreme right-wing Israeli assassin who said he acted “on the orders of God.”

These were the ephemeral glimmerings of shared humanity, soon quashed.

In the intervening decades, Hamas and the ultranationalist religious Israeli right have each extended their influence. The conflict now involves fundamentalist religious ideologies, distinct in critical regards but equally convinced that all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River has been deeded to them by God.

A political and military struggle between two national movements for the same land can be resolved by compromise, at least in theory. France and Germany settled their differences in Alsace-Lorraine. Peace came to Ireland. But absolutist claims of divine right to territory appear impossible to reconcile.” (My emphasis.)

I am citing at length because the religious fervor is something we regularly underestimated and are increasingly facing at home as well. But I also want to mention some other facts: an Israeli minister, Amihai Eliyahu openly stated that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was an option. (He was suspended from Cabinet meetings, and later claimed it was a metaphorical statement. Israel has not confirmed or denied its nuclear capabilities.) Nothing metaphorical about the bombs that have been dropped, though. According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, as of three weeks ago already, Israel has confirmed that it bombed over 12,000 targets in the Gaza Strip, with a record tally of bombs exceeding 10 kilograms of explosives per individual. That is the equivalent of two nuclear bombs (absent radiation.)

“Due to technological developments affecting the potency of bombs, the explosives dropped on Gaza may be twice as powerful as a nuclear bomb. This means that the destructive power of the explosives dropped on Gaza exceeds that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Euro-Med Monitor said, noting that the area of the Japanese city is 900 square kilometres, while the area of Gaza does not exceed 360 square kilometres.”

1200 human souls lost their lives in Israel, indiscriminately slain by Hamas attackers, with over 200 hostages taken – 36 of them children! – , and women violently raped. As of now, 14.500 human souls indiscriminately killed in Gaza, with over 5000 children ! among them (and that is not counting the lives lost in the Westbank over the last months.) Food, water and fuel cut off, preceding likely epidemics. The report of the World Food Program of the United Nations is shocking with its implications of starvation.

Sick and wounded dying for lack of medical treatment, the former not even making it into death by war statistics. All this without even the ability to flee for a civilian population, given that the borders are closed on all sides, by Israel and Arab nations alike. Flight is, however traumatizing, at least a possibility for Ukrainians – current estimates vary that between 6 and 8 million people left their homeland to escape war, of a total population of 36 million in Ukraine.

No end in sight. Certainly no guarantees that this will make Israel safer. A heightened chance that war will regionally spread. No obvious solutions for a longterm arrangement either, since both the two-state solution or a unified non-ethnocratic state seem to be relegated to fantastic wishful thinking given the conditions on the ground.

And, for that matter, no “gentle rains” either, since we’ve managed so thoroughly to wreck climatic conditions on this planet that there will be violent storms and deluges instead, not yet known to either Teasdale or Bradbury, once human suffering has been terminated for good. Or by evil, as the case may be.

It’s easy to feel depleted and paralyzed. Let’s practice hope, though, starting with being consciously grateful for all the privileges and blessings we enjoy on this particular day. May they strengthen us to face what we have to do in days to come.

Music set to the words of the poem.

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Trolls Galore

Today is your lucky day.

You can join me for all the benefits of an outing without:

  • rattled bones
  • jolted heart
  • having to listen to my umpteenth lecture on why I really, really don’t like added attractions in botanical gardens… I declare myself outvoted, promo art is here to stay.

What’s this all about? Drive with me about an hour south of Altadena to South Coast Botanic Garden. When you arrive you have to navigate a road approaching a parking lot, both of which present like egg cartons, made by and for giants, with you driving across peaks and valley, wondering about your bones, even at minimum speed, and what kind of So Cal frost could have buckled the asphalt like this. Not frost, you learn. Rather, this garden, started in the 1960s, was placed on a landfill, the latter a practical solution to yawning pits left over from mining that had started around the early 1900s, and now settling.

Mining companies went after white diatomite, the ancient deposits of marine diatoms. The region offered a continuous 500-foot-thick belt of nearly white diatomite, made of silica from ocean creatures that settled to the bottom of the sea. Over millions of years, with the addition of heat and compression, diatomaceous earth was formed and now mined as a desirable ingredient for filters, toothpaste and compounds used to produce certain forms of pesticides. When the open pits were depleted and subsequently abandoned, the current eighty-seven acres of land had been filled with three-and-a-half million tons of trash mixed with local soil by the Los Angeles County Sanitation District.

So what happens when you place a garden on a landfill? The latter settles because the trash decomposes, causing dips and buckles in trails and road. Irrigation pipes break.

“The intense heat generated as a by-product of decomposition burned the roots of trees and shrubs, leading to much devastation among the early plantings. Pockets of out-gassing methane, carbon dioxide, and sulfur caused “hot spots” to form where nothing would grow. Sometimes, plant roots would get into the trash itself; in one instance, roots grew inside a tire. The soil used to cap the trash deposits is generally low in nutrients and acts much like clay, expanding when wet and cracking during the summer dry season. This puts additional stress on root systems and allows for new gaps to vent gases. As time progressed, new plants were accessioned to replace those lost, and the rate of subsidence began to slow, resulting in greater stability of the land.” (Ref.)

The various folks establishing this garden were passionate and prevailed. Frances Young, a district director of California Garden Clubs & Horticulture Societies, began to promote a regional botanic garden, William S Stewart, then director of the Los Angeles State & County Arboretum in Arcadia joined the cause, and Donald P Woolley was responsible for the landscaping – all dedicated to the ecological use of the existing resources.

The garden has matured pretty well, given how young it is. The front is loaded with the kinds of things most of the general public might enjoy: a slightly overwrought rose garden, a decent fuchsia collection, an impressive staghorn fern collection, and a seasonal spot filled with colorful annuals. Diverse, inviting resting places everywhere.

For me it got more attractive once you wander deeper into the landscape – lots of interesting trees, an artificial stream and lake, both dry during my visit, canyons that provide shade and opportunities for indigenous plantings and wildlife.

Also the stage for a potential heart attack during my meanderings. The garden was in the process of setting up for their annual light show during the dark months, and what I thought were camouflaged projectors turned out to be loudspeakers – imagine wandering along a quiet forest trail and all of a sudden a booming voice shouts “Testing, testing” into your ear. Should have seen me jump….

The current major attraction in the garden are Thomas Dambo‘s sculptures of giant trolls which might make the kiddos jump but not your’s truly. I had previously written about his amusing efforts to recycle wood and place these creatures into the open to lure people into nature. Here now was the opportunity to see the real thing, and I might have enjoyed it more if not for the fact that the signage explaining their mission was so intensely didactic.

There is Ibbi Pip, the birdhouse troll, with birdhouse pointing the way throughout the garden

There is Rosa Sunfinger, the botanical troll,

Here is Ronya Redeye, the speaker troll,

and Camma Can, the trash troll

My favorite, if one can call it that, was Softus Lotus, the listening troll,

and here is Base Buller, the painting troll.

Squirrel unperturbed…..

Then again, who knows for whom it might register and be thought provoking or providing a teaching moment. And if it brings you to the garden, might as well teach about succulents, or the variability in needle trees or about anyone of the 200.000 plants on offer these days. Mission accomplished! She says, grumblingly.

Music is Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite today, am I predictable, or what? Maybe the trolls dance at night.

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Calling your Representative

Just a short note to those readers who are eager to support a ceasefire in the Middle East – call your representative and urge them to support a ceasefire.

Here is how you can find out how to reach them easily.

https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

For us in Portland, the number is 202-224-3121.

That gets you to a switchboard which asks for your zip code to connect you to the relevant office – in my case Susan Bonamici’s office and it took 2 minutes to tell the legislative aide there how you hope she might act and use her influence.

Phone calls might be registered differently from emails, but the latter sure works as well.

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Bold Bandits and Breathtaking Boulders

As hide-outs go, you could do worse. Particularly when you have attempted to escape prison four times, sentenced for stealing horses, and finally succeed, in 1862, with ten men dead in the process. When you are a poet at heart, you’re surely sensitive to the indescribable beauty of your surrounds.

Who and what am I talking about? Tiburcio Vasquez, son of a founding family of San Francisco, born in Monterey, and drawn to Southern California in the wake of the gold rush. He wrote poetry, he operated a gambling saloon, and eventually he robbed stage coaches when he wasn’t seducing everyone with a skirt on, married or not, apparently quite generous with the spoils of his thefts to those in his crew and needy people in the region.

Eventually he was caught, after multiple feuds and shoot-outs, hanged in 1875 after spending time in San Quentin. He might or might not have been the Robin Hood-like figure who Zorro was modeled after, but he was the one from which the otherworldly landscape neighboring the small town of Aqua Dulce derived its name.

The strange formation of sandstone is a park today, some 45 minutes north of L.A. off Highway 14. You drive through the Sierra Pelona into Santa Clarita valley, then through Aqua Dulce, a small town advertising the high school Fall Festival,

and then reach Vasquez Rocks where the Pacific Crest Trail intersects with multiple other hiking loops, all opening to awe inspiring vistas.

The rocks were formed by runoff from higher mountains, dirt, sand, plant remnants and so on, layer after layer for millions of years – 25 million, I believe – compressed by the weight of each additional layer, compacted into sandstone. Underneath it all runs the Elkhorn Fault which was actively shifting tectonic plates, thus elevating the rocks into angles as steep as 40 – 50 degrees (and pushing some of them up to 4 miles underground, in equally angular formations, it is believed.)

The main rock formations within the 932 acres of the park can be divided into those that are hard and brittle, called hog back ridges and others that are soft and round, full of holes (often occupied by owls!), eroded across time. There are also grinding holes to be found in these rocks, signs of the presence of the Tataviams (originally linked to the Shoshone) who inhabited the region for some 1300 years, from 450 BC until the 1800s.

When the Spanish missionaries arrived and founded the Mission San Fernando Rey de España some 20 miles away, a lot of them were brought in, converted, and forced to labor for their colonial masters. Within a few generations their language was lost. Today, the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians instruct us about their history and heritage and are working towards official recognition by the federal government.

There was much archeological evidence that informed about the Tataviams’ lives as gatherers, hunters and traders, including pictographs. Near the nature center where you enter the park, you can see exact replicas of many of them, all in one place. The original pictographs are in a section of the park that is closed to the public so they will not be destroyed. The originals have been there since 450 AD.

When I visited, the area was dry, suffused with light, filled with shrubbery that tenaciously clung to rocks, and a shining color palette from the greens and reds of the lichen to the orange glow of some of the boulders.

It was also relatively empty, not too many people hiking mid-day, but some climbing the formations, which provided perfect scale for the photographer.

At other times the landscape was booming with people: it has been used as a backdrop for Hollywood films since the 1920s, when it was still private land, leased to the film industry. Below is the list from Wikipedia, and that does not even include a far longer one for TV shows….

It was a perfect day. And here is locally sourced music….

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Eaton Canyon, Revisited

October 21st was Ursula Le Guin’s birthday. I was reminded of that by, of all people, my beloved, who is not exactly into literature and/or poetry, but knows how much it – and her authorship – matters to me. Oblivious to that date, I had actually been thinking about her a few days earlier, while hiking Altadena’s Eaton Canyon, completely transformed from how I had experienced it the first time last April.

Verdant then, with roaring water, now dry, with but a trickle. Full of bloom then, color and the songs of birds, now reduced to pattern, lounging frogs and lizards. Still heartrending beautiful.

I was thinking of the many poems I had read where Le Guin describes the very essence of landscapes, desert as well as coast or woods, and how I could not remember a single one in its accurate wording.

That stood in contrast to one about war, that for obvious reasons now rose to the fore:

The Next War

It will take place,
it will take time,
it will take life,
and waste them.

I don’t know about you, but even when I try, when I immerse myself in beauty combined with physical exertion – something even a few miles will do these days – I cannot distract myself away from the sorrow of the extant and future loss of life in the Middle East. When I read about proposed solutions to the conflict, it seems to me that people are just throwing out words, hopes, and closer inspection reveals that no one really has a clue as to how to bring about realistic change, on ALL sides. (Ukraine, by the way, not forgotten by me, either.) Here is an essay worthwhile contemplating that tries to make a distinction between legality and morality of retaliatory actions, and here is one that talks about the difficulty of speaking to the issues without being labeled anti-semitic or islamo-phobic, rendered to silence when we need to speak up.

When I came home from the hike I tried to find a desert poem to post, but chanced on the one below, from her ultimate collection of poems,  So Far So Good, finished 2 weeks before her death in 2018.

The volume offers meditations on nature, the recurring topic of so much of her work, but also on aging and the relationship between body and soul. Meditations that are moving, wise, courageous – and also seem an incredible luxury provided by peace time, not available to those tortured, killed and abducted, starved or rained on by bombs. As a committed pacifist, she would have likely agreed.

How It Seems to Me 

In the vast abyss before time, self

is not, and soul commingles

with mist, and rock, and light. In time,

soul brings the misty self to be. 

Then slow time hardens self to stone

while ever lightening the soul,

till soul can loose its hold of self

and both are free and can return

to vastness and dissolve in light,

the long light after time. 

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Fauré seems fitting today for music.

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Migrating South.

Walk with me. It’ll be the last hike in Oregon for a while. I am going on a roadtrip to Los Angeles this week, and will write from there until my return in November.

The birds were active today. Little finches busily harvesting seeds.

Raptors in the air.

Egrets on the go,

competing with a lot of blue herons for space and food sources.

This little caterpillar portends a short winter, a long winter, a cold winter, a dry winter, oh, if I could only remember.

These guys were fighting over a fish, until one gave up. The kingfisher watched on.

Lots of preening: the bald eagle, the ducks, the mud hens, the nutria.

Lots of flora still clamoring for attention,

some berries ready to provide for times of scarcity.

What I will miss: a concert that I urge you to consider – Annelies: The Voice of Anne Frank, co-sponsored by the Choral Arts Ensemble of Portland and the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. Details about the Portland performance are in the link – I have heard from several friends who are singing in it that it is beyond amazing, an important reminder of what matters in times when human life is under threat. The link at the end of the blog is a recording of the concert by a different ensemble.

What you will miss (if you don’t get going…): our exhibition The Gorge Beckons: Change and Continuity is still up at the Columbia Gorge Museum in Stevenson until the end of the month. Your thoughts on the work would be much appreciated.

Alternatively you could sensibly decide to enjoy the arrival of autumn in the wetlands instead.

The geese were gathering to fly formation, I wonder if they go South along side of me. I will report, stay tuned!

Music today by James Whitbourn with the MSU Chorale.

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Perennial Pumpkins

Like clockwork pumpkins beckon the photographer at the start of fall, just like sunflowers did in August and September. Like clockwork, the photographer tries to find new angles, opting for detail in some years,

the whole Gestalt in others.

Pumpkins provide never ending joy in their voluptuousness, their variability ranging from highly saturated colors

to visions of water color softness.

I am currently working on a longer essay about the new artist in residence at Portland Japanese Garden, who displays installations based on a theme of visual transposition, mitate ((見立絵)) in Japanese. It is a form of literary or visual reconfiguration, seeing something old in new ways, or making allusions that can amount to puns or parody.

Mitate is of course at the core of creating photomontages – transposing the old into the new, shaping reality into something that both maintains and shifts appearances, and, at times, meaning. For today’s topic I have the perfect examples (I have posted some of these images before, long-time readers, please be forgiving.) Here are reconfigured pumpkins. Don’t dare to carve them!

Here is some funky jazz from Poitiers, France: Light up my Pumpkin

Go make me some pumpkin bread! Just kidding.

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Sunflowers, Umpteenth Edition.

Yes, this time of year again. A few years ago I paired the real flowers with the painted ones (see below). I figured this year we just look at the real thing, the surround where they grow and the words they bring to mind.

Got Sunflowers?

So walk with me, and bring a bucket, since the farm where I went near Hillsboro allows you to pick all things ripe. Grapes were beckoning – the vines laden – or is it loaded? Whatever, lots of grapes. Still dry on Wednesday, the day before the rain came.

But I had come for the sunflowers – equally attracted by the buds,

the blossoms,

This one had a drop of water in the center like a jewel

the stems and the leaves. Intent to paint with the camera:

Emil Nolde would have been proud of me – except I am not proud of him…

Daily wildlife made an unanticipated appearance. It pays, if you are old and walking slowly, so that critters like these are more curious than frightened. S/he put on quite the show.

The makeshift tents to protect against the sun had their own structural beauty, folded and unfolded, plastic, metal rods, netting all claiming attention.

I can never decide if the poem below is full of wisdom or soppy (or both.) But in August, with the annual radiance of sunflowers, it speaks to me. (Although I’d prefer to embrace the present rather than reveling in memory. Move forwards. not backwards.)

You Can’t Have It All

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

by Barbara Ras

The sky filled with clouds, the rain would appear in force the next day.

Music today played by the talented Sol Gabetta, who was seemingly dressed in a cloud, but her cello sounded more like thunder, appropriately Shostakovian. If that’s a word. They seem to be reticent today!

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Drought

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

― Adrienne Rich The Dream of a Common Language (1978)

“I HAVE to do this: believe that there is the possibility of reconstitution. I have to be sure of the fact that there will always be those who are already engaged and can be joined, so no one has to go it alone.” Such were the thoughts on my hike last week, when assaulted by the heat and the views of so many oak trees either diseased, or dying, or dead.

The grasses will recover.

So will the wild blackberries, although the fruit dried on the wine, hard little balls of no use to perusing wildlife.

The trees, though, are suffering.

Eventually I made it to sturgeon lake, now just a puddle. Small California sunflowers lined the shores where there is usually water, a golden band screaming: beauty!

The herons and egrets joined the pelicans, some of them roosting in the trees behind the water.

A flock of Western sandpipers, really a murmuration, undulated as a cloud in the air, and looked like blossoms on a tree, in a particular spot. They were miraculous, shimmering, moving hard in the hot air. They are difficult to photograph and to detect, just look closely.

I had to sit down in a shady spot twice during a hike that I used to do briskly, without any sense of fatigue then. Yet, I am still hiking. I am still casting my lot with those who love nature and try to raise consciousness about the climate crisis. I still believe change is possible. And the birds still signal wonder.

Music today is the same mix of sadness and resilience that colored this week – from Poland with decidedly Jewish melodies perfect for the upcoming High Holidays, I’ve been listening intently.

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