Cedar

A blog and a dog

Month: June 2022

Jumping the Helicopter

Thanks to Katie (and her temporary gig for Northstar Helicopters), we boarded a helicopter with five other tourists, a guide, and a strikingly gorgeous pilot, who couldn’t start the bird. She radioed back to the office, with no reply, had to walk back and return with a fat guy hobbling along with a heavy gadget to jumpstart us. 

When I wasn’t gawking at the pilot, I enjoyed some other mind-bending scenery, from the verdant Montana Creek – Windfall Creek watershed to Herbert Glacier to the massive towers and nunataks of the Juneau ice field.

Something about jumpstarting a helicopter… I don’t know…Seems to be an apt metaphor for how I’m realizing life in middle age. We’ve got our complex corporal technologies… capable of so much when they were built… We’ve got our theories about how life works, how to achieve liftoff, to hover, to bank, and soar to some kind of greatness, maybe… But sooner or later, we need the limping fat guy with the heavy chemical box, to jolt us from failure, from humility, back into competence if not beauty. 

Whatever. Cool flight. Precious time spent with lovely Katie during the heart of June. Solstice has come and gone. (It, too, felt a bit like jumpstarting the helicopter.) The word for the moment continues to be  LUSH. Our yard is redolent with lilac. Azaleas are ablaze, spruce still sagging with new growth, Devil’s club towering 20 ft or more into the canopy, king salmon jumping into everyone’s boat but mine. 

Cedar’s good. Except when she isn’t. She’s testing me/us on recall to the point where I’m considering an e-collar. She knows what she’s supposed to do when I call her. More often than I should, I need to use my stern voice. And sometimes she simply turns from me, trots away, then walks around me in a big circle. 

If the helicopter is my aspiration for greatness for either of us, me or Cedar, it definitely calls for a jumpstart from time to time. But once you get that sucker airborne… 

She defies gravity. She commands the lush world through a sexy pair of RayBans. 

For a while.

Maybeso

Seems like indecision has been a major theme around here of late. Not for Cedar, though.

I have one piece of developmental news to report, here at Week 44 (apparently she was never really 40 or 41 or 42 weeks old if you go by my recent blog record):

Maybe not…

Maybe so…

Maybe is a funny word. As a kid, it was usually adult for NO. But really, it’s a word expressing possibility and, in the case of many of my blogs (which I realize often in some kind of “maybe-ish” speculation), equivocation.

My buddy Fred and I were chatting about the importance of decisive action for safe boat piloting. In confusing situations, with other boats trying to ascertain a course, it’s often prudent for a captain to make a decisive move, thus literally changing the facts of the situation, and changing an ambiguous situation into one with better definition. Of course there’s some tempting resonance for many life situations. Make a move and things will become clearer. The maybe doldrums can be more hazardous than rough seas.

As I was thinking these silly oversimplifications, I received an email with a request to comment on some “improvements” at Maybeso Experimental Forest. Say it ain’t so? Turns out this place full of potentiality was established in 1956 to see if clearcutting did a whole lot of damage. Um…maybe so? The good news is that it’s adjacent to a a control group forest, named, I’m not kidding, “Old Tom.”

This week, Cedar finally conquered the big log and took a walk out there herself (after many unsuccessful pose attempts, compliments of Old Tom). She’s mellowing, which is pretty cool except for her newly discovered ability to bark.

So, friends and relatives, take it from Old Tom. Make a move. The ground will hold. Others will change their course in response to your decisiveness. Clarity will emerge. Maybeso?

Cedar, not buying the navigation malarkey, posts her own watch.

Song and Speed

“By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.”

Robert Frost, “Hyla Brook”

Each June I think about Frost’s laments in “Hyla Brook” in part while I’m preparing, and half-dreading, to leave home and head to the steamy-hot forests of Vermont. For many years, exhausted by the school year, I, too, had pretty much run out of song and speed. By June, Frost’s brook has gone underground and the loud Hyla frogs have dispersed.

Here, I say, if we had Hylas, they would be in full shout.

BigTree Creek (TM) has not run out of song or speed.

I was away for almost two weeks and was really amazed by the amount of growth –especially of Devli’s Club and ferns– that went down (or went up, rather), while I was away. Cedar seems to have grown in her own right, maybe a tad mellower after her 13 days with two other dogs and after the removal of most of her femalia.

Frost mentions that his brook may “have gone groping under ground”. I’m not touching the “groping” business, but one cool thing I’ve discovered about ferns is that the individual fronds are connected by rhizomes, so sometimes when you see individual ferns at a distance in the forest, you’re actually looking at a single huge plant–sometimes ferns are as large as tall trees, but most of their “stems” are underground as rhizomes.

The Devil’s Club, too, has undergone a wild metamorphosis. Some of them, I swear, are higher than a basketball hoop. Turns out their productivity is related to the underground, too; unlike skunk cabbage, they need speed—water that moves by their roots, which is why they seem to thrive in disturbed and steep areas.

I wonder why we don’t call creeks “brooks” out here in the better half of the country. (I do cringe at “crick” though, so some of my underground Easterner remains.)

In any case, Hyla Brook isn’t just about the flow of water in June. It’s a reminder to be less sentimental (I think) and see things as they are (of course, it’s Frost, so that’s not so simple when he has just shown you both what his brook no longer is and what it presently is [n’t]). On that note, Cedar still looks like a late summer humpy. The one thing not growing fast around here is her fur.

A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.

Final lines of “Hyla Brook”
Very, very nice to have Katie home! Pretty sure Cedar agrees.

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