Some kids get a bedtime story. Our kid takes hers in the morning.
It’s the green season. Most buds and blossoms have done their work and we now walk in the presence of ferns (along with towering devil’s club, salmonberry, sugar scoop, twisted stalk, river violet, deer heart, red elderberry, and all kinds of micro-greenery). The ferns–I think most are woodferns– tell Cedar all kinds of smell-stories each walk. Yesterday she smelled the deer before we saw it high tail down the trail. Today she consulted the ferns to smell the story of who had left such a redolent gift right in the middle of our path and where they went–likely relieved–after such a generous deposit.
My “Picture This” app tells me that “the orderly arranged woodfern really soothes obsessive-compulsive disorders.” (I’m a bit skeptical there, but I’ll admit that as Cedar smells the stories, I see no sign of her obsessing over fetching.) In any case, no matter how we spin or smell or need our narratives, we’re both lucky to be graced by June’s feathery fern beauty.
All spring I’ve been aware of that feeling that things are happening before I’m fully ready for them. Maybe that’s just the way it’s always been, or it’s going to be from here on out. Hard to say.
It’s been a trying month so far. Mostly cold and wet weather. Lots of challenges. But the growth train is full speed, dead ahead, and from fireweed shoots to lupine to deer heart to sedges, we’re all greened up and then some.
Cedar had another bear encounter… a quick chase of a young (maybe 3 year-old) black bear. We surprised one another at close range and luckily it was the flight (vs. fight) type because it had made its decision what to do long before my mind produced the word “bear.” It darted to a stump about 50 feet away where it sat and we kind of mimicked one another nearsightedly staring for a few high-pulse-rate seconds. Honestly, he seemed like a pretty good guy. He poured himself down the stump and took a few tentative steps towards us, with Cedar leaning into my leg to watch. Then I think we bored him. Whew.
Cedar and I debriefed a bit, and I’m pretty sure she knows the word “bear” now, and that we’re on the same page that we listen to each other about their presence.
Scene of the bear visit
Dog is my co-pilot
Great minds thinking alike
A few precious moments of sun
Rare lizarding moment
Strawberries (with lilacs just emerging)
Some low tides
Blooming geranium, and another macro focus fail!
Skiffin’ it with Dave
Proof that I actually went for a run…
and a kayak
Cedar-colored bear
Cedar-colored Lillies
Dogwood
Wood anemone
June outtake– astonishing beauty happens..
The thing about the onslaught of late spring— June— is that it’s sort of like the moment you’ve chosen to ride a wave that’s a little too big. You’re in, come what comes, so it’s a good time to stay alert and hope you’re going to take in just enough of it to make it unscathed. A foolish hope, but one that rises and combs, set after irresistible set.
Thinking about those tough Frost lines from “Reluctance,” suggesting that it’s a “treason” to “bow and accept the end of a love or a season,” I’ll try to keep my head up, and hit the trail, one dog walk at a time towards summer.
“June Too Soon” is from the mnemonic device for sailing in hurricane season. At least we don’t have to worry about that. And at least I think I remembered how to spell mnemonic.
It’s June. And there was fresh snow on several nearby peaks this week. Rain has been falling (falling seems a little gentle for some of the days–pelting?) at sea level for days or weeks or years. I’ve lost track.
With Cedar in the lead, it’s been lovely to see a profusion of flowers despite the June gloom.
Villous cinquefoil on a cliff near a reputed sunset spot
Butter cup
Star flower
Bee working lupine
Neighborhood bird cherry
Shooting star
Lupine
Sugar scoop
Neighborhood apple trees
New snow on Thunder Mountain
Strange spiral tide streak
Garden prep
Carrot starts
Skunk cabbage
Sinkhole in the driveway
Hauling gravel to fill sinkhole
Plantain lily
The phrase “Flowers for Brains” comes from a Ryan Adams song titled “F*ck the Rain.”
Flowers for brains
Permanent sushine
F*ck the rain
All that pain...
-Ryan Adams
I’m not sure Cedar’s caught onto the gloom. She seems to have room in her brain for plenty more flowers to go with squirrels and porkies and deer and all the things to chase and smell.
Honestly, this whole post might just be a testament to the fact that I haven’t been able to get on the water to fish. Got my boat, and the bill back, today. I’ll take flowers for brains for a bit longer.
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.
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.
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.
Apparently ferns tell great smell stories!
Lush dog.
Neighbor’s Rhodie on fire.
What? This grew while I was gone, too.
Skunk Cabbage totally unfurled and making food.
A bit of a Devil’s Club time lapse.
Oops. Two weeks of time lapse missing.
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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