Nevermore

Corvidae are pointellism-resitant

I posted this shot, unaltered, earlier, somewhere. That day, a family of crows were pecking at the Virginia piedmont clay, reddening their beaks toward some unkown end. Cranking up the saturation on this shot makes it both more magical and real. I like the way the crow holds it's form while the leaves blottify. The leaves come and go, but the crow sticks around, her young and then his perching and pecking through woods dancing from growth to decay and back.

Ravens don't like having their photos taken, so I got no nevermore. The evermore of the common crow is enough for a non-poet, dirt-digger, woods-walker.

Camas Fields Forever

For two weeks in a row, I've been blessed with fieldwork in a sublime Cascadian meadow. This last time, I encountered other western Washington folks who'd made the trip top see the legendary camas bloom--the place is so famed for this blue lily that it's common name is Camasland. Last week was the time to see the bloom at its peak, when the flowers are so thick that swaths of meadows turn blue; I offer these photos (which are pathetic  stand-ins for the real scene) to those who missed the day. Explorer accounts back to Lewis and Clark speak of camas meadows that appeared to be lakes, although to my own eye (connected to a mind that demands less sense) the biggest areas of camas looked like pools of sky, complete with fluffy white clouds of American Bistort.

Camas is just the best known of many plants in this meadow that are important to native people. This meadow is a treasure to the Wenatchi and other tribes that came here generation after generation, congregating in large numbers to harvest the roots, socialize, and later light the fires that kept the meadow from reverting to forest.  The soil is black from thousands of fires, dark rich testament to centuries and millenia of tending to this special island of meadow in the Cacadian treed terrain.

While the blue may look more like sky than water to me, the camas lily appreciates lower, wetter ground, which means that sometimes it lives in the silt of relict channels and silted in streams. Camasland is a flat meadow within a bowl of forested hills, and the stream that winds through it has meandered here and there over the years. The photo above shows the faint blue of camas in one of those old channels, with the yellow flowers and larger foliage of balsamroot on the banks. Difference in elevation between these zones is only a few inches, but that's enough to nurture quite different vegetation on each. The meandering blue is an echo of a stream, a channel living forever.

This landscape is special to modern people as well. Years ago, the state decided to conserve the ecosystem here, and set aside most of it. There are rare species involved, but the place is special also because of the abundance and cultural importance of some of the more common species present. Preserving this place forever means that the ancient yet fleeting beauty of a wildflower meadow will not become a housing subdivision (the fate of most prairies west of the mountains) or some other modern development that will be fleeting compared to the natural and cultural history of Camasland, but which could do irreversible damage.

Some Salish Sea Beaches

Where the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca meet the Sound of Puget, the tides rushing in and falling out swirl round myriad peninsulae, islands, and rocks. On the rise, they reverse the course of even the mighty rivers twice a day, pushing into inlets and sloughs, fjords and marshes. As streams and rivers deliver sediment by the daily mote and occasional landslide, as bluffs calve and slump down to the shore, the tides grab rock and sand, smudging it around each cliff and dune, softening the drop into the deep. Carbon in the forms of leaves, seaweeds and logs rides tides and storms to the high water mark, adding to the littoral, the liminal that separates and unites land and sea: the beach.

Slow that story down, stretch each hour to a millenium or two, and it plays out with tides of ice. Glaciers carved out much of the sea, drowned land under grinding flows and ebbs. Each advancing lobe plows deeper while the sheer weight pushes the bedrock down. When the climate warms, the glaciers retreat, barfing collosal slurries of meltwater, rock and grit as they do. Freed of the weight and exposed to Northwest rains, the land beneath rebounds and erodes downstream. Sometimes, the glacial pace speeds up with a rushing river beneath the ice, or collapse of an ice dam that unleashes great lakes all at once.

On either scale, rocks and organics end up along the shore and on the floor of the Salish Sea.

Meanwhile, the sea sends up it's contribution. Creatures crawl up, seaweeds drift in and hold fast. All those rocks become covered with coatings of single-celled organisms, draped with flaccid primitives, crawled over by critters with exoskeletons, all while the clams and their kin burrow down and spit up sand (all of them poop, or die, or both, adding to the beach). On a low tide, the land normally hidden by the sea's glare and motion emerges, occupied over every inch in stark contrast to the plain plane of water we normally see on the calm Salish Sea. No wonder the local people have always said that when the tide is out, the table is set.

Set the table these days with these beach denizens, and you may find people saying that they ate already. Let Bourdain eat the barnacles, or that thumbheaded Bizarre Foods guy enjoy the salty cartilige-covered-in-slime texture of the limpet (well OK, Hawaiians will take the latter with gusto, but for the most part, moderns have narrowed down the list of edible shellfish to a handfull). But look at the species spread in many an old shell midden, and what you find is diversity closer to what lived on the beach than what a modern table holds. That's what happened when people needed the beach and it's life in order to live themselves; that's how it was before oyster and geoduck became conspicuous and expensive consumption.

Of course, seeing these old sites has become harder. More than a century ago, many were dug up and hauled away to burn the shell for lime, or fed to chickens to make their eggshells harder, or just piled up in dikes to "reclaim" the marshes that fed previous generations. Later, people took to armoring the shoreline, strangling natural beaches beneath fill and junk while what once stretched in front was washed away. People who believe that they own a piece of the earth want to build right up to the line, and in so doing wiped away that magical stretch of neither-land-nor-water that any good beach embodies.

For a variety of reasons, the Northwest has escaped widespread sea level rise thus far, but it will not forever, and future storms will wipe away the archaeology that could tell us how people adapted to previous changes in climate. A shift in the winds, a subduction zone quake, and the wisdom of millenia calves away, pulling certain kinds of knowledge out of reach. I've seen coastal sites that are within a few storms of disappearing entirely. Meanwhile, the agency responsible for archaeology has poured resources into studying buildings on the shore and promoting them as tourism magnets, with no perceivable effort to document and learn from the older coastal sites and what they could mean for our well-being and survival.

Beaches will always exist (they will replace the buildings when we are gone, surely as the tides will continue to flow and ebb), but the beaches that we can learn from, the ones that tell the stories of how people dealt with climate change or tsunamis, for example, are eroding, their creatures thinned to a faint shadow of their former abundance and diversity by the ongoing acidification and extinctions.