by Amy Minato
When there is the first discernible blush on the berries’ bumpy bottoms, we plan menus.
“Let’s have pancakes next weekend, then we can have strawberries with ’em.”
“We can make strawberry shortcake for Sara’s birthday.”
“Don’t buy fruit! The strawberries are near ready.”
The golden carpet of our tastebuds is laid out waiting for those royal red strawberries to parade juicily across.
Finally they are ripe! We gather in the main house with ice cream and peppermint tea, count out twelve (of approximately equal size) per person, and savor them.
Rainbow Valley experiences ten minutes of silence but for sighs, swallows, and metal spoons clinking the bottoms of bowls.
Then Raul wipes his vanilla lips and tells about his mom gathering roots in Idaho. Luke remembers spending all day making tamales at Christmas. Sara, Rita, and I swap jam-making tales. Mick chimes in, jam being half his daily fare. All our domestic stories pull up chairs around us.
We are, it seems, enjoying the enjoying of the berries, even more than the berries. Now, the irony is that we can buy any fruit from mangoes to kiwis at the local store any time of year. We can go to a restaurant that would serve strawberry pie, tarts, or flambeau. But we are instead sitting on the porch at Siesta Lane in the early summer dusk with the new moon arcing over the oaks, jowls crimsoned with juice, rediscovering our capacity for bliss.
The Goat’s Eye
The Illinois landscape is to Oregon landscape what a Jacuzzi is to a hot mineral spring. One strives to imitate a wilder nature, the other still is, at least in a few places. In Illinois, people work to reclaim their native landscape. While lifestyles contribute to global destruction—prairies appear in backyards and outside museums. The native landscape has mostly been altered and naturalists work to bring some back, like a gift. Restoration is the Midwestern environmentalist’s main job—as fixer, healer.
But we have some wilderness here in the West and the land is still under attack, the wounds fresh. Here nature lovers are teachers, mourners, or warriors—educating people about threatened places, writing elegies to beloved places, standing with placards in front of bulldozers, squatting in trees, hiring lawyers.
At least we still have a chance to save some of it, and for those of us who care, this responsibility adds weight and meaning to our lives. There’s an ache to our lives, sitting here outside the emergency room as we do, nervously flipping through magazines, different than the bittersweet reclamation of Midwestern lands. In Oregon, you visit an old growth forest and the next week it may have been logged.
The assaults are constant, daily, and for every tree saved, it seems, a hundred fall. We walk among newly ravaged places like those scenes in the film Gone With the Wind of a few doctors wandering among thousands of dying soldiers. In Timothy Egan’s book The Good Rain, he describes a radio announcer’s horror at the devastation below as he flies near the Mount St. Helens eruption site. “The volcano didn’t do that, sir,” his embarrassed guide whispers. “Those are clear-cuts.”
In Illinois, for the sake of diversity, I had let my yard go wild. Neighbors complained until I put up a cute fence around this new meadow and a neat little “Prairie Preserve” sign. The “weeds” were suddenly acceptable as “prairie plants” (like how nasty “swamps” become precious “wetlands”) as part of a restoration effort.
In the West we try to ward off destruction with our red and yellow signs—Slow, Stop, Yield. A less glamorous job, this preventative care, but a privilege to witness ecological health. To swim in a glacial lake or yodel back to a wolf, to meet the mountain goat’s gaze, and hold it.
The Slough
Wanting to nurture a healthier relationship between people in our community and the land (and enamored with Joseph, the sweet guy with the lush ponytail and olive dark eyes that I shared a couch with at the planning meeting) I help form a group to encourage direct experience and stewardship of the natural world.
Through Nearby Nature we plan to lead kids on nature walks and coordinate volunteer restoration work in local natural areas. We become a family of partial dropouts from the mainstream who share a vision. It involves a weekly trip to town but it’s ethical, hopeful work, and it’s outside. We turn our first attention to the city’s pinched capillary—Amazon Creek.
Amazon Creek, which spindles along through Eugene, was once a veritable river, flexing and sighing in its bed. Since 1959, the floodplain has been filled for development, and the creek channeled. But rivers need to breathe, to replenish and be replenished by nutrients from floodplains. Small ponds form when the river recedes, providing vital sanctuaries for tree frogs and pond turtles. A river allowed to spread to its natural girth will create islands of habitat for heron, beaver, mink.
Amazon slough, however, is now an algal sludge trickling along the bottom of a deep scar, dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers. Throughout the summer, grasses and rushes are relentlessly mowed to the very lips of the creek, destroying habitat and food. The trees in the Amazon park are “bottomed” to give shade and to keep transients from living in the skirts. The trees look naked and imbalanced, shamed in a way. All done in service to a standard of beauty that can be traced back to America’s British roots: a preference for manicured, ordered gardens and a fear of insects. In the Anglo tradition, managing, controlling, clipping, mowing, or chopping gives an area value. It bears our mark. It has yielded, become safe.
But to survive we must learn to loosen up, mingle with bugs, revere the tangle of underbrush, the individual shapes of trees and tall, teasing grass.
I bring a group of Nearby Nature children to the park. Fortunately, there is an unmowed area beside an island of trees. First, we pay homage to the robin puffed and squatting in its nest in the ecotone between the woods and meadow, dark eye gleaming.
We play, hide, and laugh in the swath of grass taller than the kindergarteners. We caress a caterpillar, whistle across dandelion seed, tickle each other with fescue. Mauve pollen colors our hair and clothes. This small meadow becomes our secret place, shared with life forms too myriad to imagine.
While we play, the park mower roars in the distance. It frightens us, more so with our new awareness of the fragile ecosystem webbed in the tall grass. Together we imagine how it compacts the soil, clips the plants before they can make seeds, chews up snakes. The kids each collect a favorite plant stalk to press and keep. We wave back at the dancing bromes as we leave.
I return the next week with another group of kids and prepare to send them to a spot hidden in the grass, to treasure-hunt for life. But the area where we play has been mowed. It is now as bald and yellowed as the rest of the park, but for a patch the size of a pool table where the Nature Conservancy has found a stalk of endangered tufted hair grass. This swath stands out like an exhibit, a museum piece to remind us of something lost and gone. Eight swallows sweep over this vestige of insect habitat. The robin has abandoned her nest, probably to seek out a better food source.
There is no one around to confront, just the parking lot and impervious picnic tables. I am stunned and silenced. Had I not played in this meadow last week, my response to the mowing would have been mute, if I’d even noticed it. Not having rolled around and napped here, the news might have brought me only mild irritation, instead of a gnawing sense of loss. I call park officials but they get more calls from folks who want the park manicured, tidy, “under control.”
For change to happen, maybe more of us need to get out of our cars, off our lawnmowers, and down onto the dirt. Making connection with a place brings familiarity, responsibility, and an extension of self. There is risk in caring about what is not widely valued, but greater risk lies in not honoring what is precious.
The kids’ excitement, buoyed by stories of crab spiders, robin chicks, and camouflage games in the tall grass, quickly deflates. They sit on the ground and cover their legs with the dead grass, contemplating, maybe, what scant world might be left to them.
&n
bsp; Reckoning
I am having a tea party with three of my worst faults.
We spread a blanket under an oak and nervously gather around it. Selfish grabs the spot with the best view, Fearful hovers behind a tree, and Careless spills her tea. The fragrant stain spreads across the fabric.
Why did I agree to this, I wonder? Haven’t I suffered enough from these characters’ surreptitious appearances throughout my life? Upon its arrival I tore up the invitation to this sorry event. I threw it in the fire, ignored it on the shelf. But nothing worked. There would always be a new one delivered to my door. Crisp and foreboding.
So I brew tea and bake cookies. We meet outside surrounded by the supportive presence of grass and squirrels.
“Selfish is hogging the blanket!”
“Careless stepped on my foot!”
Fearful shifts her gaze down and passes out napkins.
I peruse these pathetic aspects of myself and sigh into my tea. How did we get here? I’d meant to eradicate these flaws by now. But look at them. They need me.
Instead of rejecting them I look deeper. At the core of Selfishness stands a guardian, in Fearful resides a peace-maker, in Careless a dreamer.
They sit patiently around the blanket, Careless with crumbs on her shirt.
They will not go away, nor should they.
From behind an oak, a willowy figure approaches. Dressed in overalls, hair tousled, Acceptance sits beside me. She holds my cold hand. We begin a conversation that may take my life to finish
Respect
Through Nearby Nature I begin a group called the Green Scouts, a children’s club that does environmental restoration activities. One day, as we collect rare, native mule ear seeds for the Nature Conservancy, a child finds a spider. A large, colorful one in an enormous web. Kyle has an immediate, fervent desire to own this spider.
Where are the stories, I wonder, to help us learn a simple respect for other life? To teach us to take with gratitude, and only out of necessity. Where are our rituals? Native cultures are rife with them, woven into the rhythm of their lives. Stories that warn about greed and hubris, rituals to mollify the horrors of the hunt. Today many of us move from instinct and buried culture, borrowing from others the social tools for creating a spiritual and sustainable bond with the Earth.
So I explain to Kyle how spiders are important in the food chain, how they eat and are eaten by other species, how much better it would be for the spider to stay right there at Willow Creek. We talk about how we do these activities to help nature, how for one morning a month, we put the needs of the plants and animals above our own. He whines and resists until I give up, and he carries the spider toward his mom who has come to pick him up.
But just as he reaches her he says, “Wait a minute. I gotta go put this spider back. It’ll be happier here.” Kyle’s manner when he lays the spider back on the grass is different than his glee when he’d found it. He puts it back gently, with a serious look, more than a little proud of himself. Kyle watches the spider scurry off over dandelion heads, and he looks pleased at himself, his seed collecting a small feat in comparison.
June I sit on the porch at dusk with the moon between the oak, throwing shadows over the long meadow and song just comes, low and easy, out of my throat to mingle with cricket chirp and owl moan and the staccato of nearby dogs. Low rustlings and furtive twigs cracking and suddenly the woods are dotted with glowing eyes. So still, settled into myself for so long. Here, like a sentinel, watching things happen.
Song
One forest ecology theory postulates that as the motion of their sap slows, diseased trees in the forest vibrate at a faster rate, producing a higher pitch than healthy trees. Insects harken to this particular tone, congregating around the sick tree, a phenomenon that serves to prune the forest.
Now when a bird calls, I’ll abandon my current task to find it. I’ll leave the door banging, tune my ears to direction and height. For low-toned songs I’ll look down, for shrill songs, up. A hermit thrush hanging out close to the ground sings in lower tones than high-pitched treetop songbirds like the winter wren. Low sounds travel farther through dense woods; high tones vibrate easily above trees.
I’ll separate the sound and try to imitate it, to respond, to seek out the bird in the branch. Remembering that one sounds like a stutter, another a whistle, another a scold. Meanwhile my toast is burning, fire sputtering, telephone left ringing in the house.
Maybe this is a small knowledge of what it means to bring the background to the foreground—to honor the natural over the human-made, to know where our temple is. And so maybe if we stop and listen, life will tune and strum more insistently, calling itself awake. Frog chirp. Cricket call. Fire crackle. Bee hum.
At dusk last evening on a telephone wire, a starling was practicing a warbler’s song. Starlings, which are related to mockingbirds, mimic the calls of other birds. No one knows why.
Starlings were brought from England because someone decided that the New World should host all the birds found in Shakespeare. Today across the country, they continue to crowd out many native birds. Starlings take over nest sites and food sources, intimidating smaller, weaker species.
This one would start over and over, each time making small changes in the sound. When it finally settled on a tune, it repeated it many times, not quite capturing the warbler’s easy lilt. Another starling stood below, looking up, seeming to listen. I imagined that starlings mimic for the purpose of tricking their way to a nest site, or to fool an amateur naturalist like myself. But maybe it’s from a nostalgia for what in nature they are eliminating in order to thrive. Maybe this gesture is a requiem, as are our films, records, museums: an attempt to secure a song that, just by living in our particular manner, we are extinguishing.
Niche
Often during my work with kids in Amazon Park I watch the drama of the red-winged blackbird enacted against the backdrop of joggers, cyclists, and Frisbee players. While a common bird in many places, there are few red-wings in the city of Eugene and only one pair of them left along this stretch of Amazon Creek. Today, one is chasing crows away from its nest in the willows and cattails. A bird as large as an oak leaf chasing one as large as a kite. Three more crows speckle the mowed lawn beside the creek, waiting. They are patient and implacable, their slick feathers cobalt blue. The two blackbirds take turns chasing and nest-sitting, and exhaust themselves with their valiant pursuit and scolding, the red on their shoulders flashing like wounds.
It seems impossible that they have time to hunt, and that the chicks are getting enough to eat. I don’t believe we will see them here next spring.
A woman who grew up near this park forty years ago says turtles were abundant in the creek, which used to spread ten times its present width. Each morning she’d wake to the song of meadowlarks thick as mosquitoes. But the Amazon today is pinched into a single vein and the ponds where the western pond turtle laid its eggs have disappeared. The turtle eggs that manage to hatch today are eaten by the non-native bullfrogs.
Without the tall grass we lose the meadowlarks and their liquid songs. What other life forms no longer grace Amazon Creek? What else is lost that might wake us to beauty, quicken our senses, stir our imagination, and woo us toward love?
Among species there are generalists and specialists. Generalist species introduced into a disturbed ecosystem tend to have advantages over native species. Maybe they are adaptable to disturbed conditions, or immune to local diseases, or more aggressive. Generalists are competitive, tenacious, pervasive. They can adapt to a variety of environments, climates, and foods. They are cockroaches, crows, bullfrogs, possums, blackberries. They are the bane of the specialists.
Specialists need particular environments—clean air and water, shelter, certain foods. They tend to be more passive, sensitive, and yielding than generalists, and are winnowed out first when an environment changes. Unable to adapt to newer, usually harsher conditions, or to compete with colonizing species, specialists retreat, de
cline, are quietly extirpated.
As one who requires a natural habitat, I root for the red-wings. We human “specialists” also try to ward off destruction and sound the alarm—sensing what in us can survive only in a living environment, preferring mountains to malls, streams to subways, air to airplanes. Can we read our own future in the story of the red-wing blackbird? Are we putting up as gallant a defense?
Succession
A few minutes after telling a visiting boy that the tree house is off limits, we hear an ominous crash. He has fallen from it and broken his arm.
The distraught parents threaten to sue the owner, whose nervous response is to pick up the pace on selling the property.
This, of course, freaks us out. I even consider buying the land, which prompts a disgusted grimace from Raul, who doesn’t believe in owning land.
Still I concoct elaborate schemes and calculations to warrant doing it. If I never so much as have to fix a leaky pipe, maybe I could squeak by on my pathetic savings.
But the place needs work. With eight structures to care for, it’s a maintenance drain. And for someone as unhandy as myself, a likely nightmare.
Yet I’ve never felt so at home anywhere, so right about a place. I need to watch lichen wrap the oaks, barn swallows teeter on wooden fences, clouds dab the far hills.
If I had someone to buy it with, maybe, or a few others. Mick, Sara, and I kick around the idea of shared ownership. The logistics overwhelm us and it no longer seems like a simple life. The well may be drying up, the septic field is nearly full, buildings must be brought to code. What if one of us wants out?
