One of the programs we run in the forest is something called the Long-Term Ecological Reflections Program. It's a program designed to teach humanities majors how to do science. Apparently, selected humanities majors from various schools get to come to the woods with regional authors (big time ones, like Kim Stafford, wow!) and help us collect data, sort of like the Christmas bird counts, but on a much smaller scale. Additionally, they are alloted times and places to go into the woods and "reflect" in writing about the woods, so that they can get humanities credit, as well. I think it's a neat idea because it helps to bridge that gap between loving nature (who doesn't!) and learning science (I didn't know crap about science as an English major-- sampling? what's that?). The guy who runs the program says that he keeps a repository of any works about Oregon reflections that these students write. I like that point. Nature writing, although not science, is a nice popular bridge to science. I think it's good to write about what we see in the environment and how beautiful it is. Maybe it was in one of those Malcolm Gladwell books where he talked about the snow-covered mountains in Montana. If you went every year to look at the mountain, you wouldn't notice the snow-cap receding. But take a 25 year break and when you come back, you'll know that its gone. Nature writing serves as an accessible "jog" for ecological consciousness; it's a reminder that the world is big and good, but fragile and precarious. Which is why I will write this, so that I can remember it.
She, of course, was referring to the perpetually complex, cloudy sky that enshrouds the corridor. I told her that in other places of the world, we wish we had that nice cloudy sky instead of frigid winter days and humid, mosquito-ridden summers.
"I'm from Long Island," she said (I'm not oblique, but she had no accent of long-island-ish-ness). "Fred's from Dover." It was sort of an "I understand" statement, empathizing with the silly weather that dominates the Atlantic shore. We shared a sort of warm-eyed moment of conversion, the kind that you see people get after a long lunch with an old friend.
"I'm sorry," I said. We laughed. But this is not the point of the story.
Summers in Oregon have been described as being the best summers in the country. I'm not sure where I heard that and it could have been in some pro-Oregonian propaganda, but you know what, as the joke goes, 99% of statistics are made up on the spot. Again, tangent. Even if they aren't REALLY statistically, "the best," they are relatively clear, cool, and we don't have mosquitos here at all. Or at least that is what another forest-y friend told me. So, on those merits alone they certainly beat South Carolina. No more ticks trying to get their "Twilight" on.
So yesterday the summer season began. I had spent quite a long time staring at some data trying to make sense of why I was getting an autocorrelation signal in the DEM_10 slope and elevation data. My brain was fried, so I decided I would drive over the Willamette to the little town of Albany, which isn't particularly impressive as a town, but the Willamette bridges are very cool. They're all made of.... I don't really know what this is... that structural looking kind of steel, and of course since Oregon is bike-friendly there are plenty of walking paths. Sounds like a good, free way to spend an hour or so. Well, my drive to Albany took me towards the Cascades (in a general eastern direction). One of the few things I didn't like about my house when I first got here was that I couldn't see both mountain ranges. Then I realized that if I went out on Conifer and turned left(to Albany) not right (to Corvallis), I came out on the eastern side of town with the Cascades in full view. Those things are so magnificent that even on a cloudy day I can see most of them. But on a sunny day... wow... it's like they just go back forever. I could see back to the ones with snow-peaks on them.
I was intending to come up with some really good description for this, but I can't really do it very good justice. So I'll just give it a crapshot. I guess it sort of looks like the Badlands how we saw them, on a semi-cloudy day. There's a bunch of field and then there are layers of pale color where the sunlight is coming through the clouds and hitting the mountains at all different angles and on all different surfaces.
One of the best things about being a forester, although I guess technically I'm an forest ecologist now (I like that much better, to be honest-- more loving, less chopping), is that my job is literally to figure out why beautiful places are beautiful. So going to a national park or a walk in the woods, that's "work" for me. Everything that nature does it does for a reason. Form fitting function. BRORB called ecology a "fractal" once, and I think (knowing very little about fractals) that this is a great description-- the complexity remains on every level you look at. So let me tell what I saw from the point of a forest ecologist, which is part of why it is so beautiful to me. Looking to the east, I saw the Cascades in deep-glory. Much of their rock is andesitic, which means it's from volcanic origin, mostly red breccia, green tuft, and black basalt. So the colors of the stone are bright, and very from being very coarse looking to being vitric. As for the trees, there are some hardwoods, mostly alders along the streams, but the majority of the landscape is the dark green Douglas-fir on the ridge tops, and western hemlock (the more "heavy looking" evergreen tree) on the side slopes. There is also the Pacific Yew, it's a sort of furry, skinny tree that looks very Triassic. It makes me particularly happy because it is a medicinal plant. And then of course sword blade fern, Oregon grape (the yellow flower, you also have it in SF, that grows on hills), and salal ivy in the understory. So imagine, all these shades of green and black and red, being hit by literal rays of sunlight that are breaking out of purple clouds. And then add to that at least four rainbows... I'm not kidding, there is sort of a perpetual mid-afternoon rainbow thing that goes on to the east side of the corridor. I guess when the afternoon clouds pass to the Cascades and the sun breaks low in the western sky, it hits the rain just right... but that's just a guess. Or maybe it's magic. I don't know. Maybe I'll just say it's magic for my own sake of wonder. You know, it's sort of like looking at my Excel spreadsheet of data-- you can see a set of numbers on the sheet and say, well, that's a big tree, or wow, that percolation pattern sure looks complicated, but until you see the tree or write out that big honking equation, you don't really see that sort of overarching glory and order. I can see how being really good at mathematics and being into ecology are similar; the idea of having some beautiful partition function or old-growth doug-fir that summarizes just a mass-load of data kind of carries across. To me, this synopsis in tangible form sort of makes me feel a relief, sort of an "ah, yes, you know, I think that this whole world makes some sense after all." I get the feeling maybe deep down the whole "tending toward entropy thing" is fundamentally scary. Finding order in disorder brings relief; finding hierarchy or pattern above order brings enrapturement. A lot could be said about the "system" to this theory, but for another day.
So back to the afternoon. There was only one thing to do. Take full advantage of the sun break and go for a Cascades tour. I should mention the other glorious thing on this journey, which is not the Cascades, but actually the farms. Other than the brief post-college stint in Atlanta, I've been living within eye-shot of farms for about eight years now, and I've come to really appreciate them. Even the ugly ones in SC are a good reminder of the agricultural industry, and the fact that the bulk of America is still largely used for agriculture or rangeland. I would take a farm over a suburb anyday. Here, the main crops are grass, orchids, mint, and berries. So our farms are just these waving, brilliant green grasslands, sometimes spotted with yellow dots of orchid buds or purple and blue berries. There's a clover farm a mile or so up the road that is filled with white clover blossoms. So all up I-5 there are these undulating green lands, with maybe the occasional old farm house or half-run down irrigation equipment filling in the idealism. (Yes, I realize the irony of having irrigation equipment in OR, too. I have no idea why it's there. I know nothing about growing non-woody plants, except that I like to eat them, and horses do, too. Thankfully, correlation does not necessarily imply sameness).
Occasionally, the green farms break for brown, rocky soils. BRORB told me that Oregon looks almost exactly like Greece (I wouldn't know) and that, like Greece, the brown, rocky soils have deep underground resevoirs that make growing grapes and nuts possible. Another major crop here is hazelnuts, so interspersed between the green fields are just rows and rows of hazelnuts (filberts) trees. Now imagine taking this in at 65 miles per hour. It's just a sensory rush. And then you look up ahead and there are two snow capped volcanoes-- Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens-- just hanging out on the horizon, kind of saying, hey, we made it like this. We made this fertile soil when we blasted a bunch of rich minerals right out of the ground. And the Willamette and its tributaries are babbling cleanly along the side of the road. It's sort of arguing, you mountains, that was all me and my silty deposits. Well, you can't hear the babble as you drive, but you know it's there. You can smell it. And that river does seem kind of boastful.
So this is where that joke comes into play-- my forested accomplice noted that an Oregonian can find a volcano without ever being able to see it. That's a nice joke and all, but the truth is, this place is so fertile and stunning that even two volcanoes seem to be a trivial afterthought following a description of the land. Once I was in a music class in high school and we played a piece called Cataclysm. It was this caustic symphony dedicated to the St. Helens eruption. It was dramatic and fast, a very exciting piece. The next year, we got this tremendously slow (and much more famous) piece called "The Planets" to play. Cataclysm was cool, but The Planets was mind-blowing. I guess it's sort of like that, a beautiful landscape, it's a slow ode to order in an entropic world.
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