4

Notes from the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, “Walking,” 1862

Day 1

As Little Dog winds its way up the placid McKenzie River, I listen to National Public Radio via a satellite channel. First, NPR reports that the seven defendants who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge here in Oregon were just found to be not guilty. Following that comes a report that the World Wildlife Fund just released the latest edition of the Living Planet Report, which claims that the global wildlife population is less than half as large as it was when I was in high school. I’m not certain which report to find more shocking.

The deeper I get into logging country, the more “Drain the Swamp” signs I see by the side of the road. It occurs to me that an environmentalist ought to enter into this discourse with a sign saying, “Preserve the Swamps & Restore the Wetlands.”

I have the feeling, when I finally exit the highway onto USFS Road 15-130-132, that I’ve arrived late for the party. But it’s sunny here, and the fall colors along the river are spectacular. From where I park it’s hard to imagine that anything could be wrong with nature. The river was full, wasn’t it?

I am issued a bright-yellow hard hat, which the United States Forest Service prefers me to wear when I’m out and about, especially since it’s elk season, and a heavy USFS radio, which I am “urged in the strongest terms to always pack and keep on while in the field.” I’m also issued a spare battery and written instructions on how to call for help.

Getting here was something of a whirlwind. It’s Friday, not yet a full week since I left Hawk Hill for the last time this year. After driving home on Saturday, I flew to Wesleyan University in Connecticut on Monday, gave a six-hour workshop there on Tuesday, flew home on Wednesday, and drove off for Oregon on Thursday. In the process, I forgot to pack shirts, so I purchased three flannel shirts at an outlet store in Reading, California, in the hopes that FedEx could catch me up with the rest of my clothing soon.

I am assigned to a three-room studio in the “Green House”—nothing fancy, but nothing lacking. Cement floors, radiant heat. I unpack the same plastic tubs and cooler I used on Santa Cruz Island, plus an additional duffel bag, and this time I’ve packed enough beer to start a fraternity.

A smaller spotting scope this time, my travel scope. Better for hiking. Six field guides and a Kindle full of literature. Several pairs of thermals, two pairs of rain trousers, a British waterproof parka—moss green—suitable for birding in Scotland, three pairs of gloves, two scarves, gaiters, and two pairs of ankle-high waterproof boots, the “regular” ones and the extras I purchased while at Hastings. I’m all set, other than for shirts.

I pause, finally, and remind myself that rain is heading this way. Lots of rain. The food in the cooler can stay there for now. I return to the headquarters, recruit a “buddy” to make certain I check in by 6:00, and then guide Little Dog up Lookout Ridge to get some sense of the Andrews Experimental Forest’s scope. Once we get more than five miles past where the pavement ends, I feel glad for the heavy Forest Service radio I’m carrying. I also make a mental note to toss a blanket in the back next time I wander up one of these roads. A rockslide or a fallen tree could cut me off for the night, and even though there’s always a foam camping pad back in the camper shell, it would be a chilly night there without the solace of a cover.

The forest is entirely unfamiliar, and yet its eerie first impressions live up to my expectations. Having lived in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona prior to my current sojourn in California, my sense of at-homeness leans toward something more arid. This forest has the feel of abiding precipitation—a place where it has rained recently and will soon be raining again. Steam appears wherever sunlight breaks through the forest canopy for more than a few moments, and drifts skyward. I ask myself whether I could ever live in a place such as this.

Nine miles beyond pavement’s end I finally come to a small clearing, perhaps thirty meters in diameter, surrounded by second-growth firs and hemlocks. A former clear-cut. It’s windy here, which surprises me because down in the old-growth sections there was no appreciable breeze. I stand outside Little Dog for a while just taking in the soundscape. The noise is clearly being generated by the top two or three meters of each tree; it crescendos down on me, sounding sharp, as if a thousand foils are being slashed. The sylvan orchestration fluctuates, rolling around this little glen, animating it gratuitously.

To the south, through the trees and across the valley, the opposite hillside is such an aquamarine blue that at first I think I’m seeing ocean. I snap a wide-angle lens on the camera and proceed to wade through the thick understory beyond the clearing. There is no trail, and yet I can tell that someone—if not a person then a perhaps a bear—has bushwhacked through here before me. Tough going.

I come to a steep drop-off, and the forest again plays tricks on my eyes, seeming to stretch my vision unnaturally. I realize that as someone accustomed to more open landscapes, I lack some of the visual literacy I need to make sense of the expanse before me. Even the colors don’t make sense because the conifers have a way of absorbing light without reflecting it back. The washed-out sky has no brilliance, and the depth of the forest below seems extreme. Clearly, the trees I’m looking down on are taller than I think. I would like to come back here again, or someplace similar, with my chair and writing table, and spend a day just watching this valley absorb sunlight.

The only birds I see are ravens. They seem a better fit here than they did back in the Marin headlands, more able to scheme and cavort under the cover of this forest.

I keep my fog lights on the whole way down the hill, just in case I encounter another vehicle coming the opposite way in the darker sections of the forest. I do not encounter anyone or anything—I have this unpaved road all to myself. Judging from the lack of tire tracks, I’m the only vehicle to have come up here since yesterday’s rain.

I make it back to headquarters forty-five minutes ahead of schedule, and immediately go to the whiteboard where I had originally signed out. I move the magnet next to “Dr. Farnsworth” from the “out” column back to “in,” and I erase my destination info. This checkout procedure, which seemed a bit overly cautious when I was first briefed about it, makes a lot more sense now that I’ve been out in the forest. Before leaving the board to inform my buddy of my return, I erase the honorific before my name.

Day 2

The rain stops, almost suddenly, at 7:15, almost exactly at dawn twilight. It’s still dark, with first light filtering down from above, almost blocked by the tallest firs, but not entirely. In Sausalito this morning the sun will rise at 7:34, hitting the top of my masthead first, but here at latitude 44 it will not come until 7:42, so there’s time to make tea. It would be a perfect morning to build a fire, but the studio for visiting writers has no fireplace. I cannot detect warmth through my leather moccasins, but when I put my hand to the cement floor it seems that some attempt is being made to warm things up. Hot tea is my salvation.

All I see of the trees outside are their silhouettes, but that provides me sufficient information to distinguish one species from another. The Douglas-firs have a triangular crown, and the tips of the branches flare up like the primary flight feathers of a soaring red-tailed hawk. The western hemlock has a narrower crown, and the branch tips tilt downward, each branch spreading in a green cascade. The western red cedars have a cone-shaped crown, and the branches point upward at the tip. The Pacific silver firs have an oval crown, and the needles droop vertically from flat branches, hanging like the leather fringe on a western jacket. There are still a few trees out there I can’t identify, but they are no less distinctive than the others, and I hope to recognize them all by the end of my first week here.

The rain comes and goes as I enjoy my tea, and I can judge its intensity by the apparent opacity of the trees on the far ridge. They grow more silver, and faint, when the precipitation increases, greening up significantly when it abates. This tonal shift, I decide, will be my rain gauge each morning.

It’s light enough now that I can use my spotting scope to examine cones and bark, but I’m aware that I’m cheating a bit, studying the great outdoors from indoors, keeping dry on a day when I’m meant to get wet.

Before I venture outdoors, it may be wise to describe my task. I’ve been awarded a two-week residency in this forest through the Spring Creek Project,1 which is administered through Oregon State University. The project began in 2003 and will continue until 2203, fully funded. Indeed, I will receive a small stipend for staying here, enough to cover gas, groceries, and the cost of shipping my shirts from campus. Our mission is to keep a “Forest Log” of our ecological reflections for two centuries. This chapter will become part of that log.

The list of those who have preceded me reads as a who’s who of US nature writing: Barry Lopez, Linda Hogan, Robert Michael Pyle, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Thomas Lowe Fleischner, Jane Hirshfield, Scott Slovic, Kathleen Dean Moore, Scott Russel Sanders, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Laird Christensen, Pattiann Rogers, David James Duncan, Emma Marris, John McPhee …

It was intimidating when I read through Forest under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest, an anthology of the first decade of the “Forest Log,” to wonder what I can possibly add to the mix of poetry, nature essay, and literary natural history that had already been composed. Will my writing expose me as someone who hasn’t quite made the A team? As I type out this question I realize the need to brush aside the imposter syndrome, and I decide, finally, to engage in exactly what I’ve spent the past decade teaching collegians to do: description. Accurate, honest description.

My recently retired course, Writing Natural History, required students to keep field notes in which they would record two observations and one reflection each day while in the field. There was a final writing prompt, to be completed toward the end of the ten-day field experience down in Baja, which functioned as the course’s final examination. Students were instructed to place themselves in the littoral zone—in other words, on the beach—and to describe a stretch of the intertidal in such detail that were they to return to that same site ten years later they could reassess it, and, comparing it to their original field notes, determine what changes had taken place in terms of the abiotic structure, biotic diversity, and health2 of the site.

I have decided to attempt similar descriptions of the four reflection sites designated by the Spring Creek Project, but to describe the sites in ways that might be useful in scales of centuries rather than decades.

The sun comes out, and so do I, shortly thereafter, my new field guide to the trees and shrubs of the Pacific Northwest in hand. It’s rare for me, outside of wildflower season in the California springtime, to be ignoring the birds, but I hone my attention treeward other than for the momentary distraction of a varied thrush, which I identify by call but cannot locate visually because it seems to be hiding in the dense understory. The varied thrush has arguably the least haunting song of all its family, just a single, fluted note drawn out for a full two seconds, but it seems to be calling to me. I scan the ground, but instead of locating avian fauna I discover a newt, which seems very close to a California newt except that the eyes are wrong. Smaller than our newts back home.

There is a nice collection of field guides in a conference room in the headquarters, and I’ve been shown where the secret key is hidden. I capture the newt gently and it curls up its tail in a defensive pose, but relaxes quickly and begins to explore my forearm. I transport it to headquarters, there to discover it to be a rough-skinned newt, Taricha granulosa, fairly common in these parts. Had it not been common, and had I discovered a new species, I’d probably have named it the rough-skinned newt anyway, Taricha farnswortha, because of its bumpy skin tubercules. Or maybe I’d have named it the Halloween newt because of its seasonally orange underbelly.

Unable to resist, I cross the conference room to where books written by my fellow writers in residence are stored under the banner “Nature Writing.” I limit myself to checking out a single volume, which isn’t that hard because most of the volumes in this library are already stacked close to each other in my office library back on campus. I choose a book from a writer unknown to me, Michael Lannoo, called Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab.

The great naturalist Louis Agassiz had a sign on his Harvard office door that instructed, “Study nature, not books.” My departmental office back on campus has a different sign on the door that says, “Study nature; read books.” Today I study nature outdoors, learning to identify the trees of this rainforest. And a newt. This evening I will study nature as well, by reading Lannoo’s book.

When I return to my studio for lunch I look up Lannoo on the Internet, and discover him to be a professor at the University of Indiana. His biographical sketch informs me that he trained as a herpetologist, his PhD thesis having been concerned with lateral line topography in amphibians. How appropriate that my encounter with an amphibian led me to his book!

An afternoon hike with my two field guides, trees and birds, yields a newto-me bird, the golden-crowned kinglet. They were foraging actively in a mixed flock with black-capped chickadees, and I was able to bring them down to my level by making pishing sounds, an old birder’s trick.3 I’ve never been a great pisher, but there I was, the only fellow in that particular stand of forest, so it was me or nothing.

I knock off “early” at 4:00, crack open a pint of beer and a tub of my secret-recipe4 gorp, and begin reading about Aldo Leopold’s shack and Ed Ricketts’s lab. I am fully invested in the book by its fifth page, where Lannoo informs me that the concept of “shack,” which is fundamentally a frontier structure, works as “metaphor for a grounded, bottom-up, facts-based approach to thinking and to living.”

Not for the first time, I muse that I need a shack of my own.

Day 3

It’s the sort of day I’d expected every day to be up in these mountains, especially this close to Halloween: drizzly and gray without breeze or birdsong. The fog seems to rise up out of the forest itself, rather than blowing in from ocean waters in a manner to which I’m accustomed. It rises, like steam. I decide to focus on the understory, and it’s maddening how much one leaf looks like the other.

I begin by identifying some of the easier plants. Low Oregon grape is distinctive, even without its flowers or fruit, and it seems to hold up well to the gloom. And there’s trillium everywhere, an old friend easily recognizable, even without its bloom, by its three broad leaves. And then there are plants for which I shouldn’t make a definitive identification until spring, at best, when they flower. Among these is Linnaea borealis, better known as “twinflower” because of how two blooms share the same stalk. But there are no blooms to speak of here at the end of October.

One fairly common plant drives me near mad, because I’m almost certain I’ve identified it in the past, perhaps during my writing retreats in Mendocino County during the past few winter solstices. The alternate leaves are somewhat lanceolate, although not sharply pointed, with simple edges. I pluck one and measure it at fifteen centimeters using the ruler on the back cover of my field guide. The shrub grows in small clusters, seldom gaining more than a meter in height.

At the point where I’ve checked every shrub in my 447-page field guide, I march back to headquarters, leaf in hand, to check the field guides and floras there. It’s no use; I waste at least an hour on a single leaf.

I retreat back to the forest, having temporarily given up on plants. Pulling out my phone, I quietly listen to the call of the spotted owl, attempting to mimic it in my own voice. Spotted owls are reputed not to be wary of humans, and they are easy to find in the forest, say the field guides, because they will return your calls. However, I can’t seem to summon the appropriate falsetto, and the spotted owl’s airy “hoo, hoo-hoo, hooooo” comes out of my throat sounding more like ribbits and croaks.

I wander a while, hooting now and then, looking for yew trees, listening for woodpeckers. Pileated woodpeckers have been reported in these woods, huge pileated woodpeckers, and seeing one would make my day. For that matter, even hearing one drum, at this point, would make my day.

I listen, and while I listen the glen in which I’m standing seems to darken a click or two. A more concentrated rain surely can’t be far away.

One can walk silently in old growth like this, and even if one’s footfalls were to make noise, it would quickly be absorbed by the surrounding biomass. This is not to say that an old-growth Douglas-fir forest is silent, as I’ve read several places. While there is no wind noise down this far from the canopy, there is always the noise of water. It seems that one is never far from a river or a creek here in the Andrews, nor far from the noise of rain, and this supplies a constant background, white noise that’s actually silver. It’s no wonder the owls can’t hear me.

Day 4

Halloween, and it’s raining this morning even though the forecast envisioned a dry spell until late this afternoon. Regardless of the prognostications, I’m guessing that there won’t be any goblins visiting this deep into the woods after sundown.

I’ve decided to take the morning “off.” I’m supposed to be oriented to the reflection sites today, and I look forward to meeting Dr. Frederick Swanson, a retired geologist who animates this project. Meanwhile, a handful of former students have requested recommendations for graduate school, and I can’t rightly claim that my sabbatical excuses me from the responsibility to help worthy students pursue advanced degrees.

The afternoon comes none too soon, and with it, Fred. I’ve been warned that, given half a chance, he’ll talk my ears off. My ears are ready for a good talking to, however, after a morning of writing recommendations. I head to the headquarters a little before my tutor is scheduled to arrive, there to finish the final two chapters of Lannoo’s book and return it to the library. Fred, who has also read the book, arrives in the parking lot just as I finish reading.

Fred is tall, slender, energetic, and has a full white beard. He has been associated with the Andrews Forest since 1972, the year he earned his PhD. That’s the year I graduated from high school, and yet when we begin to hike, his top speed is faster than mine, as if he’s been equipped with superior gear ratios.

You miss a lot of nature hiking this way, but Fred’s approach to the forest seems perpetually frenetic. He continues to lecture no matter how far I fall behind, mostly about the history of American forestry. I had read a couple books on the subject that Fred had recommended when I was first awarded the residency, one of which was his own, but I’m getting the full spiel here on the trail as if I hadn’t bothered. Through it all, I can’t shake the surreal impression that I’ve teleported back in time to hike with John Muir.

My guide claims not to be strong at botany, but when I ask about a few of the understory plants, he can readily identify them. And his familiarity with American nature writing is outstanding. He has read the work of most of the writers who have been part of the long-term ecological reflections, and that includes the greater part of the pantheon of living, well-published nature writers. And he’s probably dragged most of them along the same hike that I’m currently undertaking. I want to ask whether he made Robert Michael Pyle hike this fast, or Scott Russel Sanders, or …

Our objective today is to familiarize me with the four reflection plots that the visiting writers are asked to visit and then write about. The first one is close to the forest headquarters, but the other three require us to jump into Fred’s car and drive. Two of the four plots are located beyond the boundaries of the Andrews Forest itself.

I will describe the plots later, when I visit them alone and have time for leisurely descriptions. Suffice it to say that they are interesting. And I hope I can find them again on my own.

November 1
Reflection: Lookout Creek gravel bar

I situate myself below the north5 bank of Lookout Creek in a young stand of red alders, none more than twenty years old, on a flat bar directly upstream of the reflection plot. Were the creek to rise another fifty centimeters, my boots would be submerged. While I set up my stool and stow away my daypack I am greeted by a Pacific wren who bobs almost formally with each two-note call. Chee-chee, chee-chee. Down up, down up. The bird is clearly aware of my presence, and seems to want me to know that it owns the timber rights to the pile of logs on which it perches.

There are four large Douglas-fir snags above me on the bank, and it could be perilous on a windy day to encamp where I currently sit. Any of six snags from the north bank would add to the gravel bar’s topography were they to collapse downhill, which judging from the deadfall around here would be the logical direction, and most of them are already leaning downslope. There are likewise two snags on the far side of the creek whose tips, at least, will someday add to the bar’s mass.

The creek runs clear despite the recent rains, and when I look upstream from the bar I can clearly make out the round rocks all the way across the bottom. From the bank I cannot see fish or any other aquatic fauna.

A cluster of large logs—I can count seven from here but there are certainly more—the largest of which are more than a meter in diameter, form a partial dam on the upstream edges of the bar, bifurcating the water to create a fairly stable island. With the exception of a large Douglas-fir that serves as a bridge from this bank, the other logs seem to have flowed here from upstream during a flood. Both channels form ripples and rapids just loud enough to make it impossible to hear ambient birdsong from the forest. Twice as much water flows to the far side of the bar than the near.

The downed log that serves as a bridge has a stile built over it to facilitate crossing. The log is covered with moss uphill of the stile, but not on the side leading to the bar, where it appears that human traffic has worn away any growth. The logs on the gravel bar, likewise, are not mossy, which may attest to the thoroughness of my colleagues’ explorations here. After all the rain in the past few days, the bridge log does not appear safe to cross.6

Three separate alders grow on the bar, the largest being approximately ten meters tall and about twenty centimeters in diameter at the base. They have shed most of their leaves by now, and appear to be flourishing. Younger hemlock and Douglas-fir saplings crowd together in the center of the bar, none having exceeded two meters in height.

I leave the security of the bank to climb along the logs atop the bar, moving from mossy stepping-stones to slick logs that have long ago shed their bark. To say that these logs are slippery is to understate the peril, and I’m glad no one can see me straddling them and crawling along the more precarious sections. The largest of the logs is a bit spongy, and I keep an eye out for rot while I cross it. The transit was well worth the effort, however: one understands a gravel bar imperfectly from the bank.

I can now count fourteen logs thick enough to have been the trunks of centuries-old trees atop this bar. None of the logs appear to have been lumbered; their ends are snapped rather than sawn. There are six large tree-trunk logs immediately downstream, visible from the outside of the gravel bar. A lot of timber went into the creation of this reflection plot. There is an S curve below me as the water runs past this bar and then left into the next group of three giant logs on the southern bank. Clearly, these trees are altering the course of the stream within its traditional banks.

After returning to the alder grove, I hike downstream a few hundred meters. More logs have aggregated here, at least a dozen. Indeed, the number of huge logs that this stream has transported boggles the mind, and I’m having a hard time getting my head around any upheaval large enough to have resulted in what I’m seeing. Heading back upstream, I am unable to access the creek a hundred meters beyond my study site. There is a larger gravel bar upstream, quite overgrown, that may have contributed to the formation of the bar I’ve been describing. I would need a chain saw to transit the upper bar, or at least an ax.

I return to the alder grove where I started. The opposite bank has been cut away by floodwaters, in many places three to four meters high as the water squirted past the upper bar. It appears that during the flood the upper gravel bar may have been created in an eddy below where the floodwaters dug into the far bank, thus aggregating the substrate on which the second bar was built. I would like to have witnessed that, especially with all the logs flowing downstream. Although this flood occurred two decades ago, in 1996, it seems like a more recent event: the evidence is still fresh. Time itself slows in old growth.

As I begin to gather up my kit, two American dippers fly by, low over the water, heading upstream. The one behind is vocalizing loudly, a sharp ZEET, and seems to be chasing the one ahead. How I wish they had stopped by to forage at my gravel bar! They are North America’s only aquatic songbird, presently, and all their food comes from under water. I look again for signs of aquatic life in the water above the gravel bar’s rapids, but can see nothing from this vantage. Ah, for a D net and a pair of waders! But I can at least infer the presence of aquatic insects from the occurrence of the dippers, not to mention the fact that one of them would defend this territory so aggressively—there has to be food here for that to happen.

The Pacific wren reappears on the logs, deus ex machina, as if to defend its turf from the dippers. It’s been at least an hour since I last heard it, but the presence of another species seems to have inspired its rhetoric.

I head downstream one last time. There is a second gravel bar—a smaller bar—some forty meters downstream of the reflection plot at the completion of the S curve. No logs lie atop it. Although vegetated, it does not support tree saplings or shrubs. It doesn’t have nearly the gravitas of its upstream cousin, but the noise of the water flowing around it is more intense, almost musical. I find it quite pleasing to sit on the bank above it, gazing upstream at the more famous gravel bar, a hydrologic celebrity that has already inspired numerous poems. The sun comes out as I sit here, absolutely transforming the morning. I check my watch, and discover that it’s already afternoon. I’ve been here longer than I thought.

I hike slowly back up the hill; there are newts everywhere along the trail. It takes effort not to step on one, and I come very close to skewering one accidentally with my hiking stick. Once I’m out of the newt zone I start searching for a possible entry for the biggest big-leaf maple leaf contest back at headquarters. Yesterday Fred warned me that anything under nineteen inches won’t have a chance of winning.

Day 5 postscript

Shortly after I finished transcribing the field notes above, I decided to head out for a walk. No destination, really, no Forest Service radio, no field notebook, no rain gear, not even binoculars. Just a walking stick. I hoped to come back carrying the biggest big-leaf maple leaf in the forest.

I didn’t get far before bumping into a postdoc, a relatively new postdoc who was awarded his PhD this past spring. We had met, briefly, earlier this afternoon but couldn’t remember each other’s names. When he asked where I was heading I told him about the contest, and he asked whether he could join me (even though I was headed in the direction from whence he’d just come). I assured him that I would welcome the company.

As we strolled through the forest he spoke about his recent journey in life, how he’d moved to a faraway university, how that had been stressful in terms of a relationship with a girlfriend, and how he missed the community he’d left behind, especially with his dissertation adviser.

We reflected, together, that many young academics experience a postdissertation letdown. One misses the intensity of the research, the focus, the collaborations. I told him how I’d wept after I finally defended my doctoral thesis and realized, suddenly, that my supervisor was no longer my supervisor. I shared how I had not even been aware up to that moment of how fond I’d become of her.

And then, your career trajectory rips you away from the campus that had become your home, alma mater, and now you’re in a field station on the other side of the continent with no one to talk to.

Yes, my new friend confided. That’s it. That’s exactly it.

And now you need to find new sources of funding for your research, and a tenure-track position at a university that may be even farther from home, and build new relationships as if you’re starting your life over from scratch.

Yes … That’s it!

We found a fabulous leaf, finally. Yellow with bright red splotches. The petiole was at least a foot long, and I couldn’t imagine anyone finding a better leaf anywhere. This one was not only huge, it was aesthetically perfect. No insect holes, no rot, no shriveled lobes.

We continued our conversation until we arrived back at the lodge where my new friend was staying, and we made plans to chat again sometime soon. It was growing dark, and I wanted to get my leaf to the headquarters building before they closed for the evening.

The leaf was put into a press between newspapers in the library, and labeled with my name. As we leafed through the other leaves, I was astonished to see one not only larger than my own, but nearly twice its size. Green. A monster. It had been collected in June by a research assistant named Sarah who had left the forest to begin a master’s program this fall.

I wish her all the best in graduate school.

Day 6

I spend a pleasant hour today with Dr. Steven H. Acker, a senior faculty research assistant in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University. He runs the owl team here at the Andrews and shares an office with the other researchers on his project. He sports a full beard and wears a mud-brown hat advertising Mud River dog products. The hat makes him seem eminently trustworthy.

Steve clarifies, right away, that his program isn’t considered a part of the long-term ecological research schema of the Andrews. When I ask how long he’s been doing this, he answers, “Sixteen years.” I laugh, and inquire how long it’s going to take for his project to lose its short-timer status around here.

When I ask whether he thinks the spotted owl will be delisted during his lifetime, Steve shakes his head “no” emphatically, and a research assistant, Andrew, doing data entry at a nearby computer quips, “The only way that will happen is if they go extinct.”

From the perspective of Steve’s demographic analysis, the problem is threefold. First comes habitat loss, because the spotted owl needs old-growth forest to flourish. Put a spotted owl into a less protected environment and it will either be eaten by great-horned owls or freeze to death. Second, barred owls have emigrated from eastern North America to the Pacific Northwest, and they are outcompeting their cousins.7 They are one-third larger, have greater environmental adaptability, and they don’t play nice with spotted owls sharing their turf. Finally, there is climate change. The spotted owl does best when rainfall and temperatures are moderate, and it’s not yet known how the changes that are in store for the Pacific Northwest are going to affect this species.⁸

The spotted owl is one of the most studied birds in the world, and I ask Steve what we don’t know about it at this point. He knits his eyebrows before replying that we’re not sure about the effect of the barred owl on our ability to locate and monitor spotted owls. Scientists have traditionally located Strix occidentalis by hooting. Spotted owls hoot right back, and often come to visit the scientist who was hooting because they are not intimidated by humans. Indeed, some birders think of them as a tame species. However, anecdotal evidence has been gathered recently indicating that spotted owls don’t return hoots when barred owls are present, perhaps because they don’t want to advertise their presence to their aggressive cousins. This seems to be a new behavior, an adaptation the owl might be making to the invasion of barred owls, and if so it will make the spotted owls much more difficult to locate and monitor.

When I ask Steve how this affects him, he pushes back his hat and answers, “Sleep deprivation. I spend a lot more time trying to hoot them up in the middle of the night.”

This leads to a conversation I really want to have, about my current inability to get the owls to answer my hoots. I feel a bit sheepish as I demonstrate my hoot, but Steve kindly suggests that part of my problem is that I’ve chosen a particularly tough time of year to interact with spotted owls, especially during the daylight hours. He doesn’t think that my hoot is all that bad, opining that he’s seen them come to naturalists with far worse hoots, and he shares that when he first got hired there were dozens of what he calls “field trip sites” where he could take people for a guaranteed spotted owl encounter. But those days are gone.

Andrew, the research assistant, comes over with a folder of topographical printouts of an area that he thinks might be a good spot to find owls right now. It’s more than an hour’s drive from the Andrews, but it has had a fairly active concentration of spotted owls during the past breeding season.

I thank them both, grab my binoculars and my Forest Service radio, and head out into the greater Willamette National Forest. It’s a great drive (snow-capped peaks!) followed by a lovely uphill hike, and I come pretty close to perfecting my hoot after the first twenty minutes. Regardless of the progress, my efforts don’t generate a response of any sort.

The forest seems fairly empty these days.

Day 7

I meet Dr. Chris Walter and his research assistant, Colby, at precisely 8:30 a.m. at their rental SUV. They do not have access to a Forest Service truck because they are conducting research compliments of a National Science Foundation grant through the University of Minnesota. Chris is a biogeochemist, presently working as a soil scientist, and Colby is taking the fall semester off from his undergraduate studies in environmental engineering, and has been working at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, another long-term ecological research site. Chris is precisely half my age, and I worry about keeping up with these lads on the uphill sections of our hike.

We will be carrying full packs. For my part I’ve packed both the camera and binoculars, and the Forest Service radio, of course, but no field guides in order to save weight during our long uphill trek. They are carrying tools, PB&J sandwiches, and soil. Yes, they are carrying dirt that they transported down the mountain two days ago. This is how science is done.

The day is nearly as gorgeous as the landscape through which we hike. Early on we transit through a glen of trees whose trunks are covered in soft, loose lichens, and Chris wonders whether these were the trees that inspired the Truffula trees in The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. Then, when we pass a particularly large patch of rhododendrons, he exclaims, “I can’t believe that people work here!”

Chris earned his PhD at the University of West Virginia.

We quickly regret the fact that I’m not carrying my field guide to trees and shrubs of the Pacific Northwest. Chris wonders how many different types of rhododendrons there are in these woods, and I assure him that there might be as many as half a dozen.9 But the shrub he thinks might be a rhododendron is actually Ceonothus cordulatus, better known as “snow brush.” A few minutes later, when we pass by an actual patch of rhododendrons, he says, “I feel like I fell asleep and woke up in a Bob Ross painting.” I can’t help but wonder what he’d be saying if these rhododendrons were in bloom this time of the year.

At one point we need to leave the trail and bushwhack through tall bunches of bear grass, straight up a steep hill to get to the meadow where the study plots are located. I can tell that this hill will be much more difficult to descend than it is to climb, and now I regret leaving my hiking stick behind. Ah, the treachery of packing light! I keep wanting to photograph the distant snow-covered mountains that we can now see off to the east, but Colby, from above, assures me that there will be better views once we get to the top. We are all breathing hard now, none harder than me, and I ask Colby whether he knows how high we’ve climbed. He pulls out his iPhone, activates the compass app, and reports that we’re just under five thousand feet.

I’m feeling it.

We top out around 10:15 into a gorgeous natural10 meadow fringed by silver fir, hemlock, and Douglas-fir. To the east, a crisp view of three volcanic peaks known as the Three Sisters, snowcapped, triangular, and splendid. To the north stands Mount Bachelor, rugged and solitary, but at just over nine thousand feet¹¹ it stands a good thousand feet shorter than any of the Three Sisters.

The meadow turns out to be well worth the climb despite the numerous plot markers that testify to where science is being conducted. This meadow is part of a worldwide study called “the Nutrient Network,” which is hosted by the University of Minnesota, and has been fertilized with nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. I can’t imagine how they lugged all that fertilizer, not to mention the fencing, tools, and markers, up here.

Chris and Colby get immediately to work installing root ingrowth cores. They removed the dirt from these cores a few days ago, transporting it down to the lab to sift the dirt and remove any root material. Chris will return a year from now to this site, pull the cores, and then determine the subsoil productivity by observing root ingrowth. This is one of nine sites on which he will be conducting this study, the others being in Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, New Mexico, and Texas. He hopes to get a better understanding of how grassland soils function as a carbon pool across a range of grassland aridity.

While they labor in the dirt I busy myself with the camera, recording the distant mountains and the bear grass bunches, the latter being a difficult task because I left my wide-angle and macro lenses in the SUV. Oh, to be in my fifties again and not have to worry about how much weight I’m lugging up a mountain!

We pack up an hour later, my partners relieved no longer to be carrying so much soil. We find bear scat—a copious amount of bear scat—at the top of our descent. Colby, who will be starting his junior year when he returns to college next semester and is therefore nearly immortal, has the Forest Service radio now. I instruct him that if a bear attacks, he is to bludgeon the bear with the radio while Chris and I run away. We pass by a five-meter high Douglas-fir, and Chris snaps off a needle, instructing me to sniff it because it smells just like orange peel.

There’s a lot you can learn from a biogeochemist.

November 4
Reflection: Log decomposition site

One doesn’t notice how narrow and overgrown the trail into the log decomposition plot is until one carries a camp chair and writing table its length. Yew saplings, Taxus brevifolia, are attempting to close this trail, pushing up through the moss and ferns, turning the old growth back into wilderness despite the best efforts of the United States Forest Service.

I set up my writing camp in the one place where sunlight breaks through the canopy, but even while sitting in the sunlight it’s cold enough in this glen that I can see wisps of my breath. I dig my British, moss-green birding parka out of my pack, and when I slip into it I feel as if I’ve just donned an invisibility cloak. I now match pretty much everything in this forest.

I make a little trip around the grove with my camera. I’ve got the wide-angle lens attached today, and the macro lens in my pack. Each time I squeeze the shutter release I realize how poorly equipped I am to capture the gestalt of this stand: the intricate foliage of the forest floor juxtaposes with the enormity of the trees themselves on a scale that photography just can’t handle. The mavens of digital photography haven’t yet invented a lens that will do this landscape justice. Because I’m supposed to be focusing on logs today, I focus my photographic attention on the understory.

There are mushrooms everywhere here—a variety of species considerably beyond what my untrained eye can identify. I see no chanterelles, however, which I know from several conversations this past week to be the most sought-after fungus in these woods.

Other than for the anck-anck of two Steller’s jays harmonizing poorly, this grove exudes silence. I can hear the occasional jet overhead, and the low distant swish of Lookout Creek, but the pen-scratch of my own writing is strangely truncated. If this grove wants me to feel transitory, perhaps even inconsequential, it’s doing a good job.

I take a slow, off-trail hike, heading north-northeast from my writing table, leaving everything behind but my binoculars. I would estimate—and I’m trying to be conservative here—that at least 20 percent of the forest floor is covered by downed trees. Many of the logs are soft and spongy. All are moss covered. I can see why loggers used to consider old-growth stands to be inefficient; all this downed timber going to waste! And yet this is what the Andrews has taught us over the years, that old-growth forests are far more vibrant and productive than any tree plantation. These downed logs contain more living cells than they did when they were vertically alive.

The forest makes me sleepy as it slowly warms up, and I can’t help wishing I’d brought a hammock rather than a camp chair. Or at least a thermos of tea.

The longer I stay in one place, the more detail I notice. For example, after the first hour I become aware of how the forest floor is littered with lichen, Lobaria oregana, which has either blown down or been knocked down from the canopy. It’s everywhere, fixing nitrogen into the forest soil that it extracted directly from the air. I notice red cedar saplings growing up beneath a Douglas-fir even though there are no mature western red cedars in the vicinity. I look this tree up in my field guide, and discover that “seed is produced copiously and wind-dispersed.” I notice how the upper branches of the truly huge Douglas-firs emerge from the trunk in a fan-shaped spray. I’ve read before that this is characteristic of old growth, but now I’m observing it firsthand.

I notice that even past the noon hour, when a shaft of sunlight hits a new log, it steams.

What am I not noticing, as morning turns to afternoon?

• I have not seen a mammal of any sort, nor the spoor of any mammals. Flying squirrels, weasels, and wood rats are supposed to abound in this forest, providing a food source for the owls, so where are their nests? (As I finish writing this I hear the far-off chatter of a squirrel. If one listens intensely enough …)
• I’m not seeing any raptors. Of course, it’s the first week of November during a presidential election year and many diurnal raptors will have already migrated. But all of them? I haven’t seen so much as a turkey vulture in the week I’ve been here.
• There is absolutely nothing in bloom right now, nor signs of recent flowering, and there probably wouldn’t be any pollinators available if something were to blossom. I wonder whether this will be the case two hundred years from now. Will climate change extend the flowering season of the temperate north? Will there be an early November when these rhododendrons are all in bloom?

I listen to a distant red-breasted nuthatch toot its tin-trumpet notes. The call sounds lonely and exotic in these woods, and none of its conspecifics answer. Birds can sound so sad this far from spring, but perhaps I’m listening too hard, and watching in wonder too wide-eyed.

Feeling completely drained, I pack up a bit earlier than I’d planned to, resolving to move at a snail’s pace as I pick my way back down the trail. On the way out I step across an eighteen-centimeter-long banana slug, and realize that this is the most charismatic nonavian wildlife specimen I’ve encountered today.

November 5
Reflection: Clear-cut site

Unlike the previous two reflection sites, this plot is not within the limits of the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest. It lies on the other side of Lookout Ridge, where I hiked with Chris and Colby a couple days ago. Although it’s physically close to the Andrews, it is existentially distant.

When one arrives at the clear-cut site, one no longer sees a clear-cut. Instead, one sees a Douglas-fir plantation where a clear-cut once happened.

I wish I could report on how ugly the plantation is, but it’s really not. While it’s clearly not as beautiful as the old-growth grove I visited yesterday, it’s no less beautiful than a Kansas wheat field or a Nebraska cornfield. The trees are all roughly the same age, as you’d expect with monoculture, and the top two meters of the branches radiate a silvery hue this morning, laden as they are with moisture from a morning fog that doesn’t disperse until 10:15, when it begins to rain gently.

One of the skills a boy must accomplish to become a First Class Scout, at least back when I was promoted, is to be able to measure the height of a tree. Using the method I was taught fifty years ago, with the aid of a hiking stick that’s exactly a meter long, I estimate the height of three separate trees, and they all turn out to be twelve meters tall. They are planted so tightly together, however, that they create a tight tangle, and it appears impenetrable for someone my size.

The birds don’t seem to mind the tangle, at least not the golden-crowned kinglets, which are noisily foraging for insects. For a moment I’m tempted to give things a try and see how far I can penetrate the tangle, but a hairy woodpecker working an alder behind me on the south side of the road distracts me, all for the better. It takes the better part of five minutes to locate the woodpecker, but a few seconds after I’ve finally framed her in my binoculars, she flies off.

I hear a wrentit somewhere up the hill. It probably appreciates the dense tangle as much as any bird would.

I find a brambly draw in which no trees have been planted, and attempt to climb it. Thorny, nonnative Himalayan blackberries have colonized the draw, making progress difficult even when I employ the hiking stick to move the prickles aside. The draw closes off after no more than a hundred meters, and rain begins again, so I retreat back to Little Dog to catch up on field notes while waiting the shower out.

When precipitation stops I drive to the west end of the plantation; I plan to climb up its west flank so that I can view it from above. This time I take my full pack, correctly estimating that the climb will take longer than it seems it would from the road.

The going is rough. This site has been logged twice and burned at least once. Numerous huge stumps, greatly weathered now, testify to an old-growth era prior to the first logging operation that would have taken place seven or eight decades ago. This site was no doubt clear-cut at that point. The logging of second-growth timber evidently followed a selective-cutting protocol where a certain percentage of trees of all species were left behind, as were a number of logs and branches. Red cedars and hemlocks are interspersed with Douglas-firs, but it seems a strange sort of forest. The logs left behind are not moss-covered for the most part, nor do I see much fungus helping them to rot. The ground is not strewn with lichens like yesterday’s plot, and I can’t help but wonder how much the soil has been depleted by the two rounds of logging.

Across from me, on the steeper sections of the plantation, the trees only seem to be two-thirds as large as they were in the flat. They are still densely packed together, however, and I will have to return downhill the way I came up. I descend cautiously; it would be easy to break a leg slipping between logs.

A fresh apple awaits me back at Little Dog, and I pull out my writing table and camp chair for the third time today, but this time I set it up so that my back is to the areas that have been disturbed by logging. The woods I’m facing now, to the south of the logging road, are notably different. There are alders here, the largest of which is a full meter in diameter at the base of the trunk. And there are snags—I count half a dozen without leaving my seat. There is a great deal more moss on the branches of trees.

My comparison is not entirely fair; I can hear a creek nearby, so this is more of a riparian ecology than the hillside behind me. Still, there is a mystique south of the road that the hillside lacks. The feeling over here is that the forest is controlled by its own systems, not ours.

Feeling ready to be finished with this disturbed landscape, I decide to head farther out the logging road just to get the lay of the land outside the Andrews. The drive is not encouraging. Stumps blacken the landscape everywhere, and even though the trees through which I’m driving have been growing back for decades, this forest lacks a certain vitality that the Andrews still exudes. It is truly disturbed, and somehow in the process of its perturbation, this forest seems to have lost significant portions of its magic.

Day 10: Day off

I take a needed Sabbath this Sunday, profaning it slightly by going into town to shop. I head into REI to pick up a summer basket for my hiking stick, which sometimes sinks twenty centimeters into this old-growth duff. I’m also hoping to pick up a hunter’s safety vest, to make up for my refusal to wear the yellow hard hat I’ve been issued. REI can help with the basket, since I originally bought my hiking stick from them, but they send me to Cabela’s for the safety vest.

I am surprised to discover myself to be the only customer not wearing camo in Cabela’s. Customers are crowded around the weapons counters, and I pretty much have the clothing section to myself. Over by the handguns you have to take a number and wait to be served, and I hear a sales representative call out, “Number 82! Number 82!”

I ask the sales rep in the clothing section whether they’re having a special sale on guns, and he replies that they are not. The reason that so many customers want to purchase a gun today, he informs me, is that the FBI just announced that Hillary Clinton will not be indicted for the additional e-mails that were discovered a week ago. The lads at the gun counter are worried that Trump is going to lose at this point, and Clinton is going to try to take their guns away.

I discover that they sell orange hunting vests in camouflage patterns. Fleece. The oxymoronic concept of high-visibility camouflage strikes me as being so wonderfully bizarre that I purchase one to wear in the field for the rest of my time in the Andrews. A shame I didn’t have this to wear on Halloween when I was hiking with Fred.

November 7
Reflection: Blue River face timber sale unit

I am near the top of Blue River Ridge, just beyond the Andrews, at an altitude of nine hundred meters, facing northwest. Although the morning is overcast, a stunning vista opens before me, and the forest is thin enough here that I can see across to the far side of the Blue River watershed. Using the Forest Service map, I search for names of the distant hills: Twin Buttes and Gold Hill sound familiar—déjà vu from other national forests in other states—but I’m taken with “Tidbits Mountain,” and make a note to look it up once I’m back on the Internet.12

The site is difficult to penetrate; no trail provides access through a barrier of bracken, snowbrush, and Douglas-fir saplings. Not only does this barrier keep out the casual investigator, it limits what is visible from logging road 1508. Were this site part of the Andrews, a trail would probably have ushered me to its bowels. I would have liked to have such a trail this morning—Dr. Walter dropped by after dinner last night to deliver his farewell and helped me polish off a modest pinot noir.

I’m looking for birds today, and I set up my travel scope at the observation site I’ve selected near the logging road, which gives me the most unobstructed view of the timber sale unit. Sure enough, the first bird to announce its presence, a Pacific wren, lands directly behind me, and were it not for its agitated chirp I would never have been able to identify it. It plays its usual wrenish game of hide and seek, and I’m happy to concede my defeat since it’s not technically inside the plot I’m monitoring. One needs to resist such distractions.

A number of mature Douglas-firs stand at the top at the top of the plot, a couple dozen trees that were spared the harvest. The original plan was to leave 45 percent of the canopy intact in this site, which was logged in 2002 and then broadcast burned in 2003 to create deadwood snags since previous clear-cutting had left it “snag depauperate.” I have no basis of measurement here, but it seems that less than 45 percent of the original canopy remains today, especially in the central section of the unit, which has a handful of snags but is somewhat tree depauperate. No matter how much you stretch the term, there is nothing here that I would currently call a “canopy.”

A western hemlock stands solitary in the middle section, and seems well on its way to becoming another snag. Its needles droop as if it has recently died, and I ponder whether it’s had too much sun during the recent drought conditions. I wish I could tell whether the needles are brown or green, and I’m suddenly missing Carol, the love of my life, who usually fills in these color details for me. The tree is thick with cones, and perhaps seems all the thicker due to the diminished condition of its needles.

I hear, but do not see, the usual suspects: Steller’s jays, red-breasted nut-hatch, black-capped chickadee. But it’s not possible to tell whether the vocalizations are coming from within the timber sale unit or from the far side. They sound distant. Listening closely, I hear the soft, rhythmic purr of a Pacific chorus frog—it’s the call referred to as a “land call” used by frogs away from the water. I must assume that it comes from a confused youngster who doesn’t realize that it’s November, not to mention the middle of the day.

The sun breaks through the thin, high layer of clouds just before noon, and I apply sunblock for the first time in many days. The sun seems to perk up insect activity: gnats hover over the bracken while an unknown species of fly inspects my writing table. Moments later, a western conifer seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis, lands, and I reach for my camera but it doesn’t stick around long enough for a portrait. Putting the camera down, I notice strands of spider silk streaming off my spotting scope as a gentle easterly breeze pops up.

It occurs to me at first that maybe these insects will draw in some birds. Then I realize the fact that although I’ve been scanning the vista to my west for several hours now, I still have not spotted a bird on the wing. When I hear close birds, they inevitably come from behind, from the timber that was not cut in 2002. I realize, as I write this, that I saw significantly more avian fauna two days ago at the clear-cut reflection plot than I’m seeing here today.

This site represents the pinnacle of modern timber practice. The loggers not only left behind mature trees, but left snags and downed logs. And yet, in more than four hours of monitoring this site, I have not seen one bird fly within it, through it, or over it.

The birds have not been fooled.

Encouragement so often follows disappointment, and today is no exception. On the drive down the hill I encounter the pileated woodpecker for which I’ve been searching ever since arriving in the Andrews. Because of the white wing bars—I had a dorsal view of the startled bird flying away down the road—for the first fraction of a second I thought I might be seeing an old friend, Melanerpes formicivorus, the acorn woodpecker. But this bird was too big for that, and I quickly realized it for what it was. I would guess its wingspan to be at least seventy centimeters, and yet it still followed the undulating flight pattern characteristic of woodpeckers, beating the wings quickly at the bottom of the lower arc and then folding its wings back on the rise, finch-like but seemingly more playful. It’s hard to be discouraged about forestry practices when you share a logging road with such a wonderful animal.

Day 12

I have arranged to spend the morning with two researchers affiliated with INSTAAR, the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, both of whom are based out of the Colorado School of Mines. Jackie Randell is a field technician with considerable expertise in data-logging systems. Ryan Harmon is a brilliant hydrologist disguised as a second-year PhD student. They’ve come out for a short stay to repair, maintain, or upgrade some of their data-collecting equipment and to download the data loggers that have been steadfastly monitoring experiments in a watershed just outside of the Andrews boundaries.

Leaving from the Andrews main entrance, we are surprised by a loaded logging truck barreling down the road. He is driving in the center of the road, which is paved but doesn’t have painted stripes to divide lanes that may or may not exist. Braking at the last possible moment, at which point my life has already flashed before my eyes, Ryan says, “Huh. I wonder where they’re logging up here.”

We find out soon enough. The logging operation is across the valley from Watershed 10, which is where INSTAAR has located its research. It will not be a quiet morning in the forest.

I don’t have to worry too much about keeping up with Jackie and Ryan this morning. They are carrying deep-cycle twelve-volt batteries, computers, desiccants, et cetera. This is their second trip today; early this morning they carried inverters to replace two that had ceased to function in the recent rains.

A short hike—a short, ridiculously steep hike—takes us up into the most incredible Swiss-family-Robinsonish infrastructure of scientific paraphernalia I’ve ever seen out in the woods. A nameless creek has cut deeply downslope, resulting in hillsides that are between sixty and seventy degrees, on average. Ladders have been strung together, pegged into the soil and augmented with climbing rope, similar to how Sherpas set up the transits of ice fields on Mount Everest. Only muddier. Wires run along the ground everywhere connecting sensing equipment with data loggers.

Ryan has installed electrodes everywhere, using an experimental method called “electrical resistivity tomography,” ERT for short. In essence, since resistivity is the mathematical inverse of conductivity, and since water increases conductivity in soil, he can chart how water flows at various depths downhill, and is able to account for the amount of water the trees draw up through their roots. He speaks of the trees turning on and off during the day when they photosynthesize, and how that influences the hydrological flows in the forest. Of course, he uses a more conventional system using soil moisture probes as a second data point to confirm what he’s discovering about soil resistivity through his ERT study.

I ask whether he’s able to do spatial analysis with this data, and after a moment’s hesitation he answers, “That’s the goal.” They are apparently in the early stages of trying to develop a program to accomplish this, but Jackie pulls a computer out of her pack and says, “I can pull up an image.” So here we are, in the forest primeval, analyzing how a computer image is attempting to capture the hydrological cycle of this very forest in full color. Ryan criticizes where the image still fails to capture the true extent of what’s going on in nature, saying, “It’s not quite this smooth a few meters down.”

The more Ryan explains the intricacies of his research, the more animated he becomes. While Jackie begins downloading a data logger belonging to another researcher, he takes me from instrument to instrument, including the ERT central control unit, which originally cost $70,000.13 But he also shows me how and where he is saving money by building his own data-collection cables and such parts of the physical infrastructure as the stand supporting a solar panel. “That stand could have cost me $200,” he says, proudly, “but I built it for free out of materials from the scrap heap back at Andrews headquarters.”

Facing outward, Ryan descends an interconnected series of three ladders, a method that can’t possibly be safe. Clearly, he’s bopped down these ladders a thousand times. I descend properly, and it takes me quadruple the amount of time it took my young hydrologist friend.

We finally reach the bottom of the creek, which Ryan calls a “bedrock creek” because it’s washed away all the soil down to the volcanic bedrock. This creek, however, isn’t where Ryan encounters mystery. “I’m shocked at how little we know about how trees work,” he complains. He speaks about how hydrologists tend to oversimplify the “plumbing network” of trees, considering them as nothing more than sophisticated straws that suck water up so that the trees can transpire it into the atmosphere. He begins to lecture me and the forest about the ways in which it’s more complicated than this.

Jackie, meanwhile, has been having trouble with the data logger, and returned to the truck to pick up another battery. This turns out not to solve the problem, however, and she discovers, after opening up the case that holds the data recorder itself, that the wiring has become a chaotic tangle of multicolored wires. “This is what you should be taking pictures of,” she tells me.

While they consult about possible solutions, I frantically try to catch up these field notes. I’m having the usual difficulty writing productively while standing, however, and I ask whether it’s OK for me to sit down on what appears to be an abandoned instrument case from a bygone experiment. It’s OK, but I should be careful, I’m warned, because that experiment has been over for quite some time, and as a seat it may be sketchy.

This leads to a discussion about “research trash,” as it’s called here in the Andrews, which Ryan also refers to as “science trash.” He tells me that he’s personally hauled out a couple truckloads of abandoned research equipment from this site, but admits that it’s almost a losing battle in these parts. He thinks that this may be a downside to long-term ecological research (LTER) sites, but I assure him that the biological field stations I’ve visited have also been struggling with this problem.

We hear a tree crash across the valley at the timber operation, and Ryan notes the irony that we’re concerned about science trashing the forest while, less than a kilometer away, trees are being systematically ripped out of the ground.

Our field time is cut short by Jackie’s need to return to the Andrews and download wiring diagrams. Ryan and Jackie will have to return here in an hour and rewire their colleague’s data logger, a process that may consume the better part of the afternoon. Realizing that my continued presence will only slow things down, I thank them for letting me experience a morning in their field site, and I excuse myself for the afternoon to attend to my field notes.

Day 13

The showers this morning had not been forecast, so I feel no particular compunction to venture out into them, especially given the vexations of last night, which was election night. I spend a couple hours setting things up for the next residency, to which I will proceed directly from here. And another letter of recommendation has been requested to help yet another recent graduate find gainful employment. The forest staff hold an all-hands meeting throughout the morning to plan and prepare for the winter season, after which they attempt a festive taco luncheon, to which I am invited. The tacos are great, but the festivity is a bit muted by the results of last night’s presidential election. No one seems to want to talk about it, but there is a lot of headshaking going on. One of the staff members takes solace that at least Oregon had gone for Clinton.

“California too,” I remind everyone.

“And Washington,” another chimes in.

It doesn’t need to be said that we are all worried about what this means for the environment. And education. And the US Forest Service. And science itself.

I spend the afternoon pursuing the endangered spotted owl along an old-growth trail where I’m told there’s a chance of finding one. During my trip into town last Sunday I purchased one of those self-contained, portable Bluetooth speakers the college kids use to turn their smartphones into concert halls. It was pricey, but I’m considering it a research expense because I can use it to play hoots via one of the field guides stored on my smartphone.14

The plan is to stop every two or three hundred meters and spread some owlish cheer. I rarely make it more than a hundred meters without stopping, however, because the mushrooms today are fantastic, and I mean that literally. I’m not carrying a mushroom field guide, of course, so I decide to photograph the more fabulous ones for later identification. Some seem to be blue, almost a metallic blue, and I would guess others to be purple, a color I’ve never been able to distinguish. And a reddish brown? Some are toothed, some are veined, some are billed, many are cupped. Most represent the classic bolete morphology, with its convex caps, some of which are huge, others tiny. Mycologists claim that there are fifteen hundred different kinds of mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest, and that’s easy to believe after a couple hundred meters into this bewitching stand of trees.

I’m still not accustomed enough to this Douglas-fir old growth to think of it in anything less than magical terms. If ever there was an enchanted forest, it must have resembled this one in most ways, especially with all these mushrooms. The light plays tricks on muggles like me with a camera in hand. At one point I see a spider web gloriously lit up by a ray of sunshine that seems to be focused solely on the web’s water droplets. The only problem is that there are two huge, moss-covered logs between me and the one with the web, and by the time I drop my hiking stick, set down my pack and climb over both logs, the sun has moved just enough that the web is not so brilliantly lit. Were I a professional photographer, I’d make note of the time and come back to this spot tomorrow to wait for the perfect moment I missed today. Sabbaticals, however, are too short for that sort of perfectionism. I content myself with compiling a photographic record of mushroom morphology.

I can’t help but wish I’d been here in this exact spot a century ago, at a time when spotted owls were common and logging activities had not made this sort of grove the exception rather than the rule. There were grizzlies then, if we’re to believe the journals of the Corps of Discovery expedition. Would Lewis and Clark have found a grove such as this as magical as I currently do? Would it have been more frightening to them, or is it more frightening to a college professor nearing retirement who sometimes hikes alone and isn’t carrying a rifle?

Over the course of the hike, which should more appropriately be considered a ramble, I stop at least a dozen times, get out my new research toy, and attempt to initiate a conversation with an owl.

No response.

Day 14

The big hike, today, now that I’ve completed all the requisite elements of this residency. Big hike, solo hike, no rain in the forecast.

The Lookout Creek Old-Growth Trail has its own brochure. It also has its own booster club; everyone even remotely associated with this forest has told me that I’ve got to “do” this trail. The trail map on the brochure is so low scale that it doesn’t show most of the switchbacks. But the last sentence in the brochure reads, “Because of the rugged nature of the trail, you should expect at least a two-hour hike one way.”

I am advised that for older knees it’s easier to climb the trail from the lower trailhead to the upper, descending on the logging road thereafter. I’m also told that it usually takes Spring Creek Project writers at least three hours to climb the trail one way, regardless of direction.

I’m stoked. I pack light. Only one liter of water, since I haven’t been consuming as much on these cool, humid, November days.15 Only my compact 10 × 25 binoculars, and only the wide-angle lens for the camera. I still bring along the recently purchased Bluetooth speaker, but I have a new plan for how that’s going to work. And I’m still carrying that loathsomely heavy USFS walkie-talkie.

Yesterday, whenever I wanted to hoot, I had to remove my pack, pull out the speaker, turn it on, and then play the audio from a digital field guide app. Today, however, I’m going to carry the speaker, which is shaped like an oversize suppository, in one of the water bottle holders on the outside of my pack. I’ll leave it on since the battery is supposed to last twelve hours. That way I can hoot every few minutes without having to stop, just by pulling out the smart-phone and hitting the play button.

The modern high-tech naturalist enters old growth. Look out, Nature.

I’m using Sibley’s digital field guide today, since I struck out yesterday with the recording from the Audubon Society field guide. Sibley includes two spotted owl recordings, one recorded in Utah, the other in Colorado. (This seems a little parsimonious. I grew up in Colorado, and love the state dearly, but when I think “spotted owl,” I think “Oregon.” Are you reading this, David Sibley?)

The forest is incredible, and it may be that the riparian section where the trail first crosses the creek is the most scenic mile of hiking in these United States. And the footbridge itself gets an A plus from this educator. The walk-way is made from a single log, milled flat at the top, protected with handrails. Spectacular. With the balance issues that have come with increased age, water crossings on wet logs have become a concern. But if this first footbridge is any indication of what is to come …

The digital hooting system works—which is to say that it functions, not that it produces immediate results—but I have to remember to hoot every few minutes because the speaker turns itself off after a period of inactivity. Maybe five minutes? And there aren’t as many mushrooms as on yesterday’s hike, probably because I’m now carrying a mushroom guide. Otherwise, I’m missing my wife terribly during this hike, because she would so love it. And she loves pointing out things that I’m missing. “Oh look over there. Purple.”

I force myself into a faster pace than I usually prefer, and it feels a bit as if I’m jogging through Westminster Abbey. During Evensong. But if I want to make it back to headquarters by the 4:00 check-in time I scribbled on the checkout board, I’m going to have to scoot.

Within the first mile the trail begins to ascend up out of the riparian zone, and I begin perspiring heavily. It’s not raining, but the humidity here has me thinking that my sequence of layers needs to be reexamined. I’ve spent the greater part of my hiking career learning how to stay cool in arid and semiarid environments. But I’m learning that sweat doesn’t tend to evaporate here in Oregon—it just sort of works its way down to your knees. I have never in my life had perspiration soak the entire bill of a baseball cap and then begin dripping from the tip, but my hat starts doing that before it occurs to me that I really don’t need a hat in an old-growth forest. The sun’s just not going to get into my eyes today. I take it off reluctantly, however; it’s the red-billed H. J. Andrews Forest hat with the rough-skinned newt embroidered on the front, and I’ve never been shot by an elk hunter while wearing it. Good thing I’m wearing my orange camouflage vest!

As I transcend the riparian ecology, I note an increase in the number of huge western red cedars. It gets to the point where there are as many of these giants as Douglas-firs, and the forest is transformed for their dominance, which I understand is rare in old-growth, since red cedars tend to be scattered into a mix of trees. My field guide, Turner and Kuhlmann’s Trees and Shrubs of the Pacific Northwest, explains that “very wet places are the exception, and here western red cedar often rules.”

Yes. These trees rule.

I finally have my owl encounter. Unfortunately, it’s a barred owl rather than a spotted owl. I’ve continued to hoot, of course, electronically, but the last hoot was several minutes ago. I’m looking down, mostly, making note of the density of the small seed cones from the red cedars, and how distinct they are from Douglas-fir cones also littering this section of trail. I’m still hiking hatless, and I somehow I sense the owl before I actually see it. By the time I see it, blasting away from a low branch, it has decided that it wants nothing to do with me. It startles me as much as I seem to have startled it, and flies away to the west.

Catching my breath, I assume that the owl had heard my speaker broadcasts and was investigating whether a spotted owl had invaded its territory. I don’t think it was expecting a sweaty naturalist representing the Spring Creek Project. I’ve read, in numerous places, that spotted owls are tolerant of human presence, often appearing tame when humans approach. If this barred owl is representative of its conspecifics, the species has the complete opposite personality.

The owl quickly flies out of vision. As I resume my hike, I hear a mob of Steller’s jays, off in the direction where the barred owl fled, squawking raucously. It seems that at least five birds are ganging up on someone, and I must conclude that they are objecting to the presence of the barred owl I just flushed. Good for them.

There’s little more to report from this hike. A half-dozen feeder streams present crossing challenges, mostly in the last mile, but I manage to lose my footing in only one of them, and am delighted to discover that these boots are as waterproof as advertised. Right now my feet are the only thing dry. I’m also happy to report that in three hours on this famous trail, I didn’t encounter a single fellow primate.

I emerge from the upper trailhead three hours and ten minutes after having set out. And I honestly feel I was moving fast, despite what the brochure might imply. As it is, there’s no time for a late leisurely lunch at this point, and I must consume my Philadelphia burritos on the hoof as I descend the logging road. It’s sunnier out here on the road, and when I withdraw the map from my pack I put the hat back on. The Andrews Forest map doesn’t show mileage markers, and the USFS map is back on the coffee table in my studio, but I estimate that I’ll be back to my truck in another three miles.

Almost two miles later, I hear a diesel pickup coming down the road. I turn around, stick out my thumb, and it stops. The window rolls down, and the driver, a white-bearded gentleman a bit older than myself, says, “We don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but you’re wearing the right hat.”

His buddy moves over, and I scramble around to the passenger side, explaining that I only need a lift to the lower trailhead. They seem impressed that I’ve just done the trail, and the driver says, sympathetically, “That’s a tough one!”

“Takes longer than it looks,” his buddy agrees.

They seem impressed that I made it in just over three hours. We discuss the merits and perils of the trail, and what I’m doing here, and when they discover my affiliation with the Spring Creek Project, they become downright supportive.

“A damned fine program, that one.”

“They bring some good writers up here.”

They ask my name, and the name of this book, and promise to watch for it.

Little Dog appears all too soon, sitting there obediently right where I left it. Before I hop out, I tell them to look for themselves in chapter 4.

I hope they read this someday.

Thanks to the lift, I return to headquarters with an hour to spare. After signing back in on the checkout board I say my farewells. Even though I’m sticking around another day, the staff here, regardless of whether they work for the Forest Service or Oregon State, have tomorrow off to commemorate Veteran’s Day. Everybody wants a goodbye hug. I object that I’m far too sweaty to hug, but we all hug anyway. It’s Oregon.

Back in the studio I switch to a dry sweatshirt, crack open a beer, transcribe these notes into the computer, hit the save button, and then steer the computer to my favorite news aggregator to see what the world’s up to. There’s a fresh article from Time magazine: “2 Oregon Residents File Petition for the State to Secede from the US.”

I’m in. And I’m wearing the right hat.

Day 15

I wake up to a surprise: my body is not at all stiff from yesterday’s exertions.

How did that happen?

Even though the forest staff has the day off to commemorate Veteran’s Day, Terry, the campus supervisor, bustles with activity. First a snowcat appears, a blade attached to the front. Then a blade suddenly appears on Terry’s pickup, ready for winter duty. Then a second snowcat appears. Where were they hiding these machines?

When I leave my studio with a final load of laundry, I ask Terry how come he doesn’t get Veteran’s Day off. With a wink, he replies, “I’m a veteran.”

I thank him for his service, and he replies, “Nothing to it, I do this every November.” I tell him that I’m thanking him for his military service to our country, and he breaks into a wide grin, saying, “That’s the first time I’ve ever been thanked for that.”

It will take me hours to pack up and then clean the studio—the place looks as if an entire scout troop spent the summer camping here. It always amazes me how someone as neat as me can make such a mess when his wife isn’t around.

I can’t apply myself fully to the cleanup detail yet, however. Yesterday, the professor who is running my department’s proseminar this year wrote to our faculty about the class session last night. The students wanted to talk about the election results from the day before, which she had anticipated would be the case. But what came up was a surprise: a few of the students were wondering whether they should change majors, given the new administration’s hostility to environmental issues.

And these were all seniors!

I shared in my colleagues’ collective surprise—none of us had seen this coming—and yet we all seem to understand why our students would be so distraught. And it’s been difficult, being up here at the Andrews, to shake the feeling that I should be available to my advisees for office hours. So since that wasn’t going to happen, I decided that rather than wander off on one last hike to spot a spotted owl, I would do something constructive by blogging a perspective they might find useful.

Here’s the blog I just posted:

Post-election thoughts for Environmental Studies and Sciences students

11/11/2016

I write from the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. I will be conducting sabbatical research for another month in the Pacific Northwest, and I regret that I cannot be with you during the turmoil. I will return to campus on December 16th, after having spent a month at the North Cascades Institute, where I look forward to working with grad students interested in field-based education.

Yesterday I learned that students attending our proseminar on Wednesday were concerned about whether they should switch away from majoring in Environmental Studies/Environmental Sciences, given the recent presidential election. This question has weighed heavy on my mind the past twenty-four hours, and, while I tend to be cautious about dispensing career advice, I would like to share a few perspectives.

I first voted in 1972, the year that eighteen-year-olds were extended the privilege of voting for the first time in this country. I was a freshman at the time. That was the famous Watergate election, which Richard Nixon won. During his first term Nixon had expanded the war in Vietnam to include a supposedly “secret war” in Laos and Cambodia, and these campaigns were highly unpopular with college students. Most of us had former high-school classmates who had already been drafted into military service, and many of us had lost friends and family members to the war. Nixon’s opponent, Senator George McGovern, ran on an antiwar platform, and was supported by nearly every college student in America. But he lost in a landslide. We were devastated, in part because we considered Nixon’s victory to be something of a death sentence for many people our age, because the war would inevitably continue past the point when we would lose our college draft deferments.

By the time I graduated, however, President Nixon had brought the war to a close, accomplishing something that the two previous Democratic administrations had been unable or unwilling to do.

I’m hoping that the Trump administration will surprise us in similar ways. Even if that doesn’t happen, I feel that there are solid reasons for environmentalists like you and me to stay the course.

During my sabbatical, I’ve spent time in field stations that are invested in long-term ecological research. The project with which I’m involved up here in the Andrews, the Spring Creek Project, is funded to extend through 2203. That wasn’t a typo; it’s a 200-year-long investigation. What I’m finding, out here in the field, is a vibrant research agenda that is providing enormous opportunity for recent graduates to gain experience as field technicians and research assistants. And what I keep hearing, over and over as I work with these young people, is something to the tune of “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this work.”

Granted, I would not want to be starting a career with the EPA during a Trump administration. But that’s not where the great majority of the ESS alumnae preceding you have been getting jobs. Rather, they seem to be finding work everywhere from the Sierra Club to Tesla. Indeed, I know of a couple ESS alumnae who are working to make the wine industry more sustainable. And, folks, people are not going to stop drinking wine just because Donald Trump was elected president. As a matter of fact …

Finally, I want to share with you my personal perspective on being an environmentalist. I didn’t go into this work because it offered attractive job prospects. Rather, I have always seen my work as a personal response to issues about which I care deeply. My first job, during my collegiate summers, was at a Boy Scout ranch in Colorado. I taught two merit badges, hiking and nature. I made $35 a week, plus room and board. The pay may have been low, but the job satisfaction was enormous, and that’s become the story of my life. Is my job satisfaction truly enormous? Well, yesterday I hiked a six-mile loop through old-growth forest, solo, hoping to see a spotted owl. Taking that hike was actually part of my job—it’s something I was paid to do, even though I only ended up getting close to a barred owl. And today I get paid to write a blog for some devastated kids I care deeply about.

Hang in there. Cry if you need to. And when you hear Rudy Giuliani complain, as he did yesterday, that you college kids are a bunch of crybabies, go ahead and cry some more because the haters will always be out there, and sometimes they win elections. In the end, however, I’m all the more committed to our present course. I’m not going to become a billionaire, and I’m okay with that. And even if I’m fighting for a losing cause, which I sincerely hope is not the case, I will continue doing what I do because it’s the right thing to do. And knowing this provides me with enormous job satisfaction.

Please join me. It’s the right thing to do, and deep down you already know why. Let’s make a difference together.

H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest bird list, October–November

• Varied thrush
• Gold-crowned kinglet
• Yellow-rumped warbler
• Red-breasted nuthatch
• Hammond’s flycatcher
• Black-capped chickadee
• Pacific wren
• American dipper
• Common raven
• Steller’s jay
• Hairy woodpecker
• Pileated woodpecker
• Barred owl

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1. The full name is Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word. The project recruits “creative writers whose work reflects an appreciation for both scientific and literary knowledge,” and its goal is “to create a living, growing record of how we understand the forest and the relation of people to the forest” over a two-hundred-year period.

2. Ecosystem “health” is something of a metaphor. Because the metaphor represents a value-laden construct, some critics worry that it misrepresents, as science, that which is not fundamentally scientific. Others, myself included, find it a useful metaphor to communicate the ecosystem’s ability to maintain ecological processes and to support viable populations, especially of native species.

3. Pishing is a way of engaging the auditory curiosity of songbirds, attracting them to come out of the foliage and reveal themselves. The best pishers seem to almost whistle the word “pish” without enunciating the i sound. For ethical reasons, pishing should be curtailed or avoided completely during the breeding season, especially in heavily birded areas.

4. Two-parts blister peanuts, one-part raisins, and one-part smokehouse almonds. Absolutely no M&Ms, freeze-dried banana chips, cashews, or anything else that clashes with cold-lagered, cold-filtered beer.

5. This is called the “north bank” in common parlance, given the general east-to-west flow of Lookout Creek. However, my compass indicates that from this point the creek is east-northeast of where I’ve set up my writing station.

6. When I drop by headquarters later this afternoon I mention the slipperiness of the logs and I’m told that, yes, a professor recently slipped off the bridge log, which crosses the shallows a good three meters up, and was lucky she wasn’t seriously injured.

7. Both species are members of the same genus of true owls, Strix. The spotted owl is S. occidentalis, and the barred owl is S. varia.

8. The National Audubon Society considers the spotted owl “climate endangered,” and projects that the species will lose 98% of its current winter range by 2080. See http://climate.audubon.org/birds/spoowl/spotted-owl.

9. Actually, there are only five, if my field guide is to be trusted.

10. This meadow is the result of natural processes rather than logging.

11. Herein lies one of the problems of keeping contemporaneous field notes. I did not know the actual elevation of Mount Bachelor when I wrote this up in the field, and therefore had to resort to rough figures from memory, using the imperial system. For the sake of accuracy, the summit of Mt. Bachelor is 9,068 feet high, or 2,764 meters.

12. I learn, once back in my studio, that the name comes from the tidbits of rock pinnacles along its ridge. Climbers, no doubt, must have originally come up with this appellation.

13. Ryan’s research is being underwritten by the National Science Foundation. He explains that the CRT controller was designed for oil and mineral exploration, and an oil company won’t shrug at paying for equipment like this. Ryan is convinced that he could develop an instrument of his own for far less if he had the time to do so.

14. The use of digital audio devices is controversial among birders. During the use of this speaker I was careful to follow the guidelines outlined by David Sibley in “The Proper Use of Playback in Birding,” found on the Sibley Guides website, www.sibleyguides.com. Speaker volume was never amplified beyond the normal volume of the spotted owl itself, and playbacks were short, with pauses between them of at least a minute.

15. This turns out to be a mistake, and I will return to headquarters with a very empty water bottle. Indeed, if I had bothered to leave the second water bottle in the truck at the lower trail-head, I probably would have drained it as well before returning to headquarters.