5

Notes from the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center

A period recourse into the wilds is not a retreat into secret silent sanctums to escape a wicked world, it is to take breath amid effort to forge a better world.

BENTON MACKAYE, “A Wilderness Philosophy,” 19461

When I left the Andrews Forest a couple days ago, the McKenzie River that led me back toward the coast was flowing at a rate of just under three thousand cubic feet per second. Although placid, it seemed like an implacable river doing a steadfast job, successfully draining a watershed where a tremendous amount of rain has fallen recently. A serious river. But now, driving away from the coast along the Skagit River, I perceive more than mere hydrological competence—I get a sense of power. The Skagit is running at just over thirty thousand cubic feet per second, and that’s after having been “tamed” by the three hydroelectric dams up ahead. This river doesn’t appear to be much wider than the McKenzie, but it seems a lot more muscular.

In another hour I will be driving over one of those dams on my way to the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center. The center was built as mitigation for the environmental harm caused by the dam when the dam was relicensed in 1989. It was a unique idea, to mitigate environmental damage with environmental education by building a world-class field campus. But the idea was supported by the National Park Service, the Forest Service, local tribes, the North Cascades Conservation Council, and the city of Seattle, which owns the hydroelectric project. The city owns the campus buildings, having invested $12 million in their construction, and leases them to the North Cascades Institute for a dollar a year. It’s a tidy arrangement for the environment.

I stop at the North Cascades National Park Visitor Center, hoping to pick up some maps and a bird checklist, but there’s a sign at the entrance that says, “Closed for the winter.”

Uh-oh.

It begins to rain, and I realize that I’ve passed beyond the rain shadow cast by the Olympic Mountains. I’ve been warned that it will rain much more up here than it did down below where I’m more familiar with the terrain. Once I pass the first dam, just past the town of Newhalem, the valley’s sides steepen. Feeder streams became cascades, and then cascades became waterfalls, and at one point there seem to be at least a dozen waterfalls per mile, equally dispersed on both sides of the river. The Cascade Range is explicating its name.

Although I’ve visited the Cascades a number of times, mostly down in Oregon, this is my first stay in the North Cascades. Copywriters associated with these mountains want to call them “the American alps,” but being from Colorado, I’ve tended to discount this as boosterism. After all, the higher peaks here seldom exceed ten thousand feet, which doesn’t stack up to Colorado’s impressive fourteeners. Right? But now that I’m engaging with these mountains, I understand what generated all the ballyhoo—it’s not so much high summits as low valleys. The delta between peak and valley is often six thousand feet, and the terrain is remarkably steep. The landscape indeed takes on an alpine feel, although this version of alpine is more heavily forested than any of the European montane habitats through which I’ve trekked. I am forced to admit to myself, finally, that this topography is more alpine than the Southern Rockies in which I grew up.

The rain stops but the gray skies persist, and then I finally get to the dam. Diablo Dam. I wait for an enormous Seattle City Light pickup crossing in the opposite direction to clear the narrow roadway, not aware that these drivers consider the road atop the dam to be wide enough for two pickups to pass if they’re traveling slowly. He passes with a friendly wave, undoubtedly noting my California plates. Little Dog wants to bark, but I shift back into gear and drive slowly along the dam’s high curve, looking to the right with expectations of the sublime. I’ve read that the water is a brilliant turquoise in this reservoir. Geologists attribute the color to the fine powder resulting from the glaciers above grinding up rock, a powder so light that it stays suspended in the lake after being washed down in the creeks.

I don’t really see any turquoise, but from the gravel parking lot I can see glaciers.2

There’s an apple tree at the far side of the dam, laden with golden apples. I almost decide to stop and pick one, but then I notice movement in the tree. A bear. A really, really enormous black bear, its coat thick, its body fattened up for winter. Munching on apples.

Deciding that it would be prudent to leave the apples to the bear, I drive on. I hike up to the office, and am disconcerted to find a sign saying, “Office closed.” I can only hope it’s not closed for the winter.

The clouds part, briefly, and sunlight careens off the high peaks above. I make a mental note that I should learn the names of these brilliant peaks immediately. It would seem sacrilegious not to.

My residency here is termed a “creative residency,” and is scheduled to last a month, from November 14, today, through December 14. This gives me a full cycle of the moon, starting with the supermoon tonight, which will be the largest full moon of my lifetime.³ The residency, however, gets off to a rocky start when I am informed that a monthlong EMT training program that was scheduled to coincide with it was canceled, which means that there will be no food service except for a few days when other groups are around. This was something I was really looking forward to, having cooked for myself during the months I’ve spent at field stations writing this book so far. Not that I can’t spend another month eating soup, hot dogs, chili con carne, and some really fine mac and cheese, to which I always add green olives, carefully sliced. But it would have been nice to know about this when I was remotely close to a grocery that sold olives.

I assure myself that there must be a store around here somewhere, but the vexations don’t end here. I’m informed that my apartment won’t be ready to occupy for “a day or two,” the previous occupant having not yet moved out. So I won’t really have a kitchen until then. Fortunately, I brought way too much gorp for a primate my size to consume over the course of seven weeks. And there are still cans of soup in my larder that I never had to resort to eating in the Andrews. And there are always the apples. And all that cheese, and all those crackers. I will not starve here, I keep telling myself. An angel lets me in on the secret that they make their own granola here, and that I’m welcome to help myself to the supply. And there’s a refrigerator full of leftovers in the staff room that I’m welcome to plunder. Sometimes lasagna shows up in it miraculously just to keep the grad students alive. They are apparently in the same metaphorical boat as me, suffering an equal loss when the EMT program was canceled.

I’m temporarily assigned to a room with four bunk beds in a lodge that’s not currently in use. One can almost hear the echoes of Mountain School, a glacier-fed river of fifth graders that has flowed through here since the beginning of the school year. My residency begins just after the last group of campers departed, a move that seemed so sensible when I thought there would still be food service.

I write for a while, distractedly, and then decide that a short hike would be elevating. Or at least redemptive. It is, but I’m a full ten degrees higher in latitude than when I left home, and sunset, which should be happening at 4:29 at this latitude, for all practical purposes happened a good hour earlier because of the mountains that surround this place. By the end of my short ramble along the lakeside I decide never again to hike during this residency without carrying gloves. And perhaps a headlamp. But at least it’s not raining. In an attempt to cheer myself up, I remind myself how nice it is to hike without that heavy Forest Service radio.

Despite the cold and the dark, I resolve to continue to approach this residency optimistically. I remind myself that this is supposed to be an adventure. I knew, going into the project, that my best-laid plans would sometimes unravel, if not completely go awry. This is the nature of the venture, and adventurers unwilling to subject themselves to the vagaries of mislaid plans should perhaps never write a book in remote field stations staffed by people more invigorated by natural history than the mechanics of scheduling and communications.

For the most part, the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center is shutting down for the season. Boats are being pulled out of the water, gear used for Mountain School activities is being cleaned and inventoried, one of the walk-in freezers has already been cleared. The staff seem a bit tired, ready to head elsewhere the moment they are furloughed. The program manager is spending her day conducting exit interviews with the naturalist staff, and when those staff are not thus involved, they are packing. Most hope to return in April when the school opens up again. Many will be heading for the ski slopes, replacing one form of seasonal labor with another.

I’m told that the pass to the east is not yet closed for the winter, but this is expected to happen any day, and then things will get really slow around here. I’m also told that last month was the rainiest October in the past sixty years, which helps explain the level of staff fatigue I’m sensing, and perhaps also explains why the waterfalls were so spectacular on the drive up.

I am invited to dine with the program manager, who will not be furloughed for another week. She will orient me over quesadillas. They will be amazing.

They are supposed to get eight inches of snow up on the pass this morning, but it’s raining down here. Pouring. The rain awakened me numerous times last night, thrumming on the steel roof of this lodge. I delay going down to “breakfast” until what appears to be a lull between downpours, but it’s a short lull and the next gush gushes before I make it halfway down the hill to the dining hall. I resist the impulse to hurry—there’s no advantage here to marking myself as a Californian unaccustomed to precipitation.

The homemade granola turns out to be as delicious as promised. And there’s a bowl of fresh Washington apples—not the golden apples from the bear tree—on the table. No sooner do I sit down in the staff room than a young academic with tousled hair comes along and scoops himself a bowl. I judge him, correctly, to be an associate professor, and he turns out to be from Western Washington University. Doctor Nicholas Stanger will be conducting this morning’s session with the MEd in environmental education graduate students that spend their first year of studies on this field campus. I ask about his topic. He tells me that he’ll be working on transformative inquiry, and I express interest even though I’ve never heard those two words linked together. After all, it sounds as if they should be. He invites me to attend, and I immediately accept the invitation, viewing it as a superior alternative to my original plan, which would have me slogging through old growth in the morning deluge. He warns that first he’ll ask the students whether they mind having a visitor around, especially since they’ll be talking about establishing safe spaces in the classroom as part of today’s conversation. He may have to kick me out if the students are feeling snarly.

This is a risk I’m happy to take.

I’m jumping with both feet into what this field campus is about: environmental education. While the previous field stations I’ve visited have been mostly about research, providing a smattering of enlightenment on the side, this institute takes the opposite approach, and is primarily an educational enterprise. In the case of the WWU master’s program, the signature program up here, they’re actually helping to educate the educators. A former student of mine got her master’s here about five years ago, and she raves about the program.

A sign on the seminar room instructs all who enter to remove their boots. Please. The room is set up with plastic chairs in a horseshoe formation, and it’s a bit chilly where I take my seat near the door. About a third of the students have broken out Mexican blankets that are stored in one of the side closets, and have spread them on the hardwood floor to create a warm space. I note that all the students taking advantage of the blankets are female, and I do a quick count: there are four males in this class, and ten females. Three of the four males are wearing knit caps, and only one female is wearing any sort of head covering, something of a Western hat, but without the huge brim all the country singers are sporting these days.

When Nick follows up his opening exercise, what in my classes I call a “free write,”4 with a short opening lecture on today’s topic, I automatically shift into student mode, perhaps as a conditioned response left over from the ten years I spent pursuing advanced degrees. We sat around enormous seminar tables at Stanford, which stimulated note-taking and rigorous debate, but there’s a feeling of intimacy here that I never experienced at the Farm. I find myself wishing I was back in grad school, here in this place, here with these people, this time engaging in a process of transformative inquiry.

There’s another exercise, this one conducted in dyads, and one of the students asks me to serve as her partner. Huge fun. After that, another professor, Gene, takes over. Gene is closer to my age, clearly a full professor, and he somehow causes me to make the mental shift from student mode to teacher mode in terms of how actively I listen. Indeed, I have to force myself, consciously, not to jump into the conversation, especially when he wanders into areas of my scholarship.

The constant rain on our roof vacillates between downpour and deluge. I find the cloudbursts distracting, but the group must be habituated to them, for I’m the only one glancing out the windows during the bursts. Or perhaps it’s just me. The comments section from every report card during grade school says something like, “Johnny gets distracted if he sits by the windows.”

And to this day I refuse to teach in a windowless classroom.

Nick takes back over, and critiques the movement toward safe space in the classroom, claiming that it’s often a false sales job. His term. What he says we need are “safe-enough spaces” to accomplish what we’re supposed to accomplish in the classroom, which often requires moving students beyond their comfort zones. I tend to resonate with everything he’s saying at this point, and take furious notes for a few minutes before deciding to relax and just take it in. He’s preaching to the choir here, and one doesn’t take notes during the sermon.

I’m finding the library to be a welcoming space, although I wish it had a fire-place on days like today. But the light here is far better than in my lodge, and on rainy afternoons like this I feel a need for light. A couple of the grad students warned me about SAD, seasonal affective disorder, which I’ve been assured is a real thing at this latitude the closer we get to the winter solstice. Between the deep forest and the thick layers of clouds, the morning gloaming seems to run directly into the afternoon gloaming without it ever getting bright in between. An all-day dusk where the only evidence of noon comes from your wristwatch.

I’ve learned a trick from the grad students for the next time I visit the library. Keep your moccasins in your daypack so you can wear them in the library, where we also have to remove our boots at the door. The light is good here, but the floorboards are cold.

I see the grad students, at least some of them, on my way to breakfast. They are already on the way out. They seem excited. Anticipatory. “Did you see the snow?” I’m asked.

The snow level descended overnight. Even though it rained on our roofs down here at twelve hundred feet, the snow made it to the two-thousand-foot level, or perhaps a bit lower. I am assured that this is terribly exciting, as if Christmas is almost here.

It suddenly occurs to me that I can play carols on the new speaker I bought for my spotted owl investigations. This prospect brightens my mood considerably.

There’s an undergraduate class from Evergreen State College5 here for a few days studying the geography of polar regions, taught by two geographers, Doctors Martha Henderson and Peter Impara. I’m happy to hear this, for it means I’ll be fed. I’ve been asked to give a guest lecture this evening about the scholarship in which I’ve been engaged during my sabbatical. It’s time, finally, to put some slides together. Because I’ve been asked to speak on the same topic when I return to my own campus in January, I give my full attention to the images. This takes several hours during the afternoon because it’s the first time I’ve looked through many of the shots I took at the various field stations preceding this one. It’s fun to look back on shots of Natasha climbing oaks back in the summer heat of Hastings, and to remember the efforts I went through to keep my head wet back then with the soaker hat. Now it’s all I can do to keep my head dry.

I have dinner with the WWU grad students, and they take great delight in hearing that I spotted the bear who has been feeding on apples down by the dam. His prehibernation binge. They speak of the bear as “him,” and I ask whether they know for certain that it’s a male bear. One of them, an outdoorsy fellow from Vermont who seems to know a lot more about bears than I do, tells us that he’s certain that it’s a male because of the size.

When I concede that the bear was huge, my new friend invites me to dinner sometime. I reply that he’s too kind, and then he replies, “No worries, I’ve got elk.” Impressed, I offer to bring a nice bottle of wine.

The conversation turns to their afternoon activities. They all went up into the snow, some hiking, others skiing. A few of them saw a buck with only one antler, an unfortunate state of affairs for an ungulate. One of the students cracks me up when she observes, “That dude’s season is over.”

The Evergreen students huddle around a bonfire outside the dining hall, and I feel a pang of guilt when they’re called in for the lecture. They come without hesitation, however, and don’t smell particularly smoky, and I’m encouraged when they scoot their chairs forward toward the screen. Once I’ve been introduced, I suggest that we douse the lights, which shifts the focus more toward my photography and less toward me.

The hour flies by, and I’m asked insightful, challenging questions at the end, starting with why I regard the trope of the solitary nature sojourner as being outmoded. I answer about the motif’s inherent maleness, and how it feeds off the narrative of self-reliance, the Emersonian roots of which I question. Heads nod, which I take as a good sign.

I emerge from the experience energized to return to the classroom in January. I needed this reminder of how much I love teaching, for I’ve been dreading this sabbatical coming so soon to a close.

In midmorning, during a pause in the rain, I hustle down to Little Dog to retrieve some gear. The door sloshes when I open it. Although there’s no water in the cab, the door itself has filled with water, probably from rain flowing down the windows. I trudge up to borrow a drill from the maintenance shed in order to install a drain hole, but the facilities manager, who grew up in Washington State, assures me that vehicle doors are built with weep holes that should deal with this. Before drilling, I’m advised, I should check to make certain my existing weep holes have not clogged up with dirt.

Having spent my formative driving years on the Colorado plateau, in the Upper Sonoran and the northern New Mexico high desert, this is the first I’ve heard of an automotive weep hole. But when I slog back down to the parking lot to inspect Little Dog for such orifices, I discover two small plastic panels at the bottom of each door. I pop open the one on the driver’s side, and water gushes out. When I pop open the one on the passenger side, I get the same result.

It occurs to me, as I hike back up the hill, hood up and my jacket zipped to the throat, that I’ve lost touch with seasons. I recall how, when we first moved to California, my wife purchased all sorts of fresh produce from farm stalls in autumn, intent on canning vegetables for the winter. Little did we know that those vegetables would be available whenever we wanted them in California’s year-round growing season. Before long, the word “autumn” would lose the greater part of its meaning, other than for being the season when they also sell pumpkins on the roadside.

When I attempted to set things up at this field station, I’d completely forgotten that there are places where things shut down for the winter. During the planning phase, I’d inquired with a Park Service geologist who monitors glacier activity whether I could tag along during my residency here. Here in the mountains, at latitude 48, in November. When he replied that he was interested in my project and would love to have me along but that he would not return to the field until April, I was astonished, at least for a moment. We arranged for a hike closer to sea level.

So. Weep holes. Important things to know about this time of year in certain latitudes.

There are at least thirty brush piles in the woods just below my cabin, each one the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. This morning a three-man crew from the Park Service, clad in heavy rain gear and yellow hard hats that make them look like fire fighters, is attempting to ignite the piles using driptorches. These devices, commonly used to start backfires and prescribed burns, look like a giant oilcan with a flaming spout. They don’t shoot fire out like a flamethrower, but rather pour it out, nice and slow, as if we have finally controlled fire itself.

This is a process I cannot ignore. I go out on the deck in my moccasins, mug in hand, and sip tea while watching. The process has its comical elements, if properly viewed. Whenever one of the Park Service fellows gets a good blaze going, he moves to the next brush pile, and as soon as he starts torching the latter pile, the former goes out. I’m following one fellow in particular, and by the time he moves to brush pile number 3, the first pile he’d torched was no longer even smoking.

I look up “driptorch” on Wikipedia, and therein learn that they contain a fuel of 30 percent gasoline mixed with 70 percent diesel. This makes sense: there’s just enough gas to keep the concoction lit when it pours, yet not enough to blow up Park Service personnel. Totally cool. I’m overwhelmed by the urge to rush out and consult. Surely someone with my experience, having worked four summers at a scout ranch where we built a bonfire every night …

I decide to stay put. Sometimes it’s nice if academics don’t get involved. Or former Boy Scouts. Indeed, I stand here instead, scribbling these notes, wondering whether they wonder why I haven’t got anything better to do than stand here on the deck watching their fires go out. Poor fellows probably were not expecting to end up in a book when they left for work this morning.

I take my scope down to the lake before lunch. I’d seen white-winged scoters a few days ago, but they were distant and I only had my binoculars so I wanted to get a better look. I suspect that today might have to be the day because it’s getting colder and there’s precipitation in the forecast for the next seven days. I’m not certain how much longer waterfowl will be sticking around.

I am surprised to discover that a lot of the birds I was seeing when I first got here five days ago are no longer here. Gone are the bufflehead and common goldeneyes. I don’t see any mergansers either, although my bird checklist shows them to be year-round residents. No common loons. I see a single pied-billed grebe and, finally, a single white-winged scoter. The scoter is in close to shore, and floating with its wings pushed down into the water so that its wing patches are completely visible. This bird appears to be either injured or too sick to have migrated.

I get an excellent look at it, and cannot help but feel a bit sad on its behalf. It’s an adult male, with a distinctive white comma behind its eye, and its eyes appear closed, which makes the white comma stand out all the more.

I hike down to the apple tree by the dam hoping that the bear might still be foraging, but there’s no sign of him. If he’s smart, he’ll be deep into his winter torpor6 before this next storm comes along.

I pick up my wife at the Bellingham airport, here for Thanksgiving. We shop together for groceries, setting an all-time record for our grocery bill thanks to the purchase of a case of wine. Although I’ve been sipping box wines for the most part during my sojourn in the Pacific Northwest, Carol upholds traditional standards, especially during the holiday season.

We detour over to Anacortes to look at a boat. We have been thinking of purchasing a retirement cabin in the San Juan Islands, and the possibility we like best is on one of the smaller islands without ferry service. I drive while she birds, and we end up spotting a flock of at least one hundred snow geese in a field. Three bald eagles, all adults, seem intent on harassing them, but the geese are doing their best to ignore the eagles. We also spot perhaps a half-dozen red-tailed hawks during our drive. The hawks and eagles are the first diurnal raptors I’ve seen in weeks, but since they are down here on the coastal plains I can’t include them on the field station list at the end of this chapter. A shame, my lists seem a bit anemic here in the Pacific Northwest, less than half as long as they were for Hastings.

It’s dusk by the time we make it to the cabin, and the Park Service burn piles are alight. The crew must have just left, I tell my wife, since all the fires are still lit. She thinks it’s wonderfully romantic to have bonfires scattered everywhere. We cook with the inside lights dimmed, enjoying the spectacle below, but we barely make it through dinner before she falls asleep, her head tucked against my ribs as we sit together on the couch, enjoying the fires. I let her lie there a while, watching as the rain begins again and the bonfires flicker out one by one. When she finally startles awake there is only one fire left burning. I coax her to bed, reminding the poor dear that her alarm went off at 4:00 this morning. She is beyond drowsy, and it’s an effort to get her to brush her teeth before she crawls into bed. In the morning we cook up bacon and eggs; this is the first bacon either of us has had since before I started my rotation with Hawkwatch more than a month ago. While we eat, the Park Service crew shows up again, this time with double the amount of fuel for their driptorches.

After cleanup we decide to try to sneak in a hike before the showers commence, which the various forecasts seem to think will happen by noon at the latest. We head out in full rain gear, thermals underneath, and as we hike I point out many of the trees and shrubs I’ve learned in the last several weeks. Carol puts up with this by feigning a bit more interest in natural history than usual, perhaps because we’re contemplating the purchase of a cabin in the Pacific Northwest.

A couple miles above the Environmental Learning Center our trail leads us over a ridge into another watershed, and this one is filled with smoke from the bonfires below the cabin, which are apparently relighting more quickly than they were originally lit. The smoke seems to have risen to this point and then stopped, apparently having met up with a temperature inversion. We hike no more than a hundred meters into the smoke, but it is thick enough to sting the eyes, so we retreat back over into our original watershed, heading back down. This turns out to be fortuitous, because the last fifteen minutes of our hike is in the rain, and we could have gotten a good soaking if we had not been turned back so early.

I can’t help but think about Edward Abbey, how he never reports in Desert Solitaire that his wife, Rita, and their child had accompanied him to his ranger station during his second season in Arches. Should I not inform my readers how delighted I am to be reunited with my best friend and helpmate of thirty-nine years, how wonderful it is to get a break in the bachelorhood that has prevailed in my life since I started working on this book?

I’ve written about this in an academic paper,7 how Abbey complains of his near-constant loneliness in his journal, later writing in the book, “I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and quiet exultation.” Well, I’ve felt plenty of exultation myself at these various field stations, whether it was discovering a new location where woodpeckers were nesting at Hastings, or watching a Santa Cruz Island scrub-jay retrieve cached acorns in a secluded meadow, or being the first hawk-watcher to spot a ferruginous hawk up in the Marin Headlands, or even during a long solo hike through old-growth in the Andrews. But there has always been the unexpected twinge of wishing Carol were here to share these experiences, a feeling of deep separation I’ve experienced at these various field stations. Even worse, the times when I put my field notes aside for the evening, settle in with a good book, and wish there was someone sharing the couch with me engrossed in her own book. Tonight, while I’m reading Scott Weidensaul’s Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding, she will be reading Paulette Jiles’s new novel, News of the World, and we will delight at being together in separate worlds.

I don’t mind reporting that she is awhirl in the kitchen as I write this. The Environmental Learning Center is nearly abandoned; staff have taken leave, and most of the grad students have already headed home for Thanksgiving. “Let It Snow” is playing on my portable spotted-owl speaker while it drizzles outside. The fire guys from the Park Service are attempting to burn off the last of the logs from the bottom of the brush piles. In the last hour Carol has cooked two quiches and two lasagnas, all of which will be frozen so that I will have something more than hot dogs and soup to look forward to in the coming weeks.

Would Abbey approve? That hardly matters at this point.

A hike today up to Happy Creek Falls with Carol.

Although our trail guide insisted that our total route to the falls from the gate where they closed the highway would be less than two miles, Carol insists at one point that we’ve hiked more than two miles. I explain that a mile in the Cascade Mountains is different from a California mile, but her iPhone attests that we’ve already traveled 2.5 miles. We push on, of course, and within another ten minutes arrive at the falls.

Regardless of the mileage, these falls are well worth the effort. One of the trail guides I’d read while planning this trek had described the falls as “lackluster,” and I was curious to know what lackluster falls might look like. Now that I’ve arrived, I wish I’d never read that description, for I may have allowed the falls’ symbolic complex8 to color my experience of this cascade. Of course, this starts with the name “Happy Creek Falls” itself. Would we view them as being less lackluster had they been named “Torrent Creek Cascades”?

Although I attempt to transcend the symbolic complex, I do not get a sense of power from the water itself. But before one concludes that these falls are truly lackluster, the observant hiker should notice the disarrayed collection of logs at the base of the falls. It took some power to move this detritus into place. I try to imagine what it would be like to be here where I currently stand while what’s left of a tree washes down the falls.

The understory here seems sparse, more like a garden than the wild space it is. There are fewer plants here with which I’m not familiar. I have been expanding beyond trees and shrubs at this point, not that I’m ready to take exams in either subject. The Environmental Learning Center has a tiny bookstore, and a week ago I picked up a thick field guide on Pacific Northwest coastal plants that has been tempting me since my arrival here. As a result of this extravagance, I’m starting to pay attention to true mosses, liverworts, and all that other green stuff—a whole new world for someone schooled in desert flora. As much as I love hiking with my true love, it will be nice in a few days to return to botanist pace so I can continue keying out plants. Today, however, is not the day for that.

We return to Little Dog just moments before combined rain and snow hit. We could not have timed things better. Sometimes the pace is just right.

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, but we decide to cook the turkey today. A looming forecast suggests that Thanksgiving might best be considered a moveable feast. Worst-case scenario: we can boil the bones tomorrow morning, weather permitting, to make Carol’s famous turkey soup.

Although we’ve never considered ourselves fair-weather hikers, we surrender to the elements on Thanksgiving, the final full day of Carol’s visit. Steady, hereto-stay rain awakens us at first light, and the forecast calls for the morning showers to turn into snow this afternoon. Overnight storm warnings have been issued. We make soup hurriedly in the morning, soup destined immediately for the fridge. Worried about the prospect of having to mush Little Dog through the snow tomorrow morning in time to get Carol to the airport, we opt to leave the field station now and spend the night in a hotel in Bellingham. A holiday date within a weeklong conjugal visit.

Once we descend far enough to get phone service, we discover that it’s too late to make reservations for most of the Thanksgiving buffets in town, but we’re able to squeeze into a second seating at an Italian seafood place. When we get there for our 6:30 reservation a thick line of folks with similar reservations has already formed. We try an old trick and ask whether we can order a drink at the bar, and get there just as two people from the first seating leave. We order a favorite chardonnay from far-away California, and ask the bartender whether it would be possible to order dinner at the bar.

“You bet.”

It’s a lovely, albeit untraditional, Thanksgiving dinner. I have ricotta and sweet potato ravioli with clams, Carol enjoys a seafood pesto, sneaking a few of my clams in the process, but leaving me the seasonal ravioli. We try to ignore the football game playing on the TV above us, which is hard to do when you haven’t watched TV since before the baseball playoffs began. But we’re madly in love so it works.

“Black Friday” takes on a new meaning when I drop her off at the airport in the morning. Nature works its wiles, however, during the drive back to the mountains. The skies clear, the sun comes out, and the high peaks dazzle with new-fallen snow.

Passing along an agricultural field, at first I think I’m seeing another gaggle of snow geese, but when two take to the air I quickly realize that the wingtips are not black. And the necks are too long. And they’re huge! “Those are tundra swans!” I cry out to the empty passenger seat. Or maybe trumpeter swans. Little Dog comes to a quick stop, emergency flashers flashing, and I literally dump out the contents of my daypack, dirty socks and skivvies included, to get to the small backup binoculars that I keep at hand whenever I’m not carrying full-sized optics. I roll down the window but stay inside; tundra swans are sensitive to human intrusion, and Little Dog functions as a fairly good blind in these situations. I try to get a good look at a bill to confirm that these are not trumpeter swans, but there’s too much vibration until I remember, belatedly, to turn off the engine. Once past that hurdle I’m able to confirm that the bill curves at the gape, and the eye is mostly visible, and the head is more rounded, all of which indicate tundra swans.

I listen a while—they sound like baying hounds, which in itself should have told me that these were tundra swans. Trumpeter swans trumpet, sounding something like an inexpertly played coronet, hence the name. While tundra swans migrate as far as Northern California, we never hear trumpeter swans that far south.

I continue on, realizing that I’m probably missing some great birds without my favorite bird spotter in the passenger seat. But I must focus on the road. I manage to glimpse a few bald eagles once again over the Skagit River—two adults in the air, a juvenile on a gravel bar—feeding. I pull over and once again attempt to switch on the emergency flashers only to discover that I never turned them off. Oops. Canvasback ducks on the wing, as I merge back onto the road, two drakes and a hen. I remember to switch off the hazard lights this time.

After coaching myself to pay a bit more attention to the actual process of driving, I proceed along a straight stretch of highway in the vicinity of Goodell Creek, where I notice that a work crew has conducted a thinning operation under the high-voltage lines near the highway, leaving several hundred freshly cut Douglas-fir saplings lying on the shoulder, waiting, it appears, to be dealt with mechanically. Driving past, I think to myself that it’s a shame that these saplings couldn’t have served as Christmas trees, and then I hit the brakes, realizing that I can save one of them from the ignominy of the wood chipper. Unable to pull onto the shoulders, I again employ the emergency flashers and hastily choose a tree that will just fit, diagonally, in Little Dog’s bed. I manage to climb back into the truck before any cars come along. I would not have wanted to attempt such a tree rescue back home in Silicon Valley’s traffic.

I’ve long been a minimalist when it comes to yuletide ornamentation. I maintain, druidically, that two strings of tiny LED lights, gold, and a single box of small glass bulbs, all one size, all one color, is all most trees can tolerate before their adornments obfuscate whatever coniferous gestalt is left after a tree is separated from its roots. But there’s no need to insist on such austerity this year. This year, here in the evergreen state,9 my tree will be nothing but green. I prop up my Christmas sapling with rocks in a five-gallon bucket. It’s a tenuous affair, but it lends the apartment a solemn glory. John Rutter’s “Birthday Madrigals, for Choir, Double Bass and Piano” plays in the background and more than makes up for any lack of visual sparkle.

I’m still writing about the tree when Carol texts that she made it home. We still share the same longitude, 121 degrees west, but we are now separated by eleven degrees of latitude, almost a thousand miles. What a world.

When I check the Lake Diablo forecast this morning I’m greeted with another winter storm warning, effective until 5:00 p.m. tomorrow, a small craft advisory, and a special warning from the National Weather Service about an increased threat of landslides throughout the mountainous region of western Washington. Today’s hourly forecast moves from the current light rain to showers, then rain, then snow, then snow showers this evening. Between dawn’s civil twilight and dusk’s civil twilight we will have precisely nine and a half hours of theoretical daylight, although in deep forest in a valley floor on a rainy day hereabouts the darkness has a pervasive quality. It’s the sort of day when you leave a few indoor lights on all day, and need to rely on a lantern if you want to find a scarf in an unlit closet.

I decide on a second mug of tea before I’m halfway through with the first.

I’m scheduled to join a local Audubon group next weekend on the Samish Flats, and have therefore been reading up on the winter birding there. Reports are that the best birding happens on the first sunny day after a storm, and when I wake up this morning to patchy blue skies, my first thought is what a shame we’re not birding Samish Flats today. My second thought—Why wait until Saturday?—was no doubt influenced by the fact that the birding here at the ELC has been so dismal the past week. After a hasty bowl of cereal I summon Little Dog, and we’re off.

Within a mile down the North Cascades Highway I notice a few droplets on the windshield, easily enough whisked away. Then a few more, until I finally have to concede that these sprinkles have become a shower. But there are bits of blue scattered above, so I continue on, forever optimistic. My optimism takes a bit of a hit when I reach the town of Sedro-Woolley, whereupon the shower is now a full-on rain event and there is no longer a trace of blue in the sky. But at this point I’ve already spotted an eagle eating a fish on a gravel bar, so I continue onward.

By noon the rain has turned into a solid downpour, but I hang in doggedly, having at this point identified snow geese, tundra swans, trumpeter swans, bald eagles, and a short-eared owl, mostly from within the pickup’s cab. This can’t possibly be considered a lousy birding day, right?

The question turns out not to be rhetorical, and is answered by a gyrfalcon, Falco rusticolus. It passes enormously overhead, almost as if it considered preying on Little Dog for a moment. I stop in the middle of the road, getting it in my binoculars to make certain it’s not a huge female prairie falcon. It is not. Its wings are longer and broader than anything I’ve ever seen on a falcon, at least sixty centimeters long. Probably a female, judging from the size.

It vanishes all too soon.

Despite the morning chill I sit outside on a wooden deck to enjoy my tea. It’s not raining at the moment, and goodness knows how long this will last. Out in the woods I overhear a conversation among red-breasted nuthatches; it sounds as if every nuthatch in the forest is clamoring at once. I haven’t heard this before, but it may be that the rain has drowned out this conversation previously. Or perhaps this is how the nuthatch community proclaims its joy when there’s a break in the weather. “It’s not raining! It’s not raining! It’s not raining.”

One can almost hear it that way, over tea.

One of the grad students overtakes me as I walk toward this morning’s trail-head. “Going for a hike?” she asks without breaking stride.

“More of a stroll.”

I have no idea where my response came from. I haven’t consciously planned out my pace through the day, let alone throughout this stroll. There is, however, something slow about this morning; even now as I walk, I’m still sipping tea.

“Have a good hike,” she calls back over her shoulder.

The second cup is never as good as the first, but it’s sometimes vital.

The tea is gone by the time I arrive at a small shelter. The sun has just popped up over the eastern ridge, illuminating the canopy above me with shades of yellow I haven’t yet seen in this forest.

These shelters are undoubtedly useful in the administration of the camp programs that NCI runs, providing a way to be outdoors and yet still sheltered from the rain long enough to have meaningful conversations with students. I take a seat on a hefty log, its bark removed and its top planed flat, and attempt to write.

In the morning’s e-mails I was invited to a poetry reading down at a private residence in Marblemount tomorrow night. Tacos and poetry, two of my favorite things. The way the invite was worded I’m not certain whether I should offer to read something of my own or whether being present as a hungry listener will suffice. I decide to have my iPhone along, preloaded with a recent composition just in case.

Semirecent. I haven’t written any verse since starting this project last June, and it seems a waste now that I can look back over six months and five field stations. I’ve been in a valley, on an island, up on the headlands of a coastal strait, and in two ancient forests—surely the muse might have experienced some inspiration in one of those venues.

It’s cold—over my fleece sweater I’m only wearing a down vest this morning, and sitting here in the shelter I’m not active enough to maintain body heat thus attired. I put away the pen, break out the gloves and the hiking stick, and move along, all the while keeping an eye out for poetic inspiration.

As I wander, so does my mind. The Germans have a word for what I experience here, in this dark, wet woodland: Waldeinsamkeit, a noun combined from Wald, the word for “forest,” and Einsamkeit, for “loneliness.” It doesn’t translate into English; the closest we could come would be “forest-aloneness,” which doesn’t fully capture the concept. Waldeinsamkeit connotes a feeling of being connected to nature while being alone in the woods. Emerson used the term as a poem’s title without ever translating it. The poem’s advice is worth the hearing:

See thou bring not to field or stone
The fancies found in books;
Leave authors’ eyes, and fetch your own,
To brave the landscape’s looks.

It’s funny how Emerson continues to haunt me, even here in this lonely forest. In four years of grad school at Stanford, The Emerson Vortex was the only seminar in which I earned a lowly B. I did all the reading and wrote the requisite twenty-five-page paper, but was never quite caught up in the vortex. My failure was clearly transcendental.

Even though it’s merely a stroll, the forest portion of the hike ends too soon. I decide to continue perambulating down to the dam, which from here should add a couple more miles to my morning. One last chance to see whether the bear is still out and about. I haven’t seen him for at least a week at this point. I realize, as I saunter along the road, how silly it could seem to be strolling alone along a road where there’s a chance of encountering a carnivore who outweighs me. But it’s almost December and it’s cold and it’s a fat black bear, and the odds are that it has already entered torpor.

I make it to a covered float just short of the dam, and decide once again to take a seat and attempt some writing. But it’s still too cold to sit there without moving about, so after a couple minutes I get up, dig the shell out of my day-pack, and put it on while examining the posters laminated to the walls. The first one tells me that Diablo Dam is 389 feet high, and was the tallest dam in the world at the time of its completion, which was in 1930.

That’s the year my dad was born. I’m suddenly feeling connected to this old dam in new ways. Nineteen thirty was quite a year: it’s when the first Mickey Mouse comic strip came out. Some twenty-five years later, in the space in my baby book where the date of the child’s first steps was supposed to be recorded, Dad wrote that I never learned to walk. According to Dad, all I could do was amble.

Now, eighty-six years after the dam was built, a son sits here, almost shivering in a down vest covered by a thin rain shell, hood up, wishing he could summon his father’s spirit just long enough to amble together along the top of the dam, out and back.

Barring that, a bear in an apple tree would do nicely.

A dreary forecast this morning. It’s Wednesday, and the nearest icon for scattered sunshine shows up next Tuesday. My cabin feels twice as dreary as it normally does. I’m told that in the wellness center at Western Washington University, down the hill in Bellingham, students can check out lights to help prevent seasonal affective disorder. And get free condoms. I head to the Environmental Learning Center library to soak up some decent light.

Reading an article in last summer’s edition of the Conservation Northwest Quarterly on rewilding North Cascades National Park with grizzlies, I come across the factoid that this park contains 1,630 species of vascular plants. That’s more than any other national park in the nation! No wonder I’m taking so long to become familiar with the local flora.

I’ve arranged to meet the park geologist for North Cascades National Park, Dr. Jon Riedel, in a coffee shop in the small town of Concrete, Washington. We arrive at the same instant, meeting just outside the front door, both easily identifiable: he is wearing a ball cap with an NPS shield on front, I am wearing a ball cap with the NCI logos on front.

Hi Jon, I’m John.

Two tea drinkers in a coffee shop, we are friends immediately. His youngest daughter is a high school senior and has applied to my university, hoping to study in my department, so he has as many questions for me as I have for him.

Jon studies the local glaciers, and I had originally hoped to accompany him up in the high country, but now that the pass is closed and the avalanches are flowing we’re planning to spend the morning on the banks of the Skagit River, searching for “organics,” pockets of organic materials that are deposited in the clay. We’re going to get muddy, and it’s going to be fun.

Jon suggests we take his car, which ends up not being the enormous Park Service pickup I’d expected and instead is an ancient VW diesel sedan that makes Little Dog actually seem sturdy.

Our first stop is at the base of an actively eroding cliff almost the height of a soccer field. Jon points out the various layers; some are gravel, some are sand, some are clay. All have been deposited by glaciation. It’s mostly the clay that interests us, and I notice that swallows have previously taken an interest in this same sediment. There are at least a hundred nest cavities up there, all abandoned at this point. I’m guessing that these would have belonged to bank swallows, which would have left the neighborhood as early as four months ago. If I’m right, they should be deep into South America by now.

We have no need to climb. Large chunks of clay have broken off in the recent rains, and have gathered at the base of the cliff. Even though I worry that other chunks could be coming down any moment, Jon seems immune to such concerns, and we start breaking basketball-sized chunks apart. There is no need for a rock hammer here, only strong hands that don’t mind a bit of clay under their fingernails. The clay has been deposited in thin annual layers called varves, much like the rings on a tree. Jon tells me that they once found an intact skeleton from a wooly mammoth in this cliff, which is something I wouldn’t mind finding myself. But a geologist has to go through a lot of clay to get that lucky, and the best thing we’ll find today are macrofossils, such as seeds, sticks, and cones.

Over the years I’ve noticed how fond geologists are of teaching nongeologists their secret language, and Jon is no exception. Once we’re finished breaking apart the varves, we search through the rubble of fallen rock at the base of the cliff, most pieces of which are rounded by glaciation and run the gamut from apple-sized to grapefruit-sized. Jon points out the “erratics,” which have come from west of our present location, moving opposite the direction in which the Skagit River currently flows. Noting my confusion, he explains that there are times when the glaciers have pushed westward over this spot, and other times when the glaciers have moved eastward. Both have contributed to the gravel on which we now tread.

We move to a second site, which involves a one-mile hop in the VW and then cutting across a riverside property for which Jon has permission to pass. We have an encounter with two large dogs who seem to like Jon, despite a ferocious bit of barking to begin with. The dogs pretty much ignore me, and I’m fine with that. Once past the dogs we bushwhack through a bramble of Himalayan blackberries, the same invasive species that blocked my access to the clear-cut back in Oregon. Jon warns, “If you walk through enough of this, you’ll end up naked.”

I’m thinking it would be really nice to be wearing leather chaps right about now. But when we make it to the riverbank we have other treacheries to navigate. Jon hustles over the moss-covered rocks as if he were still under fifty, and I do my best to keep up. Our destination is a vertical steep just above the riverbank. Water drips from everywhere, and Jon describes how it has permeated down to bedrock and flows horizontally through the various striations until emerging here. We look again for organics, and I find a finger-sized stick that’s been flattened by geological pressure. Jon examines my stick, smiles broadly, and says, “Welcome, brother. You’ve just joined the Friends of the Pleistocene.” It turns out my stick is twenty-nine thousand years old. Jon’s team has been carbon-dating the organics from this seep, and they’re pretty confident of the date within a millennium or two. After inquiring about the dues—there are none—I promise to include my membership in the Friends of the Pleistocene on my curriculum vitae. There are stranger things there.

I ask whether I can keep my stick and Jon replies, “Go ahead. It will probably fall apart when it dries out.”10

We head to another site in a somewhat sketchy backwoods neighborhood. Most of the residents here are loggers who emigrated from North Carolina when the timber industry crashed there. The lots scattered here and there are mostly occupied by trailers, and there are few signs of affluence anywhere. Jon says, gently, that we have to be careful not to trespass in this neighborhood.

We stop in a vacant place near a cabin that’s obviously been abandoned, and scramble through the thorns to a site some fifteen meters above the river. The bank here is a vertical cliff of clay, and there’s a huge Douglas-fir log sticking horizontally out of the bark about halfway up, projecting at least twenty meters out over the river. Jon tells me that he wants to take a sample of that log for carbon dating. Guessing from the layers of clay where this log was buried, he thinks it’s at least six thousand years old, even though it looks as if it died no more than a year or two ago. We don’t have a rope, however, and can’t find a safe way to get down to the log. Jon decides that he’ll have to bring a raft down to get this sample. All in a day’s work.

As we drive to our next site I ask Jon whether the park’s glaciers are in decline. He tells me that over the past thirty years his measurements show a decline of three cubic kilometers of actual water content, which represents about 19 percent of the area of the glaciers. This translates into 800 billion gallons of water, enough to serve as the water supply for the entire Skagit Valley for a century. In essence, that much water, which should still be stored in the glaciers themselves, has all flowed out to sea.

Our third stop is along the highway and involves another treacherous bushwhack through invasive brambles. There’s a face of clay here that Jon’s been wanting to investigate a good while, but hasn’t had the leisure to do so until today. He takes along a trowel with which to scrape the surface, and I take my camera to document a scientist at work. He’s cloaked in mud at this point, looking not at all like someone with the lofty title of park geologist.

He finds very little in the way of organics, complaining that most of it in this deposit seems to have oxidized. He collects a few samples of a darker layer anyway to take back to the lab, and then makes a cool discovery. He scrapes clean a lighter layer, tannish, that he identifies as volcanic ash. Jon explains that he found a similar layer less than a mile up the river and that it turned out to be from an eruption of Mount Saint Helens twenty-one thousand years ago. This is probably more of the same.

I try to share Jon’s excitement, but I’m distracted, having a hard time getting my head around the fact that the glaciers up here have lost three cubic kilometers of water content on Jon’s watch. I’m finally starting to realize how much water that actually is, and I can’t help but wonder how this will show up in the sediment layers twenty thousand years from now.

Such questions will have to be asked another time. I must leave Jon to his explorations at this point because I’m scheduled to lecture the Western grad students later this afternoon regarding best practices for using a field journal as a teaching tool. This is a topic about which two colleagues and I conducted research and published a paper a couple years ago.11 I’ve actually been looking forward to giving this lecture for some time, eager to engage with these students on an intellectual level because of how impressed I am with the group. They have a casual intimacy with each other that I don’t see often, perhaps because they spent the summer backpacking together before actually hitting the books.

I’ve been assigned a slot from 3:30 to 5:00, which pretty much guarantees that the class will be exhausted by the time I begin. It doesn’t help that the previous instructor, who was supposed to finish at 3:00, runs until 3:20. Nevertheless, the students return promptly after their ten-minute break, and not one of them seems to be in a snarly state of mind. One asks whether we can meet outdoors, but it’s rainy and cold and will be dark before I’m half finished, so I explain that I’ve prepared slides, and that other than for the slides I don’t have lecture notes. The class nods their collective understanding; they will soon be teachers themselves.

I ask them to partner up, and then I get them moving around with an exercise that tests their ability to describe simple figures, a basic natural history skill. They’re forced to laugh at their own ineptitude accomplishing a task that fifth graders should be able to perform. I ask them what it is in our education system that failed to equip them to perform this exercise, and we explore this question in light of their own educational histories. By the time we’re ready to move to the next topic, learning outcomes, they’re paying close attention, and when I introduce a ten-minute exercise for them to reconnect with the field notes they kept last summer, they’re fully engaged.

The time swings by fast, especially for me, and the group seems surprised when, at the stroke of five, right as I finish sharing the high points from my research into best practices in the field, I dismiss the class. They glance from side to side before looking back at me: Are we done? With a wink I tell them something that grad students working on an MEd in environmental education need to know: Humane teachers tend not to run late.

I stick around to answer questions. One student hands me her field notes from the summer and asks whether I’d critique them. Another asks whether he can join me birding the Samish Flats on Saturday. Another invites me to join a group of them for dinner, where I will have my choice between lasagna and “mac cheese.”

Gotta love grad students.

(Report from the Samish Flats, December 3, 2016)

I pick up my grad-student associate precisely at 6:00 a.m., a point when sunrise is still ninety-seven minutes away at this latitude. It’s raining. Hard. He has arrived at our rendezvous point before I get there, and stands patiently under a tree with his hood up and his headlamp on, his face invisible other than for his bearded chin. This would be a better scene for the opening credits of a horror movie than for a day watching birds.

We hastily stow his gear in the back of Little Dog, and I proceed slowly in the dark and the rain, sharing that I’m worried about running into deer or elk. He mentions, patiently, that he rarely sees ungulates this high up the valley, and describes the point when I’ll have to be cautious in that regard. Sure enough, when we arrive at that point, just around first light, there are a score of elk foraging close to the road’s south shoulder. He spots them before I do.

He instructs me as to the best place to stop for a breakfast sandwich. I trust him implicitly about this—grad students develop considerable expertise in matters of culinary expediency.

Despite the breakfast stop we arrive at our destination a few minutes before eight, right on schedule, but no one else is there. My companion whips out his smartphone, and within seconds informs me that we don’t have to be there until 8:30. Oops. We head down to the water to look for ducks, mostly finding scoters and buffleheads. But it’s nice to stretch the legs, and the rain has stopped for now.

When we return to the parking lot at 8:25, a small covey of enthusiasts awaits. Judging from their optics, their garb, and the fact that they would come out on such a dreary morning, I judge them to be serious birders. They seem glad to have outsiders join them, even if one of the newcomers is a college professor. My grad-student compatriot is from Vermont, currently ranked as the safest state in the country, and the Skagit Audubon Society seems to appreciate the Vermont ethos.

The leader, Libby Mills, encourages us all to carpool, and since Little Dog won’t accommodate additional passengers I ask whether anyone can accommodate two large academics. A retired couple with a luxurious SUV offers us the hospitality of their back seat. When we load our gear into their rear compartment, I am amazed at the variety of high-end optics already laid out in the back, including a super-telephoto lens the size of my leg. But there’s still plenty of room for our gear.

By the time we arrive at our first observation site—a flat, fallow farm field fenced in by firs—my colleague and I are officially having a blast. It’s fun to be with a group with equal or greater expertise, a group who enjoys birding so much that they barely notice how the wind cuts through our garments this time of morning, or how inevitable it is that rain will resume before we have had our fill of sightings.

Gotta love these Washingtonians. The one strange thing I notice about this group is that they tend not to be impressed by bald eagles. If there are three bald eagles to the right, and a tiny falcon—a kestrel—to the left, they’re all watching the kestrel. But there’s no lack of patriotism here. Familiarity, rather, is the operative factor. Bald eagles can be found everywhere on these flats. The couple chauffeuring us have an eagle nest in their backyard, for goodness sake! But an American kestrel, with its slender, pointed wings, subtle colors, and ability to hover midair—now that’s something.

The group sticks together though a five-stop circuit. During our third stop, down on a narrow gravel beach, we spot more than a dozen species of waterfowl, including a rakish, fine-feathered raft of long-tailed ducks, Clangula hyemalis. The drakes of this compact, distinctive species appear to have spent the morning in the plumage shop, being preened to perfection. I announce quietly that this species is a “lifer” for me, a bird I’ve never before seen. This information is rebroadcast by Libby, and a cheer goes up from every corner of the beach. Happy lifer! Without exception, everyone in the group shares my joy; at this level of expertise, a new bird on anyone’s life list is an occasion. The lifer experience is not merely mine; it is ours.

In bits and snatches I’m told some cool stuff about this lavish duck, which is apparently one of the deepest diving ducks around, sometimes reaching depths of two hundred feet. I’m told that it goes through four partial molts a year, an unusual number. I’m also told that long-tailed ducks will spend four times as long foraging underwater as they will spend floating on the surface. There’s also some conversation about the name change. This duck used to be called “oldsquaw,” and there was some concern about the name being offensive to Native Americans, but when the name was changed, the American Ornitho-logical Union insisted that nomenclature updates are never made on the basis of political correctness.

The National Football League will probably claim the same thing when one of their teams finally becomes known as the Washington Redtails.

A group of eight long-tailed ducks, all drakes, takes off, together, almost in formation, flap-running on top of the water at first, then slowly gaining elevation, and then banking together like fighter jets. They streak away together in tight formation, only a meter or two above the water, a proper flight of Arctic birds. I feel blessed to have seen them fly; their high-contrast plumage is even more distinctive when they are airborne.

At the penultimate stop, a number of raptors glide directly overhead, providing photographic opportunities that even those of us wearing gloves can take advantage of. Most are bald eagles, but my grad-student buddy identifies one as a dark-morph red-tailed hawk. One of the locals corrects him, stating definitively that the bird is an immature bald eagle. I am looking directly at the bird through my telephoto lens, and despite its dark coloration I can clearly make out its patagial patches. It’s a red-tail all right. I snap off a few quick photographs, but don’t come to my grad-student comrade’s defense. He needs to do this for himself.

He sticks with the bird, and calls out the field signs that he’s observing: wing shape, size, silhouette. Our leader, Libby, having seen the patagial patches herself, corroborates—it’s a dark-morph red-tail.

At the end of the day, back in Little Dog, I commend my grad-student friend for sticking to his guns. He smiles broadly, admits how difficult it was to do that, and then turns to his cell phone to look for a shop on the way home where I can purchase replacement boot laces.12

I end the day with fifty species on my personal list of observations, including the one lifer, as follows:

• Northern harrier
• Rough-legged hawk
• Red-tailed hawk
• Bald eagle
• American kestrel
• Prairie falcon
• Tundra swan
• Trumpeter swan
• Snow goose
• Brant
• American widgeon
• Mallard
• Northern shoveler
• Northern pintail
• Surf scoter
• White-winged scoter
• Common goldeneye
• Bufflehead
• Common merganser
• Harlequin duck
• ***Long-tailed duck***
• Common loon
• Red-throated loon
• Horned grebe
• Red-necked grebe
• Mew gull
• Ring-billed gull
• Glaucous-winged gull
• Pigeon guillemot
• Marbled murrelet
• Double-crested cormorant
• Great blue heron
• Black-bellied plover
• Dunlin
• Belted kingfisher
• Northern flicker
• Common raven
• Wild turkey
• Northern shrike
• Anna’s hummingbird
• Black-capped chickadee
• Bewick’s wren
• Pacific wren
• Golden-crowned kinglet
• Spotted towhee
• Meadowlark
• European starling
• Brewer’s blackbird
• Dark-eyed junco
• House finch

It’s an auditory experience at first. The forest sounds different. I am still in bed, and when I check my watch, it’s only 5:30. I instruct myself to go back to sleep, the rain has stopped, that’s all. But my ears know that this is not all. The rain hasn’t stopped, it has changed. Have I been too long in California to remember such a change?

I get up, finally. Might as well pee if I’m awake. And then, still not wearing my glasses, I cross over to the thermostat—I seem to have set the heat back too low last night. Crossing back in front of the deck, I look out. It’s not yet first light, but something is different.

I switch on porch lights. Of course! It’s snowing. Large, beautiful flakes that drift of their own accord, there being no breeze this morning.

My reverie is short-lived because I remember being warned not to leave my truck parked near the cabin if it snows—they are unable to plow the road this high, and it’s possible for vehicles at the upper level of the Environmental Learning Center to become snowbound for the winter. I dress hurriedly, putting on my snow gloves rather than the driving gloves that I’ve been wearing up to this point. How long has it been since I’ve scraped snow off a windshield?

I have to chuckle at my first glance at Little Dog. The silver truck is all white, as if trying to pass for a Seattle City Light vehicle. I honestly can’t remember if I’ve ever seen it this way. I can remember driving through snow in the little beast, but I can’t remember ever seeing it shiver under half an inch of snow like this.

It’s not snowing in the parking lot, just drizzling, and I realize that the snow line falls somewhere between my cabin and the level of the lake. I hasten back up to the cabin, hoping that it’s still snowing there. It is, but just barely. I sit outside, listening to how snow works its way through Douglas-fir needles. What I’m hearing is not the silence one might expect; the snowfall sounds like the last swash of a wave that has reached its highest point on a beach. There’s a bit of a sizzle to it, the sound of effervescence. As I sit and listen, sipping my tea slowly so that it will last, the sound changes, growing both in volume and intensity. Snowflakes turn to snow pellets, what we called “corn snow” growing up in Colorado, but which is more properly termed “graupel.”

The graupel only lasts a couple of minutes, turning back into small flakes and then, five minutes later, stopping entirely. Is that it? I scurry inside to check the forecast. Scattered showers ahead, could be rain, could be snow. But clear skies on Tuesday, two days from now. I check the avalanche danger and it’s listed as “considerable,” even below tree line. The Northwest Avalanche Center has given us two exclamation points. I head back outside regardless, this time with camera in hand.

The sun breaks through, and just as this happens the graupel returns, a bit smaller this time. It bounces when it lands in moss, as if nature is playing tricks on itself. I feel like laughing at the cosmos, or sniggering along with it, and I recognize my manic state for what it is: I’m reacting to the fact that the quality of light has changed here in the forest. It has a warm, yellow glow that even the thickest canopy can’t filter out. Even when graupel begins again to fall, lightly now, the grayness with which I’ve been living has vanished, at least for the moment.

I check my watch for the second time today. It’s December fourth, and now that the snow has descended to my level it finally feels like December. And then it hits me that the ten-day forecast now extends through the expected end of my residency. I check it. Between now and then, the only day when it’s not expected to rain or snow is next Tuesday.

I head back toward the cabin, no longer feeling quite so upbeat. I check the ten-day forecast once again, using a different weather app. Same thing—Tuesday is the only day out of the next ten when there will not be precipitation. And the forecast high for Tuesday is −6 degrees Celsius, or 21 degrees Fahrenheit, take your pick.

I check the forecast for Santa Clara, California. Out of the next ten days, rain is only forecast for two days, and even then the daily highs will be in the sixties.

I should not have looked. I’ve been away from home well over a month now, and I’m growing weary of being away. I read ten books during the month of November alone, and I’ve written thirty thousand words since I last shaved in my own basin. There have been lots of good hikes, but a lot of rain days. A whole lot of rain days. And the last time I got a haircut, the Cubs hadn’t won the World Series for more than a century.

I call Carol. She likes the idea of me heading south on Tuesday, and reminds me that every leg of this trip so far has involved me driving through rain, including when I left in October, when it rained through the entirety of California. She’d prefer to think of me coming home on dry roads.

Another snow flurry arrives, this one turning our landscape back to its prevailing gray. It’s a moment when I’d like to build a fire in a fireplace, any fireplace, adding some yellow to my world. Instead, I put one of the quiches Carol made over Thanksgiving in the oven for lunch, hoping to at least make up for a hasty bowl of raisin bran that never quite goes the distance.

There’s a lot to be eaten if I want to get out of here by Tuesday.

I’m watching snow fall, something of a renewed pastime for me. A feathery blur lands just past the deck, and I get up and go to the window. From the size I suspect that it might be a varied thrush; the descending snow line has been pushing them down to our level because they forage on the ground, and this must be getting tough at the higher elevations where the snow is getting deep.

I spot the bird under a tree where not much snow has accumulated. In terms of shape and comportment, it looks much like a varied thrush, but instead of the varied thrush’s orange-and-black head pattern, this bird’s head is black and white. And instead of the varied thrush’s single breast band, this thrush has two. And from the lower band black spots run down its flanks.

It seems obvious that it’s a thrush, but not one I’ve ever seen before. I pull out a field guide, and am amazed to discover the bird to be an extremely rare visitor from the western Alaskan islands, perhaps having come down with this storm. I discover that they’ve been seen in Washington before, but not often and not recently. I suddenly realize that this is a bird I should document.

I rush into the bedroom to retrieve my camera from its case, but when I return the bird has vanished, as they so often do. I quickly don boots and a coat, and spend the next two hours wandering the forest around the cabin, stalking first, pishing later, attempting to call it in. But all I see that entire two hours are dark-eyed juncos.

I decide that for the rest of my time here the camera will remain on the dining room table, lens cap off, hood attached, always at the ready.

Feedback to Sally, not her real name:

Well, Sally, your field notes are gorgeous, as you probably already know. I found the biggest strength to be in the reflections, and I thoroughly enjoyed the sketches. A great start.

The mapping you did does not seem original, and you should credit your sources if ever you copy published materials. This can be a simple: “Based on USGS map 201065, 2004.” It’s also nice to indicate magnetic north and a scale.

You are mixing course notes and observations here, and while that works well for the present, think about what your field notes might look like when you transition from student to educator. Visualizing this may be instructive for the next time you’re out in the field. What do you want to note if you’re going to bring a class of your own out to a particular site five years from now? If you’re serious about environmental education, field-based environmental education, your field notes become your lecture notes, so to speak. These current field notes don’t quite get you there, because they’re student notes. Figure out how to make them teacher notes.

Your sketches of flora are superior to your sketches of fauna. I’m convinced that this is a confidence thing. Anyone who can draw a great hemlock cone can draw a passable marmot. Get yourself a sketchbook and spend some time in a natural history museum over Christmas. I recommend you stop predrawing in pencil and then tracing over in pen. Start right out with pen in your sketchbook, if that’s to be your medium. Be bold, knowing that you have talent. (The marmot drawing fails, by the way, because you don’t adequately describe volume. When you figure out how to do that, send me a marmot. A fat, furry marmot ready for the coming winter.)

You might also want to experiment with speculation. Ask questions about behaviors, ecological relationships, et cetera. Let your ecological curiosity run wild—right now it seems a bit too controlled. You have been seeing things out in the field that no one fully understands, not even your professors. Question. Speculate. Inquire.

A minor quibble: you may remember, in my lecture, I mentioned that beginners tend to focus too much on species identifi cation and too little on ecological relationships in terms of the larger landscape. This describes where you are at present. Move on toward the bigger picture. Don’t just describe what the needles look like in various conifers, tell me where each tree thrives. Do some need more sunlight than others? More moisture? Start looking for these things. The needles will point you in that direction.

Okay, here’s my biggest disappointment in your current field notes (and remind yourself that you encouraged me to be critical): VOICE. I don’t hear voice here except in a few of the more brilliant reflections. Voice is where the author’s personality comes through the text (including drawings.) I read through your entire journal without getting an idea of who you are as a person. Liberal? Feminist? Environmentalist? Activist? Funny? Sensate? Adventurous? You’re holding your personality back here, withholding your Sallyness. This may be because you haven’t yet developed your persona as an environmental educator, and if that’s the case, it’s time to get moving on that issue. So set this as a goal for the next block of field notes: suppose that you show those notes to some random professor—not your instructor—and ask for her/his feedback. Will that professor have a better sense of who you are as a person after reading your field notes? I mean, something more than “Good Student Sally?” Bottom line: I just spent more than an hour reading through your field notes, and I still have no idea who you are. Don’t let that happen again.

Otherwise, wonderful. I have a much better sense of what your program is like having read through your field notes, and for that I thank you.

I’ve decided to head south on Tuesday. The last migrant to follow the Pacific flyway south. I’ve been in the field continuously since the second week of October, and I’m at the point where I need to head home and get a haircut. Please advise as to how I should get your journal back to you tomorrow.

Kind regards,

John

North Cascades Environmental Learning Center bird list

(Does not include birds from the Samish Flats. See above.)

• Common merganser
• Bufflehead
• Common goldeneye
• White-winged scoter
• American dipper
• Chestnut-backed chickadee
• Black-capped chickadee
• Pacific wren
• Dark-eyed junco
• Song sparrow
• Red-breasted nuthatch
• Bushtit
• Ruby-crowned kinglet
• Golden-crowned kinglet
• Common raven
• Pine siskin
• Varied thrush
• Dusky thrush

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1. Benton MacKaye, a cofounder of the Wilderness Society, is also considered the founder of the Appalachian Trail.

2. I am informed, later, that the turquoise water color is really a spring phenomenon. The glaciers are not all that active at this time of year.

3. A supermoon happens when the full moon coincides with its closest approach to earth in its orbit. The last time a supermoon was this close to earth was in 1948. The next time will be in 2034. Since I was born in 1954, it’s possible that tonight’s full moon will be the most spectacular one of my life. It’s even more possible that it will be obscured by clouds, although, as I write this, the sky is mostly clear.

4. I instruct my students that there are three rules for a free write: (1) don’t stop writing; (2) don’t stop writing; (3) no scratching out.

5. ESC is a public liberal arts college that I’ve always admired for its innovative curriculum and its catchy motto, Omnia extares, which is Latin for “Let it all hang out.” School mascot is the geoduck, the largest burrowing clam in the world, which has a normal lifespan of 140 years.

6. The literature suggests that bears don’t truly hibernate because they can awaken at any moment should they be disturbed by something like a loud noise. While this may seem to be splitting a fine line to some, I use the word “torpor” here because it’s the best way to describe the deep, prolonged winter sleep of both black and brown bears. I’ve heard the same term used to describe college students during lectures, but this usage seems largely hyperbolic.

7. Mentioned previously: “What Does the Desert Say? A Rhetorical Analysis of Desert Solitaire,” published in the journal Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. A copy of that paper can be found at www.jsfarnsworth.net.

8. In “The Loss of the Creature,” an essay I teach in one of my courses, Walker Percy argues how prepackaged ideas form a symbolic complex that prevent the casual observer from authentically discovering a site.

9. According to the Washington State legislature’s web page on state symbols, “the Evergreen State” is an unofficial nickname that has never been formally adopted. There is, however, an official state oyster, Ostrea lurida; a state endemic mammal, Marmota olympus; a state marine mammal, Orcinus orca; a state flower, Rhododendron macrophyllum; and of course a state tree, Tsuga heterophylla.

10. This prediction turned out to be prescient. Within a week, before it was even completely dry, my Pleistocene stick was reduced to sludge.

11. Farnsworth, Baldwin, and Bezanson 2014.

12. I’ve already busted one of the laces on my new boots, the ones that I purchased six months ago back at the Hastings Natural History Reservation. Fortunately, I’ve brought both sets of high-top boots up here to the Pacific Northwest, just in case one pair gets wet.