Willow

My husband and I awoke to a slow, powerful cracking sound. Groggily, we wondered at the mysterious force just outside our bedroom window. It was creakier than thunder and more organic than a car crash, the sound of an immense yielding to gravity.

The next morning revealed the sound’s source, half of a giant willow tree had fallen behind our house. Layers of leaves and entangled branches once full and massive splayed across the alley and the split hefty trunk appeared raw and bright against the autumn gray sky. Two weeks passed before the trunk’s other half fell, smothering half of its owner’s garage on the other side of the alley.

The half fallen willow tree.

The fully fallen willow.

Times passed and the tree’s thousands of spiky leaves and complex angled branches simply lay in a heap, a harmless obstruction at the end of a dead end alley. On a crisp November Saturday, a couple of weeks after the final fall, I saw a man with a hand saw removing minor branches and decided to ask if I could snip some of them to make charcoal.

Vine charcoal is made of willow branches baked in coals or kilns. This was a week after attending the symposium, Flow:  Art and Ecology in a Changing Climate and I was inspired by its focus on making pigments and other materials connected to place and the land such as ochre and plants. Foraging this willow would be a way to make the very first drawing tool out of a tree that had been integral to my neighborhood, connected to my sense of domestic place.

The man with the saw introduced himself as Conan, a self-ascribed name. Conan went on to share that he was the owners of the house with the fallen willow’s son. He happily granted me permission to collect branches.

Foraged branches cut into charcoal sized pieces.

While a seemingly shy introvert with a long pony tail and nondescript metal framed glasses, Conan spoke profusely. He immediately shared that he came from a family of artists and that he himself was a painter. He went on to assure me that his parents had hired someone to remove the tree but because this man was a veteran and it was the weekend before Veteran’s Day, the tree’s removal was delayed. Conan hoped this timing would be fortuitous, allowing family members to salvage willow wood for carvings and possibly baskets.

Conan then discussed a painting he had been working on, a waterscape. The empty water required something to animate the rippling, uninterrupted space. He was a bit stuck, unsure what would make the picture more complete, a breaching Orca, a flock of birds soaring overhead?

A few days later a truck with a long flatbed trailer threaded backwards down the narrow alley. Three men spent an entire day dismantling the willow’s branches and splitting its bifurcated trunk into a long stack of firewood. This line of utilitarian lumber replaced the willow’s tall, vertical green texture, opening up the sky and  deep marine horizon.

 As I prepare willow branches to make charcoal and look out at the open sky where it once stood I think about what has been lost and gained in the aftermath of the willow’s fall.

There is more light in our house, a spatial opening between two birch trees. We look out and see currents riffling a soft yet affecting and constant motion, as well as mountains near Snoqualmie pass on the horizon. There will be fewer birds in our neighborhood as the tree was a sanctuary primarily for starlings and sparrows. The motion of rippling water replaces the fluttering of birds emerging from the tree. Their erratic yet graceful movement into and out of the willow filled the air with life and their boisterous calls infused the alley with a rambunctious vitality.

The pieces of willow branches need to be peeled and packed into a metal, lidded container.

Ideas explored during the panel, “Decolonizing Land’s Imaginary,” during the Friday evening opening of the Flow symposium, complicated my bias against sparrows and swallows. Panel participant, Professor Banu Subramanium’s perspective on the implications of using language overlaps with anti-immigration rhetoric to decribe introduced flora and fauna, words such as “alien” and “invasive” made me examine how I think about these birds.  

 Language has extraordinary power in shaping ideas.  Words can act, as ecologist and philosopher David Abram suggests, like spells, hypnotizing through their associative power of suggestion.  At the same time, embodied systems and living relationships that define a sense of place and enliven land speak their own wordless languages. Land’s imaginary requires precise words as well as wordless understandings. It's critical to acknowledge verbal language’s profound power and its limitations in shaping ideas about place and land. Regardless of their origins, starlings still pulse in synchronized murmurations across the sky.  Their abundance in urban environments does not erase their striking iridescent, dappled shimmering and confident, perky characters.  The willow’s fall, and its timing just before the Flow symposium has left me contemplating how words, place, ecologies, and direct encounters affect how I know and imagine starlings and by extension other beings.

Backyards and alleys can effect reckonings and unexpected encounters. I now know Conan’s name and that he faces unfinished canvases, wondering what he can do to make the picture more complete. Listening to him while salvaging willow branches, made me more aware that sometimes words, like Conan, are chosen, and sometimes they’re imposed.  The willow’s fall raises questions about where, as well as how, we find the language to tell textured and expansive stories that nourish our roots as we soar above the spell of broken systems and dead end ideas. Sometimes cracking and yielding is an opening, not merely a fall.

The peeled pieces of willow branches were cooked in a grill for about an hour.

Vine charcoal!

Watersheds

If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.

Wendell Berry

While driving to the headwaters of the Middle Fork and Main Salmon rivers in Idaho, my husband Michael and I talked about different ways to think about watersheds and how watersheds connect us to rivers and streams. Is your watershed defined by physical proximity, limited to the water flowing near where you reside? What about the — often different — watersheds that provide the water you drink or the electricity that powers your home?

A trail leading into Puget Park ravine.

My immediate, physical watershed could be defined as the Puget Creek watershed. Puget Creek runs just blocks from my house through a cool, shady ravine, capturing runoff and discharging from my neighborhood’s slice of north Tacoma.  It emerges from both pipes and natural springs, flowing about half a mile only to be buried as it crosses under Ruston Way where it gushes into Puget Sound out of a large culvert wedged in piles of rip rap armoring the shoreline. 

Puget Creek begins its short run to Puget Sound’s Commencement Bay.

Puget Creek flows into Commencement Bay, once known as Puyallup Bay. Today as I look out at the bay, it is a singular silvery gray reflecting the layers of clouds overhead. But on some days, its colors divide along a striking sharp edge from ultramarine blue to a shimmery muted rose, neutralized ochre, or even lavender.  The color of the bay changes dramatically when glacial silt, or till, filters into it from its source on the glaciers of Takhoma or Tahoma, Washington’s tallest mountain. The glacial till coloring Commencement Bay emanates from the Puyallup, Carbon, Fryingpan, and Emmons glaciers. Melting snow and ice pull the mountain’s sediment into the deep bay (itself carved by an ice age glacier), connecting the City of Tacoma with its namesake mountain. Tacoma or Takhoma is Lushootseed for “mother of waters.”  The mountain and my city’s name tell a story about how water travels from a source to offer sustenance — the story of a watershed.

Glacial silt from the Puyallup River and its tributaries transforms Commencement Bay.

While there is beauty in the connection between the city of Tacoma and its majestic namesake there is also loss. The mountain was renamed Rainier after a friend of Peter Puget’s who never visited North America, and both it and the city named after it lost a connection to native and natural history and to each other. While Seattle business interests won repeated battles (so far, anyway) to keep The Mountain officially named after an otherwise anonymous member of the British Royal Navy, Seattle has lost its own historic riverine connection to The Mountain. The White River, which once flowed to — and colored — Seattle’s Elliott Bay after merging with other rivers to form the Duwamish, is now diverted into the Puyallup River and Commencement Bay. The Duwamish once carried some of The Mountain’s glacial till into Seattle’s Elliott Bay. And with that diversion, Seattle’s direct, physical connection to Takhoma is gone. 

The Duwamish River watershed lost its connection to The Mountain when it the White River was diverted to the Puyallup RIver and Commencement Bay.

The White River is wild and braided, its uncontrollable meanderings were not appreciated by farmers who settled in the fertile valleys on either side of the Pierce and King County border, the floodplains between two rival cities.  A giant log jam burst forth in 1906, diverting the White River from the Duwamish watershed into the tiny Stuck River, a tributary of the Puyallup.  The White River’s would-be temporary shift from the Duwamish to the Puyallup was also a shift from King to Pierce County, and ultimately from Seattle to Tacoma.  Neither county or city wanted the White and its contribution to flooding.  There were lawsuits between the counties as Pierce fought to return it to its natural riverbed and King built embankments to prevent a reunion with the Duwamish. In 1913, the White’s detour became permanent when Pierce County agreed to keep it as long as King County paid for 60 percent of the flood control costs.  A flood control dam, levees, and dredging ensured that the White would not return to its original watershed anytime soon. 

The braided White River.

Photo Credit: Walter Siegmund, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6210169

While the Puyallup and Puget Creek define my physical watershed, I don’t drink out of either, and none of the hydropower that provides 90 percent of my home’s electricity comes from those streams. Each time I pour water from a tap, I am relying on the Green River, which flows in the White River’s original channel, into the Duwamish River, and finally into Seattle’s Elliott Bay. But not before Tacoma diverts hundreds of cubic feet of water per second for for its drinking water. So not only did Tacoma take the White River from Seattle, it takes a fair bit of the Green through municipal pipes.

I can’t see the Green River or walk along its banks in my physical watershed, but it sustains me through my faucet every day.  In some ways, you could say I live in the Green River’s watershed at least as much as in the Puyallup’s. I look at the waters of the Puyallup every day, and my dog swims in those waters with regularity. But I drink the Green, and its water flows in my veins.

The water that flows from my faucets comes from the Green River.

Water also provides electricity that I depend upon each time I turn on my lights or charge the computer I’m writing on. This dependence gives me a stake in watersheds throughout the Pacific Northwest. Half of the hydropower that I and my fellow Tacoma residents use comes from Tacoma Power dams on the Olympic Peninsula’s Skokomish and Wynoochee rivers and southwest Washington’s Nisqually and Cowlitz rivers. The other half of my hydropower is generated by Columbia River dams, meaning, is a sense, that I live in watersheds extending to the headwaters of the Columbia in British Columbia, the headwaters of the Snake River in Yellowstone and the Tetons, and federal hydropower dams on Oregon’s Willamette River. That means I have a stake in water flowing from Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and even Canada.

Through the region’s dependence on hydropower, all residents of the Northwest have connections to this expansive definition of one’s watershed.  For example, the City of Seattle gets 25% of its electricity from federal dams on the Columbia, Snake, and Willamette, and it also owns dam on two smaller (but still pretty big) international rivers, the Pend O’Reille and Skagit rivers.

Hydropower connects Northwesterners to expansive watersheds.

The contours of our watersheds are vital to conceptualizing where and who we are.  My watershed can be defined by the ravine where I walk my dog just blocks from my home.  It is also a river whose major tributary was unwanted, in a sense orphaned because it meanders in intricate and unpredictable ways. The contours of my watershed also extend across the entire northwestern U.S. and a slice of British Columbia, connecting daily activities such as washing my dishes and turning on my TV to their power and flow, and the impact of dams like Grand Coulee and Lower Granite on salmon and the Columbia Basin ecosystem.

Watersheds hold histories that reveal aspects of who we are as a region and a culture. Puget Creek’s subterranean passage under roads and homes embodies its history of manipulation, a story shared by many creeks in urban watersheds. The diversion of the White River into the Puyallup tells a tale of control over wild nature that is central to the development of land across the continent. Dams that silence rivers across the American West speak to values and policies that power local industries and our daily lives. Knowing that these dams are part of my multiple watersheds, enhances my stake in policy decisions affecting river ecosystems, directly connecting who I am to an expansive geography.

Beneath Stilled Waters: Part II

…that we confront a natural world that allows great liberty in selecting, emphasizing, and grouping, and that we must therefore compose it in order to appropriately aesthetically experience it – holds out an invitation not simply to find the natural world beautiful, but also to appreciate its true nature.

Allen Carlson

Celilo Reservoir, Wikimedia, Photo Credit: Kabelleger / David Gubler (http://www.bahnbilder.ch)

Without knowing the history of “Lake” Celilo, you might find it to be an aesthetically pleasing, placid lake in the shadow of Mount Hood. Knowledge of the Columbia River’s history provides the context necessary for “appropriate” aesthetic appreciation of this environment. Knowing that this lake is in fact a reservoir and that it buries some of the most culturally significant, powerful falls on the Columbia, Celilo Falls, transforms how it is aesthetically experienced. Celilo Falls means echo of falling water. Celilo Lake holds the echoing memories of a time when the Columbia River was appreciated for its true nature. At Celilo, the echo of falling water has been silenced beneath stilled waters.  

Celilo Falls just before The Dalles Dam flooded the falls. Wikimedia, Photo Credit: United States Army Corps of Engineers

Celilo Falls was a gathering place for numerous tribes. 5,000 individuals gathered at once at this site to scoop up abundant salmon with dip nets. Gatherings centering on catching, drying, and thanking enormous Chinook salmon forged social bonds. These mighty fish historically provided some Columbia Basin tribes with 60% of their annual caloric intake. Salmon were, and in spite of relative scarcity remain, a primary source of nourishment for body and spirit in the Columbia Basin.

Knowledge of the Columbia River’s history, its significance to indigenous people, and the remarkable stories and religious practices revolving around the sacred food source provided by the river informs how one thinks about it aesthetically. The politics surrounding rivers are also dependent upon multiple understandings of place and require balancing the natural world’s “true nature” and the trade-offs inherent in molding the environment to meet particular human needs or desires. 

The very movement of water in the Columbia Basin is political. Large scale manipulation of the Columbia River began in the late 1800s. The power of the Columbia frustrated early attempts by explorers, traders, miners, and loggers to navigate this wild river, which in William Clark’s words was “swelling, boiling, Whorling, in every direction.” The lava, glaciers, and floods that give shape to much of the basin created jagged river beds giving rise to (now inundated) powerful, unpredictable rapids, currents, and eddies. At locations like Celilo, where the river narrowed, water rushed and plummeted downstream, slowing salmon migration and creating good fishing opportunities.

The river’s wild motion began to be tamed by dredging in its lower reaches for navigability. Dams were built from the 1930s through 1970s (and earlier in some tributaries) to harness the river’s power for electricity, provide for irrigated agriculture, and to control flooding. This stilling of the river’s falls, rapids, and currents benefited shipping, resource extraction, and trade, but threatened (and still threaten) to be a final blow to already over-harvested salmon runs and the cultures that depended on them. 

The movement of water in the Columbia Basin, whether natural, historical, or manipulated, is critical to how one views the contemporary Columbia River. Appreciating and understanding what we see requires seeing beyond what is in front of our eyes. As the myth of Echo and Narcissus warns, sometimes we can only hear echoes and see reflections rather than the vital reality of the true nature of place.

Echo and Narcissum, Claude Lorrain - https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/claude, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50712489

What we see is often a reflection of how we view ourselves and our place in the world. In the above painting, the limits of Narcissus’ understanding of what he sees is a curse. A watery reflection acts as a mirage and maddeningly inaccessible object of his desire. The surrounding natural world is bathed in a golden glow, soft, expansive and lush. He sees none of it, not even Echo, who audaciously reclines before him.

The myth of Echo and Narcissus is a story of the curses of echoes and reflections, the inability to be heard, the inability to recognize what is right in front of our eyes.  Echo fell in love with Narcissus and tried to call out to him, but because of a curse that rendered her incapable of speaking her own words she could only repeat the words of others and could not communicate with him. 

Narcissus too was cursed for his repeated rejection of admirers. His punishment — falling in love with his own reflection — left him withering of unrequited love before a pool of still water. Unquestioning attachment to the slack water pools lying relatively stilled behind the Columbia Basin’s dams may present its own sentimental dangers.

Beneath Stilled Waters: Part I

What you encounter, recognize, and discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach…When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us…When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us.

                                                                                                                   John O’Donohue

The Columbia River Basin, Wikimedia

Seeing activates dynamic exchanges between sensory engagement, cognitive knowledge, the imagination, emotion, and in some rarefied moments, contemplation of mystery.  Environmental aesthetics explores the relative importance of each of these ways of knowing in filtering how we perceive, judge, and appreciate environments.  This relatively new subset of the field of aesthetics exposes values and perspectives that are the lens through which we evaluate and value the natural world.  Just as contours determine what we see, values inflect how we approach what we perceive. 

There are multiple sites in the Columbia River Basin where persistent and pertinent environmental debates test and illuminate human approaches to the natural world over time.  Cosmologies, epochal histories, ecology, economics, and identities imbue its landscape.  Politically charged debates within this France-sized river basin illustrate parallels between the frameworks for aesthetic appreciation of the natural world and arguments informing environmental policy.

The Columbia River spans 1,243 miles, beginning as a small spring just above the Columbia Lake in a bucolic part of the Canadian Rockies.  This tiny gurgle is the source of the main fork of this great river, which travels through seven states and British Columbia.  Much of the Columbia Basin’s geology embodies an epoch of geology, formed by molten rock, floods, and glaciers.  Thick undulating basalt layers (nearly two kilometers deep!) underlie the basin’s topography; the accumulation of over three hundred lava flows that began 17 million years ago and continued to build, intermittently for around 12 million years.  These flows rose from fissures in the earth’s crust.  The Columbia River carved into expansive, weighty deposits of molten rock; it flows over a basalt topography whose geologic history springs from a time when the boundaries between the earth’s core and mantle were far more porous.

Ice and water were also critical to the formation of the Columbia Basin. In relatively recent geologic history, merely tens of thousands of years ago, North America was coated in sheets of glacial ice during two distinct Ice Ages.  The more recent of these occurred 12,000-15,000 years ago and gave rise to enormous ice dam that obstructed the Clark Fork River, creating the 2,000 foot deep Lake Missoula.  This lake stretched 200 miles from east to west and contained over 500 cubic miles of water. When the ice dam broke water flooded from western Montana to the Pacific Ocean, scouring a wide swath of land across the Idaho Panhandle, southeast and central Washington, and upstream into the Willamette Valley. The fast, ferocious water, in a swelling rush, unearthed lava beds, carved coulees, cut river channels, and sculpted the narrow and dramatic Columbia River Gorge. 

The Columbia Basin’s geologic history inspires awe and reverence.  Ronald Hepburn, one of the founders of environmental aesthetics, writes in his essay, “Wonder,” that while scientific knowledge can “displace” this powerful emotion, understanding the complex forces and extraordinary processes behind “perceptual phenomena” can also complement and even enhance one’s sense of wonder.  Hepburn goes on to discuss the ethics of wonder, which operates on affective levels.  Wonder, he suggests, is life affirming and promotes a sense of awe and humility.  Wonder can also elicit vulnerability through understandings of powers well beyond one’s control, grounded in extraordinary histories and evolving from astonishing processes.  It promotes receptive, “other acknowledging” orientations; the more one feels awe for nature and fellow humans, the more one feels respect, compassion, and reverence.

The Columbia Basin’s history is also a familiar story of humankind seeking to control and conquer its wild and wondrous nature. Inscribed in this basin is a story that requires reckonings that may allow us to “walk on the earth with reverence” and regain beauty’s trust.

Rose City

The Skidmore Fountain: A historic and contemporary watering hole

“Good citizens are the riches of a city.”

— C.E.S. Wood

Skidmore Fountain, Portland, OR, 1888, Bronze and Granite

The Skidmore Fountain was built as a watering hole for horses, dogs, and people.  It is the centerpiece of Akeny Plaza in Portland's Old Town district.

I've visited Portland's oldest example of public art, the Skidmore Fountain in downtown Portland, twice.  I first encountered this neo-classical watering hole last summer on a clear, late June day.  As I read the above quote, inscribed on one of its granite faces, a middle aged woman in a neon green tutu straddled the fountain's lower basin.  Half in and half out of the rippling water, her long bleached blond hair, like her arms, extended in multiple directions as she gesticulated and shouted at a couple of friends.  She buzzed with an accelerated energy that seemed as unnatural as her blond hair and tutu's fluorescent green.

The Skidmore Fountain's sculptor, Olin Wood, was influenced by neo-classical work in the 1878 Paris World's Fair.

The fountain's balanced ratios and classical elements, embossed rosettes and palmettes, spiraling volutes and twin nymphs or goddesses bearing the weight of the upper bronze basin evoke cultural ideals such as harmony, reason, and tradition.  The real time human interaction with this Victorian fount contrasted starkly with its contained and elegant aesthetic as well as C.E.S. Woods' aspirational quote.  Homeless citizens, agitated and lacking anywhere to hold their accompanying earthly possessions, congregated around this historic watering hole. 

I returned to the Skidmore Fountain last month.  While its lower basin was empty homeless citizens still gathered around with blankets and backpacks.  As I stood momentarily entranced by water twinkling like liquid stars a man with a shaved head, baggy jeans, and patchy beard staggered across Akeny Plaza.  In that moment beauty and bare life simultaneously dominated my vision. 

Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben defines bare life as a "state of exception" or condition of existing outside the state and thereby being denied the basic rights and protections granted to citizens (more on the contentious nature of citizenship in a future post!). Public parks and plazas, urban spaces meant for respite and reflection, are often spaces where visitors encounter individuals arguably living in states of exception.  These spaces built for aspirational purposes instead provide space to confront public failures. 

The Skidmore Fountain persists as a public watering hole, serving its original purpose as a space to gather and rest.  It also provides space for reflection but of a more political and urgent nature that I suspect C.E.S. Wood or Stephen G. Skidmore intended.  While encountering this bronze and granite homage to good citizenry, I imagined an updated inscription:

Good social services are the riches of a city.

Testing the Waters

Fountains

This blog explores spaces as manifestations of cultural values