Our Story (the best we know it)

Where gold once changed everything, 
private now stakes claim 
between sale units 
and controlled burns 
and salvaged gangrene. 
As purely as we once reflected 
in nuggets washed from pits, 
we now applaud our faces 
in sculpted mountains clean. 
Leading all national forests 
in sheer board feet,
we'll tell our tale again this year 
to a million more times three.  
Playing hell with weather, though, 
keeps hope in the mills, 
cafe dreams of filled streams
washing out the drought.
When a perfect storm of climate change 
fans the flames higher, 
silent screams of beetle dreams
stain the fungal night.
Can a fire-less forest still be a forest? 
A forest-less fire a sale?  
Bug kill 2011, 
our story (the best we know it).

Singing Fish

Ever dreamed of grabbing the baton and directing a symphony...of fish?   In yet another collision of art, science, and the natural world, that’s what inquiring minds found  last month at the STRP festival in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.  The fish were housed in individual tanks arranged in an arc outfitted with a twelve-channel speaker array, with the conductor's podium in the middle.  Turns out, fish continually discharge a weak electric field of constant frequency.  The display picked up those fields with special sensors and then amplified them through the audio system. Participants acted as conductors, using a modified Nintendo Wii remote.  Each "conductor" cued an individual fish or combined the sounds of several fish together, either in natural or digitally processed modes, resulting in an otherworldly choir of "singing" fish, each with its own species-specific tones.  A one fish, and a two fish, and ready...begin.

Dispatch from the Center

I write this from a study I adopted three summers ago—a fire lookout in the heart of the Black Hills of western South Dakota. I call it my study because, above its hardwood floor and oak desk, I am surrounded by a library of seventy-five windows, each rendering its own view of a past, present and future I cannot escape, nor even long to. Each day, it seems, the windows hold different stories. My job, my US Forest Service duty, is to serve people and protect resources. I do this by gathering the window stories like a panopticon, reading, watching, knowing from the center of a giant hoop, which at this point in history is known as Custer Peak Look Out. 


On a clear day the trained eye can spot Custer Peak from many locations in western South Dakota. From the Badlands and Rapid City, west to the Wyoming border, from far north of Belle Fourche Reservoir and Bear Butte, south clear to Mount Rushmore and the hills above Hill City and Custer. Just look for the slightly squashed teepee-shaped hill between Deadwood and Pactola Reservoir.

Should you come up for a visit, a word of caution: the rugged road up is not for luxury vehicles, the way it corkscrews around sharp-cut boulders and steep slopes like sinew through loose patchwork. At the road's end you'll find a a tiny parking lot from where it is another quarter-mile hike up a switch-backed trail to the tower's jaw-dropping view in all four cardinal directions.

I begin each day by raising the US flag, measuring the rain gauge, opening the cat walk (the railed decking just outside the windows), releasing the hounds (trapped and angry flies inside the cab since the previous night), spinning the weather (gathering details on current conditions), and checking in with dispatch on the radio.


Don't you ever get bored? A fair question, which I am asked almost daily by forest visitors. Yet, with so much at stake, boredom is always a choice on which I never seem to land.  It eludes me at every turn in the tower.  

Take, for example, the amount of private property in the Black Hills. Nearly fifty percent of the land within a ten mile radius of the tower is under private ownership—a reality of many other parts of the forest. Of all the forests in the nation, in fact, the Black Hills has the highest percentage of privately held land inside forest boundaries, which is mostly a result of the amount of mining claims that predate the forest's inception.

Then there are all the timber sales, of which the Black Hills also leads all other national forests. That combined with all the private land are the two best reasons why South Dakota has such strict rules on campfires or open fires. Many visitors don't realize that, while the forest straddles two different states with two different sets of laws, the portion falling inside South Dakota prohibits campfires and open fires, except by burn permit or within developed campground or picnic fire grates.

It is without drudgery, then, that I daily pore over this library of windows, studying healthy stands, bug-killed stands, thinned-out units, units primed for thinning, private meadows, public parks, old burns, new burns, gold mines, ski resorts, lazy creeks, lonesome lakes, gravel quarries, busy byways, smoky campgrounds, flittering birds, wary elk, and undependable weather patterns.

Today the windows on the south wall yield a strong thunderstorm moving northwesterly, brushing down curtains of gray above folds of a dark-blue and emerald green over-story. A few lightning bolts toss deep thunder like Deadwood dice across freshly revealed creases, canyons and coulees. I steady my lightning stool with its glass insulator feet.  At this point, the stool becomes far more than a conversation piece inside the cab.

While some of the falling gray is virga, I surmise, sheets painted white soon stretch to the forest floor, popping out layer after layer of silhouetted ridge lines, which farther out eventually fade back to gray. The contrast floods my spotting scope and probes my understanding of what I once thought of that country. As another wave of thunder rumbles, the flag whips, snaps and claps in applause, the top of its pole eye-level from my oak desk and chair. 

More lightning bolts touchdown followed by more thunder. As I count the seconds from the bolts to the sound of thunder, I make quick judgments.  I scour through a collection of topography maps I keep in a binder on the desk—a bible of sorts that yields context, interpretation, and more story lines.

As the storm passes, windows on the north bring a wisp of white rising below Terry Peak, a ski resort above Lead and Deadwood.  My breath is dammed in another race to my feet. The binoculars snuggle my eye sockets again, the spotting scope takes me closer. A dust devil from four-wheelers burning up the gravel? A water dog from wet rocks warming in the midday sun? A rogue resident smoking yard waste without a burn permit? Or is it a holdover from last week's lightning, skunking around a pile of duff? None of the above. Exhaust from the same drilling rig I radioed into dispatch earlier in the week, the result of which sent an engine crew on the scene to call it a false alarm. 

When the storm passes, I pan the binoculars across the south windows again where through evaporating mist I read Harney Peak, known to the Lakota as Hin Han Kaga, or "center of the world."  My eyes scale the granite ridge as I remember how Harney owns the honor of being of the highest point between the Rockies and the Swiss Alps. At its apex, an amazing yet abandoned stone-hewn fire look out, which came well after the day the peak earned its Lakota name. Chief Black Elk stood there once reading all he could see, yet without the aid of my binoculars or spotting scope.

It is said that as Black Elk looked out over the hills from "center of the world," he spoke of three kinds of peace. "The first peace, which is the most important," he later told a transcriber, "is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka (or great creator), and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this."

Like most other days, my tower's windows on this day bring again the story and wisdom of what always was, and yet will always be.

 

Bluff

Two-hundred degrees southwest the anvil
lifts to the east

peppering the hills with wispy, white waterdogs, evaporated
drops stretching home.

From sun-soaked cliffs and outcroppings, they sail 
above lumber and tin,

pale imitations of distant smokes questioning
my next read.

I have not come here as advocate, prophet,
seer, or scribe,

but to judge from cast and brass this din
calling my every bluff.

Important Road Work

(With thanks to Russ Henderson, who while doing road work in Idaho, became distracted by the not-so-humble Salmon River and snapped this shot)     

That all you got? Please.

Liquid to vapor to solid back to liquid and vapor?
You’re embarrassing yourself.
Round and round you go,
drought after drought, flood after flood,
your cyclical magic ad nauseum.
Please.
And for what? You don’t think we notice?
February, 2010, for example,
there between French Creek and Riggins,
the way you distracted poor Russ Henderson
from doing important road work,
for cripe sake.
Of course, he smart phoned
me another shot.
You kidding me?
And what was it this time? Oh, yes.
A giant ice clock
a hundred feet wide,
and you casually licking,
clicking, swirling the eddy to life.
Pathetic.
Just so you know,
right there on the ridge,
your friend Russ sexted
your curvy little peep show
to everyone he knew.
I was in a meeting, Ms. Drama Queen.
Please.
Must you always be the nude in art class,
spilling your tears across sleeves off the riffle?
We get it, already.
We know you don’t mean it,
that it’s only for the moment.
Yet still  we are lured by your vortex
bending you round,
bending you round eternally,
life bone-frozen, steaming yet again,
circling the circle you spawned here before.
But, please, for Pete's sake.  Please.
We have important road work to do.
                                                       ~ J.D. Anderson

Chasing Flash

In 1932, Forrest Flashman opened a photography store and studio in downtown Red Lodge, Montana.  As legend tells it, Flashman named the store Flashes and sold black and white photographs of the historic Beartooth Pass Highway, the scenic route to Yellowstone from Red Lodge.  While the store changed hands through the years, it kept the name and downtown location. 

At some point in the 1970s a tiny picnic park cropped up adjacent to Flashes, aspiring to give the corner new life.  The rumor was that the park was in memory of the dark night a business burned to the ground there, as Flashes miraculously survived.  Small, peaceful pines and benches soon came into the picture, a kind of living photograph inspiring one to pick up the pieces and move on, I suppose.  Not long after, gleaming from the salvaged two-story wall above the park—the wall that used to be the interior of the lost building—a local artist painted an advertizing mural of a happy family sparkling at a flashing camera bulb.

I am not sure whether the juxtapostion worked or not because from then on whenever we walked or drove by the mural, I never thought about the lost building, or asked what it once housed, or even why a quaint park now filled the space.  Instead, the mural made my head swim in the spoils of family shopping trips through Flashes, adventures that lavished our home in a wonderland of Kodak, Canon and Fuji. Dad made sure we had as much as we could afford: 110 to 35mm, Polaroid to Instamatic, slides, lenses, and projectors, alien-like tripods, saucer-like slide carousels, and mountain after mountain of developed prints spilling from busted albums like spring run-off.  A flood of moments frozen by blinking shutters.  A family at war against time.

Somewhere deep in those tomes, I've spotted pictures of my father as a newborn, my brothers and sister as newborns, and now, in the collection I married into, my wife and her mother as newborns. The earliest picture I've ever seen of me is a black and white taken the summer I turned one year-old, as if this were the day I was born. I am on all fours on the sidewalk in front of our home, wearing only a diaper, eyes aglow in a grin of wonder. In my hand, a Gerber jar lid for catching ants.

In fourth grade, I only played shoulder to shoulder with the  Killebrews and Stargells of neighborhood hardball long enough to be sidetracked by broad streaks of light shooting from the foul line ditches--silvery glimpses of daring brookies and rainbows, nature foiling my right-field chase for fly balls. As I looked to where the water drained toward town, I imagined the spring feeders twisting and turning through a veritable flash carnival down to Rock Creek.

One day I picked up my brother's Zebco rod and reel instead of my mitt, tying on to the end of the line a small rock. After tutoring myself in casting along slices of thin, green banks, I made my way down to Rock Creek where the spinners and lures I'd found in Dad's tackle box soon decorated the overhangs and underwater roots.

As the run-off faded, my fingernails packed proportionally with wet dirt from the muddy banks and overturned boulders--hunts that yielded deep brown, juicy worms and crawlers for the bait hooks I'd found in Dad's tackle box. When that luck dried up, the summer heat compelled me back to trapping. Spent peanut butter jars were christened a kind of purgatory for my captured grasshoppers, especially those haphazardly tickling my arms and legs. At Summer's peak, some hoppers roasted to a crunchy crisp before the jar rested near the flashes I last spotted in the deep pocket water out at the edge of town.

Even now, trace remnants of those snatched moments lay frozen in a trunk at the back of my spare closet. They are stuffed under handwritten documents and drawings on construction paper of when as a child I tried recording this world with crayon and pencil. Deep in the fertile roots of high school graduation scrapbooks, Mom faithfully consecrated these fragments as a mother squirrel caching away nuts for her family's long winter.  While my tribe had little religious influence, Mom and Dad showed all of us faithfulness and dedication by laying hold of memory, if only in the scribbles of a child, collecting the scraps as psalms and sacraments, sacred rites of passage.

In one of my early grade-school drawings a stick figure stands in an open, paper-colored meadow fishing a small, grassy stream. In another, a stick figure casts into a creek meandering down a tall valley with big green trees. Another presents an alpine setting of triangular mountains topped with sharp, snowcapped peaks under clear, sunny skies, a backdrop for my stick family casting long loopy lines at jumping fish in sparkling lakes.

My hand-printed newspaper titled The Anderson Gazette fills one in the latest family buzz. The feature titled "Camping Trip a Success" details a rainy weekend in the high backcountry, a family horseback hitch at Timberline Lake. "Julie Gets 4-H Blue Ribbon" outlines the judging results of her leather work submission at last week's 4-H fair. "Gary Admits It" exposes the truth behind what really happened on the farm tractor when it accidently tore down a chunk of electric fence, contrary to what had previously been believed.

Are these captured moments the root of my own connection to art and land? Like life follows water, did my chase for ants lead to a life-long chase for flash down the watershed, then  a chase through the wilderness of words that somehow never fully rope-in the sense of place I remember? The more I study and relive those sealed moments--those irretrievable settings, plots, and characters--the more haunted I become by never fully redeeming the utterly immeasurable loss.

Community Caves

Cyndi, Jazz and I recently took a cool (very cool) hike to a well-kept secret called Community Caves.

Just 2.5 miles from town, the final 200 yards is a rigorous climb. When we arrived we looked up to see this: a wall of ice measuring about 70 feet tall pouring over the cave entrance.









Ice climbers were there that afternoon and had strung a belay rope down the face.











Cyndi and Jazz at the entrance.











Shots from the entrance looking out.


















Inside, other ice columns pour from the ceiling, spigots frozen in time.



























In different light at different temperatures the colors of the sheets change like cloud cover.





























The trail continues up the
cliff behind me. But I like it just fine where I stand, listening to a symphony of drips, each one finely tuned to a pitch of its own.







The view from where I stood in the previous picture. The ice climbers have their gear spread out on the floor. You can see why it's called Community Caves: a community of tiny caves each coming together in the larger commons area, and this time of year each with its own unique display of ice and drips .

In one cave, a shelf above our heads had sunlight steaming through from another entrance, which made these ice stalagmites look ghostly green.

 

This is true to what we actually saw, no color enhancement or Photoshopping, which is why I decided that this might be a good spot to turn back.

Diamond Lake Subtext

There is no trail to here,
bushwhacking up three-miles through snow and bug-killed timber,

scree and fresh runoff,

giant hunting knife boulders.

Dropping in from above

you might need a topo, which I’m told helps in talus.

Each line a scale of rigor,

a point of elevation.

But jumping off Beacon Point

points to another matter. The cartographer

a kindergartener

scribbling an orange Crayola.

Deva mountains like this

cast their own lead roles, write their own subtexts,

score their own

cliff hangers.

We try upstaging the scene,

filling backpacks with vices, plotting, grasping, and knowing,

yet the mountain remains

a mountain.

Soon our feet are pustules

our knees hamburger helper, while time and weather

scratch and bleat

against twisted knarls.

Whatever your social strata,

it’s shaven to a shadow here by blistered boulders

and muscle-burned crags,

the strata of barefoot equals.

~ J.D. Anderson

Stand Tall Bipedal Forrest

 

What is the greatest difference that distinguishes humans from every other living organism? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argues that we have the brains to determine our own future, of understanding our own providence, of deploring the moral implications of such, and of fighting against those implications.

In his book, "A Devil’s Chaplain," Dawkins writes:

Stand tall bipedal ape. The shark may out swim you, the cheetah out run you, the swift out fly you, the capuchin out climb you, the elephant out power you, the redwood out last you. But you have the biggest gift of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence. The gift of revulsion against its implications. The gift of foresight—something utterly foreign to the blundering, short-term ways of natural selection. And the gift of internalizing the very cosmos.

My personal favorite is the gift of foresight. Not just because it can predict outcomes like firing a gun, or driving without seat belts, or depending on Wall Street for your self-esteem, but mostly because of how it can help me find good pleasure. If I catch wind of a blues band coming to town, or Clapton coming to Sturgis, I can pretty safely predict what kind of experience I am in for. Usually my only problem is finding a way to get there (and perhaps finding my way back home).
 

If I hang around my bipedal friend Forrest Cain long enough, soon I will experience high culinary art—redneck style. Be it carp cakes over a bed of rice, white bass tacos with fresh Baja sauce, smoked pronghorn shoulder with a PBR, fried pheasant hearts under glass, smoked whitetail backstraps wrapped in bacon and stuffed with cream cheese and fresh mushrooms, or as in this picture, smoked polar pig in a concrete cave (which gets its name from this early-December smoking day with a high of just eight degrees Fahrenheit and a north wind at twenty miles-per-hour).

Here I am helping him ‘get his pig on’ the three-by-six foot cinder-block wood smoker with a customized grill comprised of welded rebar and bailing wire. Beginning at midnight with wind chills well below zero, the porker took sixteen hours of steady oak, cherry and apple smoking to complete. With apologies to Dawkins, stand tall bipedal Forrest. The pig may out pork you but, indeed, you have the gift of internalizing his very cosmos.

Razor Clams

     
(This came in the middle of ten days in January at Seaside, OR. It was the residency where Pete Fromm suffered a heart attack, Claire Davis sprained her ankle, I first met Kim Barnes and Stephen Kuusisto, and an unknown sea lion lost it's head).




“Deeper,” cries the clammer, rubber boots on fire,
raincoat saving the hunt.
“Razors at low tide were never this easy,”
as she pounds the beach for squirts.

January black bleeds into waves,
that bleed into sand and poly-jumpers,
power walkers pumping to songs of the day
from iPods soaked in rain.

It’s a bumper crop year, so we’re told,
waves writing paper-white poems,
aesthetics, synecdoches, and objective correlatives,
pounding, piercing, and pushing up…stuff.

“First do no harm,” sings the fisherman.
“Cast from the shallow, to the shore,”
while a headless sea lion washes up clean,
having lost his bout with an Orca.

One wave after another
and still the seagull sings.
“Kiss the dog” shouts the girl on the beach,
leashing the lab to her dream.

“His nose is a little wet, but kiss the dog.
Kiss the dog for free.”
By now the poet has soaked his loafers,
reeling, rhyming, screaming back to the room.

“Come,” bids the siren, “Dream and discover.”
“Dare beyond the vortex of doom.”
And me on my squeaky training wheels,
scratching the paved Promenade.

“What would Pete do?”
I ask through blind tears,
as the blind whispers in blue,
“Listen, listen, listen.”

~ J.D. Anderson