Speaking of PVC . . .

. . . I was impressed by Mountain Equipment Coop's work on alternatives to PVC-foam in flotation vests. I particularly like their willingness to share.

The first MEC-brand PFD that uses PVC-free foam took a year and a half to reach production. As the first PFD manufacturer to use cross-linked PE (polyethylene) foam, we invested considerable time and money to get it approved for use. The foam meets all UL and ULC testing standards and exceeds many of them. It's lighter, more buoyant, better aging, and, best of all, doesn't require the same problematic chemicals in manufacture, produces no dioxins if burnt, and is easier to recycle than PVC foams. We think the benefits are such a good thing that we've made it available to any other manufacturer who wants to use it.

Taking a Side on Siding

This is one of those long wandering posts where I am writing mostly for my own benefit, for the discipline of stating things clearly, which requires me to think clearly.

Did I say that clearly?

I finally woke up to the folly of slapping vinyl siding on our house. My Dad told me about a catastrophic fire in Edmonton that is believed to have spread through the vinyl exteriors of the houses. (For a discussion of this and other similar fires, see this editorial.) Around the same time I stumbled across an old discussion with CG where she called some houses "plastic monstrosities." Now you might think I am overreacting to a couple of people's comments, but what was my basis for choosing vinyl in the first place? Somebody's comments about "low maintenance," and somebody else's comment that steel siding makes a house look like a shed.

Why would steel siding make a house look like a shed? Because everybody's always done sheds that way, and houses a different way? I have to wonder. Industrial and agricultural buildings around here are overwhelmingly steel clad. In these utilitarian buildings, I would assume that they use steel because it works. So why not on a house? Don't we want houses that work?

But as I started overlaying blocks of colour on digital photos of our house, my resolve began to waver. What if I create a metal monstrosity? The colours look too strong. Is it worth the hours of fiddling to try to come up with a realistic image that includes shadows and different light levels and so on, to see what it will really look like? On the other hand, how do I know that vinyl would look any better?

The present siding on the original part of the house is concrete shingles in need of repair. Repair is a neglected "R." I came across a very interesting article discussing the environmental, economic, and aesthetic merits of repair for traditional house materials such as wood siding and slate roofs, but I don't think that would apply to these shingles. They are quite unattractive to my eyes, sort of halfway pretending to look like wood. I think they'd look better if they didn't even try to look like anything other than thin flat slabs. Complicating the issue of repair is the possibility that these may contain asbestos. They have been painted, and the paint is peeling, but I don't want to start scraping them. So instead, we are planning to entomb the concrete shingles inside a thickened wall, thus turning them into a bit of thermal mass and giving us an opportunity to add more insulation outside them before adding the new siding.

And here I am back at the question of new siding. Shall I blaze a new trail, challenging the notion that steel siding is not for houses? At this point in the writing of this post, I turned aside to browse more sites about steel siding, since I had seen one for a U.S. company making steel siding that looks like clapboard - and I found a Canadian company making similar steel siding that is PVC coated. If you're choosing steel to avoid the toxic chemicals involved in vinyl production, you might want to know about that. Now I wonder. I don't even know what type of coating is on the steel we bought for the roof. So many questions! If I made sure to ask them all, I'd never get the house finished. Heck, I'd never even have got it started.

Deep breath. Why should steel siding be made to look like clapboard. It isn't clapboard, it's steel. Why shouldn't it look like itself?

And what about clapboard? Who says maintenance is evil? As that article I mentioned above points out, a zero-maintenance product is one that cannot be maintained, but must eventually be replaced. Which work and expense do you prefer, maintenance or replacement?

And then I get thinking about local materials. There's aspen. Does anyone make siding out of it? Perhaps they should. Perhaps we should. Somebody around here must have a sawmill. But would we also need to find a kiln?

I recall that the wood panelling in the Mother Theresa Centre at Kenosee is aspen. Where did they get it?

All these questions make me tired. Maybe I'll fall back on the idea that came to me in the midst of all this: this house would look great covered in cedar shakes.

I mentioned the idea to my Dad, and we were right back to the beginning of all this: the fire hazard. But as Dad says, the house is fairly well separated from its neighbours. And then there are those concrete shingles in the wall, which would tend to keep a fire from going deeper.

Well now. Did I decide anything?

I could get all worked up about the ill-informed decisions I've been making all the way through this project, but instead I'll put it back in perspective. It seems hugely significant, and certainly there is a lot of work and expense and energy and environmental impact involved, but it doesn't happen every day. Things that do happen every day, like eating, might seem insignificant, but they're not. So if I fail to find the best information about building because I'm too busy learning to garden by gardening, well, so be it.

And I'm learning to build by building. When I finish learning this way, I'll have a finished house.

Juxtapositions

Last night, via SimplyTim, I discovered this essay which nicely sums up many of the main currents of my thinking on ecology and our part in it: How To Save Civilization.

Then this morning I was startled by a new voice taking up the thread of an old conversation from my own blog, exploring the deeper currents of tragedy and hope.

And somehow it reminded me of all those moments over the last few weeks when things connected across time and space.

Many arose in Regina as I came and went to and from the hospital. There was the moment when I walked confidently along the now-familiar way from the doors toward the elevators, but suddenly the place turned strange as I noticed a small procession dominating the corridor ahead. There came a very tall lean young man, dressed entirely in bright yellow, shuffling but stiffly erect, his eyes straight ahead as though he did not even see this tiled hallway, those glass doors, these people drawing back against the walls. Close behind and beside him paced two very different men, much heavier, dressed entirely in dark stiff uniforms, their eyes sharply focussed on the here and now, on the yellow-draped man who shuffled before them. With a start I noticed the chain clinking between his ankles.

I had slowed my pace. The procession came on, and I realized that we would be meeting just at the point where the wide new corridor was constricted by a stone archway preserved from the old hospital entrance. I stood aside, just outside the arch, and waited while they passed through. As I stood there, I remembered how the arch used to be, with a glass door in its midst and a concrete step in front where my mother slipped and fell, trying to open that door for me as I tried to quell my nausea, tried to breathe through the contractions, tried to convince her and myself that I was still okay to make my way to the labour and delivery unit under my own power. I cried out when she fell, but she bounced back up again and hurried us on . . . and that's a whole other story, a beautiful story that continues right up to this day in the person of my daughter. But the tumultuous opening chapter was all right there, for a moment, as I stood by that old stone arch and watched a prisoner shuffle by.

Then there was that moment in the car somewhere in Regina, running some errand while waiting for something to happen, finding a small pleasure in listening to a favourite radio station that I can't tune in out here, when a Rodney Atkins song brought CG's difficult journey to the centre of my heart. And I wondered if it meant anything, changed anything, to have it there, but I hoped so.

And there was some moment somewhere, I don't remember what it was now, but something brought to mind all the beautiful men I have met since that morning when we woke early to "fire the grid." I don't think that was the purpose, to start me seeing beautiful men, but they have been everywhere since then. And come to think of it, the women and children are beautiful too.

The Thought that Counts

Anthony was scornful of this article, but I found it fascinating. Of course my training in biology probably predisposes me to give credence to ideas coming out of evolutionary biology. But I find those ideas profoundly useful in noticing my own predispositions, the ones that run so deep I feel offended at having to justify them, the ones that run back through thousands and millions of years: the ones that I should be most careful to either justify or reject.

I hope you'll read the article, but the gist of it is that human males are genetically predisposed toward conspicuous consumption as a means of showing females that they are good mating prospects: they can provide the stream of material goods required to raise the offspring. Females, meanwhile, are predisposed towards volunteering as a means of showing males that they will do the self-sacrifice necessary, again, to raise the offspring.

Volunteering, huh? Can you hear my balloon deflating? Now I will have to re-examine everything.

As I was washing dishes yesterday, mulling this discussion of altruism and evolution, I remembered one of Garth's favourite sayings from the Dalai Lama: practise altruism, study wisdom. Doing altruism without wisdom is like seeking vengeance without knowing what will truly hurt your target. You might try to hurt them and find out later that your act didn't bother them at all! Likewise, if you want to help someone, first find out what will truly help.

Through my rather dismal experience of trying to help the world through environmental consulting, I can certainly see the wisdom in the Dalai Lama's words. Remember the truck song?

And so, as I continued with the unambiguously helpful task of dishwashing, I realized the deeper wisdom in the saying, "It's the thought that counts."

If you're doing a kindness to a close friend or relative, then surely (most times) the thought will be noticed and appreciated, even if the action is a little off the mark. But when you start do-gooding towards nameless, faceless members of needy groups you've identified (or had identified for you), there is more and more danger of missing the mark (and quite possibly doing more harm than good). At the same time, there is less and less chance that the thought will count for anything at all - if anything, the recipient of the do-gooding may well become bitter and cynical because of the do-gooder's obvious ignorance and indifference.

But here's the deeper wisdom. Consider a woman who is unconsciously carrying out her genetic orders, trying to appear selfless and thus attractive to prospective mates. Her genes compel her to think of others, and to be seen thinking of others. Whether there is any ultimate benefit to those others doesn't matter, as long as she is seen to be acting out of concern for them. It's the thought that counts.

And there is deeper wisdom still. A woman who becomes aware of this drive can reconsider her compulsion, and examine it from all angles, tracing out the consequences at different scales of time and place. She can think less defensively and more deeply. Hopefully, with time and patience, she can come up with a line of thought (and action) that truly counts.

Anatopism

Looks like moose country, don't you think?

Not.

But I've seen them out there - not right along this highway south of Stoughton, but not far from it, near Lampman. And I've seen them in similar country south of Willmar.

I've heard that they have been seen on that vast bald expanse in southeast Alberta. Why are they venturing afield?

Here on the edge of the Moose Mountains, I hear talk about the timber they are cutting in the Park to try to get the forest to regenerate, and speculation that wildlife is on the move because of that. But moose would appreciate the regrowth in those cutblocks.

I also hear some talk about the old days, when anything leaving the sanctuary of the Park forest would be quickly diverted to somebody's freezer.

Is this sign another side effect of the gun registry?

Sibling Friendliness: Only If You're a Plant

Experiments at McMaster University have turned up evidence that plants are more friendly toward their siblings than toward unrelated plants. Fascinating stuff, but I'm not sure I agree with the comments in the article about implications for gardening. If growing near strangers causes plants to grow more root mass, is that a bad thing? I'm thinking a little bit of competition early on (maybe eased by thinning a bit later), might make all the plants more vigorous underground, so they would be better prepared to deal with drought.

You would think, after all these weeks trying to garden in sticky mud, I would quit worrying about drought.

Nope. I'm from Saskatchewan.

ReLent: New Life Instead of Guilt

Upcoming: Ash Wednesday Worship, Feb. 21st, 7:30 p.m. at St. Andrew's United Church in Arcola.

From our church bulletin:

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. Its roots lie in the ancient Jewish festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Atonement means "at-one-ment." If we are to be at one with God, with creation, with each other, we must face honestly who we are, make our confession, and open ourselves to the supportive power of God and our faith community in the Lenten struggle for new life. So Ash Wednesday is a day of honest confession and of commitment to the Lenten journey.

In the service on Sunday, Anita reminded us of a Mission and Service fundraiser our congregation did during Lent a couple of years ago. We had a calendar of the days of Lent, and for each day, we would make a contribution as specified on the calendar. One day might specify counting the number of light bulbs in your home, and paying so many cents per light bulb. Another day might ask how many pairs of shoes in your closet, and so on.

Anita wondered if we might try that fundraiser again, or if there were other ideas.

Here's mine.

Instead of feeling guilty about our stuff and our energy use and so on, why not find out what we can do about it, and what would do the most good? We'd save money at the same time, and then we could put some of that money towards the M&S fund.

I tried the Ecological Footprint calculator, mostly so that I would know what to tell others to expect, but I myself was surprised at the results. Here in the cold, sparsely populated northern prairies, we tend to think that a large part of our footprint comes from heating and travel - things that are difficult to change much (without moving south). Surprise: according to the quiz, a large part of my footprint comes from food. This was not entirely news to me, but the magnitude was a shock. Of my total footprint of 5.3 hectares, food contributed 3.5 hectares. Shelter came out at only 0.7 hectares, and travel at 0.3. Goods and services made up the remaining 0.8 hectares of my footprint.

On with garden planning! Next year, grass-fed beef, or venison, and maybe some chickens! And for a more immediate impact, how about porridge or cold cereal made from local grains, instead of breakfast cereal shipped in from Ontario?

This year, instead of a time of guilty brooding on the darkness of this world, Lent could be about learning a better way.

Dear God, This Is Adam

© Laura Herman 2002

Dear God,
This is Adam.
Have you noticed us lately, six billion strong?
O God, hear your Adam.
We've been toiling, and toiling, and it's coming along.
You told us to fill all the earth, and subdue it.
When you gave that command, did you think we'd pursue it?
Did you ever imagine that we just might do it?
Are you proud of us now?
O God, are you proud of us now?

Dear God,
This is Adam.
Well, it's one of the voices that fill Adam's head.
O God, hear your Adam.
Can you hear this small voice, with so much being said?
We've got most of the planet pressed into service,
As donkeys with burdens of fuel for the worship
Ascend to the altar, not knowing the purpose.
Are you sure of us now?
O God, are you sure of us now?

O, Dear God,
This is Adam.
Well, a small part of Adam that keeps looking back.
O God, hear your Adam.
Are we fit for your kingdom, trailing the pack?
But God, look at your biosphere, stretched on the altar,
All the wonder of life, the hope of the future,
Lying quiet like Isaac, bound by his father.
Are you watching us now?
O, Dear God, are you watching us now?

Where is the ram?
Our knife is falling!
Surely, God, surely
there is a ram?

Inspiration

Something sparked, and a little circuit of memory flashed, and I went looking for a comment from Wayne that I had never followed up. My first hunch was right - it was attached to my introductory post for an ambitious series: "Chained to a Tree: the Powerless Environmentalist." I have yet to deliver a single installment. I have bundles of ideas, a few notes, and a draft of the first post, but I think the scale of the thing has overwhelmed my ambition.

That's okay. Perhaps someday it will come to flower. In the meantime, there's Wayne's link to a post by Phila at Bouphonia: "That Which Surrounds Us." I'm glad I remembered to look for it.

Should I Go?

Homes on the Range: Conservation in Working Prairie Landscapes
is the theme of the 8th Prairie Conservation and Endangered Species Conference and Workshop. This event is held only every third year, and the location roams around the prairies, so this is the first time since 1989 that it has been held in Regina. The theme sounds great - I've been suggesting something along those lines for our Native Plant Society of Saskatchewan workshop for years - and it's only two hours' drive away, but hang it all, now that it's here, I just don't want to go. I get sort of drawn in looking at the program, but at the same time part of me starts gagging on all the big stuffy words. Oh, I understand them all right, but I can feel that stale conference air already, and smell the exhaust in the parking lot, and I just can't shake the feeling that I've got enough in my head already, and better things to do.

Or not do.

Counter-Intuitive Bad News

Here's a new finding that goes the exact opposite direction from what the climate optimists have been saying. You've probably heard the argument that CO2 is plant food, so rising CO2 means more plant growth, which means more food for humans and everything else, and at the same time, controls the rise in CO2 levels. You probably already know some problems with that argument: plant growth is obviously not controlling CO2 levels, and CO2-fertilized crops may actually be less nutritious.

But here's the new problem. Satellite studies indicate that microscopic plants in the ocean grow slower when the ocean gets warmer.

That startled me. From my biology background, I know that most biological processes speed up with temperature. Heck, just from living through a cycle of the seasons here, I know that plants grow faster when it's warmer. So why do these tiny plants in the ocean grow slower? From the news release at Oregon State University:

When the ocean surface warms, it essentially becomes “lighter” than the cold, dense water below, which is loaded with nutrients. This process effectively separates phytoplankton in the surface layer - which need light for photosynthesis - from the nutrients below them, which they also need for growth.

Well, so what? Aren't trees more important than these phytoplankton that we can't even see with the naked eye? Back to the news release:

Despite their microscopic size, ocean phytoplankton are responsible for about half of the photosynthesis on Earth, a process that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converts it into organic carbon to fuel nearly every ocean ecosystem.

Ouch.

Bad news, yes. Or is it? I'd say it's better than no news. If phytoplankton dies in the ocean, and nobody hears about it, it still dies. How about using this news as fuel to fire up your determination to walk instead of driving. Try a toboggan for the groceries, with a picnic cooler on it to keep the bananas and lettuce from freezing on the way home. Or grow some sprouts instead of buying lettuce, and check out those new garden catalogs for some fruit trees and berry bushes to plant next season. Insignificant? Consider this: a lot of people say our food in Canada travels an average of 2500 km to get to a dinner plate, and I've heard some estimates as high as double that.

And pass the word along to a climate optimist. Gently. They don't like to hear this stuff - and can you blame them?

Change

"How are the hazelnuts?" I asked.

"Terrible," was the reply. Mom and Dad figured that, with so little berry and seed production generally this year, anything that did grow had been snapped up.

We were chatting over lunch. I had spent the morning helping Mom in her seed gardens, in exchange for her listening ear, while James helped Dad lay some laminate flooring, in exchange for some spending money. Through the early afternoon, I played Dad's guitar with half my attention, and chewed over my favourite dilemmas some more with Mom. When the temperature outside was peaking, I decided I really needed to spend some time just walking the land. In hindsight, I think Mom probably needed some time to shake herself free of my burdensome talk.

As I climbed the trail behind the house, I thought of the camera I didn't bring. Just as well, I told myself. This time is for me, not for the blog.

I went first to the summit of Anemometer Hill, perhaps the highest point of our little highland, which is itself the highest land within the surrounding several miles of hills. I stood a few minutes just soaking up the vista to the west. And I heard myself discussing that view with blog readers, debating the definition of a hill.

The landscape is very striking these days, with the grass on the ridges dry and bleached pale, while the aspen and shrub areas are still a rich dark green. There was no water visible in all those miles of view, but I knew where I would find it.

I moved on, away from the usual routes along mowed trails, and into the bush. The cattle-and-deer trails have shifted a little since the days when I did a lot of roaming, and I spent some time weaving from one hint of a trail to another before I found the main thread of the path I remembered, and emerged onto the tiny grass area that faces northwest just off the crest of the same height of land.

I was surprised to see a large patch of blue on the neighbour's pasture to the north. That slough must be holding up well in spite of the recent drought. Maybe the rain on Tuesday brought the level up some.

Down the north slope I went, watching my footing and still slipping a little, pausing to gaze up and around at the birches and the forest canopy stretching away, and to wonder if I could capture the sense of this place in a picture. Ah, the blog had followed me here, too.

There were hazelnuts. Some were ripe already - I've never seen them that early. Twila and I used to pick them around the first weekend in September. As I moved down the slope, my path unravelled into fading threads in the hazelnut understory. A bit of colour off to the right caught my eye - high-bush cranberries! Turning red, here in the second week of August.

I cast about for the best offer of a trail, and then, noticing a brightness that might be an opening, I went sideways. What I found was more than an opening; it was the mowed trail along the toe of the north slope, and I'd have been on it in only a few feet more, if I had just pushed straight ahead.

I let it lead me west. At the edge of the hay field I paused to enjoy the return of the breeze and the last of the shade. Not a spectacular view at that spot. Dad had said something about the view I could get from the house site I'd mentioned to him - the latest dream site in a long series. I asked myself: do I need a good view? That's what walks are for. Too good a view, and I might just sit at home.

I took a few swallows from my too-small water bottle, and set out across the sun-burnt hayfield, moving gently in the heat. When the truck trail turned south, I continued west on a cattle trail toward the dam.

The ravine here used to be densely forested, like most ravines in these hills, but now there is not a large tree anywhere near the dam. It was the death of the trees, that dam, because it brought the beaver.

I remember how I used to analyze the landcover as I roamed, noting all the ways that previous tenants of this land had changed things. Now when I wander, I notice new changes, wrought by my own family, and sometimes even by me.

I wonder if Mom and Dad would have put that dam in, had they realized what the beaver would do. The first few years of impact were the most obvious, as that swath of forest fell. I might have thought that it would end there, after the beaver ran out of trees within a reasonable radius of the water. Yet now - how many years later? ten? fifteen? - the beaver's work goes on, mostly out of sight, unless you take the time and effort to walk the ravine downstream.

I crossed the dam, pausing to admire butterflies puddling on the damp mud, duckweed stippling the water surface, and a robust sedge that's new since my last visit, growing on the seepage areas of the downstream side. At the dry spillway I hesitated. I wanted to walk the bottom of the ravine, but I knew the beaver had wreaked havoc with the cattle trail down there, drowning it under a series of small pools created when they built one little dam after another below our big dam. From what I could see from my high vantage point, the problem hadn't resolved itself yet.

A new option beckoned, though: beyond the spillway, the cattle trail continued up and across the north bank of the ravine. I followed.

It was a good trail, much better than I remembered from the last time I wandered here, and taking an unusual course across the midslope. Cattle tend to drift to the bottom of slopes like this. Midslope trails do exist, winding (like this one) along where the bush ends and the grass of the upper slope begins, but on a steep sidehill, they are rarely so well travelled. I suspected that this was an effect of the beaver's work below.

Finally the trail plunged down into the thick forest, down, down, driving my toes painfully into the fronts of my boots. When the ground flattened out, the understory opened suddenly into a magical grassy place overarched with great old trees. The confluence, I realized - the place where the dammed ravine joins the Deep Ravine. This deep ravine was a dark, mysterious barrier to much of my childhood wanderings, and it poses such a restriction to westward movement that it forms a sort of boundary of our farm, though the cattle do use the thin wedge of upland pasture that lies beyond. For some years there was no fence on the west, and the Deep Ravine functioned as a real boundary, as our cattle kept mostly to the east of it, and the neighbours' stayed mostly west. (By the way, I'm calling it "our farm" for convenience - our farm, our dam, our cattle - but it's really my parents' farm. I just use it freely.)

Now I took a cattle trail south along the bottom. I had gone only a few steps though, when the scene changed dramatically. Great trunks of felled trees lay at angles across a bare mud hollow, bright with sunlight falling through the broken canopy. It was a beaver pond, now dry. I crossed its margin easily enough, but southward beyond its low dam I found a confusing jumble of very uneven ground, branches and logs, tangled vegetation, and haphazard trampling that never resolved itself into a reliable trail. The banks of the old winding streambed were carved up by frequent beaver "runs" (narrow deep ditches) and tunnels which had collapsed in places. As I ducked under a felled tree that hadn't fallen all the way, I realized with a shock that this was no longer a place where you would want to ride a horse. Was my memory reliable - did we ride here sometimes? I felt a guilty twinge at the thought that others may have ridden here sometimes, unconcerned about property lines, comfortable in traditions of use much older than my family's ownership of this place. If they did - and they certainly could have come here often without our notice - what did they think of the beaver works that we brought with our dam?

As I struggled on, past more dry beaver ponds and over more low dams, I noticed hoofprints in the mud and trampling in the grass, and still no trail. Suddenly I understood its demise. The problem was the pace of change. Trails shift, always, as trees fall, as soil slips, as shrubs grow up; when a new obstacle arises, the cattle and deer just push around it, and one animal follows another until a new path is formed. But here, the new obstacles were thrown up thick and fast, faster than the trail could weave itself around them.

Ah, I thought: the pace of change. This beaver problem was, at its root, no different than many, if not most, environmental problems. Nature responds to change; life goes on, and springs up new and different and wonderful all the same; but when the change is rapid, the response from nature can seem chaotic, inhospitable, or even violent.

Humans are certainly not the only living creatures that create rapid changes in their own environments. Obviously, beavers do. I found myself thinking about disease organisms, too, and how some of them bring about their own swift demise by killing their hosts. There is no need - and probably no advantage - to think of humans as uniquely self-destructive. Quite the opposite, I mused: it might be worth noticing how the consequences fall on any living thing that tips the gentle flow of its surroundings into a freefall. Being a part of the web of life is no guarantee of a safety net.

All the same, as I slowly picked my way southward, I marvelled unhappily at the long reach of the effects of that dam. Who would have guessed it? I might have imagined subtle changes in the moisture regime, and maybe some differences in the way tree seedlings got established, very slowly changing the downstream forest. But I never dreamed of changes so swift, so large, and so far.

I tired of my sad journey. I wanted to find the place where high-bush cranberries grew, to see if they were as abundant and advanced here as where I'd seen them earlier. But even that desire wasn't enough to keep me pushing south; not when I noticed a trail leading up the east bank. I gazed up it, trying to decide if it was trustworthy. Could it be just a beaver trail? Inviting, those trails, but fickle, petering out at the limit of the beavers' logging operations, with half the slope still to be climbed and nothing but dense hazelnut on every side.

I risked it. Soon I was standing, panting, heart pounding, leaned against a smallish black poplar, looking at the expanse of hazelnut understory above. No more trail.

Last time I made this mistake, I had a group of Mom's relatives with me, and we pressed on, crashing through that understory. It might have been the same beaver trail. It wasn't fun, at least not for me. I think some of the folks I was guiding astray actually enjoyed it, being so thoroughly out in the bush, and showing each other how rugged they were.

This time I turned back down. Partway, I was drawn to a great old tree. I leaned against it, and suddenly, awareness of its history washed over me. Here it had stood, through storms and snows, through the stillness of frozen winters and the pulsing riots of - how many springs? I moved in close against it, grateful for its strength. For a moment I could relax from my struggle with gravity on that steep slope. I wondered what it meant to the tree, if anything, to feel my weight against its trunk. I wrapped my arms around it, my fingers finding fitting places in the deep grooves of its rough bark. Never had I felt like this - well, never towards a tree! I laid my cheek against it, and stretched my neck to feel more of that bark touching my skin.

After a while I shifted my weight back onto my own feet, and looked up the trunk, trying to decide which kind of poplar it was. There were lichens at eye level, and just above I noticed the tiny delicate spore capsules of a moss. How very tiny they looked, against the bark of that great tree!

At last I moved on down the beaver trail, back to the bottom, back to the jumble of logs and branches, bush and rank grass, beaver runs and bits of old trail. I rationed my water and let my mind wander over a life that seems, these days, just as jumbled and tangled as that ravine bottom.

Suddenly one of those bits of old trail seemed to grow firm and smooth and familiar beneath my feet. That is what I noticed first: the smoothing of my footing. So striking was the change, that I dropped whatever thought I had been busy with, and looked around for the reason. I saw it at once: I was south of the beavers' work.

A few steps further, and a hawk streaked by above, moving with easy skill among the closely-spaced trunks of the poplars. A Cooper's hawk, perhaps. And only a moment later, a flurry of motion and sound on the path ahead resolved itself into the oddish outline of a ruffed grouse living up to its name. It occurred to me that this sudden abundance of birds was no accident. I could feel the difference in the forest here; the canopy was closed above, and the understory around me was slightly more open and variable. It was a friendly place.

A good path up out of the ravine soon presented itself, but I passed it by. The walk along the bottom was a joy again, a joy that reached all the way back to my teenage ramblings, untouched by disappointment.

I found the high-bush cranberries, laden with berries still mostly white. I came to a richly grassy place, and just below it, water trickled out of the gravel and flowed a little way along the streambed before sinking out of sight again.

Now I was ready. A little below the spring, a very good path led up the east bank, and I climbed, satisfied. My gaze lifted to the ridge high above, and I realized that this was Mom's ridge, the place where she says she'd like her ashes scattered.

I pictured that final moment of goodbye, and saw with wonder how happy and peaceful it could be. Mom's ashes would come home to a place that she loved without demanding anything of it, without aspiring that it become anything other than just what it was. There would be no distracting symbols of things that she accomplished, no sad unspoken thoughts of things she could not finish. Just her love, her freedom, and the beauty of this place.

I wondered if God approved of these thoughts. Before I even framed that question in my mind, I felt a rush of loving presence, seeming to say that approval really didn't enter into the matter. God was there embracing me - no, not even that far away. Looking out through my eyes and taking in my view with wondering love.

Yet close behind that feeling was a thought of suffering women, unspeakably suffering, trapped in a world of war and violence, of torture and rape and hunger and fear. I hardly noticed the rest of the climb. At the ridge-top, in the delicious breeze, I turned back to marvel at the great green trough of forest canopy below, but soon I turned away down a gentle grassy slope to the east, my mind full of the vague and awful plight of nameless women. I stopped and prayed for someone, that the living spirit might strengthen her to lift her broken body from its torment - to lift it, or to let it go, or to let it be. The prayer felt right and powerful at that moment, and yet now I cannot seem to put even the gist of it into words, and even the idea of it feels somehow false and contrived.

But after that point, my gaze and my thoughts were free again, and I enjoyed the simple satisfaction of reading the landscape in a not-so-familiar corner of the pasture and knowing just where to look for a trail through an aspen bluff. I crossed an area of tame hay, moving back towards the highland of our home quarter. Something on the steep slope above the hayfield caught my eye: a doe, moving swiftly downhill, but not in flight. The wind was towards her, and it amazed me that she came on down the slope, apparently unaware of my presence. She was moving almost directly towards me, but slightly to my left, and as she reached the lower ground, a low knoll hid her from my view. I resumed my walk, and when I came past the knoll, she was nowhere to be seen.

I climbed the ridge she had descended, but slowly, pausing often, drinking up the last of my water a few swallows at a time. It occurred to me that this was the ridge where Garth and I had sat, some years ago, at one of those times when things were particularly rough between us. Did we decide anything? The memory didn't offer any answer to that; just a vision of Garth's sadly earnest, hopeful face.

The saddle behind the crest of the ridge had nearly closed in with trees since then. I was moving faster, more purposefully, aware of the approaching supper hour. My thoughts became more purposeful, too, and I asked myself what I need.

My answer: I need a clear and simple path. No, I thought, not clear and simple.

Strait.

Notice the spelling: no "gh." Strait is a different word, and it has nothing to do with the shortest distance between two points.

It means "narrow."

As I imagined blogging about "strait" versus "straight," I found myself grinding my teeth. I couldn't be sure, but I suspected I'd been free of that tense habit for most of my walk.

I thought about one of my recent sermons, in which I explained my discovery that the "straight and narrow way" is not biblical. The way that Jesus spoke about was narrow, yes, but he never said it would or should be straight.

I need a narrow path, a deer-and-cattle path, just wide enough for my feet as I pass along my way. Anything more is a distraction, extra maintenance, a temptation to go sideways.

Now all I need to do is find that path.

Hills

Some hills tend to cradle you.

These hills lift me to the sky.

I took this view for granted.

All those years growing up on my parents' farm, I could walk out to this hill just across from the house, just about any time I wanted. Almost looks like an aerial photo, doesn't it? But when I took this picture the other day, I was sitting on a rock. A small one. With my feet on the ground.

We kids used to go out to "the South Slopes," as we called this spot, in late winter when the sun was getting stronger and starting to melt the snow off a few small patches near the peaks of the biggest hills. I still remember the thrill of standing on that bare brown grass and earth, reconnecting with the ground for the first time in months.

We'd come out here to look for the first crocus buds, too.

When I walked out onto this hilltop a few years ago, when we had just moved back to the farm after fifteen years in the city, I was struck with a sudden realization. This view shaped the person that I am.

The other day, with my camera, I tried to capture a sense of the place, but it was quite beyond me. Perhaps if I'd had enough digital memory left for a video, I could have given you a glimmer of it. As it was, I got stingy with the pictures and didn't even zoom in on Arcola, so all you get is a blow-up of part of the scene above. This is my childhood view of the town where I now live.

It's just that band of dark green with some buildings showing in it, stretching across most of the width of this view of the distant "flats." I sometimes worry if I'll offend someone by saying "the flats," but our Arcola-Kisbey history book is subtitled "Mountain Hills to Prairie Flats," so I guess it's okay.

Arcola is about half a mile wide, I'd say. The road you can see in the middle distance is running from north to south away from the hills, and the next north-south road, one mile east of it, runs past the left end of the dark green area.

To give you a sense of how steep this hill is, here is another picture looking across its slope from a bit further east. You can tell by the horizon line on the flats - I didn't tilt the camera. (Okay, maybe a teeny bit. It's hard to stand up straight on that slope.)

And if you're thinking that's not steep, try climbing it. Or try browsing through some pictures of foothills. Most of the steeper slopes that you see are supported by rock formations. This is just glacial till. Here is a view of the "South Slopes" from the meadow below, looking west across their face.

If geology and ecology and botany bore you, skip along to some more pictures below.

I've been told that the Moose Mountains are a dead-ice moraine. When the last continental ice sheet was retreating, a chunk of the ice sat here and melted, dropping all the clay, sand, gravel, and boulders it contained in a great hummocky heap. If I recall correctly, the hollows are places where pieces of ice remained longer, so the earth materials settled around the edges of these lingering ice blocks, forming hills, and when the ice blocks finally melted out, they left holes that softened into hollows. All along the foot of the hills there are sand and gravel deposits, where streams running out of the melting ice slowed down as they entered the glacial lake to the south. The sand settled out of the water as it slowed. The silts and clays took much longer to settle out, so they were more-or-less evenly distributed across the lake bed, forming the flats.

But we're still up in the hills, cradled in a meadow. I'll tell you a little bit about it. The crop in the foreground above is blue grama grass, a native species of short- and mixed-grass prairie, found most abundantly in dry upland areas. (Mom and Dad grow it for seed, for prairie reclamation projects.) This meadow was once a tame hayfield of yellow sweet-clover and smooth brome grass. Smooth brome was widely seeded as a hay crop and as a stabilizer for road ditches, and has taken over most of the "edge" area between grassland and wooded areas in our parklands. Any natural "edge" area - or "ecotone" as the biologists call it - is very important habitat to many wildlife species. My dad remarked that we probably don't know what "edge" used to be like here; brome grass has changed it, everywhere. In the photo above, you can see the extent of the brome grass, as the bright green area beyond the blue grama field, reaching to the edges of the trees and well up the slope of the hill.

Ah, but it's a part of who we are. I have a song about that, called "The Whispers in the Brome." Maybe some other day. I still have lots more pictures. Here's another view in the meadow.

And on the other side of the meadow, south of those "South Slopes," we have "The Big Woods."

It's not the deepest, darkest view I could get, that's for sure. I love to thread my way through the bush and peer through beneath the understory for tiny flowers and mushrooms and such, but when it comes to taking pictures, I'm always drawn to the light. Besides, I was in the perpetual hurry that seems to haunt me these days, so I mostly kept to the not-so-natural trails.

The cattle had just been put into this pasture the day I rambled through it, so they hadn't grazed and trampled out the trails yet. Give them a few days. Then you can breeze through without having to dodge the stinging nettles, and maybe come away with only a couple of woodticks.

The "Big Woods" are a bit unusual in this landscape. They cover a broad low area that probably has water table fairly close to the surface, supporting black poplar (or balsam poplar, Populus balsamifera) and willows. Usually these species are found in smaller areas along the margins of sloughs and the bottoms of ravines.

This is a view from the upper slope of a ravine at the west end of the "South Slopes." I didn't go down to the bottom. You can see a little bit into the shadows, but we're looking mostly at the crowns of the trees. The ravines are a different world. If it's hard work climbing the South Slopes, it's an ordeal climbing straight up through the tangle of thick underbrush on the side of one of these ravines. I've only done it a few times. Usually I seek out a good path before I start up. There is always a path along the bottom, where the cattle and deer and elk and moose follow the way of least resistance. There is good grazing and browsing there, too, even when the hills are dry, and in some of the deeper places there are springs.

Back up at the top of that slope, looking southwest, you can see the ravine running away through the center of the photo towards the flats. In the middle distance at the right side of the photo, you can see an area of more uniform grass cover. Again, it's an old field, now in tame pasture. Notice the contrast with the more diverse vegetation east of the ravine.

Time to turn for home. I did use a deceptive camera angle for this shot, getting down on elbows and knees to look through the needle-and-thread grass (Stipa comata) among the harebells (Campanula rotundifolia).

Oh, I still have more pictures, but it's time to go.

Advent Thursday #1

Waiting.

The hunters seem to be waiting, waiting for tracking snow. Brian says the only orange hats he has seen are on fellow oilfield workers that don't want to get shot. The flurries we have had over the last few days have finally started to whiten the ground, but I don't know how much is needed for good tracking. When I hunted deer with my sister, we didn't do any tracking; we just walked through the hills until we saw one.

When I pulled into the farmyard yesterday, the ground was crisscrossed with rabbit tracks. They're snowshoe hare, actually, the "bush rabbits" that we see; I believe there may be some cottontails around but they're not common here. The hares have been waiting for snow. A couple of weeks ago, when we first had white everywhere, I noticed one calmly crossing under the six-foot-high catwalk where I was noisily tramping along. He(?) was hardly visible except for the gray rims and black tips on his ears. A few days later, that white fur was shouting for attention, against the brown and grey of the bush and fallen leaves.

In the open country there are jack rabbits (also a type of hare, rather than a true rabbit). I am wondering if the hares around town are jack rabbits, or snowshoe hares. I found the little field guide, "Animal Tracks of Western Canada" by Joanne E. Barwise, that we gave to Ruth about six years ago, and it looks like I should be able to tell by the width of the hind footprints. The dog and I spotted one in Brian's hedge the other day, or actually, hopping out of his hedge when we passed within a few feet of it. Otherwise I don't know if even the dog would have noticed it was there.

This morning as we walked on the trail between the brick ponds and the old railway grade, the dog and I spotted a vole skimming across the trail ahead of us. If it hadn't been for the leash, I think she might have caught it. This is a tough time for the wildlife, not only for the small things that need deeper snow for cover, but also larger animals, since the sloughs and dugouts have frozen over and there isn't yet much snow to eat for water. Plants are getting past the toughest time now, since it is staying cold and not stressing them with freeze-thaw cycles, but a blanket of insulating snow would be welcome for many. All things are waiting.

Back at the farm yesterday, among all the snowshoe hare tracks, there were squirrel tracks too, and a tiny paired row of tracks that probably indicated a shrew. In a remnant of an older drift of snow behind the seed plant, I noticed just a few pairs of weasel prints dimmed by the newer snow, but they are unmistakeable once you know them. On the lane past the barn, right up the middle, was the neat row of cross-shaped prints that testifies to the regal strut of a ruffed grouse.

I saw no deer tracks. In the earlier snowfall, I noticed plenty of deer tracks, and I don't recall that there was much else.

Of sowthistle and saltgrass

I've started to notice patterns in the vegetation of our yard. If you don't know the Arcola area, you might want to know some background. The area in general is a glacial lake bed, with mostly clay soil as I recall, and high salinity in the lowest areas. Our yard (pictures here and here) is right on the margin of the old "brick ponds," where there used to be a brick factory about a century ago. I don't know what the areal extent of that operation was, so who knows - maybe the soil in our yard was disturbed back then. Presently it's mostly lawn with some unimaginative hedges and tree rows along the edges. Last year I didn't do much to it besides planting some veggies in the square of bare (well, weedy) soil and mowing the rest. This year I've noticed three main types of growth in the lawn: the thin scraggly stuff in the shade north of the house and under the tree rows; a fairly healthy patch on sunny level ground just south of the house; and a weedy area on the very sunny slope south toward the brick ponds. The scraggly stuff doesn't cut neatly with my push-powered reel-type lawn mower, but as noted in my previous post, I've come up with a plan to greatly reduce the area of such grass. Now it's just the weedy area on the sunny slope that's bothering me. Why is it so thick with sowthistle? I asked our neighbour, and she said it's because of all the sowthistles blooming in the long grass around the brick ponds and spreading seed. Maybe partly, but there's a definite area where they are almost choking out the lawn, and in other areas I don't notice sowthistles at all. I got thinking it must be something in the soil. I guessed salinity might be an issue, and the vegetation seems to confirm that: I found desert saltgrass (Distichlis stricta) growing through the same area as the sowthistle, as well as some kochia patches nearby. It would make sense that there could be some salinity on this slope above the brick ponds, due to evaporation and capillary action drawing water up from the ponds through the soil and leaving its salts at the surface.

Now what? I suppose the most common approach would be to try to kill the sowthistle with a herbicide, but that won't fix the salinity. Irrigation might, but if I'm going to water my landscape, I'll water the garden part. No, I'll have to look for something more subtle. I am thinking maybe if I overseed some other salt-tolerant plants, like Nuttall's salt-meadow grass (Puccinellia nuttalliana), I can give the sowthistle some stiffer competition. I'm also wondering if I should look at some alternative to lawn there, like some low shrubs to shade the soil more to reduce the evaporation. However, that's one area where I do like to have a mown lawn, just as a deterrent to any wandering creatures that might come in from the "wilds" of the brick ponds. I'm still pondering.

Thanks to Wayne for a post that prodded me to write about all this.