Accidental Quilter

The Accidental Naturalist has taken a short break from the Great Outs of Door and writing to work on creating a quilt for my college-bound son. I am not handy in the homecrafts, though I can turn out an indestructable potholder (yes, the loopy things on the metal loom) in 15 minutes. The quilt I decided to undertake began as an idea 18 years ago when my son was 5 months old. A neighbor had created a cottage industry out of turning cotton T-shirts into commemorative quilts. She had made dozens of quilts for amateur and professional athletes from their drawers full of T-shirts (triathlon, marathon, fundraiser runs, football jerseys, etc) as well as quilts for her kids from their favorite childhood T-shirts. These quilts were her gift to her kids when they went off to college.

My son was in a Onesie at the time, but I felt relieved that I had already decided what to give him for his highschool graduation present. I started collecting T-shirts in a drawer, then a suitcase, then a footlocker. Eighteen years later, my son finished highschool and it "suddenly" dawned on me that I had not started his quilt. I had planned to send all the T-shirts back to my neighbor to make the quilt, but found enough local quilters, Internet resources, and friends who offered advice and loaned me their sewing machines and equipment to tackle the project myself. A quilt is light-years beyond a potholder, but I was ready for a challenge, though I knew there was a very real possibility of the whole thing looking like a raggedy dog blanket when I had finished. 

Sorting through the T-shirts was fun, cutting out the design was not. First, it was tricky getting precise measurements to turn the stretchy T-shirt fabric into nice flat squares. The pieces needed to be squares, not parallelograms or rhomboids. Second, I found myself reluctant to cut the T-shirt. I had some 70 T-shirts laid out in front of me--from tiny, infant-sized ones to Mens Large. I still had strong memories of my son in those T-shirts--of his body in them--the chubby newborn, the toddler, the frog-collecting kid, the elementary school kid, the soccer player, the growing adolescent, the rock guitar player, the muscle-amassing high-school wrestler and rower. Cutting them up produced a nice square for the quilt, but meant I lost the physical reminder of my son's body in the T-shirts. But I had to cut. And, yes, I had to use the leftover T-shirts as handkerchiefs on more than one occasion.

Because this was a more emotional experience than making a potholder, I worked on the quilt when my son wasn't at home so that my son did not see this as the gift that reduced his mother to a weepy mess. Imagine, every time he got into bed at night he was accompanied by images of me sobbing over a pile of his T-shirts! The quilt would end up in the back of his closet for sure. This was not going to happen. Luckily, once I had finished cutting and starting piecing together the squares, the joy of creating something replaced the sadness of losing something and saying goodbye to my son's childhood as he gets ready for college.

I worked at the kitchen table, pinning and sewing and pinning and sewing. I could actually feel the adrenaline kick in as I watched the quilt grow from a few 8" x 8" squares into a queen-sized extravaganza. It didn't look like a dog blanket at all. Now, it is in the hands of a professional. I know my limits. Assembling the top, batting, border, and backing into an actual quilt was well beyond them. Soon, I will soon be stitching the binding--by hand I am told. I imagine myself sitting in our rocking chair in our kitchen, sewing in bad light in a hideous pair of green reading glasses. I will hand the needle to my son to thread, the way he remembers his great grandmother doing years ago. I will sew my way around the edges of the T-shirt, holding a different part of the quilt in my lap as I go. I hope to cherish each tiny stitch. I hope the quilt is not soggy with tears when I finish.

My younger son has watched the progress of the quilt and my slightly manic work habits (talking to myself, running from room to room for scissors or pins, putting on reading glasses for the first time to thread the needle, hiding the quilt from his brother) and is probably hoping for a car for his highschool graduation present. Or a gift card. Not a chance. I'm going for King Size.

Murrelets in the Mountains

It’s about sixty miles from my home in Olympia to the town of Ashford, in the foothills of Mt. Rainier. It’s an easy trip for motorists, a challenge for cyclists, and unthinkable journey for a chubby little seabird flying non-stop from Puget Sound or the Pacific Coast. But the marbled murrelet makes this long journey from salt water to the forest to its unlikely nesting site—a wide branch high in an old-growth tree. Though most of Washington’s population of murrelets nests closer to the coast, biologists have detected murrelets in an 80-acre patch of old-growth forest, known as the “Ashford 80.”

These eighty acres are part of the Nisqually Land Trust’s recent acquisition of 600 acres between Gifford Pinchot National Forest and Elbe Hills State Forest. This purchase, from Hancock Forest Management, brings a total of 1940 acres of timberland into protection for the federally threatened marbled murrelet and northern spotted owl as well as nine other species of concern. The Mt. Rainier Gateway Reserve, as the property is officially called, was purchased by the Land Trust through a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a donation from the Nisqually Indian Tribe; the Washington Department of Natural Resources will hold a conservation easement on the property.

On a recent foggy July morning, I was part of an expedition to celebrate the Reserve and the marbled murrelet at the Copper Creek Hut, a cozy gathering place that is part of the Mount Tahoma Trail Association’s hut-to-hut ski-trail system. An extensive stretch of the trail system is now part of the Reserve property. The low, grey clouds accompanied us through Yelm, along the Nisqually River, and past Lake Alder, but as we began the climb up toward Ashford, blue skies greeted us as did the promise of a view of the mountain. From Ashford, we bumped along a rugged road in a four-wheel drive for a good 20 minutes, imagining how very different this would be on cross-country skis or snowshoes—and on top of ten feet of snow.

The sun-drenched hut was a welcoming sight as was the new Mount Rainer Gateway Reserve sign and the view of Mt. Rainier. This close-up view of the mountain’s west side was capital-S Scenery. It was so breathtaking that I couldn’t take in with my eyes alone so I found myself taking deeper and deeper breaths to better and more fully absorb its magnificence and beauty. I had never really thought about it before, but breathing really deeply must be a physical response to breathtaking sights.

The view of the “Ashford 80” kept my breathing deep, almost to the point of hyperventilating. There, maybe a quarter mile below the ridge where I was standing, was a dark, green and angular patch of trees rising above the recently logged hillside. This was murrelet nesting habitat—eighty acres, sixty miles from the water. It was mind boggling. There, somewhere in that dense wood, were wide, moss-covered branches where a pair of murrelets could lay a single egg and raise a chick. There, in the shade of the towering evergreens, was the summer home of a seabird with a hellish daily commute to saltwater. There, each morning around sunrise, an adult murrelet would land with a whole, small fish for its chick. There, for a month, a murrelet chick would sit, still and silent, waiting for the moment when it’s flight feathers would carry it to the sea. There, in that piece of forest, was a future for the murrelet.

I have lived within sight of Mt. Rainier for just over three years now. I look for it when I am out driving or biking. Even a brief glimpse of it, peeking briefly out of the clouds, will make my day. As will a walk around the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge, or a crossing of a Nisqually River bridge, knowing that the murrelets may follow this river to the mountain. And now, with a view of the Ashford 80 emblazoned in my mind, I see the mountain not as a destination for hikers, day-trippers, skiers, or snow-shoers, but as a home for the murrelet, a gateway for hope.

NOTE: Access to Copper Creek Hut is winter-only and restricted to members of the Mount Tahoma Trail Association. For information on joining, go to http://www.skimtta.com/. For information on the Nisqually Land Trust properties, projects, and upcoming events, go to http://www.nisquallylandtrust.org/

Too Good To Be True

I swim in lake with an osprey.

The lake I swim is where an osprey fishes.

An osprey hunts in the lake where I swim.

The lake I swim in was carved by a glacier.

A long time ago there was just thick ice.

Now there are bass, an osprey, and me.

We are all in the water together this summer.

Once the sparkling water of the spring-fed lake was solid ice.

Now an osprey soars above the water looking for fish.

Now I am in the water swimming and floating and watching the osprey.

I have watched it hunt.

I have seen it perched in a fir on the shore and swum towards it.

I have heard it calling.

To amuse my teenage son who is beside me on a tire inner-tube and who is also watching the osprey, I flip onto my back, tuck my arms in close to my side, flap my hands on the water's surface like fins, suck in my cheeks, and make fish lips. Look, I say, bait.

He laughs.

The osprey leaves its perch and swoops toward me.

I quickly flip over and resume my breast stroke, hoping my dead salmon act does not end in a pair of talons in my scalp.

The osprey is no fool. He veers off toward the far end of the lake.

The osprey hunts on the East side of the lake near a tall line of Douglas-firs.

The osprey flies over us and we can see its head turning to look.

I swim in a glacier-carved lake with an osprey that notices me.

I swim in a deep dark lake with fish glinting and jumping.

I swim in a lake with a bird pushed to the brink of extinction by eating the fish from waters poisoned by DDT.

I swim in a clean lake stocked with bass and graced by a beautiful brown-and-white osprey that hatched from a thick-shelled egg. Whose parents hatched from a thick-shelled egg. How many generations of osprey nests failed before the egg could again withstand the once-crushing weight of a parent?

I swim in a lake of recovery.

I share a lake with an osprey.

As many times as I say this—to myself and to my friends and family—I am not convinced.

But it is true.

I just can’t believe the osprey and I are this lucky.

In between bouts of reading non-fiction and fiction, I enjoy books by writers on writing. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, and Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer are three of my standard favorites. Ron Carlson's little book of writing advice now joins them on my book shelf. This work of non-fiction reads like fiction because Carlson has written the story of a story. The story is "The Governor's Ball" and Carlson unpacks this story--one sentence, one paragraph, or one conversation at a time--letting  us know exactly how each part came into being. It is a fascinating short story and a fascinating story of the creative mind in action. Here are a few of my favorite parts from Ron Carlson Writes a Story (Graywolf Press, 2007) with some comments from me along the way.

“The most important thing a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen."

GUILTY! I left my desk to make a rhubarb strawberry cobbler from scratch the moment the idea for my book on clouds landed in my lap.

"But. It’s this simple," Carlson continues. "The writer is the person who stays in the room. The writer wants to read what she is in the process of creating with such passion and devotion that she will not leave the room. The writer understands that to stand up from the desk is to fail, and to leave the room is so radical and thorough a failure as to not be reversible. Who is not in the room writing? Everybody. Is it difficult to stay in the room, especially when you are not sure of what you are doing, where you’re going? Yes. It’s impossible. Who can do it? The writer.”

“…I will just say that the Internet is the enemy of the writer’s day. The Internet is a heaping helping of what everyone else is thinking—and right this minute. If you open your e-mail, you are asking to let go of the day. I don’t want to belabor this obvious point, but we have welcomed this convenience right onto the very screens where we are writing stories, and e-mail is not a friend to the writer.”

NOT GUILTY! I have removed Internet connectivity from my laptop, though I do take breaks to use the Internet throughout the day.

“No one among us suffers the radical appreciation for coffee that I do. It calls to me, but I have learned not to listen. All the valuable writing I’ve done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I’ve wanted to leave the room…I look up from the page or the screen and I think, hey, I want some coffee. There’s my cup right there, just like yours, half full of cold coffee, and I’d like a cup of coffee….after I begin to stick it out, to stay in the room, when I did finally close down the section or find a place past the tough going where I could stop, the coffee tasted so much better than it ever had before. It was then that I began to see how good coffee could be.”