Wells Tower Nails Redwoods

The Accidental Naturalist feeling "disheveled, crooked, and mortal."

    A few Sundays back, an article called "The High Life" appeared in the New York Times magazine. I was lured in by the lush photograph of a redwood grove and the article's subtitle "How Tall Trees, Tree Huggers and Pot Farms are Transforming a California Backwater."  That backwater--Humboldt County, California--is one of my favorite places to observe marbled murrelets. Because of the county's large concentration of old-growth redwood forests, it is also a favorite nesting place for the endangered murrelet.
   But this isn't a blog about murrelets, nor really about redwoods, old-growth forests, of the marijuana in Humboldt County. It is simply an appreciation for another writer, the article's author, Wells Tower.
   Though Towers has published many a prize-winning short stories in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, I had not read his work until his book, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned was selected by my book club a few months ago. Tower deserves prizes for his verbs alone. "High Life," however, should earn him a prize for ending the epic struggle by writers to describe the experience of being in a old-growth forest.
   While researching my book, Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet, I read countless descriptions of these trees, most collapsing under the weight of adjectives and superlatives, all falling short.  Wells succeeded in two paragraphs. And here they are:
     
  "Perennially fattened on a diet of Pacific Ocean fogs, many of the trees in the state park (and its counterpart in northern Humboldt, Redwood National Park) casually top 300 feet, and the oldest specimens have been growing for two millenniums. In my touristic career, I've grown numb to the presence of hammerhead sharks, giant tortoises, grizzly bears, blue-footed boobies and pilot whales, but in the awe department, coast redwoods seemed to have no point of diminishing returns. Each tree revealed some astounding new characteristic of girth, bark tone, branch anatomy or moss couture. The forest's crisp, misty air made breathing a thrilling novelty. It seemed to inhale itself. I tried not to think about a distressing spate of recent studies wondering how these trees will survive what looks to be a worsening, climate-change-related shortage of coastal fogs. Instead, I tried to marvel gratefully that there were still thousands of these trees standing,not just one on a museum lot enclosed by a velvet rope.
   The trouble with redwood forests, though, is that they are hard on the human ego. You can't spend much time among all of that primordial rectilinearity without starting to feel disheveled, crooked, and mortal. I'd had every intention of going for a hike, but you cannot maintain a pace staggering around with your neck craned, guffawing like Jed Clampett seeing his first skyscraper. Back at the car, the dashboard clock said it had taken me two hours to walk a mile."

  Click here to read the full article in the New York Times.

Happy Earth Day

This image and prayer from the fabulous Grist.org--a "beacon in the smog."

Prayer to St. Cloud

"O Benedict of the ozone, protector of the stratosphere, I weep for the gaping hole in your gaseous layer of love caused in part by me. I call upon thee, sweet saint of the clouds, and plead forgiveness for my selfish western ways. I vow this day to reduce my obscene Andre the Giant-sized carbon footprint and no longer make you weep acid rain. With a contrite heart I will gladly endure the inconvenience of chatty carpoolers, hair spray, and hippie cleaning supplies. Grant me the strength to swear off my inconsiderate ways and always carry the common good of my fellow mortals and Mother Earth in my heart. Amen."

Please go to grist.org for more very useful, insightful, often hilarious advice on living on the planet. Then go outside.

Cloud of the Week #11

Formerly Lovely Cloud Enhanced with Fear (photo by Maria Ruth)

    I am probably going to get in some hot water for this blog, but a cloud-alert reader sent me a link to a whopper of a YouTube video to promote our National Day of Prayer, celebrated in our oh-so-tolerant national on May 5th.
   Sadly, the filmmakers have portrayed our friends the Clouds as death-and-doom machines (cue "Jaws" theme music) seem capable of destroying our fine nation if we forget to pray on this one special day (cue "O, Fortuna" from Carmina Burana or an unhappy cut from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack).
   Click here to endure the blessedly short video.
   I have nothing against prayer. But, I take offense at the attempt to nationalize what I consider to be a private and personal time of self-reflection and focus and the maligning of the meteorological phenomenon that makes life on Earth possible. Without clouds, we are, in fact, doomed. The Weather Channel does a pretty good job of giving clouds a bad rap, but to turn these glorious forms into a symbol of wrath and a back drop of the Apocalypse is dangerous.
   So, this week's Cloud of the Week (#11) is cumulus manipulatus eupteron. (BTW: "eu" is Greek for "right" and "pteron" for wing).
  
  

My Cloud Collection

Keep?

Cut?

Keep?

   Over the past six months, our family computer has come under attack. Viruses have found there way in and it now, it takes twenty minutes to open an e-mail from the time I fire up the beast in the morning. Finding my way to any to any website became a battle as I was redirected several times the no-man’s land of Tazinga, Viagra, and Trojans.

   At first, I thought it was simply a matter of having an older computer, so I kept a few books by the computer and read poetry or literary style guides to pass the time. My teenage sons, however, felt entitled to a computer that responded instantaneously to every keystroke. I suggested they use the library or school computer for Internet access. They declined. So did their time sitting in front of the computer downloading music (which I was convinced was the vector for all the viruses). 

    When the computer ceased to function, we downloaded three or four different anti-virus and malware programs, switched search engines, and called pc-savvy friends for advice. Nothing helped for long.

    This past week, faced with the prospect of getting through both “Beowolf” and “Paradise Lost” in the glow of the screen, I unplugged the computer and took it to 4^th Dimension for a diagnosis.

      I got a call the next day. Viruses? Too many iTunes? Crashing hard drive? Computer senescence? No. The problem was too many clouds.

    I have apparently loaded so many photographs of clouds onto the computer that our Windows operating system had no room to update itself and keep things running smoothly. This, in turn, made it possible for viruses to make their way into the computer. And, because we didn’t know any better, the software we downloaded to vanquish  the viruses were working against each other and creating a quagmire in our computer.  Now what?

   I brought the computer home and set it near the tangle of cords and cables. I am dreading plugging it back in. I know that as soon as I do, I will be faced with the painful task of deleting most of the 1583 photographs I have taken over the past two years of clouds. Sure, I could buy an external hard drive, or store them “on the cloud” as one friend suggested with a laugh. But I know it is time to go through my collection of clouds, pick the best, and delete the rest. This means I will have to go through them, one by one, decide which is more beautiful than the next, which is unusual or rare or unique, which one has sentimental value or also includes friends, family, or a landscape I cherish. And there’s the rub.

   Is there a “best cumulonimbus?” A “most meaningful family portrait with altocumulus?” A photograph featuring a combination of cloud types that has never been seen before and will never be seen again—something with potential scientific significance that I should send to a meteorologist for analysis?

    No. It is time to make a thousand decisions. I need to figure out what the clouds in each photograph mean to me, why I value one over another, how my perception of clouds has changed over two years. All of this will inform each tiny bit of pressure on the delete key. A thousand keystrokes will send my clouds into the ether.  

    But one of the marvelous thing about clouds is this: They are ubiquitous, common, and unique. And living in the Pacific Northwest, I know where to get more.