September

(we) dove

Speaking of entering the adult world, we just bought our first house. Or, maybe more precisely, signed a thick stack of paper promises to incrementally buy a house while we live in it and treat it like our own. This is all still sinking in, but in the mean time we’re very pleased.

A few minutes into our first visit to the loan office we noticed a mother dove tending her nest, tucked under the eaves of the building next door, her dark yellow eye staring in at us through the window. On our second visit (more papers), we brought the camera. She was gone, but now there were eggs in her nest.

Once, a couple years ago, Ash asked me, “are animals poor?”

She was 5 at the time, and I think we had just been watching swallows build their muddy nests onto the steel girders under a bridge. “Are animals poor?”

She had asked essentially this same question a couple of times earlier. Once when we were walking along the Truckee River and saw a man in ragged clothes sleeping under a picnic table. And again when we were carrying all of our food and shelter into the mountains on our backs for the night. “Are animals poor?”

Where does one begin?

I think I probably started in with some Thoreauvian patter about how, well, that all depends on what you mean by poor. How we’re wealthy in relation to all the things we can afford to, or are glad to, do without, and so on.

She didn’t seem to be buying it.

“Yeah, but I mean if animals don’t have a nice place to sleep, like people, are they poor?”

This same basic question continues to come up from time to time.

When the power goes out.

When after walking across the great concrete bridge at the mouth of the Siuslaw River, we stumble into the rising smoke and bearded faces of a hobo camp in the ferns and pines.

When a deer limps across the road at dusk, followed by her fawns.

Or when, chasing a woodpecker into the eucalyptus forest behind our motel on the Mendocino coast, we instead find the handsomely tended tent-and-tarp shelter of somebody still not returned home from work for the day.

I’m still working on a better answer.

Related: the foxes have holes, hoboclowns & coelacanths, Hallelujah, Bum Again, thanks

Into the Mystic, and a procession of ontologies

One morning, earlier this summer, we were driving north along the Salmon River in Idaho when Van Morrison came on the radio.

We were born before the wind

Also younger than the sun

Ere the bonnie boat was one as we sailed into the mystic

. . .

Just about there, Tom called right out from the back seat, with something between amusement and scandal, “we weren’t born before the wind!” We had all day to get to Missoula, so of course, this led to a longer conversation.

“What do you think he’s singing about?”

And so it went.

We never set out to make positivists of these kids, as they come to us little animists, playing in the outskirts of our rational, grown-up world. But here is one game that we’ve played with them. I guess it doesn’t really have a name, but it goes something like this:

“Which came first, gates or bait?”
(Followed by speculations and reasoning all around, until resolved to everyone’s basic satisfaction.)

Which came first, poles or holes?

Red or black?

Jerks or jerky?

Shoes or blue?

And so on.

Here’s another. Is a thing good or bad? Grasshoppers, Snow, Cheatgrass, Lightning, and so on.

“Are roads good?”

“Yes, for people. No for prairie dogs.”

“Yes, for ravens. No for Raccoons.”

Anyway, you get it.

related: about toys, madrugada, 3 short improvised plays

~3,000 miles

Cove Hot Spring, washed out on the Salmon River

thee Boat Box

tonic of wildness?

launching a cork boat

a day late for Taco Thursday in Kalispell

found: notes from somebody's playground experiment

a murder of crows harries a dog in Portland

lost coast found

 more photos here & here

8 states bird list: May 24—June 9

Pileated Woodpecker
Acorn Woodpecker

Hairy Woodpecker

Red-naped Sapsucker

Northern Flicker

Red-breasted Nuthatch

Brown Creeper

American Crow

Common Raven

Scrub Jay

Steller’s Jay

Yellow-headed Blackbird

Red-winged Blackbird

Brewer’s Blackbird

Northern Mockingbird

Mountain Bluebird

Mountain Chickadee

Black-capped Chickadee

Chestnut-backed Chickadee

Oregon Junco

White-crowned Sparrow

Chipping Sparrow

Song Sparrow

Lark Sparrow

Spotted Towhee

American Robin

Townsend’s Solitaire

StarlingRockPigeonHouseSparrow

Eurasian Collared Dove

Golden Eagle

Bald Eagle

Northern Harrier

Osprey

Red-tailed Hawk

American Kestrel

Turkey Vulture

Common Nighthawk

Purple Martin

Violet-green Swallow

Cliff Swallow

Barn Swallow

Western Meadowlark

Mourning Dove

Anna’s Hummingbird

House Finch

Lesser Goldfinch

Pacific-slope Flycatcher

Western Kingbird

Yellow-rumped Warbler

Wilson’s Warbler

Belted Kingfisher

Ruffed Grouse (just heard, not seen)

Blue/Dusky Grouse

California Quail

Wild Turkey

Wilson’s Snipe

Spotted Sandpiper

American Dipper

Black-necked Stilt

Ring-billed Gull

Western Gull

Pelagic Cormorant

Double Crested Cormorant

Pigeon Guillemot

Canada Goose

Brown Pelican

White Pelican

Mallard

Common Merganser

Western Grebe

Pied-billed Grebe

Sandhill Crane

Great Blue Heron

Great Egret

(Utah, Idaho, Montana, Alberta, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada)
other lists

3 views of trash: washed ashore (there is no "away")

 

from Angela Hazeltine Pozzi's Washed Ashore project, Bandon, OR (off season)

& glass beach at Fort Bragg, CA

3 views of trash: sea (tsunami & islands)

from Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers II project

Bonnie Louise Monteleone & the Plastic Ocean Project

detail from Basurama’s Trash Tsunami in Santo Domingo, DR

Zak Noyle in Indonesia

Of course, there's always a darker, less sanitized side to this trash business, too. For example, Chris Jordan explores this from about the starkest, most direct angle possible: in situ photos of decomposing albatross carcasses, dead of starvation having filled their bellies with inedible sea plastics.

This is from his Midway project, shot in the general neighborhood of the infamous pacific trash vortex. (Also known affectionately as the great pacific garbage patch, more wishfully as the plastic beach, or, simply, "the gyre.")  Here at Midway Atoll, this includes Albatross chicks who are fed small pieces of plastic by unsuspecting parents, eventually killing them. This is a series with far too many photos. And if we're talking about taking plastics and other chemical toxins into our bodies, we know that albatrosses are certainly not alone as a species in this.

Like many, I think there are serious problems with aesthetizing waste and toxicity. Jordan nods to some of this on Midway, and on earlier projects, like his Intolerable Beauty. But you see this ambivalence in that Gorillaz album, for example, as Murdoc describes his discovery of the "plastic beach." And you see it in people's attempts to describe these places and phenomena. Like where surfer Tim Silverwood explains: "I was frolicking in cinematic heaven before quickly being swamped by a feeling of being delivered into a postcard of oceanic hell."

Are these boldly aesthicized (and fetishized?) representations worth the strategic risks of normalizing trash? Of making it seem benign, or even beautiful? Are they necessary and inevitable points along the arc of our realizing long-ignored horrors? Drawing us through understandings of "litter" as less an ecological problem than an aesthetic one, but then flipping this to reckon with the larger scales of consumerism, waste, and toxicity as massive "environmental" and public health crises?

3 views of trash: land (the parts we throw away)

When this Landfill Harmonic trailer first came out a year or so ago, I got several different emails from friends and family linking me here and there. Since I’ve never been to Paraguay, and as I have no musical talent to speak of, I’m left to attribute this coincidence to a known interest on my part in garbage and various sorts of cheapskatery.

This may also account for why I’ve been so into what people like Vik Muniz and Chris Jordan have been doing with trash too.

Anyway, earlier this spring, I was able to work along similar lines (but on a much less ambitious project) with some colleagues friends and students. Aside from Muniz and Jordan, some of our inspiration here comes from Chuck Close, Zac Freeman, pointillism more generally, and other upcycling projects.

So, here’s what we came up with:

 

And a little story from the local paper.

(Above the fold and in color! Not bad, eh?)