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Spine vs. Slime: Our deteriorating politics mirror our deteriorating planet

A fried egg jellyfish floats in the Strait of Juan de Fuca off the coast of Washington

Slime.

You don’t need to go far to find it these day.

If you’ve been around kids, you’ve probably seen them stretching it and rolling into balls — it was one of the most popular DIY toys last year, thanks to the internet

Speaking of the internet, the slime is alive and well there too, but not so innocent. Slime ideologies of racism, anti-intellectualism and fascism, rolled into the textures of our memes, social media and (oh yeah) the federal government which has lately incubated amoebic ideology of toxicity and hard-core selfishness.

Where else can you find slime these days? Tar sands, a poisonous black sludge that oil companies are trying, ceaselessly trying, to move south and west out of Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast and to ports along the Salish Sea near where I live.

The Salish Sea, which includes Puget Sound, the Strait of Georgia and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, is another battlefront in the slime invasion, this time the jellyfish and algae that have begun to choke out complex vertebrate lifeforms like salmon and orcas.

Infinitely pliable, slime is passive, non-resistant to external forces. Yet, when there is enough of it, it overwhelms everything. Jellyfish, like fascists, thrive in toxic environments that degrade more sophisticated organisms.

I believe that all these forms of slime are linked together (excepting, probably, the kids’ slime.) Big Oil brings in the money that shapes Trump administration policy and Big Oil brings in the money that fills the war chests of pro-oil members of the US House and Senate. The slimy souls, who prefer dollars over democracy, have demonstrated their willingness to sell land and sea for drilling, to cut away the safeguards that slowed climate change. And now we link to the slimification of the ocean, where jellyfish and other simple organisms choke out other life.

All of these slimeforms are a lot to fight, yet, I believe that those of us with spinal columns  have the tools and drive needed to win the battle. We can join others who say “no” to the oil that powers the slime machine. It is also within our ability, as sophisticated, social vertebrates, to create relationships and groups that push the slime back through cooperation. Victory has emerged out of environmentalist and Native American groups’ dogged resistance to major fossil fuel projects here in the Pacific Northwest. Groups like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have turned individual abuses into a national conversation about justice and equality — a broader challenge to the abusive, bigoted men who remain in seats of power.

The Rise of Slime

Rise of Slime, is the name for a trend noticed by the oceanologist Jeremy Jackson that as the oceans became warmer, polluted and overfished, they are becoming slimier too. Algae is one organism that does just fine in warm, polluted water. It has filled in where coral reefs, which couldn’t survive the changing sea conditions, have died. Here in Clallam County, Washington, you aren’t so likely to see algae in the water. Nonetheless, poisonous algal blooms have closed off mussel gathering two years running. The Washington Department of Health warns shellfish gatherers to expect more of these harmful blooms as the sea continues to warm.

More visible, than the algae are the jellyfish that clot the water throughout the warmer months. Cross jellies and comb jellies bloom numerous enough so that it can be difficult to look down without seeing through one of them.

There have been many occasions while kayaking when I could blindly dip my hand off my boat and be sure to come up with a clear, quivering blob. Whether or not this preponderance I saw is nature’s old way or climate reality, we could argue. Yet people have been seeing jellyfish on the rise the world over and evidence is beginning to point to jellies as a result of of pollution, overfishing and climate change.

Slimy jellyfish, with their simple needs can better withstand toxins than a more complicated organism such as an orca or salmon. The cnidarians may drift passively with the currents, but they are fast to reproduce and grow.

I think about these simple bags of slime, expected to do so well amidst the floating garbage. Then I think about the stunted ways our society communicates with one another now, how a couple hours of wading through internet news and social media will bring me to a similar protoplasmic, directionless feeling. Complex thought requires a diet of complex thought, before we bring our developed ideas into the world through gestation and nurture — not too dissimilar from the way mammalian creatures raise their young. Yet, in the toxic environment, it doesn’t pay to develop your thoughts, but to spew them out fast. Divide, multiply and overwhelm; that’s the viral strategy, the slime strategy.

Complex thought, like complicated, multicellular life is disadvantaged in the polluted environment, likely to be choked out by memes or plastic bags.

Witness the slimers like Sean Hannity, Steve Bannon or message board trolls who have flourished in the tide of toxic bullshit that flowed into the national discourse. At the center of it, quivering orange protoplasm oozing brain effluent out through a Twitter feed.

What about Hillary’s emails? Climate change is not the problem. Bigotry is not the problem. Skyrocketing inequality is not the problem. Fake News. Political correctness is the problem that we’re dealing with. Press conference over. Here’s your tiki torch/deportation papers.

Thinking people retain the wherewithal to see bullshit for what it is. Yet the sheer quantity of it  still has the power to overwhelm. If we take the time to address each new outrage, we spread ourselves thin and fall into involuntary myopia. There’s less time to go deep any more; it’s harder to settle down with a book when the news is blowing up yet again.

Paying for gas is paying for Trump

One way that I have tried to push back against the slime tide has been to watch my carbon footprint.

The act of riding a bike to work may not feel as cathartic as blocking a tank (or tanker ship) but for me it is less about riding my bike and more about not turning the ignition. The deep consequences of climate change have emerged out of seemingly trivial decisions such as driving or leaving the lights on.

Every time I fill up my tank, I feed the climate crisis. Compounding that, I know my gas money also feeds the ideological crisis of our time.

The dollar flows from the pump to the oil company, to the political action committee to the vicious petro-Republican agenda that oozes like tar sand over the fabric of our rights. The administration is soaked in fossil fuel — from Tillerson to Zinke to Pruitt. Oil companies may have hesitated to go all in with a racist liar in the general election, but then he won and they realized they were sitting atop a rich vein of opportunity. They pitched in millions for the inauguration; no doubt they are prepared to loosen their purse strings for the 2020 campaign.

A look at the obscene pro-oil, pro coal agenda pushed by the Trump team shows that the companies’ investment in them has been well placed. This year’s horrors included the administration pulling the country out of the Paris climate agreement and a move to declassify Capitol Reef and Bears Ears as National Monuments — to open the land to drilling. Further outrages include Zinke’s proposals to permit offshore drilling rigs in the Atlantic and Pacific.

The money from the Gas n’ Go doesn’t just prop Trump though. Thanks to Citizens United nourishing currents of money from companies like Exxon-Mobile and BP help feed the slime organisms that rule the swamp Congress. Witness the language of the newest tax plan that opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, saving money for billionaires so they could get the tax break they don’t need. Trump swiftly approved.

At the state level, the American Legislative Exchange Council also leverages Exxon-Mobile and Koch Industries donations to write the proposed legislation that the state senators and reps vote for. It is convenient when companies lean on politicians for results and have a bill conveniently pre-written that reflects their agenda, whether that agenda is about fracking standards or Stand Your Ground laws.

If any of what I have described above outrages you, just remember that we pay the bastards.

We support them every time we drive. The daily commute, visits with friends, a last minute trip out to buy dinner all put money in the pockets of those who have threatened our climate — helped feed the tumor growing on the face of democracy, equality and human decency.

A question of my own culpability

I continue to ask myself how much should I should use Tom’s on The Move to talk about the destruction of life as we know it on our planet. How much should I mention the climate crisis in my writing? Is it fiddling while Rome burns that I might admire dewdrops on the moss, while villainy is afoot?

I think of the balance between nature appreciation and advocacy when I look back on a summer  hike that I took with a couple friends who are heavily involved with environmental activism. Naturally, we had made this a gas free trip — having biked from Port Angeles to the trailhead, and then walked up to Lake Angeles at 4,000 feet. The lake was flanked by 2,000-foot cliffs of monumental stone. Even in the height of summer, the shadows held large swaths of snow. Snow gave way to braids of roaring water cascading down down to lake-level.

Throughout our hike, our group had talked about the latest outrages from the administration, dire indications of how climate would worsen drought and fires in the Olympic Mountains. Protests, petitions and letters to the policymakers awaited back down in Port Angeles, and my friend felt guilty about going above it all to admire the scenery.

Though I admired the commitment, it seemed wrong to me that someone who worked so hard to protect nature would doubt himself because he was taking time to enjoy it. I came up with Edward Abbey, who wrote in Desert Solitaire, “Where there is no joy, there can be no courage, and without courage all other virtues are useless.”

It is unthinkable for me to cut myself off from nature, which has been one of the greatest joys of my life. Yet the natural world remains under dire threat. I fear I may let my love of nature become a narcissistic relationship. If it enriches my life, shouldn’t I do something in return?

I wish I could say that I felt like a member of good standing with this relationship to the natural world, but I feel more and more like a freeloader who needs to do more.

It’s not that I don’t try. I have taken a few steps that most people around me have not, including adopting a vegan diet, buying the majority of my food in bulk so I can use reusable containers and driving my car with extreme parsimony. I use my bike for commuting, grocery runs and most other errands.

I cut down on the amount of produce I had to buy from out of state by making stir fries from stinging nettles I harvested, also going several months where the only fruit I ate was the berries, apples and pears I’d picked around Port Angeles.

The doorstep adventure remains my favorite way to travel. I consider it important that I have spent the past summer traveling throughout the Olympic Peninsula on bike and foot. It is my way of saying that I will not make an exception, even for doing the adventures that I love, that I would rather stay close and push myself near home, than fly out to some exotic locale, on the wings of a carbon blasting machine.

A cross country plane trip to visit family back home was my biggest carbon expenditure of 2017, and for all my other efforts, it likely tilted the scales beyond what would be sustainable for one person over one year.

Even if I disregarded that trip, my (mostly) grounded vegetable existence would still feel inadequate to address the task at hand.

Do vs. Don’t

Why inadequate? Inadequate because the bulk of my actions have seemed to start with “I don’t,”  as in “I don’t eat meat” or “I don’t drive my car to work.” I began thinking that if I wanted to have a meaningful place in the world, I needed to have some “I do” statements about myself as well.

Naomi Klein, the environmental activist and author, puts words to the feeling in her book No is Not Enough, which came out a couple months after Trump’s inauguration. Klein argues that if the opposition can only say no to things that Trump does, they will fail. There needs to be an alternate vision that they can say yes to. This vision would be a progressive agenda that stands up for human rights, corporate responsibility and sustainable energy.

The agenda Klein believes in resonates with me, but I want to say yes with actions as well as words.

Over the past year, I have tried to use actions to build my commitment to the environment. I haven’t done anything spectacular, just little steps that include volunteering time at some restoration sites, going out to help monitor stream quality around Port Angeles every month and spending time working with Olympic Climate Action. The later has included helping at a fundraiser against the Trans Mountain Pipeline, work compiling a weekly list of news stories for members, and speaking out at a county hearing about the need for shoreline zoning to represent climate change reality. These small actions have made me aware of those who do so much more.

Take Michael Foster, one of a group of five “valve turners” who broke into pipeline substations near the U.S. Canadian border and shut down 15 percent of the oil imports entering the United States in one day. Foster could now face more than two decades in prison for his actions. His sentencing is in North Dakota, the state where he shut the wheel on the Keystone 1 pipe and cut off the tar sands crude it was bringing into the U.S..

Not a compromising kind of guy, Foster. In a Seattle Met interview, he tells the reporter that fellow activists who fly in planes to vacation overseas are “actively destroying the planet — for fun.” He is also one of the kayaktavists who have blocked oil tankers and drilling platforms on the sea using sea kayaks as buffers.

When I saw Foster speak in Port Angeles, it was regarding the Trans Mountain pipeline proposal, a line that would haul more tar sands oil than even the Keystone XL project would and increase oil ship traffic by 700 percent on the Strait of Juan de Fuca between the U.S. and Canada. The sheer audacity of this project, the scale and money that would be involved was staggering to consider. Foster, the former mental health practitioner, had a message for our group: he may have seemed crazy that he was willing to trade away his freedom in order to turn a valve, but it was even crazier to believe that half-measures would save us from the climate crisis.

Coming together

Native groups have been another dogged and inspiring resistance to the fossil fuel industry. Tribes throughout North America have forced corporations to backpedal projects and the government to respect the old treaties giving them rights to fishing and healthy lands. The  fronts are too numerous to name, but include a stunning 2016 court victory where the Lummi Tribe used treaty rights to win against what would have been the largest coal shipping terminal in the United States at Cherry Point, Washington. Tribes in Washington and British Columbia are united against the Trans Mountain pipeline proposed by the Kinder Morgan Corporation. The Puyallup tribe continues to push back with lawsuits and protests against a proposed natural gas terminal alongside their reservation land at the Port of Tacoma.

Like Foster, citizens in these groups have been willing to face arrest for what they believe in. They, who stand witness to generations of exploitation, know the stakes.

Those who toed the line at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in North Dakota are coming back to fight projects in their homelands. I have heard the Lakota phrase “Mni Wiconi,” — “water is life” —  here in Washington, where it applies to the life within the Salish Sea just as aptly as it would apply to the Missouri River in North Dakota.

The theme of common struggle is not just geographic, however. It reflects the burden climate change puts on people across all walks of life — though the burden is shouldered disproportionally by the poor, the marginalized and the disenfranchised. Environmentalism is entering a coming of age moment where the public image of the movement is far more than just a group of concerned white guys like me.

Tribes that fight oil pipes also fight centuries of racist treatment and a prevailing attitude that their existence doesn’t matter. History shows them they cannot expect benevolence from those in power.

Every place where there is a fight to protect the environment, there is also a fight for human rights and dignity.

See the superfund sites, flush with oil refinery toxins, that flooded out when Hurricane Harvey slammed Houston, Most of the sites were put around working class black or Hispanic neighborhoods.

Another jarring image from 2017 — the President of the United States free throwing paper towels at a crowd of Puerto Rican hurricane victims. The moment demanded a leader who would acknowledge the need to do more to halt climate change, a leader who would see the need for massive and uninhibited aid to fellow Americans who happened speak Spanish and be majority Hispanic.

Instead, the supposed leader of the free world gave the Puerto Ricans a golf trophy dedication that they could share with the Texas and Florida hurricane victims.

Lack of empathy for these groups, the victims of climate change from flooded Bangladesh to the melting native Alaskan village to the strip mined Appalachian community, fits into what Klein would describes as a “sacrifice zone” mentality, an attitude where whole communities, entire regions, can be seen as necessary losses for the sake of business.

The ugly concept of the sacrifice zone is a product of the same mindset that accepts civilian deaths from an indiscriminate bombing, a mindset that not only accepts grotesque disparity between haves and have nots, but demands walls to keep the have-nots out.

Sacrifice zones have a way of creeping through anyway. One day you may be grateful to be inside the border with the sacrifice zone out of view; the next day, the pipeline is coming through your land, the storm has come for your city. That’s when you realize that your best hope isn’t setting yourself apart but stepping up,making connections. Now that you need someone else to have your back, you can ask yourself: Did you have theirs when it counted?

The idea of strength through unity runs through the “Join or Die” motto of the American Revolution, up through the Pull Together movement among Northwest tribes fighting the Trans Mountain Pipeline. More outreach equals more support from those who will sign your petition, or else put their bodies on the line with you.

Thus, the wise environmentalists know that their fight is with groups like Black Lives Matter, for gay rights groups, anti-poverty activists, those who speak for immigrants and refugees and the burgeoning #MeToo movement — all of whom are working to prevent people from being treated like disposable sacrifice zones.

The power of diversity is confirmed by study of nature: the most beautiful, complex systems exist with diverse actors fulfilling different roles. A healthy forest has a range of trees and shrubs, worms, bugs, helpful fungi nourishing the roots.

Organisms themselves are built on the harmonious relationships between types of life systems. This is true, even for simpler, slimier organisms like jellyfish. They are not altogether simple, boasting nerve nets, tentacles for feeding, tentacles for stinging, innumerable stinging nematocysts. Jellies may bloom into thousands, yet still drift with the currents — with little control or care regarding the agenda.

Far more complicated, far more threatened, we have the Chinook salmon that delivers nutrients from the sea through the rivers, back into the shadow of the northwest forest where it was born to propagate itself anew. Its brain allows it to follow the cues it needs to navigate back to its birthplace, its muscles allow it to thrash up currents that would splat a jellyfish to the wall.

The strength is reinforced by an agglomeration of differentiated tissue below the dorsal fin. Nerve and bone comes together to give the fish that feature that gives it membership in our shared phylum: chordata. The current goes one way, but the salmon has the power to resist (just like we do) — because of its spine.

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The Big Spit

Kayaks beneath cliffs west of Dungeness Spit. You can see the erosion coming down on the right side. Photos by Jarrett Swan.

  

The houses along the cliffs in Dungeness, Washington are beautiful and doomed.

Erosion marches slow and steady toward these stately manors. For now, they stand at the brink of the approaching edge looking out over world class views of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Vancouver Island, Mount Baker — and that vast strip of sand jutting out into the water: The Dungeness Spit. At 5.5 miles long, it is the longest of its kind in the United States. The eventual destruction of those houses and the creation of the spit are linked in a fascinating Yin-Yang relationship.

More on that later.

On a recent sunny day, I was also taking in the view of the Spit from my bicycle saddle. I was pedaling 17 miles back to Port Angeles to meet my friend Jarrett where our kayaks would be loaded on his truck. We would put the boats in the water out of Hollywood Beach downtown and paddle east with until we got to where my car was parked at Cline Spit in Dungeness Bay. It would be an 11 mile paddle with a short boat portage. If we went all the way around the spit instead of portaging, it would be a 21 mile paddle. You can probably guess which option I preferred.

The day was serenely beautiful, in a way that made me feel that, somehow, all was right with the world. I pedaled against a light breeze that cooled me nicely against the warm sun. Looking out from the sea-cliffs, I saw that half the water in Dungeness Bay was gone, vanished with the low tide of a new moon. In a couple hours, the powerful flood tide would start refilling the basin as our boats took advantage of the eastbound current in the strait.

Mature and juvenile bald eagles wheeled above the shallow waters. I saw them take turns harassing ducks. A small crowd had gathered on on the cliff to ogle a large juvenile perched in the branches of a fir. Signs nearby warned them not to get too close to the edge. It was eroding rapidly.

Even the road I was biking seemed uncomfortably near to the edge of destruction. I wondered how many years it had left.

A couple miles later, I was biking through the amber fields outside of Sequim. Earlier, I’d  planned to bike to nearby Carlsborg and catch a bus to Port Angeles. This plan would have involved sitting in a bus stop for forty-five minutes breathing exhaust from Highway 101. If I pedaled a little faster, however, I could still get to Port Angeles in time for Jarrett and I to catch the flood tide.

I took backroads to the Old Olympic Highway and connected with the Olympic Discovery Trail. The trail was blissfully un-busy, weaving in and out of forest where the leaves cast dapples on the pavement.

Instead of highway exhaust, I breathed the cool scent of ferns and moss as I maneuvered switchbacks into creek gullies. A couple miles later, the trail popped out at the coastline, where acres of kelp and sea lettuce steamed on the hot cobbles.

By the time I reached Jarrett’s place, he was still packing/eating breakfast.

 

“So what do you think about wearing drysuits today,” he said.

“It’s going to be rough with this heat,” I said. “I’m probably going to end up splashing myself a lot. But it’s worth it having the extra safety.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Though, I was thinking about just wearing my Farmer John today.” As it happened, he had two of the sleeveless wetsuits at his place. One would fit me.

The only thing was, I had this awesome drysuit that really worked at keeping the water out. A prolonged immersion in the water was extremely unlikely, but I liked to think that I could be immersed in the water for a long time and turn out fine, thanks to my drysuit. Was that really the best course of action? Heat exhaustion from paddling in the full sun was another risk. I had to weigh.

As I looked at that beautiful orange suit of waterproof fabric, leaving it behind felt like a betrayal.

“I mean … I love my drysuit,” I said.

“Yeah, I love mine too,” Jarrett said. Both of us were wavering. “But I don’t think it’s going to be any fun paddling in it today.”

“Screw it. I’ll take the wetsuit.”

Emotional attachment is not the best rationale for choosing gear anyway. Take it from a guy who’s had (too) much loved hiking boots fall apart on him on the second day hiking the Hundred Mile Wilderness.

Our drysuits stayed on their hangars.

Padding beneath the pilings at the abandoned Rayonier Mill site

 

The hot sun and warm air at Hollywood Beach reinforced our certainty: We had made the right decision. Before I got in my boat, I deliberately dropped in the mucky shallow water to get myself soaked. The cool water evaporating off my trunk was most welcome as I started paddling.

The beginning of our trip stayed close to shore, following the riprap barrier below the Olympic Discovery Trail where bicyclists zipped past our boats on the way to Morse Creek.

“Bikes move faster than kayaks,” I observed.

Though we may have been lagging behind the bike trail traffic, we had more opportunities to explore, including the haunted remains of the Rayonier Mill. An abandoned wood pier with tall pilings jutted out in front of us, offering dark narrow places where we could squeeze our boats through.

Closed since 1997, the mill recently marked its 20 year anniversary as a Superfund cleanup site. The mill had been a major paper goods manufacturer that processed wood chips into consumer products like film, cigarette filters and diapers. The business also left behind some less desirable products, such as PCBs and dioxins. The EPA labeled Rayonier as the biggest polluter in Washington State in 1993.

In the film, “The Memory of Fish,” former employee Dick Goin recalls seeing fish coming down Ennis Creek turning belly up as soon as they came in contact with the mill discharge.

Tons of toxic soil have been hauled away but the cleanup is ongoing. A chainlink fence separates it from the bike path.

It is scheduled to be completely cleaned up (at least by the government’s standards) by the year 2026. Meanwhile, Rayonier, headquartered in Jacksonville, Fla, still owns the site and has paid out millions to clean the site. I have been running and biking past the site for over a year now, and have yet to see any work that looks like cleanup.

The large wooden pilings jutting out from the pier represent another hazard.  Within a hundred feet of them, I could smell the tarry scent of creosote. As it happens, the county’s latest shoreline strategic plan proposal bans this type of piling, presumably due to the fact that creosote is toxic and will eventually leach out into the environment.

The spaces beneath the piers had the subterranean feel of a subway station, with pilings instead of pillars, the flutter of cormorants’ wings instead of pigeons. More alien were ochre sea stars the size of medium pizzas feeding on the mussels along the posts. They hadn’t gotten the memo about the toxic creosote, I guess, though I’d hesitate to say that the presence of life precludes the possibility of environmental harm.

Clearly the pilings provided a large amount of surface area for clinging life.

Northern feather duster tube worms jutted out like mummified cinnamon sticks. Below the water, the worms released their delicate red fans of feeder cilia at their ends — about the size of silver dollars. I couldn’t resist letting my fingers brush up against one. The reaction was immediate: the cilia shot in, sending a blob of bubbles upward.

White plumose anemone’s wafted in green water further down, trolling for bits of plankton.

The next couple miles of paddling took us past a coast that was armored by riprap. The busted stone kept the shoreline from eroding, though there were still a couple landslide zones behind the bike path After Morse Creek, the riprap went away. Massive earthen sea cliffs jutted up, cutting off access to the headlands except for in the occasional creek gully.

 

The blissful day called for a lack of hurry, and small explorations. Jarrett and I took a stop at one of these gullies and found a small campground on what appeared to be private property. We ate lunch, paddled for half an hour, got out again so I could explore another gully. There is supposed to be a large cavern hidden somewhere in these cliffs, but I couldn’t find it.

At one point,we heard a crack and a few pounds worth of stones and dirt clattered off the cliff onto the beach below. Further on, we saw where someone had built an elaborate sequence of wooden steps down to the water from above. The only problem was, the cliffs had given out and the steps were mangled, half fallen off.

A week before this paddle, a woman hiking along the beach below of one of these cliffs stumbled upon a giant wooly mammoth molar that eroded out of the substrate above. Over the years, locals have found pieces of mammoth skulls as well as tusks from these bluffs. Jarrett has collected (legally) a few pieces of petrified wood in these places also.

The cliffs were so interesting to look at that we stayed close, even though we could have caught a faster current out in the strait. They were just damn interesting to look at, these weird conglomerations that were neither stone, nor sand exactly. There was symmetry between the delta shaped drainages and the pyramidal deposits at their base. They formed hourglass shapes, and like hour glasses, they marked time by the passage of sand.

The warm colors and the bleakness of the walls was desert-like, reminiscent of African coastline.

All I had to do was ignore the pine trees along the top. It certainly felt hot enough for us to be pulling out of Algiers .

“Thank God, we didn’t wear the drysuits,” I remarked.

 

When we started getting hot, we had the 54 degree Strait water to cool down.

We got out of our boats and waded in the water along the beach. I practiced getting back into the boat from my kayak, and got a couple pointers from Jarrett, who made it look easy despite his high center of gravity.

“See the lighthouse?”

He pointed, and I could see the New Dungeness Lighthouse, built near the end of the Dungeness Spit.

We were getting close.

The cliffs became even more unstable as we paddled along, so much so that they now tilted forty-five degrees, with enormous piles of sand and gravel accumulated at their bases. We stopped our kayaks for a moment to watch erosion in action. There would be a sudden tinkling noise and a flow would start moving down the cliffs. It looked kind of like a waterfall, it was falling sediment. The flow would continue for a minute or so before it ran out. Then another flow would begin somewhere else.

“It’s like the cliffs are taking a leak,” I said.

These must have been the “feeder” cliffs that I had been hearing about. The super-fast eroding ones were moving backward at a a rate of three feet a year. Watch out!

Why are they called feeder cliffs though?

Because they feed important ecosystems and landforms in the local environment. That sediment leaking out from the cliffs would eventually reach the water, creating the ideal substrate for eelgrass beds, which are habitat for juvenile salmon and other small marine critters. Longshore currents and tides carry much of the sediment further, and it deposits on the Dungeness Spit. The spit is born out of the destruction of these cliffs.

A similar deposition process helped form the three mile long Ediz Hook, which gives Port Angeles its harbor and is home to the local Coast Guard base. The Hook has faced erosion over the decades however, partly because of the dams on the Elwha River, partly because of all the riprap around Port Angeles. The dams (now demolished) plugged up useful sediment coming down the Elwha from the mountains. The riprap, still plugs up the useful erosion coming down from the sea cliffs around Port Angeles, and diminishes a supply that could still be used to rebuild the Hook. Last year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contracted with a construction company to expedite that building process by dumping several tons of cobbles off the Hook. In 1995, the Corps was paying up to $100,000 a year moving rocks out onto the Hook. It is ironic considering that the Hook is threatened precisely because of the tons of rock laid out along the Port Angeles shoreline.

The falling sand beside my kayak reminded me of dead trees in a forest or compost in a garden. Something needed to die for rebirth to happen. Humans with their usual impulses to leash the unruly universe had mucked the system well.

A mantra entered my head as I paddled: “Don’t resist the rot of this world.”

The cliff, is falling away, so don’t build there. Let the sand slip out of your grasp, let dead leaves crumble into dirt. There’s a place for it all. Don’t interfere until you really know what you’re doing. If you don’t figure out this much, maybe it’s better to sit back, slow down and see how nature can do it better than you do.

The undeveloped beaches around Dungeness Spit are far nicer to paddle than those around the Hook. There are easy places to land a kayak, fewer power boats to dodge.

The Hook is crowded with its access road, boat launch and the navy docks under construction. The Dungeness Spit has no roads, only the lonely lighthouse at the end.

 

If we paddled all the way around the lighthouse, we would essentially double our trip, making it about 21 miles. The other option would be to portage over the spit and paddle directly to my car, shaving 11 miles of travel.

Jarrett was in favor of the later plan. I wanted to change his mind, but didn’t want to be pushy about it.

“So…” I said. “What would you think about going around?”

“No man. I’ve been doing kayak tours all week. I think I’m done today.”

I was bummed, but didn’t want to end the trip on a sour note by arguing into getting my way.

“No sweat, Man. It’s been a great trip. Where should we portage?”

Jarrett scanned the beach where tourists and day hikers were thick on the the sand.

“We’ll go down a little ways to get to somewhere where there aren’t as many people,” Jarrett said.

The lighthouse was drifting closer into view.

Jarrett kicked his kayak into high gear. My muscles ached to keep up. I was glad he was in front though, because I had a feeling that he actually wanted to go around the lighthouse. It was my job to shut up and let him decide it for himself.

For half an hour we raced down the spit with the wind behind us, saying nothing. Finally, Jarrett put his paddle down on the deck.

“That lighthouse is getting pretty close.”

“It is,” I said.

“Alright. I could go around. You game?”

I pumped my fist.

“Hell yes!”

The New Dungeness Lighthouse. Glacier Peak is visible between the lighthouse and the building to the right.

 

We celebrated our decision by pulling off and grabbing some food on the beach. The Cascade mountains had grown taller and better defined. My view included Glacier Peak and Mount Baker and the smaller mountains on the San Juan Islands. Behind us we had a view up into the Obstruction Point Ridge area and Elk Mountain where there 1,000-foot snowfields clung to the north faces (Stay tuned for news of my next Doorstep Adventure.)

Time was no longer on our side. After we launched the boats back out, I saw the strands of bull kelp were straining against an ebb current. We were fighting the tide now.

The current only got stiffer as we rounded the spit into Dungeness Bay, slowing progress to a crawl. The tidal grip weakened as we got further into the bay, however. We pulled our boats up on the bay side of the lighthouse to do some more exploring.

A small footpath led us up toward the white building, with its red roof and central lighthouse and tower. It dates back to 1857.

Faded laundry flapped on a line above the lawn. I saw one man reading a book outside. The scene looked peaceful and old-fashioned. I felt that I could drop in, find a seat, put my feet up on the railing and argue about whether one of those newfangled steam engines would ever really outrun a clipper ship on a broad reach.

I’d accept the invitation to stay at the lighthouse, where I would write at hardwood desks, gather salt in my beard, look out at waves, wear sweaters.

In fact several people reserve places for the of staying at the lighthouse. 2018 reservations are going for $375 per person per week or $2,250 for the whole house. To earn your lighthouse keep, you also tend to chores like tending the lawn and polishing (daily) the brass inside the tower.

A small driftwood sign pointed an arrow back down the Spit to where it connected to the mainland. “Real World: Five miles.” I saw the appeal.

The spit stretched west as a sandy ribbon down the middle of our sightline, diminishing with distance. There were breaking waves from the Strait to the north and calm water inside the bay. The proud houses on the mainland were distant, superfluous seeming. You could see the worried world from this dreamy perch on the sand, but the worries were at arm’s length.

Empty beach replaced the large crowds we’d seen at the west end.

Few people hiked all the way out, not only because of the 10 mile round trip, but also because it meant trudging that 10 miles over soft sand at a tilted angle.

This long stretch of land doesn’t just isolate lighthouse keepers from the bustle of the mainland. It is also a popular spot for birds, who benefit from being able to nest in an isolated spot where predators are less likely to come and get them. The south side of the Spit is a national wildlife refuge, which is off limits to human visitors. Signs warn boats not to get too close to the land.

We got back in our kayaks and started paddling back to the “Real World” with its email, riprap and superfund sites. Part of me wanted to stay out on the spit away from the noise waiting on the mainland. On the other hand, I was hungry and had eaten my last Clif bar. The lighthouse keepers come back to mainland for similar reasons, I imagine.

As the sun got lower, we started seeing eagles wheeling across the sky. I saw the cliffs where I had biked earlier, my car parked in the lot.

Jarrett and I high-fived at the boat ramp. 21 miles on the water. No regrets.

Thankfully, the road hadn’t crumbled off the cliffs by the time it was time to drive back home.

Paddling into Dungeness Bay. The Olympic Mountains rise up to the left.

 

FURTHER READING

Mammoth finds around Port Angeles sources:

Who’da thunk it? Those crumbly cliffs around Sequim are full of mammoth parts!

A big find: Locals stumble upon mammoth molar on Sequim beach

http://www.burkemuseum.org/blog/mammoth-find-sequim

Feeder cliffs sources:

Clallam County, Washington is in the middle of updating its Shoreline Master Plan document. Much of the document is policy proposal (i.e. a prohibition against creosote treated pilings as seen at the Rayonier site.) The document also talks about how feeder cliffs work by depositing their erosion into the sea, which eventually helps build up sandy deposits like Dungeness Spit

http://www.clallam.net/LandUse/documents/CCSMP_dftSRP0213.pdf

Ediz Hook rebuilding sources:

This Peninsula Daily News article discusses the recent Army Corps of Engineers project of dumping cobbles onto the northwest side of Ediz Hook in order to shore up the hook against erosion. Come to think of it, this is exactly where I had struggled to land my kayak against the crashing seas on my recent Lyre River trip. A sandy beach would have been nice.

http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/rocky-additions-to-cut-ediz-hook-erosion/

The cobbles were only of many attempts to save Ediz Hook from erosion. This source reveals the $100,000 a year that the Army Corps of Engineers spent (as of 1995) to rebuild Ediz Hook. While the report points to the  Elwha River dams as one of the main reasons that the Hook is no longer rebuilding itself, it also points to the problem of shoreline armoring, which has prevented valuable cliff erosion from going into the sea and rebuilding.

https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=dC03AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA92

Information on the Rayonier superfund cleanup site:

This Peninsula Daily News article talked about the 20-year history of the Rayonier Mill as a Superfund site.

http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/rayonier-20-year-anniversary-sees-site-still-dormant-with-2026-as-cleanup-target/

I watched a screening for the film Memory of Fish a couple months ago. The film explores the decades fly fisherman Dick Goin spent on the Elwha River, the decline of the salmon that he watched over the years, and his push for dam removal on the Elwha River. Shortly before his death, he got to see the Glines Canyon dam come down. Goin was also a former Rayonier employee. The film explores his ambivalence about his role working for a company that polluted fish habitat.

http://www.thememoryoffish.com/#intro

Information on the New Dungeness Lighthouse:

If you want to live on a lighthouse for a while, the folks at New Dungeness would like to talk to you.

http://newdungenesslighthouse.com

Oh yeah, why is it called the New Dungeness lighthouse? Was the old one destroyed by a storm?

Nope? The old one is actually back in Dungeness, England. George Vancouver named the Dungeness Spit after Dungeness, England because it reminded him of back home. Thanks Wikipedia!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeness_Spit

A lot of stuff around the Northwest got named by or after Vancouver’s expedition. See Mount Baker, Mount Ranier, Puget Sound, Port Townsend, Discovery Bay, Protection Island, Vancouver Island, Whidbey Island…etc.

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Endurance

I was getting out of town, getting away from my computer and the onslaught of destructive news. I decided I needed to do something that hurt, because hurt is something that will be a part of our lives and it was good to get familiar with pain. It was good to practice gritting teeth.

Hurricane Ridge is over 5,000 feet above sea level in Port Angeles where I started — about an 18-mile ride.

I’d chalked Love Trumps Hate onto a sidewalk down below, and the small defiance felt shamefully unfamiliar to me. I have to practice that too.

Within two miles of climbing, I felt the sweat trickling out of my armpits. There was my faint nausea and the weakening in my legs. So soon?

Rain was falling, and soupy fog cut visibility down to a 100 feet.

The message that the red and blue maps had fed me was powerlessness. They spoke of circumstances, beyond control, someone pushing me down, of being tied up while a murderer goes out to commit atrocities. Like so many Americans, I craved feeling strength again.

Pushing past the weakness, I felt a second wave of energy. I knew I would. I wanted to somehow make the effort stand for something, to push against the gears or even turn back time. But I was just cycling up the hill.

Many seek the outdoors as a form of escapism, but I looked around and I saw responsibility instead. Never mind whether my legs would endure for the long climb ahead — how would everything else endure? Our country? The planet? My faith that good will triumph over evil?

The trees, ferns and wildlife around me weren’t disconnected from the unfolding crisis. Their realm is also threatened as global warming marches on, as strange weather patterns take hold and fire, flood and plague ravage the ancient ecosystems here. There is no escape for anyone on a planet connected by climate. A president who denies climate change is dire news for the sickening earth.

The lies of this election have been bad for this wild place. The politics of fear were no good for the stands of sitka spruce, because they put a man in office who couldn’t give a damn about trees. Inequality in America threatens the glaciers on Mount Olympus, because it enables corporate pillagers to cut the biggest piece of the pie and tell the workers they’ll get their slice after they drill more oil and dig more coal.

The legacy of racism was here too as I considered the logging, mining and damming that happened throughout this country after white settlers wrenched it out of the hands of native tribes. The protests at Standing Rock are one in a series of confrontations in which the people with the strongest ties to the land have defied the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to despoil it. Now their fight will be that much harder.

Those who have least in this country feel the most pain when the storm smashes through the levies, when the heat wave ravages the city, when the drought kills the crops, when mountaintop removal fills a valley or when companies are looking for cheap real-estate to bury waste.

When I think of the fight to stem the destruction of the planet, I think not only of the need to install more solar panels and windmills, but also to improve upon how we participate in democracy.

States like Maine, which have installed ranked choice voting on candidates, spell hope that voters can empower third parties without throwing their votes away. An end to Citizens United, would mean less corporate money going into the elections, so that the politicians aren’t financed by fat cats. It is also fair to take a hard look at the Electoral College and decide whether a resident in a rural state should have more voting power than someone in a city.  We need a stronger press with more articles that push back against climate denial and other fictions— not simply regurgitates a candidate’s talking points.

Journalists should candidates more than just token questions about climate change (after they’ve spent the bulk of a debate talking about the economy.) They should ask about the fact that we are in the midst of the largest mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs.

Voters need to realize that they are not separate from the fate of the biosphere that feeds us and gives us air to breath. They do have power to influence the future.

Yes, the crisis demands that we slap down new pipelines, deny coal ports on the west coast, terminate leases on federal land, but the battle is more than a battle against fossil-fuel corporations. We must look at ourselves too. We need to insert environmental responsibility into our personal code of ethics, and expect those who are close to us do the same.

Faced with a new government that is unlikely to take responsibility with the task at hand, individual responsibility is all the more important. Perhaps it is the greatest power we have left.

Taking such responsibility means people first acknowledge how our consumer-driven lifestyle has been trashing the planet. We should feel guilty when we turn the ignition in our cars to go somewhere that we could have reached by bus or bike. We should carefully consider vacation plans that involve flying around half the country or half the world, and probably reconsider for something closer. The planet would benefit if more people went vegetarian or vegan to reduce the amount of land it takes to support their existence. More local food. More gardens. Such proposals may sound draconian compared to the options that wealth and consumer goods have brought us, but if we are serious, these and more should absolutely be a part of the equation.

Nor are such decisions antithetical to the Pursuit of Happiness. Fulfilling this American dream absolutely means that the jobless and the disadvantaged should have access to healthcare, education and dignity. I do not, however, believe in reckless pursuit of bigger houses, larger cars and rooms full of consumer goods. In fact, this pursuit has led to more unhappiness, because of the debt, clutter and waste that comes with these things.

It’s better to focus on cultivating meaningful relationships, with friends and in the community. This idea recurs in several of the environmental books that I’ve been reading lately, from writers like Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben and in The Story of Stuff, by Annie Leonard.

Studies have shown that people have fewer close friends on average now than they did in earlier decades. Perhaps this is why we crave more things to fill our lives, and why we demand more comforts that come on the back of the environment. Such isolation can also explain why we feel less safe in our cities and have a hard time understanding those around us.

We know now that social media can provide some sustenance to our disconnected lives. It also promotes isolation and echo chambers where it’s easier to talk to someone from across the country than it is to talk with someone across the street. Trump has risen out of such divisions and from the distrust that we have for one another.

Too many of us live lives that value competition over cooperation, where the best throat cutter rises to the top. It is not the best model. Consider that Trump has cut plenty of throats to get to where he is. What else should his supporters expect he’ll do for them?

We must deal with this poisonous thinking.

We will connect, not just on Facebook, but in person, ready to offer emotional support now and ready to stand together later. “Join or Die” was one of the memorable mottoes of the American Revolution, and it is once again imperative that we follow this example, look past differences and unite ourselves. We should reestablish ties to those we are close with and dare to reach out to those that we don’t know so well. Such networks will help us support ourselves, provide a place for us to act with purpose and power and create strength to resist his policies.

On my climb to Hurricane Ridge, I pedaled alone, fighting my way up through the mists. If I pushed myself, it wouldn’t even matter if there were no views or that it was going to be a cold, wet, ride down. I knew that I did have strength I could use. I was not powerless.

I had made the climb alone and it was alone that I started down the winding road, squinting against the wind as I fell out of the mountains toward the town. There I would find others like me, still trying to understand their place and to decide what to do next. That was where there was the real work to do.

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A Sense of Style

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It is a quiet joy to see the flash of dress billow with her movements as she picks her way along the desert wash.

This is Utah.

The scale and severity of the landscape always halt me. Here are the ramparts of scorched red-rock, cutting me off from the table land. Here is the muddy Colorado, writhing between the canyon walls like some vast serpent. There lie the snow-topped mountains, half hidden in clouds. At my feet, a delicate flower emerges out of cactus thorns.

And then I must consider this extra splash of color, moving along the debris behind me.

I hadn’t seen LeAnn since November, and though we hadn’t officially been together for a while, I was thrilled when she agreed to join me on a trip to canyon country. Neither of us was seeing anyone at the time, and it is more fun to have a fellow traveller that you are in tune with.

By in tune, I don’t necessarily mean that we resonate at the same frequency — not exactly. LeAnn will wear dresses on the trail, talk about home health remedies, stop to coo over a toad that I’d practically stomped on because I was looking at the horizon, frequently calls me “The Old Man.”

I got the name because I tend to go on curmudgeonly rants about everything. It doesn’t take much to get me rolling about the insipidness of pop music, the shittyness of movies, the selfishness I see society encourage in people. The only thing missing is some heavy oaken cane for me to shake at the world in general disproval. The Old Man goes on rants, worries about safety, loses things, and dodders along the terrain, lost in thought.

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Put me in a North Face advertisement

No, there are plenty of differences between us two, but often these different frequencies find odd harmonies. Each of us sees and thinks differently than if we went out by ourselves. We do share the common goal of trying to find some measure of freedom and joy in nature.

The sense of freedom is what I enjoy about seeing LeAnn take to the trails in colorful dresses. Not much is sacrificed in terms of practicality here, excepting the occasional snag from a sagebrush or juniper branch, an added difficulty for boulder scrambles. But then, sometimes the way we do a thing is as important as the thing in itself. The rhythm of the swishing skirt makes a fine contrapunto to the desert music and somehow seems as vital as the gallon jugs of water that I’d filled earlier.

“Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution?” writes naturalist philosopher Edward Abbey, in his book Desert Solitaire. “I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy, there can be no courage and without courage all other virtues are useless.”

Abbey was talking about desert toads that reveal themselves to predators with their loud songs. The trait is seemingly maladaptive, but has value in attracting mates. Whether or not the toads appreciate their songs and find that they give meaning to their lives — I leave that question to toad scholars. What I don’t doubt is that we humans enrich ourselves when we can express what we are.

Expressing what we are sounds simple enough on paper. But when you are an Old Man, you see plenty of complications. Truth is one. It is no good to shout from the rooftop if you are shouting lies. But some people are so quick to respond or react to events that I can’t believe that they really know whether they are shouting truth, gibberish or something worse. There is also the need to make your mode of expression your own, not carrying someone else’s banner, retweeting some cliche, ignorant of what it actually stands for.

At least toads don’t have to worry about their sweet songs being co-opted into advertisements by a multinational corporation. Oh wait. Look at the beer shilling frogs in the ‘90s TV commercials. “Bud!” “Weis!” “Er!”

Expression is easy enough, but in order to make it into “self expression,” there needs to be some self involved, not just a collection of reactive impulses masquerading as a self.

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I’ll leave open the possibility that self can be enormously complicated, likely inextricable from the world around. One of the beautiful things about being human, is that we can take others’ ideas, (art, literature, conversation or whatever) process those ideas and make them our own. We can eat a banana without becoming a banana, but still benefit from the nutrients within. The same goes for how we process nature. We can commune with it, and process it on our own terms.

What I see with modern communication is that it throws so much information at us, much of it manipulative, that our internal processor is hard-pressed to keep up.  Internet access, social media, smart phones and corporate advertising beat at the doors to the self, pinging at us, pinging at us, dumping so much content that there is no time to it all absorb into self-ness. I picture a virus inserting a foreign strand of genetic code into our own identity. Suddenly, when we try to express our own ideas, we only have the tools to spew out more of the virus. And then the virus infects others. And revenue increases.

The hellish, confining nature of this system makes us long for something different, maybe a nice descent into addiction, or if that seems too extreme, a pleasant walk in nature, where we believe that we won’t hear the racket from the money-driven noise machine. Perhaps, in that place of contemplation, a clearer vision of the self will emerge.

But the advertisers and other purveyors of bullshit know how dangerous that is. When you run for the hills, they will be hot on your heels eager to subvert your desire for communion with nature into a desire to make purchases.

The purveyors tell you to snap your picture, tag yourself, and move on, making our interactions with the real world as superficial as they are in the virtual one. Perpetual distraction and dissatisfaction are good because they feed consumption and make dollars flow.

The purveyors take your warm feelings for natural beauty and redirect them into brand loyalty. They pervert the profile of Half Dome into the North Face logo; they repurpose the grandeur of El Capitan into Apple’s El Capitan operating system.

This year, Subaru clinched the title of “Sole automotive partner of the National Park Service’s Centennial”* Going to Yellowstone? Pollute it in a Subaru! 

“Our national parks embody an undeniable sense of freedom,” reads the opening to Budweiser’s partnership statement/branding opportunity with the Parks Service.*

New advertising policy put out by Parks director Jonathan Jarvis will soon allow even more opportunities for major park donors like Coca Cola, Humana, and REI to fly high their banners from from Acadia to Joshua Tree. **

If the idea of festooning a National Park with corporate logos leaves a bad taste in your mouth, consider the hordes of tourists who already walk those trails decked out in their shiny Arc’teryx shells, or paramilitary Under Armour tops to take selfies, cybernetic music blasting out of earbuds. There is expression here alright, but not self expression. It is hard to see any concept of selfhood in those who drape themselves in symbols that belong to others.

Because they have not bothered to craft their own identities, they grab all the more desperately for some T -shirt with a Jeep Grand Cherokee, or list of Tweety Bird witticisms. There’s are plenty of prefab identities available for you to buy. You can pick one one up for $15 at your local Wal Mart.

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And I’m not just picking on poor slobs who couldn’t afford the latest and greatest performance-wear.

Naturally, many of us begin to believe (but would never admit) that the more expensive the clothes we wrap ourselves in, the more value we accrue. Such walking retail advertisements have bought into a finer-crafted identity, with higher thread count and built in iPhone sleeve.

What seems especially crass to me about the omnipresence of corporate symbols in national parks, is that they remind me about the forces of money, still out there pillaging the environment I am now trying to enjoy. Even if they never get around to, say, fracking the Grand Canyon, human want, driven by relentless advertising, will ensure that there will be plenty of smog to go around, more bright lights, more pressure for billboards, helicopters and luxury lodging crowding out the natural world.

I shouldn’t let it get to me. I should just look at the canyons now. Watch the graceful eagle in flight — not the bro posturing in the camo Under Armour hoodie. Relax.

The problem is that this march of advertising, of posturing, self-important bullshit does not want me to not pay attention. It screams at me to see it, to read its words, to acknowledge its existence, when I came out here to acknowledge the existence of something far more subtle and profound. It is hard to hear truths whispering like leaves of grass when a car salesman screams into your other ear.

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And I do believe that many of us get so caught up in broadcasting ourselves (or rebroadcasting others) that we don’t spend enough time listening. We demand others see us and become addicted to their validation (some  run for president.) If validation is the best thing that comes from self-expression, then the matter of whether such expression is a true expression of the self becomes secondary.

Above all, I think that people who want to escape the grind should quiet down for a minute out there instead of bringing the grind and all its tedium into nature. See what it feels like to walk a mere hour without saying a word or without looking at a screen. Note what thoughts arise.

I’m not the first person to complain about what people wear, whether on the golf course or in the wilderness.

In Backwood’s Ethics by east coast naturalists Guy and Laura Waterman, the authors suggest that people who seek out nature should tone down their wardrobes. A neutral-colored tent is better than a flashy orange one, they argue. A bright-colored tent stands out over long distances, and draws attention to itself, clashing, instead of harmonizing with the outside environment. The argument resonated with me, even though I’d recently bought a pair of day-glo ski pants partly because, hey, they looked cool.

Even as one part of me nodded along with the Waterman’s curmudgeonly wisdom, I also thought about how many animals are as vain, or far vainer than the Eddie Bauer acolytes or North Facers who walk the trails.

If a male cardinal (the bird, not the clergymen) struts out on a branch in his finest red feathers, shouldn’t we call him out on his vanity? If he insists on chirping his song from the highest branches, why should he be less annoying than that dude with the pocket speaker system playing Top 40 singles near the waterfall? If the birds sing because of some reel imprinted in genetic memory, it’s all the more reason to disdain their unoriginality. The same goes for those loud toads Abbey mentions. They are just another pack of attention mongers.

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I’ll check myself before my argument becomes any more absurd. It is easier to acknowledge that there are times, when it is appropriate to call attention to ourselves in nature, just as there are times when it surely isn’t. Artists like Cristo and Jeanne-Claude who once erected thousands of orange gates to in Central Park, used a bold sense of style to complement the winter landscape, not diminish it.

We humans still rely on expression to project ourselves, sing ourselves, and build bonds between others of our kind. There is a time to shut up and let nature do the talking, and many people still need to learn how. Nonetheless, we humans are also entitled to do some talking of our own, especially if we are trying to express some understanding that we developed in the time that we shut up and listened.

LeAnn, who has taught me the names of many plants and animals, shown me wild edibles and explained the different life processes happening around me, has done plenty of listening to nature. She also understands, intuitively, the need for joy.  Joy is the expression that I see in the dress moving through the desert. I see it, and believe it is her own. I permit myself to enjoy it also.

Joy need not deny that terrible things happen in the world or that difficult times can test the very core of what we believe in ourselves. It is not the unobtainable idea of a flawless world as dreamed by an advertising exec.

The desert won’t tolerate such fantasies for much time. Just keep walking into the canyons and away from your car. See how long you can believe the comforting platitudes.

You’ll learn to step carefully, if you’re going to make it through alive. You’ll need to learn how many ways the desert can kill you and how indifferent it is to your fate.

But if you are going to live, you might also learn to take joy at finding an oasis to drink from or finding a succulent prickly pear to ea., You would do well to create some kind of narrative that gives a purpose to your survival efforts.

Sometimes life needs to shine forth, unafraid and unapologetic amidst the landscape, and even bright colors can complement the world around, not detract from it.

While the sight of corporate logos on the trail speaks to me of commodification, the sight of the bright dress on the trail speaks to me of freedom. It reinforces the fact that a landscape, which offers hardship, danger and privation, can also be a place of joy — if we rise to meet it.

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Links:

* http://findyourpark.com/partners

**https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/05/09/yosemite-national-park-brought-to-you-by-starbucks/

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Lessons in Snow Travel for Moose and Humans

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The moose moved through the deep powder in an awkward, bucking lurch.

There was nothing elegant in its stride, but it was movement, and that was what counted out here.

Stillness seemed to be the rule in this Rocky Mountain valley — its contoured architecture of snowdrifts, the pendulous gobs of powder hanging like oversized Christmas ornaments off the branches of the pines, frost feathers creeping out of aspen bark in minute increments, the stolid cliff walls rising above it all, going up to where the distant white monuments of Big Agnes and Mt. Zirkel shone indifferent to the blue sky.

Even though it was hardly a speck in my field of vision, the thrashing moose was a distinctive element against the otherwise quiet tableaux. No, the moose was not charging at me; It was merely crossing from one side of a frozen lake to another. I have no way of knowing if it was aware of my presence, though when I consider that I have seen moose stare at me with blank indifference, I doubt that my arrival was scary enough to spook one this time. Some other business…

The animal’s long, spindly legs were meant for exactly the kind of deep snow that lay in the valley. The long legs allowed its hooves to sink down to solid purchase while keeping the bulk of its frame above the surface. Even with this engineering, it still rocked up and down like a boat in rough water. No doubt, the moose was burning many of its hard-earned winter calories to get anywhere.

The skis on my feet were another way to get around in the snow, one with respective advantages and disadvantages.

I had spent the last couple hours figuring them out as I made my way up a drainage coming off the Elk River.

My backcountry Nordic skis were chattery on the packed trail, and badly wanted to backslide. When I cruised out into the powder, however, the ride smoothed. It was a slow, steady progress through the  foot or so of snow that lay above a stiff, crusty layer. Fallen trees that would have been no big deal on a summer hike became strategy problems that required me to take awkward, potentially compromising steps around sharp branches.

There was no elegant stride and glide here. I moved nothing like the way a track skier would tackle a groomed trail, more like a snow-shoer, taking big waffle-stomping steps. I got a little extra glide here and there when I got lucky.

I found a patch of sunlight in a clearing where I ate lunch, shed a jacket and attached climbing skins to the kick zones at the bottom of my skis.

The friction of these synthetic fibers gave my skis a better brake against gravity, allowing them to kick downward to glide upward. The skins not only helped with the inclines but added much needed purchase when I needed to get over dropped trees. The trade-off was that I had even less forward glide than before.

A band of willow shrubs marked the buried watercourse I was following. Here and there the moose and elk had gnawed at the young tips. I slid over their icy footprints as I climbed.

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Elk or moose tracks wind through some willow shrubs in a drainage area

Hunters, sliding on skis with animal skins attached to the bottoms, have pursued big game this way for millennia, traditions that live on in places like northwest China. Mark Jenkins accompanied one group that still uses skis to pursue elk, and wrote about his experience in a fascinating article for National Geographic: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/12/first-skiers/jenkins-text.

Because the skis gave the hunters the ability to float above the snow, they were able to chase an animal down to exhaustion, then attack at close quarters.

A 21st century vegan like me is unlikely to use such techniques anytime soon. I nonetheless respect the consideration and engineering that the ancient skiers used to conceive a tool that would enable them to master an environment that human bodies weren’t designed for. When human ingenuity took a seat in the designer’s chair, it came up with a myriad of different models, ways to make awkward bipeds as at home in the snow as an elk or snowshoe hare.

It may seem basic to modern skiers that their equipment consists of should use two skis of equal length, along with two poles, but there are old models where travelers used a long glide ski and a shorter kick ski covered with rough animal hide that enabled the skier to move around like a kid on a scooter. The hunters Jenkins travelled with used only one long wooden pole instead of two, and — going against everything I teach beginning skiers — they leaned backwards with it going downslope.

What matters most about technique is whether it works, and in the hunters’ case it did, refined through centuries of observation, practice and thought. Jenkins, an accomplished adventurer with a modern set of Telemark skis, had trouble keeping up.

 

As I went up the willow drainage, I wanted to approach my adventure with the hunters’ mindfulness of the environment, if not the horsehair skis and single wooden pole.

The snowy landscape forced me to consider questions: How I could get up a steep wooded slope without pointing the skis past the threshold where they would slide backward? Was it was worth the improved speed if I took the skins off in order to glide over a half-mile of flatlands before I came to the next incline? Would the skis catch slush beneath the snow if I travelled out onto the frozen lake? Would there be a slippery ice crust waiting on a south-facing slope?

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Frost feathers grow out of the north side of an aspen tree

The mental acrobatics would have been even more rigorous if I’d gone out on waxable skis*, which require the skiers to match the wax they use with the properties of the snow crystals so that they can get the best grip and glide.

All of these considerations are part of reading the language of snow. Reading snow means being able to travel over where the moose plunges through. It makes it possible to get far into the backcountry and come back safely and knowing when to expect ice on the slopes or where an avalanche is brewing.

Learning this language may not have seemed important to me when I needed to scrape said snow off the windshield of my car and rely on the internal combustion engine for transportation. Indeed, the language may not seem so important to anyone when once reliable snow recedes (like the moose) from places like New England, Minnesota and all but the highest mountains and the northernmost reaches of the continent. Knowing kick waxes is already about as relevant to most people as knowing how to chase an elk down in the powder.

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Contrail cuts across the sky. Who needs to know how to ride over snow when you can ride on air?

Given all the time and effort that human beings have put into perfecting skiing, it seems especially tragic to think that technology and climate change may someday render such knowledge irrelevant.

After the moose pond, I came to a steep ridge, impossible to ascend even in my climbing skins. Maybe, I could have pulled it off in snowshoes, the kind native tribes used for travel in North America. When I took my skis off, I found that I couldn’t climb the mountain; for each step I took up, I sank down exactly the same distance. It was time to get down from the hills.

I skied back inside my tracks. Only at the steepest sections did I veer into the unbroken powder to break speed. A couple days later, some friends were able to use the tracks I’d left on their own adventure. I hope we keep the trail broken all winter.

  •     The term “waxless skis,” in reference to the type of skis I was using, is a bit of a misnomer. Skiers in waxless skis still put glide wax at that tips and tails of these skis to boost speed. What makes these skis different from traditional waxable ones is that the waxless skis have scales or other groove patterns in the kick zone, an area beneath and in front of the ski boot. When the skier kicks down and back, the grooves stick in the snow and provide the friction needed to push off and move forward. Waxable skis also use glide wax at the tips and tails, but the kick zone is smooth and there is a stickier kick wax that goes there, also designed to stick into the snow.
    One advantage of waxable skis is that you can tweak the grip of the kick zone depending on how spiky or round the snow crystals are. A hard kick wax will work well on a cold day when the snow crystals have sharp points to drive into it. A softer wax becomes necessary not to slide backward as the temperature warms or the snow gets worn down — leading to rounder crystals that don’t like to stick into wax.
    If this sounds easy to screw up, it is. But, it appeals to the wonk in people the way many still enjoy the control that manual transmissions have over automatics (with an equivalent risk of stalling and grinding gears.) I had a bunch of “fun” playing around with my new pair of waxable skis in Minnesota last winter. I learned the importance of bringing extra kick wax on trips after I stripped out the bottoms of my skis five miles out from home and had to learn how to skate ski in order to get back.

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    Snow along the south fork of the Elk River exhibits some of the funky contortions and graceful shapes within the winter landscape.
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The Lazy Gardener and His Yield

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Fresh cherry tomatoes ripen on the vine within in my small garden

I’m not a huge fan of the caterpillar holes in my kale, the little green turds that the caterpillars leave, or the sight of their fat, green bodies crawling around the leaves as they chew out sections.

I pluck the leaves anyway, washing them thoroughly before I chop them into my stir-fry.

I’m such a half-assed gardener.

I take my bike out in the morning, peddling over to the greenhouse that my neighbor built, fill watering cans in the rain-barrels and wave them recklessly over the tumbled greenery. If I should cross an unlucky caterpillar, I’ll crush it between my fingers. I acknowledge the invasive Canada thistle and the inroads that it has made among the useful plants. I should take care of that before it gets out of hand. 

Two-thirds of the greenhouse is actually weeds. My neighbor, who set up most of the infrastructure I’m using, is taking a year off from organic farming so that he can catch up with other business commitments. I have commitments too: to work, to the ultra marathon training earlier this summer, as well as my  recreation and leisure time. The latter can be demanding.

Hence, I’d thought it wise not to try and take the entire greenhouse under my management. The weeds get their portion and I work to make a decent garden out of mine.

Maintaining a small empire allows me to improve on domestic policy rather than wage costly (in effort) foreign wars on the weeds outside my borders. I provide my subjects with water, pruning and some weeding and insect pulling. I tax them by harvesting their leaves and fruit.

I walk among the ranks of kale when I get back from work in the early evening.

If my garden were Dubai, the kale would be the oil coming out of the ground. It keeps on giving. I’d emptied out the entire packet of kale seeds at the start of the season when I figured that this would be the best way to make sure that something grew. Also, I don’t mind eating kale all the time. In fact, I eat it almost every night.

Behind the kale in productivity, I have my cherry tomatoes, which add color and panache to my cooking. The fruit grows in orange clusters — and I’m not just using the technical sense of the word when I call it fruit. It is deliciously sweet, the way an orange or apricot is sweet, but in its own tomato-y way. I’ll eat them off the vine, or put them in a stir-fry, leaving them whole in the frying pan to trap the flavor beneath the skin.

The peppers are small and few,  an occasional treat.  Small cantaloupes and muskmelons fatten on the vine.There were about a dozen ears of sweet corn also. Not the best yield by Monsanto’s standards, indeed not a  great yield for the standards a dedicated gardener, but for I’ll take what I have.

It can be hard to find the chance to tend garden when you live life on the move. Because I rent in this state, haven’t been here long, and plan to move again soon, it is hard to motivate myself to build soil beds, erect fences, or undertake any such long-range improvements that can only benefit me for one season.

If I stayed in one place, I could allow improvement to build upon improvement. The work put into bettering the soil one year can improve yields for years to come.

On the flip side, it is harder to build on success when you are starting over each season. There are the many hours of repeat work that goes into new fencing, new pots, new work clearing a plot of land for planting. The gardener who stays rooted in one place has more time to learn the challenges and character of the land.

The rooted gardner is also in a better position to comment about the changing environment. Such people have an investment to protect. They develop what naturalist Aldo Leopold describes as a “Land Ethic,” wherein farmers, hunters and gatherers learn to protect the land not only because they profit from it, but of the love they develop for it over time. That relationship drives them to stay and fight where others would look for new soil to dig up.

It is easy for rooted folks to distrust the drifter, someone who could chop down the family orchard for a quick buck, and move on to the next venture.

Now, more than ever, our money and our sense of gratification, move at light speed. A package from Amazon arrives far quicker than the time it takes a flower to become a fruit. We can reward ourselves with a thousand clicks online with less effort than it takes to cook dinner.

I realize, though I loathe admitting it, that this impatience is very much a part of me. Many times, when I was digging the ground or putting seeds in, I wondered if I would get distracted by something and let the garden fall by the wayside.

It was the sight of those first green shoots pushing up through the dirt that built my commitment. If I neglected the garden then, I would be failing the life that I had propagated. I needed to keep it around long enough so I could eat it.

One blessing I found in the garden, was that the plants I’d put in the ground had their own interest in being alive. As the plants began asserting themselves, I had less work to do. Perhaps, I had put the kale seedlings a little closer together than ideal for growth, but this helped crowd out the weeds.

And eventually, even my half-assed gardening yielded food, mostly the kale, which has come in fast enough so that I can eat it every night. And why not? It tastes great in stir-fry, it’s healthy, and a few bug holes don’t ruin it.

Fresh veggies are expensive here in Northeast Minnesota. Taking this one expensive item off my grocery list has saved me hundreds of dollars without compromising healthy eating.  The cherry tomatoes, which develop quicker than full-sized ones, are a nice investment too. If one cherry tomato goes bad, it’s far less of a loss, than if it had been a beefsteak.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t think about how much more the garden could have given if I’d put more time into it. The other day, I helped tend a garden at a nearby home where potatoes, beets and onions grew in abundance. Such root vegetables, seemed like a pretty good investment for a small amount of time.

I can look at that well-manicured garden and think, “good job,” reflecting that hard work was rewarded in kind by nice yields. Those fruits are worth more than mine, because they were tended with an abundance of love, focus and dedication.

My garden could be a parable of human failure, how our throwaway society has instilled in us the fallacy of expecting much reward for little work. But I am in no mood to expound upon the garden I don’t have. The treasures from the real  garden, however modest, motivate me better. It is a lazy yield, but it is my own. Therefore, I will take that bite of caterpillar-damaged kale, stir-fried with cherry tomato, and I’ll think, “Not bad.”

 

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Hitting the Meat

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That’s me going over the last rapid in the Cascade River before it empties into Lake Superior. Photo courtesy of Chuck and Sheila Noel.

 

I’m still afraid of going under.

That’s what I realized as I sat at the edge of a gravel bar in my new whitewater kayak, studying the rapid in front of me.

It was pretty straightforward. Shove off, hit the waves beneath the bridge, aim right, paddle like a lunatic as the nose of the kayak drops out, hit the standing wave and hope that it doesn’t tilt the boat over, leaving me thrashing in the icy water of Lake Superior.

This was the end of the line for the Cascade River just west of Grand Marais Minnesota. Immediately downstream of me was the bridge where Highway 61 passes over. It created a beautiful archway, a frame for Superior’s cold horizon, just a hundred yards away. Upstream were the real falls: 20+ foot drops that real life lunatics actually run. So what I was doing was kids’ stuff basically.

There were no rocks to dodge at the last minute, no undercut canyon walls or gnarly branches to get hung up on. The boiling piles of water might have flipped a boat, but weren’t going to recirculate me and drag me under.

Still,  my mind was haunted by a primal sense of unease, as I waited on shore, an unwillingness to accept that I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen, and I would have to let myself find out.

It was just like how Tom Petty sings it, in his lame-ass song: waiting is the hardest part.

So I shoved off and embraced the irrevocability of the current.

“Remember, that you are actually doing this,” I told myself.

The boat passed beneath the shadow of the bridge, waves slapped over the cockpit. I steered right to avoid the strongest part of the hydraulic at the bottom of the rapid, what we called “the meat” during my summer of rafting two years ago.

Then the yak tilted downward, and I paddled for what I was worth.

Chunk!

The wave came up against my boat. The nose plowed through. But then the rapid pulled a dirty wrestling move, twisting the boat and jerking me sideways in the current. I slapped the water with a low brace and came back up.

Gentle waves from the lake lapped up against my bow as I bobbed along the current. The river created a brownish path through the Superior’s blue waters. This was the tannic acid dissolved from fallen   pine needles and leaves. This also created the tiny dancing bubbles, which make me thirsty for a pint of nitro stout.

I spun my boat around to look at the churning brown maw of the rapid.

“Chicken,” it said. “You didn’t hit the meat.”

“I’ll show you.” I told the river. “I’m going down again, but it’ll be when I’m good and ready.”

The second run, I also avoided the meat. I hung entirely to the right this time and hit the wave at the bottom straight on. This time the rapid didn’t even come close to flipping me.

There was no excuse to not hit the meat now. I was prepared to flip and had brought a paddle float along to rescue myself if necessary.

The kayak, went over the edge again. I aimed at a glistening wave in the middle of the river, bumped over it and went down, following the triangular tongue of dark racing water to the center of the meat. The white boiling water raged up and now it was ride or die baby.

Wham!

This time the water slammed up to my chest. As I pulled out of the wave, the kayak did a wheelie. For a second I was worried that it was going to dump me backward, but again, the river god had mercy.

A couple of RV’ers on the river bank had seen it all go down, asked me if I wanted to do another run and get my picture taken. Well, playing to my vanity seldom fails.

The run went much the same as the previous one, only I tilted a bit at the end and had to brace myself against a flip. Having photo evidence from the couple was another nice plus and I was glad they were gracious enough to stick around.  Of course, I seem to remember the rapid looking bigger and more terrifying than that. Funny thing, memory.

Having hit the meat, I knew that I could sleep easier that night. But, I still had another thing to take care of: I hadn’t flipped yet.

I needed some more practice with my Eskimo Roll. I grimaced and turned turtle in the 38 degree water. I leaned back, snapped my hips and thrust my paddle down. I was about 80 percent of the way there, when I felt that fiend gravity pulling my back. It was then that I felt my paddle blade connect with the stony lake bottom. The tiny shove was enough to send me the rest of the way upright.

I sat there with a colossal brain freeze thinking about how the roll didn’t count, how I cheated and needed to do another one with better form. Then I needed to paddle straight back to the meat and fight it and flip, fight it and flip and fight it until I became a real whitewater kayaker.

I considered this, and then thought, maybe next time.

I was done for the day.

*******

You want to see what some real courage in a kayak looks like?

I was moved to hear about the recent Paddle in Seattle against the Shell Oil rig which is in port now. The rig is Alaska-bound with the blessing of the Obama presidency, which just made the shameful decision to approve Shell’s oil exploration in the Chukchi Sea — part of the Arctic Ocean.

Many others have pointed out the irony that there is a rush to drill oil in the Arctic Ocean as the ice caps have receded due to the global warming, which is a direct consequence of — hold it — oil drilling. But you knew that already. And you probably already know that oil has a nasty habit of spilling, like that time in the Gulf of Mexico, also in California most recently. Oil has spilled a lot these last couple years in the midst of the oil boom, and I’m sure no one will be surprised if it spills a bunch more times, destroying a few rivers, ecosystems and peoples’ livelihoods along the way.

So I’m just here to say that I, like you, think that this arctic oil drilling decision sucks. The stupidity of the decision, like so much policy these days is rooted in incredible short-term selfishness that fills me with despair.

And now, to everyone who had the courage to get into the boats, I want to say “thank you,” because you help me turn back some of that despair and because I think it is a responsibility of folks who love the outdoors (including me) to stand up for these important places and ultimately the planet that we live and breathe.

You took up that responsibility by getting out on the water and surrounding the rig, letting the world know that it wasn’t welcome in your harbor. Some would argue that this was just a gesture. And yet, even if that rig ends up despoiling habitat and contributing to climate change, it would have been far worse for it to gone off unchallenged with approval by default from citizens like you and me.

I wasn’t there with you, but I feel like you were there for me, and for that, I owe you one.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/paddle-in-seattle-protesters-gather-against-shell-oil-rig/

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Bottled Water Everywhere

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Plastic bottles wrapped in plastic. Absurdity.

Amidst the troubled backdrop of our planet’s state of violence, injustice and deepening environmental crises, it might seem trite to launch a diatribe against bottled water.

But what choice do I have? I’m the guy who stocks the fridge at work.

Perhaps one of these days I will have to stand before some tribunal as the prosecutor questions how I, how anyone with a conscience, could have allowed the crates full of bottles to roll off the truck and into the office. Further investigation will reveal how I regularly restocked the fridge downstairs so that resort guests could snag them (when clean, potable water was available from several nearby sinks) and eventually discard the plastic husks. Compounding this idiocy, many people will throw their bottles out half full.

“I was just doing my job,” I’ll protest, knowing in my heart that I was part of a senseless problem that didn’t need to exist.

 

OK, I really don’t want to explain why bottled water sucks because I feel like I’m not saying anything new. The verdict’s been settled year’s ago, and we’re all supposed to be drinking tap water from trendy (if pretentious) Nalgene bottles, aluminum flasks, that funky glassware I’m seeing in stores now, or some kind of goddamned reusable vessel. But all these people who keep swilling the bottles that I stock in the fridge, haven’t got the memo yet.

So here’s what they need to know:

 

Strike One!

Putting water in bottles is a stupid waste. The plastic comes from oil, so already the bottles support a polluting industry. Ironically, oil extraction comes at a heavy price in water, and the industry has a crappy track record when it comes to spills. Burst oil pipes have ruined people’s water along the Yellowstone River in Montana this month and back in 2011*. The next big oil bonanza, the Alberta tar sands, which so many of our beloved members of congress are so keen on shipping via the Keystone XL pipeline, has created its own health crisis. The indigenous people who rely on the Athabasca River** for its food and water, have suffered a huge risk of cancer cases, which studies have linked to leaks in the tar sands mining operations.

The Aqua Fina bastards actually have the gall to put “Eco-Fina” on the side of their bottles because they figured how to make the bottles with 30 percent less plastic. Sorry, but I’m not so impressed when 100 percent of those bottles shouldn’t exist.

Yes, plastic bottles are just one part of a vast web of petroleum-based products that our society has become dependent on. But while it may take some sacrifice to cut down on driving, turn back the thermostat or take the bus, it’s pretty easy to stop drinking out of bottles and start drinking out of the tap. Actually, it could save a bunch of money. Even if the drinking habit only costs a buck a day, that’s $365 down the toilet by the end of the year.

 

Strike Two!

Shipping bottled water is a stupid waste. Semis belching diesel fumes rumble along thousands of miles of highway so that a consumer in California can swig Poland Spring water from Maine (only some of it actually comes from the “Poland Spring, the rest we have no clue. ) *** Presumably the Californian has water available nearby, even if much of it goes toward keeping lawns green and the vineyards watered.

Normally it would be economic insanity to pay the gas to ship something as low-value as water across country. Unfortunately marketers are very good at assigning value where there isn’t much. “You’re not just drinking our water, you’re drinking our brand!” I can imagine some scummy ad-exec telling a boardroom. Hence the elongated, extra-wasteful bottles from Fiji (the name of the brand and, incredibly, where they ship water from.)

When I trundle one of the cases of water toward the fridge, I imagine the energy that it takes to haul this, multiplied over thousands of miles, the gallons of fuel burned into the the atmosphere, to provide a trivial convenience.

The companies have cashed in on this status value, paying themselves with something both unnecessary and harmful. If you’re like me, you might rankle at the idea of someone hoodwinking you into buying something you don’t need by convincing you it’s necessary. What’s next? Bottled air from British Columbia? Stay tuned.

 

Strike Three!

What the hell makes their water better? There have already been studies showing that bottling plants often have to abide by lower standards than city water systems. I’m not going to wade into each bottled water company’s processes, in part because I doubt many customers even consider what the processes mean either, but just assume that something in a comforting, plastic package is necessarily safer than whatever pours out of the sink.

For those who are convinced that the local water is really tainted, do they take the next logical step and stop using it to prepare meals, stop drinking soda at restaurants where it comes from syrup and tap water.

OK, so there’s no accounting for taste, and if you really don’t like the taste of your local water, you’ll probably just have to suck it up and keep drinking. Or get a filter if it comes to that. You probably don’t like the way some water tastes because you’re used to drinking the water you grew up with. Once you start drinking from the tap regularly, you’ll probably get a tolerance, in the same way that many people come around to the taste of coffee or cheap beer.

If your water explodes or is actually full of poisons, you might have to reach for a gallon jug sometime.

I doubt most Americans are in that situation — not yet. In fact, I’m sure many of the bottled water drinkers who visit the fridge I fill have heard something about how wasteful and destructive this habit is. They persist because ‘aw, what the hell?” Then they get into their Subaru’s tricked out with all the green and lefty political stickers, unaware that they debase what they claim to believe in, because they aren’t willing to make a sacrifice as tiny as drinking out of the sink.

We’ll have a chance of reversing the planet’s catastrophic course if we start making comprehensive changes to our personal habits, redefining our wants and needs so that we don’t take more than our share and we give back what we owe. There’s a lot of work to do, but maybe we can start by throwing down the fucking bottle.

 

* Un-fucking believable. When I was writing this blog post, I wanted to mention the 2011 spill. I did a web search for Yellowstone River oil spill and I found out that another disaster happened today. How long are we to keep destroying life and beauty for the conveniences that fossil fuel gives us in the short term.

 

** Check out this fine article in Outside Magazine: http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/The-High-Cost-of-Oil.html

Better yet, pick up a copy of This Changes Everything, the Naomi Klein book that came out in 2014, which talks about the cancer rates suffered in the community around the Tar Sands, and does an altogether excellent job explaining the various destructive pathways carved by the fossil fuel companies, and the toxic effect that unchecked capitalism has on our planet.

 

 

*** Mother Jones backs this up. MJ pressed Poland Spring’s PR guy to admit that only one third of the water in those bottles comes from “Poland Spring” in Maine. Personally I wouldn’t give a damn where the well was drilled. I’d rather have the water be a well nearby, or drink treated water from the abundant Lake Superior, which is right next to me. The article also underscores the lack of transparency that bottled water companies have when it comes to identifying where their water comes from. I suppose we should just take the companies at their word, because who’s heard of a company being dishonest to customers?

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/03/bottled-water-poland-spring-rubio

 

**** Here’s another source that has some damning numbers about bottled water:

Note that the author found a Columbia University study showing that water in a bottle costs 2,900 times more than what’s on tap.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100310/why-tap-water-is-better/