Fieldwork

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 The bottom of the bridge  used to be on the top of the  timbers you see stacked up  at the right of the photo. It  was a stout bridge, built in  the early 1970s, when the  Pacific Crest Trail was first  constructed. The timbers  spanning Lemah Creek at  this point were about fifty  feet long, and were flown in  by helicopter. 

The worst problem with this bridge were the poorly-designed hand rails. The weight of winter snows broke them, and we couldn’t figure out how to get the posts out of these funky brackets in order to replace them. That is no longer a problem since one of the wilderness rangers discovered the bridge missing in June. It’s as if a giant hand just picked it up and moved it. There was no sign of it, until I spotted one of the big stringers a half mile downstream at a lower trail crossing. It’s lying on its side on a gravel bar. 

Where could the rest of it be? What force of nature would tear it from its abutments and scatter it in pieces downstream? Avalanche? Flood? Logjam? 

One of these days we will have to think about how to replace it. For now, there’s a detour that horses and riders can use. Hikers can climb down to the creek and teeter their way across balanced on rocks and a couple old planks.

 After nearly two months of restrictions,  it was time to see if I can still get out  there. 

 Yes, I can still do it. The feet and legs  can carry the rest of me, the heart  works well enough to power the body  through the woods. It is coming home  to walk in these mountains.

 It was the annual trail crew visit to the  campsite at Lemah Meadow, to work on  the Pacific Crest Trail from Spectacle  Divide to Solo Tarn. The distance is just  over eleven miles, but it takes four days  to get to camp, cut the logs across the  trail and make  other repairs, then pack up and go back. We could spend a lot more time there cutting the huckleberry, cascade azalea, and vine maple that grows in profusion. But four days of Lemah is about all anybody can take. 

It’s a gorgeous place, but I used to get the heebie-jeebies before a hitch. Stuff happens out there. It rains for days, tents fill up with water. The mosquitos are just about unbearable. There was the year of the bald-faced hornets. There was the year of the forgotten hose to the propane stove. There was the time mice flung themselves against the nylon of Jon’s tent half the night. There has been trail crew suffering, the cutting of brush up on the hot switchbacks. The 17 mile hikes and trudging back into camp at dark. I could go on.

This time it was thunderstorms. The humidity rarely dropped below 50%, which is very muggy for here. Afternoon temperatures got into the high 80s. We could see the storms building right over us. On Tuesday, the sky started grumbling at about 2 pm. We heard Red Top Lookout call in the first smoke to the east. Then Thorp Mountain Lookout was calling in smokes. Thunder and lightning all around. Where was the rain, I wondered. Since we were at Lemah, we would have to get wet. It came in time for the commute back to camp, highlighting the fact that we had not been able to cut enough of the brush back to keep our pants and boots from soaking through. 

Lemah Creek is glacier-fed and very cold. In the evenings, and after a rain, mist rises up from the water. Water condenses above the surface because of the sudden change in temperature between the cold water and warm air. That’s the scientific explanation, but it looks quite magical.

I know that wet hiking boots, clouds of obnoxious black flies with pointy butts and a desire to bite my flesh, and profuse sweating will not cause lasting harm. The memory of swinging a brush whip for 1300 feet until my wrists are screaming fades. Instead I have the song of the Swainson’s thrush as I fall asleep, the sound of the creek, the color of ferns, the golden eyes of a frog that watches me pass on the trail, the satisfaction of running a well-tuned crosscut saw through a green log with an experienced colleague opposite me, the delighted smile of the hiker who is searching for the lost hat I have found and am carrying in my hand.

I have remembered where I belong, and I can still get there under my own power.

 The best early tomato for this part of  the world that I have found is ‘Stupice’  (stu-PEACH-ka). Bred in the former  Czechoslovakia, the moderate-sized  plant produces small salad-ready fruits  by mid-July. It will bear until frost. This  is the third or fourth season I’ve grown  it, and it is reliable even through our  long cool early summers.

 My other tomato plants have green  fruits and yellow blossoms. The next  one to ripen will be ‘Quick Pick’, which  has larger fruits. I am also growing my  favorite ‘Garden Peach’, a yellow  heirloom, and ‘Chadwick Cherry’. New to  me this year are ‘Fantastic’, ‘Momotaro’, and ‘Gill’s All Purpose’. August and September will be prime tomato eating time. All I have to do now is keep them watered.

Late July: heat and thunderstorms; shooting stars in the night sky; blackberries ripening; green beans climbing their strings in the garden; fresh corn and nectarines showing up at the fruit stand.

 I looked this up: Ponderosa pines were  first described by Lewis and Clark in  1804. The botanist David Douglas gave  them the name “ponderosa” in  recognition of their great size.

 It’s hard to find really big ones these  days. In this part of the country, they  were cut down and made into mine  timbers and apple boxes. The big old  trees can live up to 600 years. That why  I call them slow pines…because they  grow ponderously slow and get quite large if they are  left alone. They also take on character,  twisting and spiralling, or swaying out in  a curve.

The six inch long needles grow in bunches of three. The bark of mature trees is cinnamon-colored,and grows in layered plates shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces. This bark can become very thick, which helps the trees withstand low intensity ground fires. On sunny days they give off a sweet pitchy scent. Some people say it smells like vanilla, but I don’t think so. It smells like warm growing pine tree. There’s nothing like it.

 It’s getting serious now.  Food Frenzy 2009 has  officially started. It’s  innocent enough in the  beginning: a few radishes,  some fresh lettuce leaves.  Then the strawberries get  ripe, and the early lettuce  starts to bolt. Then I’m  putting sugar snap peas in  everything, and I still have  lots. So I fix some for the freezer, along with rhubarb sauce. I’m giving produce away to friends and neighbors. Every trip to the farmers market and fruit stand has me hauling fresh food home. I’ve been drying cherries and apricots. The fruit stand lady didn’t have to try very hard to convince me that I needed some broccoli to blanch and freeze today.

I still have canned fruit from last year. There’s just one of me. It’s not like I’m feeding a family. This food preservation problem of mine originates with how I was raised. You grow a garden, you eat out of it, you can and freeze. Fresh local food tastes really good. But it also feels like some hard-wired Stone Age hunter-gatherer-saver thing down in my reptile brain. Gotta find food, gotta preserve it for winter. I watch ants going about their business, and squirrels in the fall. I understand, because I have it too.

 I’ve been working on Table  Mountain. It’s a sort of  island—a basalt cap lifted  up off the valley floor, and  separated from the rest of  the world by deep canyons.  The road to the top goes  through distinct plant  communities: from  grassland to open  ponderosa pine forest, to  mixed conifers, and finally to the subalpine zone above 6000 feet.  I like it best on top. It’s a little bit like being dropped down into Yellowstone National Park, with extensive lodgepole pine stands, meadows, and fairly rolling terrain. You can see forever from up there: Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adams, the North Cascades, and east to the Columbia Basin.

In the nearly twenty years that I’ve been hiking on Table Mountain, I’ve been able to observe changes. Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), is considered a seral species, meaning that it comes in after a disturbance such as a fire. The trees require lots of sunlight and grow fast. The stands are usually even-aged, having all gotten started at the same time. They rarely live longer than 300 years, usually less. The fact that Table Mountain is blanketed with lodgepole pines tells me that it probably all burned at one time. The changes I notice are that there are more lodgepoles across the trails, and tops snapped off during the winter storms. There are more subalpine firs and engelmann spruces coming up from below. These species don’t mind growing in the shade of taller trees. Trails that used to feel open now feel a little more claustrophobic and tight as the young trees encroach.

Every summer I look at the dead pines piling up on the forest floor and wonder if maybe this is the year that some of it will burn? Change is inevitable in the woods; the only unknowns are what shape it will take and when it will happen.

 Freedom from hunger,  homelessness, fear,  persecution.

 Freedom to go in the house  when the banging, booming  and whistling in our  neighborhood got loud after  dark last night.

 Freedom to loaf around. To  go visit friends, and choose  one of our many local rivers  to cool off in. Climbing out of the water and sitting on sun-heated rocks while our skin dried. Watching the dipper birds streak up and downstream a few inches above the surface of the river. Watching the cottonwood leaves flutter and flicker.

Midsummer! Starts getting light before 4 a.m. and stays light till after 10 p.m. The mosquitos are out and the nighthawks are back. Cherries are ripe. Baby birds are falling out of their nests, and any interested opportunistic cat knows this.

 Sometimes all I have to do is  step outside to do  fieldwork. Today the spirea  bushes are full of  bumblebees. My field guide  to Pacific Northwest insects  lists only two native  bumblebees, but I’m sure  there are more than that.  The genus name is Bombus,  which strikes me as just  right for these rotund furry  creatures. They root around  in the flowers with an intense single-minded focus. It’s nearly impossible to interrupt them. If I look closely, I can see the pollen sacs on their legs. They also like the catmint (Nepeta sp.), which blooms all summer. Honeybees prefer the catmint right now too. Someone near here has a couple hives at the edge of the woods, so honeybees can usually be found in my garden. When I went around to all the flowers, I noticed a variety of pollinators. Bees are most common, but there were also some fly-like insects, and crawling insects. Sometimes a swallowtail butterfly floats through.

I’ve read that native bees are in trouble around the world, but I see lots of them at home and in the woods. This area has a wide variety of plant communities and habitats. I wonder if that helps the bees.