Five Hours 6-19-24

 6-19-24 POBR


Blowing away mosquitoes while I warm up from a cold shower. Today I sat and sat until my sciatic nerve pinched, the most downtime we’ve had all 4 days. It was a five-hour curve shot from Bird Creek and now we are stationed in Crane Prairie. I remember nothing - waking up, I remember waking up. The trees shifting from dense full-grown trees to even denser young trees accompanied by their chaperones. I realized that once again I had no clue where I was, and yet I was ecstatic enough to start up conversation. As fun as it is for me to talk decolonization, my most memorable moment from today was walking with Sandy to a dock and feasting our eyes on The Three Sisters: the guardians of the forest. Our stomachs full, we rushed our chores and ran to the campground shower. The maintenance man saw us rushing in, and turned around in compliance of our tardiness. 



From The Drive Down

(Graphite drawing of a road with trees surrounding it)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beaver People 6-17-24

Image
  6-17-24 POBR Today reminds me of the hill I climb when I’m on my way to Cowiche so I can “give myself a challenge.” It's always a precursor to the severity of the journey ahead. The feeling of pure exhaustion, only to realize that the hill is a terrace. The fire kept their hands warm but I was warmed just by the idea that the fire hadn’t stopped. A kiss to the river and off on the road to another unknown location. It's not like that information wasn't fed to me over and over, I just simply love the idea of not knowing where I am and having trust that the path is guided. After we met our gracious hosts, they taught us how to build beaver dams. Jeanette Burkhardt and Gerard Foley were our lead beavers choppin' and chewin' through the day like it was a soft cottonwood. Nothing was soft about the trees we had to haul though. Come to find out, the logs were extra dense and extra thin. The rocks real scarce and the foliage a pain, were tough to pack in the dams to diver
Read more

Intuitive Geology 6-23-24

Image
  6-23-24 POBR Our day started off early as ever and with a slap of cold air on the back. I find comfort sitting in the back seat, squished between Ilene and Virginia, I think we all find a bit of comfort. As Dr. Black stated, “They are conditioned to instant slumber.” Our expedition began at the cobble stone plains where we learned to use our hammers and how to identify the rocks we were indulging in. Our second stop was Brennan Van Alderwerelt‘s first of many story times; this one was the scientific tale of Mt. Mazama’s eruption told by the Klamath tribe of Oregon. Truly a beautiful representation of Indigenous interaction with nature, Brennan continuously circled back to engaging with geology in an intuitive way that he swears the Indigenous peoples must have known through tradition and passed down knowledge. Come to find out most of our horizon has been affected by the collision of tectonic plates that created the Cascades. That includes The Painted Hills, the balding hills, the co
Read more

Pumice Moonwort 6-21-24

Image
  6-21-24  POBR Warm water on a cold morning blesses the hands of the dishwasher. Today’s adventure was in service of the Forest Service and our mission: locate the elusive Pumice Moonwort of the Pumice High Desert. I asked the Pumice Steward why. Marlo Fisher replied with a, "No clue,"; it's truly the appendix of Mahogany Butte but its recent disappearance is a sign of an imbalance in the ecosystem. To further understand the minuscule world and the forces that govern our giant-infested landscape, we went to work on our water samples. To test water, one must be one with water, so we went to our friend Joy Rochester's house to shower. A can of sparkling water down the gullet transported me to the lake of Crane Prairie. She offered her life force and gifted us a grand view of The Three Sisters. The agar plates containing our previous bio-samples were distributed to become subjects of our microbiology experiment. A surprisingly simple process revealed our gram-negative b
Read more