Whychus Canyon on Earth Day 2013

Tags

Deschutes Land Trust, Earth Day, nature, Whychus Canyon Preserve

Hi all,

Whychus Canyon – near Sisters, Oregon

My guest blog of a hike through Whychus Canyon Preserve on Earth Day was posted this morning on the Deschutes Land Trust’s blog.

It was Monday morning, Earth Day, and my husband, Chuck Logsdon, and I were driving from Bend toward Sisters, first on Highway 20 then, after a few turns, on gravel roads through juniper woodlands to a small parking area tucked into the trees for an Earth Day hike. Our leader, Mary Crow, and co-leader, Ginny Elliott, were visiting with the early arrivals. . . .  

. . . Earth Day is a day of education and action and walking through a nature preserve allows time to consider scenarios of change and protection. Mary asked us to think about what we could do for the earth, a theme that she clearly carries with her every day. She reached into the back of her car and brought out a kitchen scrub brush, explaining the importance of cleaning our boots after hiking so we don’t accidentally carry seeds to the next place we visit. . . .

Please visit the Deschutes Land Trust blog to read my entire post: A Hike through Whychus Canyon Preserve–Earth Day 2013

Book Review of ‘Deep Landscape Turning’ by Ann Hutt Browning

Tags

landscape, poetry

This morning in my e-mail I found messages from my friends that let me know my review of Ann Hutt Browning’s book of poetry Deep Landscape Turning was up on Rattle.com.

Holly Hughes, co-author of The Pen and the Bell wrote:

“Wonderful review, Katie. You really made me want to read this collection—what a good review should do. So poignant that it’s Browning’s first and last collection, too, so it’s a good tribute to her, too. I’ll use some of her poems in my poetry of witness class—thanks again for alerting me to her good work.”

Anita Sullivan, Airlie Press:

“What a delight to see your name at the top of the review of Ann Hutt Browning’s ‘Deep Landscape Turning.’ Terrific review! I especially like how you admitted at the end that you had mis-read some of her poems, or at least not read them deeply enough. . . .“

An aside on stubbornness: I submitted this review to Rattle for the first time last fall and the second time in January. In between, it was rejected for not having enough conviction. When I received the rejection, my first reaction was to abandon the review but, re-reading Browning’s book, I still found the poems very interesting and evocative. I rewrote the review.

The first paragraph of my review of Deep Landscape Turning by Ann Hutt Browning:

Even on a second—and third—reading of Deep Landscape Turning, I am sucked into Ann Hutt Browning’s vision, and can enjoy another romp through poems of youth and death, love and politics, travel, and a daughter chronicling her flawed father. . . . I see disintegrated family relations in the letter (a poem) from an English aunt . . . but then also a closeness between husband and wife. In “Soliloquy And Near-Soliloquy,” the husband speaks alone on the porch . . . [read the entire review on Rattle.com]

Permalink: http://www.rattle.com/poetry/2013/04/deep-landscape-turning-by-ann-hutt-browning/

Procrastination, Deletions, and Questions of Intent

Tags

Alaska, clouds, creativity, deletions, essays, glaciers, golf, Gray Butte, holes, ice, imagination, intent, Knik River, landscape, Matanuska River, mud flats, navigation, Oregon, procrastination, Thompson Pass, tunnels, writing

Blue hole. Matanuska Glacier. Alaska.

Recently I read an article about procrastination. The premise was that determined procrastinators can be very productive because of what they accomplish otherwise, when procrastinating. This could be true. Rather than working on an essay, I compiled this post.

I say “compiled” instead of “wrote” because when I revise an essay I delete and rewrite but the deleted chunks don’t just vanish. I save them into a document ‘deletions’ like hardware leftover from assembling furniture bought in a box. Maybe useful. Maybe not.

Instead of working on the essay, Imagining Landscapes, I read ‘deletions’, trolling for questions of importance and looking for a sentence or paragraph I mistakenly cut. Something illuminating, evoking the sense of place or experience, such as

A distant view makes things seem simple.
A wrinkled landscape challenges our imagination. 

View to the west from Gray Butte. Oregon.

Driving across the bridges over the Knik River, glance to the west at the silvery channels. In the distance, Mount Susitna’s gleaming flanks. Below, on the mud flats (not sand bars), a tree lodges, smooth as a sculpture, roots clawed into the sticky silt. 

Matanuska River channel. Upriver from the Knik River bridges. Stones not mud. Alaska.

A well is a hole in the land. The well we had was cased with a narrow pipe. The pump a tube suspended deep in the hole. Once wells were dug by hand, wide enough to reflect the moon. Place is also space. Open space. Cleared space. Inhabited space. Consider holes in space. Where would you go if you fell in? Into a black hole? How can a hole be anything but black? Some holes are deep like wells. Others have very little depth, like voids in clothing or leaves. 

. . . through a chewed leaf. Fireweed. Alaska.

Descending the slight incline of a jetway. Fairbanks in January, warm and heated. Juneau in December, a refrigerated tunnel. Fuselage a tunnel through space. Uncomfortable, but enter in one place, sit tight and (then) exit somewhere else. From an aerial view, the continuity of moving across landscape vanishes. Cannot peer into living room windows like from a train. From inside the jetliner, only the overview view. Clouds. Ocean. Blue islands. White mountains. Ice. Glaciers stretched taut, the tuning pegs tightened.  

Near Thompson Pass. Alaska.

Returning to the essay, Imagining Landscapes, I notice the sentence:

I am drawn to incongruities within the landscape but when I find something meriting scrutiny, I wonder whether what interests me is predictable or, like spring weather, utterly changeable?

Ice golf. Hole-in-one? Or ultimate sand trap?

Cheers, all.

. . . now, back to revising the essay.

Winter visit to Crater Lake (Oregon)

Tags

Crater Lake National Park, Mount Mazama, nature, Oregon, snow, winter

Crater Lake. March 29, 2013.

Walking on snowshoes, the snow held us seven feet above the ground and we looked down a thousand feet at Crater Lake, the lake mirroring a sky full of puffy clouds.

The hard-packed trail veered away from the rim into the trees, tall evergreens, hemlocks mostly. A skier stopped. He wore a backpack and red-and-white ski patrol patch on his jacket. He asked how far we were going, looking like he might wish we were heading back rather than out so near the end of the day. He said, “it’s a mile to Discovery Point, the next good overlook.” We continued on but soon turned back, already tired from the effort of snowshoeing at 7100 feet where the air is thinner than we’re used to.

The Friends of Crater Lake National Park staffs the visitors center at the south rim during the winter. Chuck and I volunteered at the visitors center for the last three days in March. We learned stories and information about Crater Lake and talked to visitors about the lake and the Park.

Seven thousand years ago (approximately), Mount Mazama, a twelve thousand foot tall volcano, erupted. The eruption—a hundred times worse than Mount St. Helens’ eruption in 1980—caused a massive collapse and formation of the crater we call Crater Lake.

The lake is 1,943 feet deep. No rivers flow into or out of Crater Lake so the water level is maintained by precipitation—rain, snow, and snowmelt—and the porosity in certain layers keeps the lake from overfilling. Crater Lake is remarkably clear and there are fish, Rainbow trout and land-locked salmon called Kokanee, that were first introduced in 1888, having been carried up the mountain in buckets.

William Gladstone Steel. “The Mountains of Oregon” (1890).

Crater Lake, South Rim parking lot.

From my journal, three days at Crater Lake in 2013:

March 29:

Clear skies and layers of puffy clouds to the north—
a desert sky over a snowy landscape at least two months ahead of summer.

March 30:

Thin ice on Crater Lake. March 30, 2013

Blue skies. The “bluebird day” we desired. Early morning scrim of ice is rare, even after the coldest winter nights. The temperature was 33 degrees and we speculated the lake was colder and that the lack of wind let ice form.

March 31:

Clouds, even though we hoped for clearing. Wind riffled the lake. At the opposite rim, four or five miles away, the water was a steely matte. Without reflections, the walls appeared only half as high as before.

Still a clear view of craggy Mount Thielsen.

Mountains west of Crater Lake. March 31, 2013.

As an elbow of clouds draped the peaks to the west, I went outside the Visitors Center, to the rim, to photograph the lake and cloud front. There was an aura of pilgrimage, that an out-of-the-way destination had been reached. Visitors clambered up the snowy ramp and marveled at the caldera-contained lake. They took pictures of the lake and themselves, their family and friends. There were no food carts or coffee kiosks (although you could buy lunch in the cafe) and regarding the ubiquity of towers—wind turbines, telecomm antennas—there were no towers.

Evening, south rim of Crater Lake. March 31, 2013.

A short time later, inside the third-floor visitor center with snow accumulated nearly to the windows, I looked out and saw nothing but the creamy opacity of clouds. All afternoon, a dense fog lingered and disappointed visitors asked, “which way is the lake?”

. . .

Later in the evening, I checked the web cam which dimly showed the lake. We again drove three miles up the winding road, hoping for one more view of the lake. The parking lot was empty and the silence profound. Tromping to the rope line that marked the edge overlooking Crater Lake, I suspected the web cam could “see” better than we could through the clouds.

Wizard Island in fog. March 31, 2013.

We waited, in silence and mist, figuring we’d been fooled by the web cam picture, but then the clouds shifted, exposing Wizard Island’s snowy cinder cone and, for a moment, a soft view of the far rim.

____________

More info & links:

Most of the five hundred thousand visitors each year come to Crater Lake National Park in the summer when the Rim Drive and the North Entrance are open. In winter, you’ll see fewer people and a lot of snow but you can only drive to the south rim Visitors Center. To travel farther you’ll need skis or snowshoes. The gift shop rents snowshoes (or bring your own), or sign up ahead of time for a ranger-led snowshoe hike (in which case the snowshoes are provided). In the winter, no park entrance fee is charged.

. . .

US Geological Service: Mount Mazama Volcano and Crater Lake Caldera, Oregon.

Wikipedia: Mount Mazama

Crater Lake National Park: Frequently Asked Questions

Friends of Crater Lake National Park

More on the fish in Crater Lake: The Crater Lake Institute

“Crater Lake” (pages 12-72) in The Mountains of Oregon. William Gladstone Steel. 1890.

Poems in Elohi Gadugi Journal

Tags

Alaska, Arctic, climate change, Elohi Gadugi Journal, forests, Greenland, Iceland, nature, poems, Students On Ice

The online journal Elohi Gadugi accepted four of my poems for the Spring 2013 theme issue “Root & Branch.” Each poem has a backstory, something that sticks with me so I begin writing. Two of the poems arose from my experience traveling with Students On Ice:*

Greenland fjord with the Students On Ice Arctic Expedition. July 31, 2011.

Deconstructing Forests begins with a view from the bus window crossing Iceland.

Where Is The Nobility In Accidental Death? begins with a glacial fjord in Greenland that is close enough to touch.

Before moving to Oregon I lived in Alaska for years, decades, actually. Plenty of time to observe seasonal changes and ask: Is Nature Enough? 

Sometimes poems come from a good story. Sometimes a good story arises after a bad storm, or a mega-storm that came suddenly and without warning: The Storm—Aftermath is based on a story my mom told me.

Links:

http://egjournal.org/issue/spring-2013/article/deconstructing-forests/

http://egjournal.org/issue/spring-2013/article/is-nature-enough/

http://egjournal.org/issue/spring-2013/article/the-storm-aftermath/

http://egjournal.org/issue/spring-2013/article/where-is-the-nobility-in-accidental-death/

_____________

Notes

*Students On Ice, is a Canadian organization focused on education of high school students about the Arctic environment, science, culture, and climate change. In late July 2011, we departed from Toronto on a night flight to Reykjavik—over forty scientists, artists, Inuit educators, adventurers, gun-bearers, researchers, writers and poets, and seventy-five very enthusiastic students from seventeen countries. Nearly three weeks later, we had crossed Iceland (by bus) and voyaged by ship to Greenland, Labrador, and Nunavik.