Your Favorite River

On the spine of the city, the tower welcomes the fog.

Wherever you go in the city, it has a way of appearing between the trees.

SF residents passionately fought against its construction half a century ago, but now the strange-looking tower is a familiar part of the skyline.

Beyond the ridge, the ocean glows silver.

Cornel West once said that living in contemporary America is like watching the holocaust from a rollercoaster at disneyland. Life in San Francisco certainly captures that sentiment. But it remains a uniquely beautiful place, even in the midst of late capitalism.

I’ve gotten used to dealing with city traffic jams.

There’s something quietly pleasant in being an anonymous person getting off the commuter train in winter’s darkness and fog.

I try to fit in with the urban sophisticates while remaining true to the values of my greater Haight Street neighborhood.

One nice thing about this city is there are abundant wild places, even if some of them have no historical analogue on this continent.

Others have been here a long time.

The hills are full of gardens.

It’sis an ever-rolling tide of bloom and decay.

Lotta mountains between Davis and Missoula. Between them, sagebrush flats. Juniper and pinyon rising into yellow pine. Larch and fir. Creekside meadows where false hellebore roars. All the aspen too. Serviceberry.

The peak of spring, late May, everything in shades of green and blooming. These dry lands seem not so harsh. You could get by here. The bears seem to.

Through the mountains of Nevada and Utah. Every range is different, each separated by miles of sagebrush.

 

Missoula has some of the best dandelions I’ve ever seen. Saturday nights, contra dances rage.

If you need me, I’ll be by down by the creek.

 

California’s oak woodlands are expansive and luxurious. The sort of picturesque, pastoral savannas that Midwestern restoration ecologists can only dream of. (Easterners get more turtles, though, so there is some cosmic balance.) Somehow, despite all global change pressures and the ominous, sprawling tentacles of vineyard monoculture, many of our oak lands have survived thus far, at least in some parts of the state. And lovely places they are.

In the upper reaches of the Cache Creek watershed, the oaks are still in the tender spring-green leaf-out phase on the Ides of April.

Why do California oak woodlands retain their stature, while the Midwestern savannas have almost all been subsumed into either fescue pastures or densified woodlots? Does the summer drought of the Mediterranean climate discourage woody competitors?

Within the oak landscapes, there are smaller landscapes.

Where the air is good, there are lichens on every oak twig. Usually “unseen, unread…making a world they could live in.”

Beyond the oaks, on harsher soils, endless shrublands thrive, interrupted only here and there by ghost pines.

 

Over the long Wisconsin winters–as the sheets of ice on the lakes showed no signs of retreating and the north wind whistled past the house into the barren chicken yard–I would jealously watch accounts of California wildflowers coming into bloom. To be out there, in the promised land of warmth and floral diversity.

Things change, and this year I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time for a rare, spectacular spring bloom in the deserts of SoCal.

I arrived in Anza Borrego at dusk and made camp.  Woke up in this field of sand verbena and evening primrose.

Anything that can seemed to be blooming, including the shrubs and cacti.

Mimulus bigloveii just before sunset.

Brown-eyed evening primrose carpet in early morning light.

There’s a lot of pollen out there.

Each canyon seems to have a different flora.

Carpet of Boraginaceae

It was sweet. It was juicy. A rare treasure, invaluable in the right time and place.

But then it was left to rot in the gutter. In the rain and cold. Get run over by an old chevy SUV with a loose serpentine belt squealing into the driveway. JR on his way back from working the night shift. To be fair, he’s tired. Doesn’t even hear that succulent pop as the rear tire macerates the glowing sphere into gooey pulp.

All over town, you see it. Abandoned love. As Pema Chodron said something like, too much a good thing is not so good anymore, is it, suckas?

But they are good. Oh, the townies poo-poo the street trees. Not even worth trying, just a hassle to clear them off the walk. If it ain’t snow it’s citrus.

My sampling indicates they are usually most excellent. A few, sour, but still good squeezed with tequila. And most, ever-so-sweet, better than you can do at the store. Fine enough that you might, on a circuitous journey home from a night on the town, lift a comrade onto your shoulders to pick from a known good tree, and slurp the gooey goodness there on the aslphalt outside the lumberyard, under faint city stars.

The perishing republic shines and fades. Tis no different than the endless blackberries rotting along I-5 in western Washington, a fight we gave up centuries ago.

Despite our earnest rudderings towards the horizon, are we not all tragically immersed in the ebb and flow  of the universe? And does it come as any surprise that, blinded by abundance and starvation, some hoard resources far beyond what they can use, or discard those which are good? Are we not all so guilty, perhaps, at times?

For that matter, zygomycetes* need homes too.

*molds that grow on dog poop, or sometimes fruit

The paradox of a mediterranean climate, as in the Central Valley: summers are the dead season, barren and brown. Plant skeletons lie as thatch across the baking landscapes after seeds are long-dispersed. But the landscape greens again in fall as the rains come. Mid-winter brings blooms. A few brief months of life before everything dries up again.

So winter is the time to walk the foothills. Leave the agricultural valley, the Midwest of the West, for a while. There is surprising wildness just past the edges of the crop fields, where the landscape starts to climb.

Even in these harsh, rugged landscapes, there are cool, damp pockets.

The creeks and rivers are high this year.

Amid the rocks and grasses, there are small stories waiting to be read.

September in the Pacific Northwest. A late summer landscape with the ghosts of fall emerging on cool evenings. Apples ripen and fall from old trees around abandoned homesteads in the Coast Range. Alder leaves brown and curl. Some rain, some sun.

A long bike ride south: ten days from Portland to Eureka.

A farm on the long climb to the top of the coast range. Biking you have plenty of time to get to know the sky.

One-stop shopping in Beaver, Oregon.

The rhythm of hwy. 101: cruising along beaches, then climbing through dripping forests behind headlands.

Sneak off in the dunes to sleep and dry the tarps in morning sun.

In the small towns along the coast, a steady stream of bike tourists mingles with the locals. Travelers commiserate about the last big hill and exchange rumors about the route ahead. No shoulder on the pass, but if you take the old road up the creek…

 

I first met Megann when I was 19–I called a phone number on a flier asking for people who wanted to start a coop house with her in Olympia. We never started the coop house, but stayed friends for many years.

After I left Olympia, we often lived in different places, but we stayed in touch. We would meet up from time to time around the Northwest. Usually a trip to some beautiful place was involved. Megann had something of a forest fairy spirit, and it was nice being out in the wilds with her.

After I started grad school at UW I encouraged Megann to apply there too, and she got a great funded position studying library science. We would talk about the challenges of adjusting to Wisconsin culture after so many years on the left coast. Megann missed Olympia, but she made many loving friends in Madison.

Megann lived and died near where the Yahara River enters Lake Monona. There is a little rocky point at the mouth of the river where I used to stop at the end of runs and look out at the lake. A sense of bigness–open sky and water, or expansive ice tundra. An endless procession of clouds. It’s a beautiful place.

I think of Megann being out there in that bigness now. I miss her.

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After five long years in the mid-continent, Your favorite river has returned to the open landscapes of the West. It is good to be back.

I took an only-slightly-rambling road trip out to California, with a little stop to see a few of my favorite Ozarks places, and some nice Kansans.

These days, I’m studying how plants respond to fire at different elevations in the Sierras. Some things, however, remain much the same as previous seasons: long hikes over rocky ridges, camping by creeks, and conversations with interesting characters in small towns.