This summer, I've been working as an intern for the Audubon Society of Portland's education department. Recently, I led a couple high school trips up to the San Juan Islands and down to the Redwoods, stopping in at the Oregon Dunes on the way back. Here are a few of my journal entries...
MT. CONSTITUTION, ORCAS ISLAND:
As night falls, the hills of the Olympics fade, ridge after ridge, into paler and paler blues in the distance behind Cypress Island’s black bulk. From high above, Mt Baker’s glaciers peek through wisps of ethereal silver cloud. Nighthawks crest the cliff, tilting erratically through the air in pursuit of insects as wings set a baseline: •••• • • •••• • • ••••. Dives punctuate the rhythm as the birds reach an apex and plummet– 70, 80, 90 feet– and tent their wings as they pull up, sending the deafening buzz of a quick succession of sonic booms into the night.
After some period of time, the birds twisting through our midst alight one by one on the dusty ground between us (myself, a fellow intern and our collective armload of marshmallow sticks) and the gray stone of the lookout tower, mottled wings folded in upon camouflaged bodies. We stand stone still as the nighthawks rest silently before eventually shuffling forward through the dust and lifting off into the night.
SAN JUAN COUNTY PARK, SAN JUAN ISLAND:
The cliff plunges below me to the Salish Sea. I perch on a rock shadowed by sheltering madrones, peeling bark blazing orange in the evening sun. Said golden orb hangs low over Vancouver Island’s dark mass, splashing a broad, bright swath across the straight. Below, beyond a small island upon which a harbor seal rests, a dorsal fin breaks the surface. A sleek black and white body follows, then disappears northward into the abyss.
From the south more whales appear. In twos and threes they surface in sync, following an obvious offshore current through which salmon presumably migrate. As soft pffft reaches my ears, followed by another– and another. I realize acutely that, from miles away, I can hear the orcas breathe. As a mother and calf move into the sun’s blinding reflection I am struck by the intimacy of my current position: as I watch the orcas play, breathe and lunge through the water in pursuit of prey, I (tucked away in the rocks), as far as the whales are concerned, simply do not exist. When the pod reappears out of the sun, they have become a series of specks to the north– out of presence, maybe, but imprinted for a lifetime into an unseen human’s memory.
JEDIDIAH SMITH STATE PARK, CA:
I have become a Borrower. An insignificant speck. Sword ferns tower over my head. The earth is hidden, blanketed by Oxalis, leaves spread wide over layer upon layer of squishy auburn needles. Golden shafts of light percolate through needles pillowed in feathery clumps hundreds of feet above to splash across the sorrel’s heart-shaped foliage. Redwoods’ rich brown furrowed trunks rise skyward, proud steadfast pinnacles amidst dappled undergrowth. I wonder what a mouse thinks when it encounters the base of a tree that would require 20 of me to reach around.
It is absolutely silent.
JEDIDIAH SMITH STATE PARK, CA:
Less than an hour ago I plucked a two-inch, casi-neon orange salamander from the duff. When I set it down, it disappeared into the needles. It was young, genetically singular, and will most likely die within a year or two.
I currently lean against a tree that, if carbon-dated, might reveal material that has existed in this form for 30,000 years or more. The mother tree has long since disappeared. Her shoots (with diameters well over ten feet) streak ramrod-straight into the lofty remnants of today’s morning fog. The grandchildren, again several feet across, rise along the childrens’ trunks. And, from the solid, burly, needle-covered base of the collective mound rise two puny saplings: the shorter perhaps eight inches tall. There is no way to age these monuments: too many branches have fallen, and the girths are far too wide to attempt a core sample. If I were to sample the smallest shoot, it would reveal the same-aged material as its great-grandmother, and its great-great-grandmother, who no longer stand. These giants (and saplings) are clones: they have survived wind, snow, fire and humans to pass down and continue their history into the future, far beyond the time when our seventh generation will have come and gone.
OREGON DUNES, FLORENCE:
I rest among saplings. On second thought these are, in fact, full-grown trees– the spruces and hemlocks surrounding me simply feel infantile with the impression of their sempervirens counterparts still etched steadfastedly on my soul. They grow with bulges and crooks. They sway in the breeze. They are dwarfed by the golden dunes rising behind them beneath the setting sun, marching fluidly inland, rippled sand swallowing trunks and needles. Wind whips sand into streamers against the sky and sets it down to slowly, indisputably, smother and erase mature forests from the landscape.
