Standing on the Lake Bottom

(This essay appears today at http://www.earthstorys.org/ as well.)
Depending on the time of year, the amount of snowfall, and the thirst of people and potatoes downstream along the Snake River, I live anywhere from a third of a mile to a little over a mile of the Palisades Reservoir. I run with the dog for miles along its edge with frequency, particularly in late spring when snow keeps me out of the mountains and early fall when hunters push me back to the flatland. This late in October I can drive for miles across the lake bottom, bumping along on a ever-narrowing strip of old asphalt pock-marked with gaps where the lake gradually erodes the pavement during the few months each year the abandoned highway is underwater. Sometimes the dog and I explore the lake bottom and the high-tide line. This day I stand on the low foundation remains of a farmhouse, the neat grid of cement blocks the only legacy of someone’s home before the dam was completed a dozen miles away in 1957. Silt anchors the blocks in the ground and covers more than half their small elevation.



The lake has receded for the winter, drained to fatten Idaho potatoes to McDonald’s uniformity, or to be fair, to the uniformity demanded not just by McDonalds but by Burger King, In and Out Burger, Carl’s Junior, Ore-Ida, and a few dozen other purveyors of the American obsession with the French Fry. A bit of the water goes to Idaho cities of course, which largely means Kentucky bluegrass imported to Idaho, and some of it feeds sugar beets and alfalfa and wheat, but mostly it goes to potatoes, for Idaho is practically a case study in industrialized monoculture, which means it hosts many “managers” with expertise in irrigation storage and chemical soil enhancement. The reservoir is 34% full the Bureau of Reclamation tells me in its daily statistics, nearly two thirds of its million and a half acre feet of storage removed. The summer boaters are gone too. No anglers here in a land that is often cracked like an aging palm.


What those “managers” mostly offer me this day is a place for contemplation from a small rectangular pad of cement that probably served as the front stoop of a farmhouse. From there I contemplate the surrounding mountains that are my daily companions and try to imagine the valley as it might have once been. Now miles of that valley succumb to a mostly flat expanse of spongy soil tinted faint green by the limited hardy plants and grasses that can sprout during the brief time between burial under summer water and winter snow. In the days of the farmhouse I assume I would be looking at a waist-deep expanse of hay meadows turning autumn gold and awaiting the reaper’s scythe. I have followed the irrigations ditches that once curved along the valley floor, have seen the labor evident in rock piles from cleared fields. I wonder if any neighbor’s rooflines would have been visible. I imagine the work: the labor of digging irrigation ditches and tending animals and harvesting enough hay to get them through brutal winters, the effort of hauling enough wood from the surrounding mountains to heat this tiny home through six months of bitter cold when the snow would pile four feet deep against the now missing walls


And what was here before these foundation stones where laid in their neat, small grid? Probably sage flats, and in October that would have meant the presence of bison to be joined in November or December by elk. Would there have been cottonwoods and willows along the river? How many pools and unexpected falls would the river have offered, how many braided channels and choked-off islands?


I stand on these thin strips marking the outline of a once-house and I wonder. There are a few cliffs that protrude from the mountainsides above me, though such palisades are not the dominant topography of these timbered mountains. What fences, what barriers then did the managers choose from when naming their new lake? There is not a fence in sight. Only the occasional roofline dots the last fall color in the surrounding mountains. No army settled here. No, the only true barrier seems the lake itself, slowly silting the past.

Death in Western Forests

This is a post "recycled" from an article I wrote last month for Earthstorys (http://www.earthstorys.org/):

I dreamed of flames last night, a forest erupting around me: fogbanks of smoke, a landscape of living flame, come-hither gestures of fiery fingers followed by encircling snares of engulfing orange demons. I awoke trying to run among persistent runnels of fire, smoke filming my eyes and clotting my throat. The root of the dream is no mystery, for the day before we had travelled deep within the smoke of a smoldering forest—the Bull fire in the Gros Ventre Range—a scene made surreal by the dampening effect of an elongated rainstorm, a storm that would prove to save thousands of forest acres no doubt. With the fire suddenly manageable again—for it had grown quite unmanageable, adding more than 1,000 acres every twenty-four hours—the Forest Service hopes to direct the burning back to the mosaic pattern that might be the best hope for preserving the forest’s long term health and its best defense against a burgeoning invasion: the western pine bark beetle.




It is a forest in need of health, a forest, like most in the region and soon throughout the west, sickly with the ravages of the pine bark beetle. Rocky Mountain forests are dying. It is a crisis so severe that it is difficult to describe to those who don’t live in the west or are not frequently visitors over time. Entire landscapes are changing and death is everywhere apparent—mountainsides where brown has replaced green as the dominant color, stands of pine where the death rate can reach greater than 80%. Colorado may have seen the worst ravages thus far, and aerial photographs there reveal National Forests inundated. The standing dead that remains creates a tender-box of fuel in regions that have already suffered year upon year of drought and decades of fire suppression that has created a lethal understory and where often there are twice as many trees as scientists view as healthy.



The current and future devastation is far more than aesthetically unpleasant or visually shocking. Like all radical changes in an ecosystem, this dominant presence by a single species will have caustic effects on most others, and in this case that will ripple all the way up the food chain. For example, the double blow of pine beetle infestations at high altitudes when coupled with the deadly presence of white pine blister rust threatens overwhelming loss of white pines, which means the loss of white pine nuts, a critical staple in grizzly bear diets. Similarly, sudden blow-downs of standing dead wood are not only lethal to the living things in immediate proximity—be they animal or vegetable—the soil disruption will create new erosion hazards, impacting streams, rivers, and their inhabitants alike.



Western forests are in critical condition and there is no clear cure. There are few sure means to kill the beetles. The most effective means is fire, though even then the timing matters, for it needs to occur while the next generation of beetles remains in larval form. One can cut and burn diseased trees at this stage or cut and bury them in an attempt to save those nearby, though this is entirely unrealistic when considering the millions upon millions of acres already in one stage or another of infestation. The traditional environmental control—freezing—where there are -30° temperatures sustained for at least five days, rarely have occurred in recent years. Thus every year the beetles advance further north, though the pundits who deny the existence of global warming refuse a relational view.



If viewed in ecological time, the forests will recover, even if they will be dramatically different forests from the ones we have been familiar with previously. Those who are informed understand the multiple fingers of the human hand that has accelerated conditions where such devastating insects now thrive, including decades upon decades of “management” practices that suppressed fires and encouraged logging techniques detrimental to natural reproductive patterns. Eventually succession will be revealed and western forests will feature more deciduous species and fewer coniferous ones. In my little neck of the woods, this will mean more aspen and more Rocky Mountain maple. Human settlements in wooded western regions probably will fare worse than the forests we have built within, and it is certain our strategies for recovery will prove impoverished by comparison. Coupled with our inability to have the patience for natural transformation, this may well spell intellectual disaster in our relationship with the forest equal to the consequences of catastrophic fires. Indeed the forests will eventually recover, if in ways that we are not accustomed to seeing. The greater question may be whether we will prove capable of learning to change as well, and most particularly change the patterns that aided in the development of the crisis in the first place.



Each morning this week I have awoken to the aroma of smoke, for the Bull fire is but one (and among the smallest) of fires burning in the greater area in a fire season that has proven relatively mild and winds carry far. I suspect we in the west should prepare for a future where the smell of smoke will be the least of our worries and but one lethal element encroaching on our dreams.

Employee of the Month

Employee of the Month
Originally uploaded by theWORDwright

Gee, thanks a lot for the honor.

New Project ~ bioStories

I have launched a new writing project, a website devoted to honoring the lives of ordinary people called bioStories.  Visit the site at http://www.biostories.com/.  I am actively looking for contributors as well as trying to build a readership base.  For a clearer sense of the project's intent, I am posting the following from the "About" page.

bioStories offers word portraits of the people surrounding us in our daily lives, of the strangers we pass on the street unnoticed and those intimate to us who have been most influential and most familiar but who remain strangers to others. We feature daily posts from a diverse variety of writers and select some of the portraits they offer as featured essays. We particularly look for work that offers slices of a life that help the reader imagine the whole of that life, work that demonstrates that ordinary people's experiences often contain extraordinary moments, visionary ideas, inspirational acts, and examples of success and failure that prove instructive. In short, we believe every life displays moments of grace. bioStories wishes to share pieces of these lives and celebrate them.


View the pieces of the lives presented here as portraits, sketches, tributes, memories, remembrances...pieces of lives that enrich our experience for having shared them. We ask writers to, as Toni Morrison has said, "Imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar." Share a life. Introduce us to someone we don't yet know.

October

October 1st and we've just seen the hottest week of the year in Western Wyoming.  The world seems topsy turvy--snow in late August and now highs in the 80s.  It was still a pleasant temperature somewhere in the mid 40s for this morning's run, a soothing, mind-cleansing sort of  5 or 6 mile run in easy, flat terrain.  October, and I avoid the woods as hunting season is in full swing, so it was the lake bottom today, for the lake has gone away, swelling potatoes now that will soon swell MacDonald's french fries that will then swell American bellies and arteries.  I ran at random across the lake bed veering into what must have once been an irrigation canal in hay meadows before the construction of a dam and the stopping of the Snake River.  Barely identifiable, silted over, I suppose, in places there are hummocks of piled rock on each side slowly giving way to grasslands.  How much work that?  Decades of a rancher clearing rocks.  The ditch bottom is relatively smooth, easy running in most places, the grass laid over by the presence of the lake part of the year, a faint game trail giving over to sand for much of its length.  The lake gives way to grassland, the grassland was once hayfield, the hayfield once meadow and likely tree-lines along the river course.  Flat.  I can see 15 miles north until the river bends, 20 miles or more south.  Rising east and west are the Snake River Range and the Caribous, sporting patches of aspen orange and yellow and highlights of red from the last of the Rocky Mountain Maples now losing their leaves.  Absolute silence.  The only sound that of my feet on the earth and the "jick, jick, jick" of the dog's collar.  Rejuvinating.  Room to think and clear my mind.