#25 Taking Care of the Forest, the Forest Taking Care of Me

We need the tonic of wildness... We can never have enough of Nature. …

We need to witness our own limits transgressed,

and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Thoreau

Writing projects heat up, and visitors stop by my cabin in the coastal redwoods outside Willits, keeping me busy. A friend just pointed out an interesting article in the New York Times, The Busy Trap on the nature of keeping ourselves busy—and telling everyone we are—to convey self-importance or to reject the validity of quiet and slow activities as pastimes, no matter how rejuvenating and necessary they may be. Since I ended my previous post declaring that I’m still a Type-A personality in the woods, I had to reflect on being driven. I do believe that we can keep busy in positive ways when working for the good of our communities and the earth, but rejuvenation is necessary in all living things.

One of the projects that keeps me busy is tending to the forest around me. I have 23 acres of redwood, madrone, fir, and tan oak. Learning how to conserve the forest’s best qualities while minimizing fire hazard is a job in itself. Even as I agree with Thoreau about enjoying the wildness in these woods, the force of human hands long ago impacted how the forest grows and looks now, and the woods need tending.

Debris in the Forest

To get the picture of what forest stewardship can mean, here is a photo(left) of the woods that were cleared of brush and small trees along an old logging road just below the house. You can see individual trees and some logs lying on the ground.  Compare that to a photo below of woods not yet cleared of brush, an indistinguishable mass of leaves. The old adage should be, “You can’t see the forest for the brush.”

Here is another picture (left) of the trail going down to the creek with Cholo ambling along two years ago, in the fall of 2010. You can see he’s in the midst of a chaos of fallen tree trunks and branches. Most of that debris is from tan oak which grows abundantly throughout these woods, but often in small spindly forms. Here is a photo (below) of Sata on the same trail recently. 

A Brief History of This Forest: Slash and Burn

This whole area was logged thoroughly in 1951, with the bigger redwood trees cut down. Walking through the woods you come upon impressive stumps of 4’-5’ in diameter.Then, in 1952, a huge forest fire spread throughout the Sherwood Valley and surrounding hills where I live (you turn off of Sherwood Road to get to my cabin). All the fallen treetops and “slash” from the tree harvesting made for ripe forest kindling after a year. 

The charred remains are visible everywhere in these woods. Apparently the small town of Sherwood burned completely to the ground and never was rebuilt. 

As the embers cooled, new life eventually regenerated in the forest. The fallen trees you see are mostly tan oak, as in this picture (below) 

I was told that the tan oak quickly sprouted after the devastation. However, over the years as the new redwoods took root and stretched high into the sky, the shorter tan oak below them lost their sunlight and grew weak in the shade.  Also, snowfall in the winter—brief but heavy—leaves branches weighed down and soil soggy.  Hence, trees snap off, sometimes in the middle or uprooted entirely, leaving the forest looking like a battlefield, especially in the steep hillsides of the creek bed.

Present Day Fire Danger 

Even as I write this in July 2012, a forest fire has already burned down 25,000 acres of Mendocino National Forest to the northeast of Willits. A thick haze of smoke has spread for miles, including the Little Lake Valley of Willits and its hillsides. The threat of a fire is all too real.

The California Department of Forestry and our local fire departments find every means possible to get the attention of human forest-dwelling creatures to insure that we follow a few basic rules of forest fire prevention: for 100 feet from the house, clear all brush, all branches up to 10’ on the tree, and any trees smaller than a 5” diameter. For homes sitting on a steep slope, like mine, the danger of a flames racing uphill and consuming a property are even worse. So in the winter when I moved here, 2010-11, I started cleaning up the swath of woods just below me, relying on a crew of men to cut and burn. 

Now I can enjoy feeling a little safer, and the forest provides more of a sylvan glade vista rather than a wall of impassable brush.  But the environmental irony is bitter: creating several roaring fires with their particulate matter streaming into the air in order to reduce fire hazard and improve the environment.

I’ve been learning about building brush piles as a means of continuing to clean up forest debris while potentially making homes for critters. Here is another before (left) and after(below)cleaning at the top of the creek on my land that eventually joins Willits Creek far below.

The Earth Manual

Malcolm Margolin, friend, writer, and publisher of Heyday Books for nearly forty years, began his career as a writer after a stint working on replanting forests in the Olympic Peninsula and leading youth on environmental education hikes in the East Bay parks. In his 1975 book The Earth Manual: How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming It, he describes how to build trails for humans and shelters for small forest animals, recycling branches, brush, and leaves. Guiding my work here is Malcolm’s purpose in caring for the wildland: “how to stop its erosion, heal its scars, cure its injured trees, increase its wildlife, restock it with…wildflowers, and otherwise work with (rather than against) the wildness of nature.”

I’ve been trying to follow some of these lessons, though I have much yet to learn. For example, Malcolm warns about creating a trail down hill that will become a water sluice in the winter. Check! 

 You can see how neatly I dug the steps on this part of the trail, and above to the right are pieces of redwood plank and rebar used for steps. But in the last torrential rain of the winter, I discovered too late that I had not created enough of an outslope to allow for water drain off. Well, there’s always time to try again.

Cleaning up a Mile of Trail

As well as the creek bed, the old logging roads from 60 years ago form the basis for many of the trails I’ve been renovating. I’ve even found remnants of the old logging practices, such as this three-inch thick cable used to haul the logs up skid rows through the forest. 

I’ve been creating trails through these acres for the last two years. I always carry clippers and alternately loppers, a saw, a rake or a shovel to clear the path. 

Hauling logs and branches up and down the steep hillsides is tremendous exercise.

  

My puppy Sata is a little mountain goat, racing up and down the hills, bounding over logs, and trying to bite the piles of leaves I throw on top of my brush piles. 

Various work crews of friends have graced the land over the last years. My friend Nomi with her sons Izzy and Micah helped clear the path.  

My friend Keasley and his two sons Elliott and Emerson helped build steps down to the creek head and clear a half a mile of trail.

Katherine likewise made brush piles and then created an Andrew Goldsworthy type artwork of the curved redwood branches falled to the earth. (Goldsworthy’s River and Tides is an inspiration for making art with nature and in nature.) (YouTube shorts) 

Recently my crew of my two nieces and nephew, Julia, Laura and Kyrae, helped clear the trail. 

The work of cleaning up the forests makes me admire ever more the work of the Conservation Corps during the New Deal, which put thousands of Americans to work in our nation’s parks to build roads, trails, bridges, benches, lodges, and many other improvements to our parklands. As I try to make a mile of trails and sylvan vistas, I see how much vision and hard labor made our forested parks such pleasant glades to wander in.

The forest offers opportunities for giving back to the earth, and sustains us in many ways, from Sata’s little swimming hole  to places for delight and meditation. 

#24 Ch-ch-ch-changing

         'Tis done. The changes have wrought a new life. 
                          
       Friends, blogacious and otherwise, have been asking, “What’s happening with your blog?  I want to hear about your life in the hills.”  Well, it’s a long story…

 Said Thoreau (in slightly different terms): "If one advances confidently in the direction of her own dreams, and endeavors to live the life imagined, she will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." 

Two years ago in May, I began advancing rather more fearfully than confidently toward my own dream, but at least I advanced, if only stumbling forward at times.  And I have met with success at last.

 I left what many would consider a dream job and its many benefits (including health benefits), on the tenure track at California State University Sacramento. There I had engaging colleagues and students; the opportunity to help young people in their minds and hearts and thus contribute positively to society in relation to gripping social issues. I had a lovely home, here below in February with the wisteria in bloom, and an amazing neighborhood to live in by the American River (Cholo enjoyed it especially), along with much more for which I was and still am grateful. 

And yet… and yet I was deeply unhappy. I complained ad nauseum about The Papers. Having been first a high school English teacher, then a college composition teacher in whatever class I was teaching (Urban Education, Gender Equity), I had been spent 25 of my 29 years in classrooms taking home piles of papers daily.  Nor was I ever able to give these papers mere cursory attention as I was instructed to do by colleagues concerned about my burn out. After all, many teachers manage to stay in the profession for 35 or 40 years (even if burned out themselves). No, I labored minutely over every essay, giving each 30 minutes to provide feedback on everything from the student’s positive use of language and analysis to teaching comma rules and reasoning on that same page. Many students expressed appreciation for this feedback that they had rarely if ever received before. And so I pushed on—to the breaking point. At 100 or 150/week  x 30 minutes per paper comprised a crushing 50+  hours of work on top of classroom time, office hours, committees, lesson planning and communications.

Until the end this work was usually worth it. My students—at Sac State, but also in other colleges and high schools where I have taught—often taught me about the world through their papers, as well as through our class discussions and antics, through our conversations outside of class. The student who reported in his essay that his brother had killed their father to stop the violence against their mother.  The student who shared that her parents would send her back to India if they knew she was dating a man they had not picked for her marriage. The student who revealed the indignities he had tolerated from fellow students teasing him about being “a fag.”  The student who told me before anyone else about her pregnancy, seeking advice what she should tell her parents.  Oh, so many hundreds of stories!  I cherished the trust put in me, even as the weight of suffering and want revealed burdened me. The lessons in poverty, racism, and sexism and their impacts touched me deeply wherever I taught.

In fact, my need to break away from teaching before breaking down wasn’t just the papers.  I had been carrying the weight of others’ problems and my deeply embedded proposition to resolve those problems from the time I understood my mother’s drinking problem at age 12 and resolved to heal her (i.e. a severe case of codependence, and yes, it can cripple one; see this site: Codependents Anonymous).  A child’s magical thinking became an adult’s rescue mission. 

Surely I have had helped many students, as some former students graciously attest, just as they have influenced my life and remained in it, as these recent photos show: I got to visit Juan at his welcoming party for his new baby, a housewarming for Jennifer (below), and Tanisia (below) who helped fix my hair with her cosmetology skills   for a performance I did (a story for another time) 

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others.   Pericles

But sometimes the teacher needs to learn and the rescuer needs rescuing.

My most supportive colleagues tried to find ways to keep me at the university without my going under, given the ever increasing demands on faculty as the university itself was going under from budget cuts (need I say that our national priorities are screwed up?).  But after four years there (now three years ago, in May 2009), I let my colleagues know I needed to take a leave of absence by May 2010 (such planning ahead at the college level!). I hoped that after a break, I could return, rejuvenated.

However, several months into using my leave to rejuvenate my cabin in the woods as well as myself, a whole new path for my life opened up. Who could not love this sunrise from the back deck? 

Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis. /Martha Beck, O Magazine, Growing Wings, January 2004/

My blog started a year and a half ago, in December 2010, when I had just moved to the cabin and was beginning the renovations, which started with clearing brush on the land and getting plans and permits ready for the actual rebuilding.  The reconstruction projects lasted from April 2011 to October 2011. I was planning to settle down finally for a few quiet months of my new editing, research, and writing work, but then all hell broke loose between my housemates back in Sacramento where I’d been renting rooms. 

Just when you think you’ve got your life into a new groove, a healthy routine, here comes change barreling through. After much deep agonizing about my future, my security, my loyalties, I decided to let go of my job and put my house on the market in favor of risking the more basic conditions of life at the cabin and the unknown potential of work as a writer.

We cannot discover new oceans unless we have the courage to lose sight of the shore: Andre Gide

When I perseverated about these changes, I had no lack of support from many loved ones who knew how desperately I needed to remake my life: A long walk with my brother Stephen on a beach, talking about the right to find happiness even at the expense of letting go of old ways of giving to others. A reminder from my brother Greg that I had been complaining for years, years, about feeling burdened by my work. A loving butt-kicking from my sister-in-law Wendy and a similarly insistent letter from my sister-in-law Phyllis whose philosophy is worth sharing with the world for anyone down-and-out: 

“How about being relentless about re-creating joy in your life in a way that would be beneficial to everyone around you?  How about struggling to find a new way to use your gifts of giving that would restore your optimism, your strength, and replace weariness with wonder, boredom with beauty and brilliance?  You may find that your energy to contribute will not only be restored, but may even multiply.  I realize that walking into the great unknown is scary.  Just know that ‘with great risk, comes great rewards.’  Those rewards are waiting for you to claim them.”  

Phyllis echoes what Norman Vincent Peale said: “Change your thoughts and you change your world.” 

With the final decision to resign from my job and sell my house in Sacramento came whole new pressures to sort and pack up my stuff, make repairs to the house, repaint, and yet again deal with a slew of people to enact this long-term plan, all mostly single-handedly (a shout out to Katherine and Jeff in Sac for all their help and support in this process).  Exhausting! This is why we refuse to change our lives.

All this combustion explains in part why I left the blog behind.  I was dealing with dry rot , too much stuff  garage sales, and open houses.  

Lovely home that it was, in a sweet neighborhood near a good school and open space by the American River, I got an offer on my house the day after it went on the market, an offer far less than I bought the house for, naturally, in this time of the housing market collapse, but that it sold so quickly for a good enough price perhaps also signals some minutely positive change in the economy.  A high school English teacher, her husband, their two dogs, and a baby on the way were the best possible buyers I could have imagined for a home and the nearby river that had given me, my family, friends and lots of kids among us many good memories. 

Once I had most of my belongings relocated to a storage unit in Willits  and I had returned to my cabin on the hill, instead of choosing relative rest after all the commotion of moving, I leaped into yet one more renovation project. Garden below cabin before Garden below cabin after Sonny's work

A back hoe last year had cut a couple of raw terraces into the hillside below the cabin.  Now Johan was installing the irrigation while Sonny was providing the expertise and hard physical labor, as well as laughter, to get the terraces built, turning the rocky cuts into three beautiful terraces. He use the “moonboards” (cuts from redwood trees felled last year to create more sunlight for my solar power system), along with other parts of redwood trees. Sonny got the opportunity to work out a marvellous design while rock music rang out on the hillside and Sata played in the dirt beside him. After a month of Sonny’s hard work and company, money for the garden ran out as my need ran up like a fever for the quiet and solitude I’d been working to create over these last couple of years. Renovation fatigue! But amazing results in the end.         

Wednesday, May 23^rd, was the last day of having folks here helping with renovations on a regular basis. Now, I may spend several quiet hours a day doing some editing work, an hour hiking with Sata and clearing the Creek Trail, enjoying the new lilies, another hour planting deer-resistant lavendar, and wrap up the evening by writing or reading.   I hope to share some further experiences over time about what it’s like to head back to the land, to run away from home in one’s 50s and start over again, to milk goats and get food from a farm that still uses horses, to learn new ways to give back to society without expending one’s one vital energies over and over again. A friend asked me if living here is relaxing. I reply to such questions that you can take the woman out of the city, but not the city out of the woman quite so easily.  I’m still a Type A personality, but I do have trees to temper my busy-ness.

I close with a couple of lines from a wonderful poem called "Pruning" by Erica Funkhouser in this season of spring:

After a point, one sees/what one's life is going to be,/what one really knew all along.
Grace requires adaptation/to circumstance,/learning to work with one's nature…

#23 Introducing Sata

Gleeful Sata on Top of the World Blanketed in Snow

After months of turbulent changes, I finally used a day of being snowed in at the cabin over the Spring Equinox to stop everything else (especially since I can’t get off the mountain in my non-4-wheel drive) to tell the story of Sata. Watching this four-month-old puppy play in her first snowfall inspires sharing the commotion and delight she has brought into my life.

Not long after my beloved companion of 14 years, Cholo, passed away in early November (see Blog #20), I began looking for my next sweetheart. My moon has been in chaos over these last few months, a subject for another blog post as it relates to my life on the land, but in short it wasn’t a good time to get a puppy. How bad a time I didn’t yet know, being unfamiliar with puppyhood at this point in my life.

I’d been “dating” online at various shelters or rescue sites to find the perfect match, seeking the same scruffy look that I loved in Cholo. So I was thrilled to find “Scrunchy” (left ), a former street dog now at the Ukiah shelter with her puppies, including this one. Actually, I wanted this puppy’s brother who had a grey face like Cholo (far right), but these puppies were going fast, as a mere glance can explain why. By the time I finally got to the shelter a week later in mid-January, only this puppy was left.

I named her Sata (pronounced Sah-ta, as in Spanish) after the Satos, the name for street dogs of Puerto Rico, which can live a wretched existence. While we often overindulge our dogs (in my opinion), in other countries they are often neglected and abused. My vet in Willits, Dr. Chana Eisenstein at the East Hill Vetrinary Clinic, was in Puerto Rico over the holidays and knew I was looking for a cute little dog. Dr. Chana sent me a photo of this adorable sata (left) that was eating out of the garbage bins at a beach restaurant. Did I want Chana and her partner to bring back the dog and save it? It was a heroic effort that didn’t work out since the little sata was no longer at the restaurant when they went back to get her. Chana said it was horrifying to see so many dogs barely alive, a scarecrow of skin and skeleton feeding off garbage heaps, or dead in the streets, or floating bloated in the water. Chana’s heart went out to this little sata that she hoped to save. In appreciation of the intent, I named my little street mongrel Sata. (My friend Twig in Boston also works for an organization that tries to help save some of the satos of PR: (http://allsatorescue.org/)

When I was thinking about adopting the puppy at the Ukiah shelter, my brother Leighton was visiting with me (here is Leighton, right, On Top of the World on a sunny January day) and off we went.

When we got to her cage, this puppy actually waved her little white paw at us twice, twice! Leighton said, “Aw! You have to get her.” And so I did.

We saw Sata’s mother, Scrunchy, who looked like a Cairn terrier-mix. Her father must have been a border collie, since she has that energy and look to her.

At eight weeks old and four pounds, Sata came home with me—well, actually, I was (as I so often am) on the road. Leighton and I were heading for our parents’ house in Sonoma. Of course, Sata wasn’t housebroken yet. I knew that might be a problem, but denial is a beautiful thing, I always say. When we arrived at our folks’ house, we went around back where I opened the door on their sitting room. Tiny Sata crawled over the doorsill. My father roared, “What’s that?!” I suddenly felt like I was eight years old again and—well, bringing home a stray puppy.

To be fair, I hadn’t warned them, and my father’s fear of pee and poop was valid. But he later added, “You know, Cholo was such a fine old gentleman who I really loved. I wasn’t ready for this.” Yes, indeed it’s hard to have grandpa replaced by an infant—tell me about it!

We are a dog-loving family, though, including the dogs my siblings and I were raised with and that they have with their own families now. Leighton and I had arrived at a family gathering for the weekend, and that was the best arrangement I could have for my little puppy to be introduced as she was passed around from one set of loving hands to another (Don't know whether my nephew Michael , right, or my puppy is cuter here.) My sister Chris (below) immediately found a dog training book online that she downloaded. I needed a few tips since I hadn’t had a puppy in 14 years. I’d gotten a crate on the way from Ukiah.

Chris bought Sata a lovely elephant, subsequently named Elie, that kept her company in her crate and later became a great play companion.
Since that first weekend, Sata and I have had some tough times. I’d forgotten that one should not take a puppy under four months into the world where she might get exposed to parvovirus before she’s gotten all her shots. Four months! That meant two whole months of quarantine; some of that time I was on work duty in the Bay Area and staying with friends. Travelling everywhere meant a whimper from the back seat begging for an urgent pit stop. But where to stop that other dogs haven’t been? When I heard stories of puppies getting very sick with parvo and ending up on intravenous fluids to the tune of $1000, I got more serious about trying to get home and stay home.

And of course, Sata and I had the typical conflicts that accompany parenting of babies: the wanton destruction (well, really just one shoe got chewed on); curiosity leading to chaos (actually, she only dumped over the wastebasket twice); the endless teething (she continues to bite everything to know it). When I let Sata out of her crate each morning, she sticks her front paws out in her Downward Dog yoga posture, then she digs her head into my lap, mouth open as she seeks something to gnaw on—my hand, my leg, her own paw. I chew; therefore, I am.

The worst of puppyhood is avoiding the “accidents.” As the puppy book I used noted, the puppies don’t have accidents; we do by failing to get the pup outside frequently enough and failing to reinforce the good behavior. (A great free resource, downloadable: After You Get Your Puppy by Dr. Ian Dunbar at http://www.dogstardaily.com/.) Sata is quite sensitive and thus responsive to instruction.

The last time she peed in the house (at three months of age), we clearly were miscommunicating. I was sitting at my desk working. She propped her front paws on my knees. Thinking she wanted to play, I got her rope toy and played tug with her for a couple of minutes. I went back to work, and she came back at me with another nudge. I got her Elie and played a little chase. The third time she jumped on me, I insisted, “Honey, I have work to do; I can’t play.”

So she went over to the closed door, squatted, and peed. I can laugh now at the slow motion film that rolled out with me screaming, “N-n-n--o-o-o-o!” I rushed her outside, dropped her on the ground, harrumphing all the while.

Sata grovelled at my feet, her little white-tipped tail wagging in hyper time to communicate, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

I immediately scooped her up, hugged her, and apologized too. “I know! I’m sorry. I should have let you out. I just didn’t get what you were telling me.” We’ve never had another problem.

Having a young puppy is akin to having a toddler. I rail against having too much stuff and overly indulged pets, but somehow my puppy has collected too many toys. The floor of the cabin is littered with four stuffed animals, several balls, a plastic rubber play toy, socks tied to a rope, and two pieces of rawhide. Sata will sometimes bring one of her stuffed animals to me to indicate she wants me to chase her around the house—and of course I do. Kids and baby critters invite playfulness (back) into our lives.

My land reclamation efforts are re-energized as these hikes also insure Sata has enough exercise each morning and often in the afternoon too. Mountain goat-like, Sata tears up and down the hills in wild abandon as I hike down the creek trail and clear away debris. (Here she is ripping toward me on a hill I’m cleaning up.) Even at four months she’s been happy to trot across fallen logs high over a creek bed. When I stop to clear out a spot of the creek, she wrestles a stick, then complains for us to keep roaming. Getting out with her inspires me to find or create new trails on the land here, as well as discover wonderful trails in the vicinity.

She enjoys looking out at the trees as much as I do. Sata is a most wonderful companion for a woman practicing self-sequestration in a hut on a hill.