The new road is an expensive accomplishment. It runs above the old Toutle riverbed along the hillside with fancy bridges, then into the Coldwater Creek drainage (I hiked down this when it was old-growth forest, and trail was the only access); makes a big curve around the head of the valley and does a long switchback climb. In that upper cirque of Coldwater Creek there are plenty of old gray logs lying tossed about on the ground. Between and around the logs the hills are aflower in fireweed and pearly everlasting Anaphalis margaritacea. Little silver fir three to ten feet high are tucked in behind the logs, mixed in with the tall flowers.
Finally pull up to the high ridge, now named Johnston after the young geologist who died there, and walk to the edge. The end of the road. Suddenly there’s all of Loowit and a bit of the lake basin! In a new shape, with smoking scattered vents in this violet-gray light.
The white dome peak whacked lower down,
open-sided crater on the northside, fumarole wisps
a long gray fan of all that slid and fell
angles down clear to the beach
dark old-growth forest gone no shadows
the lake afloat with white bone blowdown logs
scoured ridges round the rim, bare outcrop rocks
squint in the bright
ridgetop plaza packed with puzzled visitor gaze
no more White Goddess
but, under the fiery sign of Pele,
and Fudo — Lord of Heat
who sits on glowing lava with his noose
lassoing hardcore types
from hell against their will,
Luwit, lawilayt-lá — Smoky
is her name
TO GHOST LAKE
Walk back down from the west side view ridge and drive back to Castle Rock and the 5. Start a drive-circumambulation of the mountain, going north and then east up the Cowlitz Valley. The Cowlitz River gets some of its water from the south side glaciers of Mt. Rainier and the northwest side of Mt. Adams. Dinner at “Carter’s Roadhouse” — old place, slow and funky service, a bar, small press local history books for sale. Then swing south on a forest road to the Iron Creek Campground on the Cispus River and lay out groundsheet in the dark.
Next morning walk the gravelly bar of the little Cispus, duck under droops of moss from old-growth cedar, hot tea on the fir needles. Drive to the Boundary Trail, winding higher on ridgerunning tracks, break out around a corner and there’s the mountain and then suddenly we are in the Blast Zone.
In a great swath around the lake basin, everything in direct line to the mountain is flat down: white clear logs, nothing left standing. Next zone of tree-suffering is dead snags still upright. Then a zone called “ashed trees” blighted by a fall of ash, but somehow alive. Last, lucky to be out of line with the blast, areas of green forest stand. A function of distance, direction, and slope. Finally, far enough back, healthy old forest stretches away.
New patterns march in from the edges, while within the zone occasional little islands of undamaged vegetation survive. In some cases a place still covered with snow and down in a dip. From Windy Ridge the carpet of floating logs on the lake is mostly at the north end.
Go out several miles walking along the ridge and onto slopes of the volcano. It’s all ash and rock now, no forest regrowth here, and the sun as hot and dry as Arizona.
At the car again and drive to the Norway Pass road turnoff (from the mountain road see an arrow, shot and sticking in a dead tree, up high, and from the downslope side. Why? How?) and go north for a look down at the Green River valley and beyond that the high Goat Mountain ridge. Too far north up there to be affected. Down in the Green River valley one can see the distinct boundary between the unmanaged “ecological zone” of the Volcanic Monument where natural succession rules, and the adjacent National Forest land that had soon been logged and planted. The planting took hold well. In the natural succession blast zone the conifers are rising — not quite tall enough to shade out down logs and flowers, but clearly flourishing. But over into the “planted” zone it’s striking to see how much taller and denser the growing plantation is. Well, no surprise. Wild natural process takes time, and allows for the odd and unexpected. We still know far too little about it. This natural regeneration project has special values of its own, aesthetic, spiritual, scientific. Both the wild and the managed sides will be instructive to watch for centuries to come.
Baby plantlife, spiky, firm and tender,
stiffly shaking in the same old breeze.
We camped for the night on a ridgetop with long views both ways. A tiny fire, a warm breeze, cloudless starry sky. The faint whiffs of sulfur from the fumaroles. In the morning, cloud-fog rising covers the sun. Fog comes up the Columbia Valley and fills the deep-cut side-canyons clear back to here — floats awhile past our nearby truck.
Sit on folded groundsheets on the ashy pumice hard-packed soil and pick up our conversations again. Fred clarifies distinctions such as “original” and “restored.” What’s old? What’s new? What’s “renew”? I then held forth on the superiority of the Han’-gul writing system of Korea over all other alphabets, but what got me started on that? Our hissing Primus stove. I talked about ten years of living in Japan, “Two hundred miles of industrial city-strip along the railroad, and tenth-growth forest mountains far as you can see. Went twice through Hiroshima, great noodles, full of activists, green and leafy — doing fine.”
Fred’s mind is as open as a summer morning in the Sierra. We talk about a lot. But when we come back to forests, eruptions, and the balance of economy and ecology, I shut up and listen.
Green tea hotwater
Sunball in the fog
Loowit cooled in white
New crater summit lightly dusted
Morning fumarole summit mist-wisps — “Hah” . . . “Hah”
One final trip before leaving: a walk to Ghost Lake: pearly everlasting, huckleberries and fireweed, all the way.
Out to Ghost Lake through white snags,
threading down tree deadfalls, no trail work lately here,
light chaco sandals leaping, nibbling huckleberries, walking logs
bare toed dusty feet
I worked around this lake in ’49
both green then
PEARLY EVERLASTING
Walk a trail down to the lake
mountain ash and elderberries red
old-growth log bodies blown about,
whacked down, tumbled in the new ash wadis.
Root-mats tipped up, veiled in tall straight fireweed,
fields of prone logs laid by blast
in-line north-south down and silvery
limbless barkless poles —
clear to the alpine ridgetop all you see
is toothpicks of dead trees
thousands of summers
at detritus-cycle rest
— hard and dry in the sun — the long life of the down tree yet to go
bedded in bushes of pearly everlasting
dense white flowers
saplings of bushy vibrant silver fir
the creek here once was “Harmony Falls”
The pristine mountain
just a little battered now
the smooth dome gone
ragged crown
the lake was shady yin —
now blinding water mirror of the sky
remembering days of fir and hemlock —
no blame to magma or the mountain
& sit on a clean down log at the lake’s edge,
the water dark as tea.
I had asked Mt. St. Helens for help
the day I climbed it, so seems she did
The trees all lying flat like, after that big party
Siddhartha went to on the night he left the house for good,
crowd of young friends whipped from sexy dancing
dozens crashed out on the floor
angelic boys and girls, sleeping it off.
A palace orgy of the gods but what
; “we” see is “Blast Zone” sprinkled with
clustered white flowers
“Do not be tricked by human-centered views,” says Dogen,
And Siddhartha looks it over, slips away — for another forest —
— to really get right down on life and death.
If you ask for help it comes.
But not in any way you’d ever know
— thank you Loowit, lawilayt-lá, Smoky Mâ
gracias xiexie grace
ENJOY THE DAY
One morning on a ridgetop east of Loowit
after campstove coffee
looking at the youthful old volcano
breathing steam and sulfur
sunrise lava
bowls of snow
went up behind a mountain hemlock
asked my old advisors where they lay
what’s going on?
they say
“New friends and dear sweet old tree ghosts
here we are again. Enjoy the day.”
II
Yet Older Matters
BRIEF YEARS
Hanging Out by Putah
Creek with Younger Poets
Sitting on the dusty
dry-leaf crackly ground,
freeway rumble south,
black walnut shade,
crosslegged, hot,
exchanging little poems
Yet Older Matters
A rain of black rocks out of space
onto deep blue ice in Antarctica
nine thousand feet high scattered for miles.
Crunched inside yet older matter
from times before our very sun
(from a conversation with Eldridge Moores & Kim Stanley Robinson)
Flowers in the Night Sky
I thought, forest fires burning to the north!
yellow nomex jacket thrown in the cab, hard-hat, boots,
I gunned the truck up the dirt-road scrambling,
and came out on a flat stretch with a view:
shimmering blue-green streamers and a red glow down the sky —
Stop. Storms on the sun. Solar winds going by
(The night of the red aurora borealis: seen as far south as northern California, April 2001)
A Dent in a Bucket
Hammering a dent out of a bucket
a woodpecker
answers from the woods
Baby Jackrabbit
Baby jackrabbit on the ground
thick furry brindled coat
little black tailtip
back of the neck ate out,
life for an owl.
Work Day
They want —
Short lengths of 1” schedule 40 PVC
A 10’ chimney sweeping brush
someone to grind the mower blades
a log chain,
my neighbors’ Spring work.
Chainsaw dust
clay-clod stuck spade
apple blossoms and bees
Asian Pear
The slender tender Asian pear
unpruned, skinny, by the zendo
never watered, ragged,
still puts out fruit
fence broken,
trunk scored with curls of bark,
bent-off branches, high-up scratches —
pears for a bear
Cool Clay
In a swarm of yellowjackets
a squirrel drinks water
feet in the cool clay, head way down
Give Up
Walking back from the Dharma-Talk
summer dry madrone
leaves rattle down
“Give up! give up!
Oh sure!” they say
How
small birds flit
from bough
to bough to bough
to bough to bough to bough
Whack
Green pinecone flakes
pulled, gnawed clean around,
wobbling, slowly falling
scattering on the ground,
whack the roof.
Tree-top squirrel feasts
— twitchy pine boughs.
Yowl
Out of the underbrush
a bobcat bursts chasing a housecat.
Crash — yowl — silence.
Pine pollen settles again.
April Calls and Colors
Green steel waste bins
flapping black plastic lids
gobbling flattened cardboard,
far off, a backup beeper
Standup Comics
A parking meter that won’t take coins
a giant sprinkler valve wheel chained and locked
a red and white fire hydrant
a young dandelion at the edge of the pavement
Sky, Sand
Cottonwoods streambank
splashing fording up the creekbed
black phoebe calling pi pi pi here, near —
Mexican blackhawk cruising — squint at the sky,
shoes full of sand
(Aravaipa Canyon, Arizona)
Mimulus on the Road to Town
Out of cracks in the roadcut rockwalls,
clumps of peach-colored mimulus
spread and bloom,
stiffly quiver in the hot
log-truck breeze-blast
always going by —
A Tercel is a Young Male Hawk
Falconers used to believe that the third hawk egg in a clutch would be a male. So they call a young male hawk a “tercel” from tertius, “third.” Who knows why carmakers name their cars the way they do.
Taking the gas cap off
stick it in my work vest pocket
I see a silver Tercel parked
by a hedge and a waste bin full of bottles
— filling my old Toyota pickup.
Brighter Yellow
An “Ozark Trucking” bigrig pulls up
by me on the freeway, such a vivid yellow!
a brighter yellow than bulldozers.
This morning James Lee Jobe was talking
of the wild blue bonnets
and the dark red Indian paintbrush down in Texas.
Said, “from a distance — them growing all together
makes a field of solid purple.”
Hey — keep on the right side
of that yellow line
To the Liking of Salmon
Spawning salmon dark and jerky
just below the surface ripple
shallow lower Yuba
River bed — old mining gravels
mimicking a glacier outflow
perfect for the redds below Parks Bar.
(how hydraulic mining made the Yuba Goldfields like a post-glacial river in Alaska)
GLACIER GHOSTS
Late July: Five Lakes Basin & Sand Ridge, Northern Sierra
A lake east of the east end of Sand Ridge, a sleeping site tucked under massive leaning glacial erratic propped on bedrock, bed of wood bits, bark, and cones.
Gravelly bed below a tilted erratic,
chilly restless night,
— ants in my hair
Nap on a granite slab
half in shade, you can never hear enough
sound of wind in the pines
Piko feared heights
went up the steep ridge on all fours.
But she went
Catching grasshoppers for bait
attaching them live to the hook
— I get used to it
a certain poet, needling
Allen Ginsberg by the campfire
“How come they all love you?”
Clumsy at first
my legs, feet, and eye learn again to leap,
skip through the jumbled rocks
Starting a glissade
down a steep snowfield
they say, “Gary, don’t!”
but I know my iceaxe
Diving in the perched lake, coming up
can see right over the outlet waterfall
distant peaks Sierra Buttes
Tired, quit climbing at a small pond
made camp, slept on a slab
til the moon rose
ice-scrape-ponds, scraggly pines,
long views, flower mud marshes,
so many places
for a wandering boulder to settle,
forever.
A gift of rattlesnake
meat — packed in —
cooked on smoky coals
how did it taste?