Again I couldn't muster the energy for a full walk through the park, due to illness.  Instead, I poked around the edges and saw signs of spring.  The Indian plum is leafing out, not quite blooming yet.  The tall Oregon grape has large flower clusters that haven't opened up yet.  Some of the snowberry bushes are covered with fresh little leaves while other snowberry bushes remain dormant.  Some trilliums have poked their heads up through the leaf litter while others are still sleeping. 

Since I have been reading Pacific Feast, I decided to try a little nettle tea, to see if it would help my cold.  I found nettles on private property that are just poking up, and I harvested less than five percent of the colony, with permission of the property owner.  I was careful not to get stung as I snipped off the tops of two plants.  I steeped the nettles in boiling water for fifteen minutes.  It smelled a bit like spinach, so I added a little sugar before tasting it.  With sugar, it was okay, nothing special that I would seek out.  I can't say that it has particularly made me feel better so far. 

60 minutes had a segment on the placebo effect.  The book by Pojar and McKinnon is full of supposed medicinal uses of native plants, and I wonder if the effect may have come from the expectation of a cure.  If I want to reap the benefits of medicinal plants, do I need to cultivate a peculiar ignorance?  Do I need to believe in the power of the plant to heal me?  I can believe in nature, I can believe in the potential goodness of humans and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, but I don't know if I am able to believe in the curative properties of nettles.  I hope it can still work on a skeptic. 

I didn't know I would be taking so many pictures of rocks when I first started this biography.  It started as a way to visually demonstrate the authenticity of the effort.  Now, it is a ritual, and every time I go to the beach, I look for interesting rocks and interesting settings in which to photograph them.  It has become a kind of language or code.  I have not deciphered the code, and I don't know what the patterns of rocks mean.  It probably means nothing, but the patterns feel like the communication of an essential truth.

I have been searching for a particular type of rock that would speak of the deep history of this land.  I keep checking for fossils as the land opens up before it falls into the tidal zone.  So far, that mammoth tooth or arrowhead has escaped my notice.  I did find one piece of petrified wood, although it does not say anything specific about this forest.  It may have come from far away, brought here by the glacier.

The stones are new every day, even though they are always the same.  When you look across the gravelly beach, it seems the same as every other day.  When I hunt for that particular stone that will star in the day's picture, I see just how varied and beautiful they are.  So many are unique, created in processes I don't understand.  The stones with perpendicular lines seem like that couldn't have been made by any sedimentary process I can imagine.  If each stone could tell its story of millennia, I could learn of the fire and ice, rain and wind, accretion and erosion.  Some rocks bear the scars of sudden dramatic events.  Was one of them blasted out of Mt. Rainier the last time it experienced a major eruption?

The day after I talked about how my forest makes me strong, I became deathly ill.  Sure, it was only a minor cold, but I felt like I was dying at several points.  I did not make the full walk through the park.  Instead, I visualized the park.  I tested myself to see if I could remember every tree, shrub, and blade of grass.  I had no trouble remembering the major trees, the landmarks of the park.  The two remaining sentries by the street, and the one that was sacrificed, now lying on the ground, becoming a nurse log.  I could visualize every twist in the big maple by the Y.  The maple and fir trees smashed up against each other make a memorable image.  I could even think of the trees that were removed, for no good reason.  There are sections of the park that aren't completely visible from the trail, and I could not be certain I remembered the number and orientation of those trees exactly right. 

Some of the shrubs are just a mass, like the salal in the middle of the park.  I remembered most of the individual ocean spray plants, with their distinctive arches.  The red huckleberries are rare enough that I could think of both of them.  I know the locations of all the surviving trilliums, those that haven't been plucked and killed by thoughtless people.  The ferns are hard to remember in specific terms, since they are ubiquitous and fairly uniform.  I remembered all the little trees I planted in the landslide, trying to stabilize it, before I finally gave up on that after losing dozens of trees.  If I knew how to draw or paint, I think I could recreate a representation of the forest, although some of the proportions and exact locations might be a little off. 

Some day I will actually be deathly ill, not just sidelined with a common cold.  My beautiful dogs will probably be gone by then.  When I am alone in that hospital bed, with the noise of distant TVs and the smell of medicines and sanitizers, I will close my eyes and take a walk with my dogs through my forest. 

In the late nineties, before I became interested in native plants, I worked hard for days to eradicate a patch of thimble berry plants near my kitchen window.  It didn't work.  They grew back bigger and healthier than ever.  I am glad of that, and years later I came to appreciate them.  The would come alive in summer, electrified by dozens of bees.  The patch of thimble berry was about eight feet tall, fifteen feet wide, and forty feet long.  What had been an eyesore and a problem became a treasure because of my attitude change and increased knowledge of ecosystems. 

I did not set out to be an environmentalist.  15 years ago, if you would have told me that my future involved volunteering hundreds of hours for the benefit of the environment and helping lost dogs and cats, I would have said you were crazy.  I am much different now than I was 15 years ago, not because I changed in a way someone mandated, but because I became aware of the value of things I once found worthless.  As a kid, I only thought of the forest as a place to be alone.  I did not care for the environment, and I did not hesitate to flatten any plant that was in my way.  It was just growing there, so why shouldn't I trample it?  If someone would have told me, "You have to change your ways for the benefit of trees and ferns and dogs," I would have resisted.  The change came naturally, over time, as I learned things.

For ELP to be healthy, many people need to change their behaviors.  Obviously, they are not going to change because I want them to.  If I think it is vital for the planet that people change their ways, no one is going to listen to me.  Instead, people ought to change because it is in their own best interests, which it most certainly is.  By entering into a symbiotic relationship with your planet, you can become something greater than you were.  I am the forest and the forest is me.  Where I used to see some trees and a bunch of worthless plants, I now see a vibrant and beautiful ecosystem.  I have integrated myself into that ecosystem in many ways, and I am smarter, stronger, and healthier because of my relationship with the forest.  I am smarter in the sense that I understand how it all works.  I understand most of the individual pieces of the ecosystem, and I see how they interact.  I am stronger in the sense that I know where I belong and what I stand for.  When trying to fit into other ideologies, such as capitalism or religion, I was constantly frustrated by the incongruities and hypocrisy.  Capitalism is designed to fail.  Religion is deeply in conflict with itself.  Democracy, well, that is just a complete myth. Long before those ideologies came along, ecology flourished.  Ecology made us, and we hurt ourselves if we try to destroy it. 

I am not asking people to enter into a symbiotic relationship with their environment because it benefits me or because it benefits the environment, although both are true.  People should take a different approach to nature for their own health and well-being, for their own enjoyment and entertainment.  A world with trees and wilderness is just richer, more alive, than a world of highways and strip malls.  Rows of similar houses with lawns and hedges are just boring and pointless.  Wilderness is where we belong, where we can be alive.

Today I set my iPhone up to shoot a time lapse of the clouds rolling by over Vashon.  Well, the clouds hardly budged, but an eagle swooped through the scene, hunting a duck.  The duck got away.  That was the first time I had ever seen the eagle actually in the process of hunting.  He had been in the perch tree, directly above that spot.  He swooped straight down at the duck he had been watching, but the duck dove down under water.  The eagle swooped back and forth, climbing and diving, keeping the duck underwater.  When the duck came up for a breath, the eagle dove again, but the duck dove down deep and swam away.  The eagle made a brief attempt at two more ducks about thrity feet away, but they flew off before he could reach them.  The eagle gave up and flew up to the alder tree just above my head.  Then he let out a loud call.

When I saw the eagle, I pointed him out to a man exercising on the stairs.  He got to watch the whole episode.  He said he had been coming to the park for years to exercise on the stairs, but that was the first time he had ever seen an eagle.

Stone 46

I have dreams where I fly through the park.  Instead of walking along the trail, I float along between the trees.  During these dreams, I think, Oh, right, people can fly.  Of course that is natural.  How could I have forgotten.  Then, when I wake, even though the dream wasn't real, it retains a sort of reality, like an extra dimension.  I tried to shoot a video that would represent flying through the park.  The app on my iPhone was not all that easy to use, and the end product does not match up at all with the feeling of my dreams.  Also, trying to shoot a time lapse video while holding onto four dogs is not a recipe for success.  I will try to shoot this video again, some day when I have more time and fewer dogs.

Back in Eagle Landing Park, thinking about the homeowner's desire for order, color, and definition, I realized that my writing and photography about nature are usually focused on finding patterns, highlighting colors, and arranging details.  When taking pictures, I have a selective eye.  I look for something noteworthy or novel.  I try to keep my horizon level.  I may use techniques like the rule of thirds, leading lines, or framing.  I balance light and dark.  I find edges and accentuate shapes.  These are the same artistic touches that are so detrimental to the environment in the homeowner's yard.  The desire for order and structure makes a landscape of wild natives less desireable in this sense. 

When I am writing about the park, or about anything, I follow rules, usually.  I make a stab at correct grammar, and I try to stick to one topic at a time.  I group my ideas into paragraphs.  I usually have a point I am trying to make.  A native plant garden in someone's back yard might not follow the expected rules for gardens.  One particular example is that, in the typical garden, any leaf that falls is whisked away in order to avoid the perception of carelessness or untidiness.  In nature, fallen leaves are healthy and natural.  Lawns are supposed to be kept trimmed, neat, edged, green, lush, and groomed.  Nature does not stay within boundaries, sprawls wildly, often shows brown leaves and damage, and resists any attempts at grooming. 

A desire for order and structure can be useful and healthy even within ecosystems.  One could add this order and structure through writing and photography, through the selective eye, rather than imposing a physical order on nature that would be stifling and destructive.  Even in doing restoration within ELP, an ordered approach is helpful, attacking vertical ivy first and clearing the healthiest areas of all invasives first.  I can even rearrange elements of the park into patterns temporarily if I put them back.  The pictures below show today's stone in its natural state, with the other stones of the beach, and then highlighted in an artificial way that allows the viewer to see the details of one particular stone.  Neither way is better.  The isolated stone is simply easier to comprehend.  Choosing particular details of the environment fits the habits of our minds.  The stone will go back home some day, and nothing will be lost from nature.  If viewing nature in an artificially ordered manner makes us like it more, then that can be a benefit to the ecosystem. 

It is not enough for me to say that the typical suburban yard looks as if people hate nature.  We need to understand the reasons for this bias against nature.  One reason is that our system of capitalism punishes those who do not display their primary asset, their home, in the standard fashion.  Another reason is the mind's natural tendency to impose order as a way of increasing understanding.  A third reason is cultural bias that has not been questioned.  A fourth reason may be that people do not understand the impact of their gardens on the environment.  People think a garden is friendlier to the environment than a parking lot, which may be true, but not by much.  A fifth reason could be security, as burglars might be more likely to strike at a home with a wild, unkempt yard, although I don't know that this is necessarily true.  All of these reasons why people have a prejudice against nature can be overcome if they are examined.  The main obstacle to a true appreciation of nature is the blind assumption by people that the way things are is the way things ought to be. 

Eagle Landing Park would be in its best possible health if it was restored to all native species, and if every yard adjoining the park was also filled with native species.  Eight parcels of private property surround the park.  The two parcels that share the most linear footage of fence line with the park are very wild looking, although those properties are not necessarily any healthier than the park.  When the majority of homeowners throughout Burien view a wild tangle of native plants as desirable for their own back yards, then I will have done my job and ELP will breathe easier.