Lookout Creek

Many years ago, I realized that the University of Oregon wouldn't fire me for building creative writing exercises into my upper-division biology course, Amphibians and Reptiles of Oregon. I chose to take seriously the precept that science and art provide different vantage points on knowledge. We can triangulate from these disparate points in the living landscape to navigate attentively and truthfully into a wiser future. This is the premise on which the Long Term Ecological Reflections program at H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest began 20 years ago.

For several years I hiked with my class along the H.J. Andrews Old Growth Trail down to the torrent that is Lookout Creek, a roar of gravity-driven water rushing impetuously along the canyon bottom. I challenged my students to separate along the way. Find a place to sit alone with their journals. Shut off their phones. Be still for an hour. Pay attention. Record anything they saw, smelled, or felt. Write anything they liked. Or didn’t. I promised to be alone and write with them. And to read my piece in class a day before theirs was due.

Reading those small essays and poems became one of my greatest joys in teaching. Some of the writing was flat out beautiful and probably publishable. Other folks struggled with language barriers. Punctuation and capitalization were sometimes an approximation. Despite all that, the honesty they entrusted with me was utterly humbling. And I realized that by being truthful with them, I had given them tacit permission to bare that honesty, an interweaving of spirits borne on empathy.

Now the Lookout Fire has burned the upper reaches of Lookout Creek. I know what an old-growth fire looks and feels like. Trees torching into super-heated air, a swirl of sparks ascending into descending nightfall. That evening, I could feel the collective heat from the far side of the canyon. I know that fire sparks regeneration that favors a host of species otherwise excluded from perennially cool and stately old-growth communities. I also know that mossy salamander refuges are replaced with dry ash and charcoal. Sunlight that was once attenuated by needled fingers of western red cedar and western hemlock becomes a hard glare on south-facing slopes. Even though the autumn rains have returned as usual, on Lookout Creek everything is different. Everything will be different for a few hundred years.

Oregon Slender Salamander

Grief comes in many flavors. So does gratitude. They braid together the way a multichannel river traverses a flat valley bottom. Last summer was my last year of teaching Amphibians and Reptiles of Oregon, my last year of reading those honest discourses rising from old trees and amphibians, written next to water that bubbles and snaps as if to remind us that all life rushes along whether or not we are paying attention. I’ll miss that collective attentiveness. Mom is gone. I wrote an obituary for her yesterday, trying to encapsulate her life into less than 500 words. The newspaper charged 700 bucks for the privilege. I’ll miss her even while knowing that the universe has a way of gathering us back into ash and dust at an appropriate time. My friend Richard is also gone. It was to him that I dedicated those first words penned years ago in a silent mediation along Lookout Creek. He was too weak for visitors when I wrote the piece, but he read and appreciated the words before he left.

For Richard and my mother and the Lookout Creek that was, is, and is yet to become, know that I am extraordinarily grateful.

Lookout Creek

A white curtain of water roars over a downed cedar snag, pummeling my ears, roiling the clear pool below, then dashes downhill, forking around an oblong boulder riddled with holes, childhood scars left when heated air burbled from fiery young liquid, gas bubbles barely escaping near eternity in cells of cold stone.

Below the pocked boulder, the creek rejoins itself in mindless continuity. A herd of water molecules tethered by hydrogen bonds are strung into a stream, forced by gravity to follow this canyon of the creek’s own making. Water clear as Buddha Mind flows beneath standing dead cedars, roots drowned when the impetuous turbulence changed course and began chattering past a small gravel bar, a collection of basalt cobbles broken and polished by the endless tumble of water.

Inside this reckless physicality, I park my butt on a piece of mountain worn to roundness by the creek, sending the cool dampness of leftover night creeping into aging bones. A cluster of half-grown nettles smells like green tea mixed with bobcat piss. At my feet, moss struggles to claim space on the stones. I struggle to claim space in this place, space in my mind, space for mindfulness.

Uncertainty enters every pore. Shall I drop my pen and breathe in the effortless endless flow of water? Or should my brain remain engaged with fingers, eyes, ears, skin? I’m wondering, because…

Who am I to act as conscious interface with this utterly unconscious place, pungent sun dancing through a blue gap, casting light and shadow on ancient conifers?

Who am I to force human meaning onto acrid nettles, spittlebug spit on fireweed, flat green palms of cow parsnip and thimbleberry, baby hemlocks springing from a log long dead but still feeding baby hemlocks, or the slither of Coastal Giant Salamanders stalking quiet pools for crayfish and cutthroat trout, their wide brown heads with feathery blood-filled gills seeking water-borne oxygen?

Who am I to serve as witness? Yet I must attend to old mountains and trees dying with grace and tranquility, worn down by relentless water and spreading years.

Now you are dying with grace and tranquility, worn down by spreading cells gone feral, cells no longer following the cooperative dance laid down by evolution.

When you told us you were leaving, I promised I wouldn’t be sad. Yet I am. Because gratitude and grieving are the pool and riffle, the noisy quietude of our lives. Still, I am not paralyzed. You have taught me that our time is uncertain, that consciousness is uncertain, that life is spun only from attentive forward movement.

So I’ll toss the bright pebble of your life into this clear pool. Watch ripples spread outward. They disappear into the sweeping current.