Softened by Mist

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6:15 a.m. on the front porch of the Johnny Gunter place and 43 degrees. Fog hangs dreamily on the ridges, gentles their abrupt rise from the valley floor, softens the prickled needles of big conifers. The vapor slips easily into my nose, tiny particles of water that rinse away the coffee taste lingering in my throat. Mist smooths the edges of the mid-May soundscape. The dawn chorus is dominated by chirruping Black-headed Grosbeaks. An unseen woodpecker rattles its bill against a trunk like the creak of an old leather hinge struggling to open. From the dense second-growth fir to the west comes a sonic landmark of spring: the first vaporous tendril of a Swainson’s Thrush song. The call is barely audible to my aging ears, and for a moment I wonder if it is only imagination borne on longing. The easy air is disrupted by the thump and whir of charcoal wings. Raven circles in to check the altar of flat basalt stones at the edge of the parking area for the remains of any unfortunate mice trapped from inside the house. They circle again, head cocked toward me, asking Really? I raise my empty hands. Sorry, not this morning.

My grandsons are with me on this trip. Edmund appears on the porch. He is the morning person, almost twelve, his body a gangle of pale skin topped with a thick swirl of white hair, as if he had captured a piece of the foggy morning and made himself a hat. He now wears my size twelve shoes. We go inside to make the ritual hot chocolate. On the living room floor, his seven-year-old brother Chris is snoring. No one knows exactly how far he travels in his sleep, but this morning he has reversed directions and is mostly out of his sleeping bag. His pillow lying in a useless crumple at his feet. Hot chocolate in hand, Edmund returns to the porch with me, slurping and writing in his own journal. The cold soon drives him back inside to the woodstove, leaving me with birdsong and the scritch of my pen bleeding thoughts in black ink.

Ostensibly, the boys have come to help. Yesterday we fired up the hydraulic wood splitter and began breaking up large rounds of a Douglas-fir that once stood between the driveway and the orchard. Although I was rarely left alone at the task, they circled in and out of the splitting in an erratic choreography driven by youthful attention deficit. I didn’t mind. Despite the unending To-Do lists that constantly surround this place and clutter my thoughts, when my grandsons make the trip there is a single imperative—that they love being here and love coming with me.

The mist is a gently breathing thing. It softens. It also obscures. Sometimes these amount to the same thing. In the fog beyond the meadow a narrow trail opens to the spring. The boys and I walked there yesterday. Edmund is nervous about leading because his eyesight is diminished by albinism. My goal is to bring him often enough that he can memorize the route. Even for normal eyes the trail vanishes into dense salmonberry foliage at the edge of the old forest. Beyond this point it becomes a phantom, grown over by plant beings who dwell in the subdued light of the understory: dwarf Oregon grape, salal, and small hemlocks. We always stop for the log walk. Edmund balances along the uprooted corpse of a large Douglas-fir, teetering along it to a point beneath the vine maples where the trunk becomes too narrow to follow further.

Beyond the downed log a steep bank rises on the right to a mossy hollow above the path. By mid-May, the time for Lady Slippers, the vernacular name for Calypso Orchid that I grew up with, is ending. Their thumb-size blossoms of bulbous pink and lavender were Mom’s favorite wildflower. Decades ago Mom chose this small depression shaded by big trees and fringed with decaying logs to transplant some bulbs. Mom was a rescuer. Cats, dogs, Guinea fowl, a gaggle of prepubescent Bantum roosters, and a mistreated goat from next door had been some of the beneficiaries of her mercy, and the orchids had likely been saved from certain death somewhere on a planned clearcut. She checked on them faithfully every spring for as long as she was able to make this walk. I can’t remember how many she placed there originally, but this spring they have been reduced to one. Today the single blossom has faded toward late spring, transformed from vibrant flamingo to pale pink.

For years I’ve known about the ongoing decline of the lady slipper garden. Other bulbs had been rescued from a neighboring clearcut years ago and transplanted along this trail. They met a similar fate—only one bloomed this spring. I’ve also learned that a patch of over thirty thrives just down the hill with no human intervention. Lady Slippers certainly can’t survive on sun-beaten clearcuts. However, even in a closed canopy forest they have their own intrinsic knowledge of where and when and how to be orchids that does not include human intervention.

Mist conceals. Mist softens. When Mom could no longer make this walk, I made sure to tell her only about the new lady slipper patches I discovered on my forays through the surrounding forest. Knowing that the orchid patch was dwindling would have made her sad. And for Mom the boundary between sadness and anger was fluid. Amorphous. Complex. Like ever shifting mist on a May morning. Her anger came from a complex entanglement of causes. Family culture. Unprocessed grief and loss. A rural post-Depression upbringing that left her on the receiving end of classism, an insipid word that really means culturally acceptable bullying, a piss-on-your-leg emotional beatdown designed to keep people in their place while feeding the egos of the self-anointed. The emotional outcomes of bullying are rampant and overlapping: insecurity, depression, sadness, helplessness, a desire for revenge. In retrospect, I realize that she suffered from all of it.

Despite this, Mom was a fundamentally good person. Because of her experiences she always had tremendous empathy for the underdog. She taught us to look out for kids who were being bullied in school. Taught us to reach out to others who seemed like they needed a friend. She took care of those less fortunate, including people, chickens, and Lady Slippers. Mom despised bullies precisely because she had been bullied.

This year I’ve been sitting quietly along the turbid river of my own anger. I don’t become fully immersed. Rather, I park on the bank and let my feet hang in the moving water. Waiting. Staring. Allowing the swirl of silt to slowly clear. The bottom eventually comes into focus. There are pebbles of all colors, shapes, sizes. I look them over carefully, searching for those that might represent wisdom. Finding these nuggets isn’t easy because, like it or not, my eyes are clouded by personal perception and bias. My hope is that quiet spaces and deep intuition will provide some clarity. In the process I often think about Mom.

There was a time not so long ago when I sought to expunge my anger, to “heal” from it. But ire has nuance, and some forms seem appropriate, especially what is sometimes called righteous anger. Like Mom, I despise bullying in all its forms: verbal, physical, and emotional. I despise it wherever it occurs: on the playground, in the workplace, at parties, on the highway. I despise it in politicians. I despise it in all manifestations of classism: racism, sexism, gender identity, and sexual preference. I despise it in whatever form brings cruelty to human and other-than-human beings. Thank you, Mom.

But there’s a catch. There is always a catch. In fact, there are multiple catches. An obvious one is that even righteous anger can be dealt out inappropriately, especially when intolerance becomes engrained into a moral code. There is an even more difficult entanglement. For people like me and my mother, our righteous anger is wrapped up with the traumas that were inflicted by our oppressors. We have become hypersensitized and lash out at inappropriate times, a response stemming from insecurity and even self-loathing. Disentangling this snarl of emotion will take the rest of my days sitting and waiting for that turbid river to clear again, and yet again. For now I am unwilling to let all of the anger go when some of it seems so appropriate. There is only this: even with all the damaging intolerance in the world, please allow me to remain intolerant of bullying.

Mist conceals and softens. Mom did her best to dilute the impact of her anger on her family. I have resolved to do likewise, whether or not I have sorted out its shifting forms. The boys and I walk to the head of the trail to drink from the spring that waters the house. We dip the cup, and again I tell them the story of how this water dissolves the sandstone bones of the mountains, how the mountains will become their own bones, making them stronger. They argue about which of them will live here when they are grown. I smile inside. In the two-gallon pool where the drinking cup lives, the water is crystalline, lit by Sun streaming through a break in the canopy. The pebbles are sharply defined.

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Here a couple of upcoming summer events:

Sunday, June 29, 10:30, “Nurturing Our Inner Wildness”

Unity of the Valley, 39th & Hilyard Eugene OR

You can livestream here: https://www.facebook.com/unityofthevalley

or from http://www.unityofthevalley.org/

I’ll be onstage at about 11 a.m.

Tuesday, July 22, 6-7 p.m. “Breathless: Celebrating Salamanders and their Small Wild Spaces”

Science Pub, at Axe & Fiddle Public House, 657 East Main Street Cottage Grove, OR

Sponsored by Coast Fork Willamette Watershed Council.

Trivia contest begins at 5! I’ll take the stage at 6 with the most kick-ass salamanders pictures and stories I can muster.