Is Art the Answer?

Yesterday I was reading the latest edition of a literary nature magazine. I stumbled through an article in which the author appeared to need an extreme adventure to notice that the earth was warming up. (Geez…and what was the carbon footprint of that little self-indulgent exercise?) Next was yet another manifesto for a plucky, US-style, cheerful, can-do future, we just need to “re-envision” it. How many more of those “vision quests” can people like me, a lifelong environmentalist, take?

from The Cost of Coal by the Beehive Collective

I was about to give up when I got to an article about a gently subversive artists’ group in Maine who tell important stories of people and nature with intensely researched and designed and metaphorically dazzling wall sized posters. Their most recent project? The Effects of Coal. They travel with their posters, telling their stories and educating those who listen.

I decided to take a closer look at this group—the Beehive Collective. (www.beehivecollective.org)

I agree, these folks look like Hieronymus Bosch paints social issues. Their murals are frighteningly detailed, black and white “beehives” of activity. They look almost alive, pulsating. I feel if I look away and then back some bird will have flown, some frog will have jumped, a tree will have shed its leaves, the pond might have frozen. The art is monumental, uncanny, challenging, thought-provoking. Their first poster projects were about technology but over twelve years they’ve evolved to take on issues of free trade, women’s rights, corporate greed, planetary crises.

Dismantle Monoculture Poster from the Beehive Collective

I’m not sure that the visual arts is a path through to a sturdy future. But I do know that, at some elemental level, it offers at least a glimpse.  Over at that eternal source of Yes We Can Because Yes We Must, 350.org, they’ve started a global project called eARTh, making art on a scale seen from space. The results? see for yourself on their video (www.350.org).  And they led me to this: www.frankejames.com/debate/?page_id=2315. Wow! What an eyeful!

Can these efforts make a difference? I know they do for me. While I may remain not optimistic, these insightful artists (including our grandchildren) continue to give me hope.

Collage: "Tree—2011" © Ben Gomersall (Our grandson)

Waves: Explained

I love children’s books. They are my “go-to” source for straightforward explanations of difficult scientific concepts as well as a reassuring fount of seemingly simple but actually quite astute and often great wisdom.

Bottles and Waves from Dorling Kindersley "Ocean" p. 13

Consider this: A few weeks ago we were down at the beach watching waves. Digging deep into my graduate school education (what was I thinking? A marine biologist who’s afraid of water?) I remembered the physical oceanography course that spent weeks,  and countless words and diagrams trying to explain waves. At the library I was reminded of the very complicated (and incomprehensible to me) nature of waves by an entire 267 page book devoted to the subject called Waves and Beaches by Willard Bascom (1964). In the textbook An Introduction to the World’s Oceans (fifth edition, 1997) all of Chapter Nine deals with the topic, “The Waves.” I looked, I pondered, I scratched my head. As they used to say, It’s all Greek to me.

Waves © SR Euston

But a quick tour of the children’s room landed me Ocean, a Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Book. This is truly a remarkable YA series—now covering over 120 subjects from Epidemics to Baseball, Shipwrecks to Climate Change. And DK did it again. In two sentences they told me just what I needed to know: “Waves are formed by wind causing friction on the surface of the water….Waves that are driven by winds toward a beach, break when the water becomes too shallow.” Oh. I get it now.

Quiet Water © S.R. Euston

As for great pearls of wisdom, whenever the world gets just too crazy (think Republican “debates” or bombing Iran) I can always turn to Wind in the Willows. In the very first chapter, “The River Bank”, Mole is drawn up from his underground spring cleaning into a warm grassy swale. And then he finds the river! By its side “he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last by the insatiable sea.”

And back at the beach, the waves. We, who live next to the ocean, are gifted to listen to their “insatiable stories”. Who cares if  we “understand” what waves are or not.

At the Beach © SR Euston

Spring Signs

I know I’m over a month early but there are too many signs not to recognize that Spring is in the air.

Pacific Tree Frog courtesy of kjfmartin at Wikipedia Commons

The wonderful frogs we call “peepers” (they’re really Pacific Tree Frogs) have begun to hunt for mates, chirruping from the nearby wetland.

Birds have also begun their predawn serenades. The robins and redwing blackbirds are flocking.

Skunk Cabbage Bloom © SR Euston

Last year we noted spring flowers in April. This year, we’ve already seen pussywillows bursting and the first shy woodland yellow violets. Even the skunk cabbage has begun to send out sensuous buttery blooms. Quince have begun to flower.

As our local year turns its back on winter and faces towards the equinox (as does most of the US) in other parts of the world this has been a bruising season.  Europe has had record smashing cold with snow in Rome, and subzero weather in the east. Istanbul has had snow, so too, the mountains in Libya and Algeria. Japan has had blizzards.

Climate scientists aren’t surprised. For them, and most of us sentient beings, these wild gyrations only underscore the urgency of addressing global climate change now. Meanwhile politicians pass state laws requiring the teaching of denier “science” and presidential hopefuls madly scramble to put distance between themselves and climate reality. Of course the federal government, by refusing to address the issue at all, just adds to my pervading sense of frustration and gloom.

Pussywillows © SR Euston

Hal Borland, in his 1957 book Countryman: A Summary of Belief, makes this wry observation: “I used to think that strangers to the open country made so much noise because they feared the silence and the human loneliness. Now I have my doubts. I suspect that they are afraid they may meet themselves coming around the mountain or through the woods. They know how dangerous they are and how little they can be trusted, especially when they are surprised or frightened.”

Still, he reminds me, Spring is coming, and the world does go on regardless of us: “I am, by the simple fact of being alive and sentient, a part of something magnificent and vastly more enduring than the human crowd. I am a participant in Spring.”

Amen to that.

In the Wetland © SR Euston

Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day!

Want to send a unique, clever, useful valentine this year?

Check out all the choices at: www.oregonwild.org/valentines

Here’s mine:

Cape Blanco Tide Pools

One of the many attractions on the north crescent beach of Cape Blanco is the tide pools, which are exposed at mid-to-low tides. A few weeks ago a sunny day and a low tide allowed us to examine up close some of the more amazing flora and fauna found between the tides. With my new, 21st century Brownie (completely and utterly Point and Shoot) I took some snapshots of what I saw. AME

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Book Review: Plastic Ocean

As a discouraged environmentalist (I mean really—when states pass legislation that REQUIRE teaching the “denier” side of climate change, what’s left?), I picked up Plastic Ocean by Charles Moore with a sense of dull fascination.

Plastic Ocean, Charles Moore. Penguin USA, New York. 2011. 358 pg.

But two events suggested a mindful look. First, a few months ago I was involved in a casual conversation in the post office lobby where the opinion was voiced that the “Pacific garbage patch” was a hoax. A friend’s response, “So, you’ve been there and looked?” Hummm…

Then there’s the article that appeared in our local papers this week noting that debris from last March’s tsunami in Japan has begun to arrive on shores in British Columbia. Specifically, Tofino, a beach community and Canadian National Park of spectacular remoteness and beauty. The local article reminds us debris will be coming soon to our own remote and beautiful (although “plastic sanded” at times) Oregon Coastline. (To view NOAA’s tsunami debris trajectory visit: http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/japanfaqs.html)

Deep Pacific Ocean Debris courtesy of plasticoceanthebook.com

Plastic Ocean, by Capt. Charles Moore, released October, 2011, includes a discussion of the potential of tsunami debris in the larger context of the Pacific gyre’s concentration of plastics which Moore, who’s been following and sampling since August, 1997, describes, not as a vast contiguous floating patch, but rather as a “plastic soup.” His findings are just plain scary, perhaps especially to those who like me trained as a marine biologists. When he talks of “nurdles”, tiny floating particles of busted-up plastic, I can only envision filter feeders, concentrating toxic chemicals associated with the plastics even as they starve, filled with plastic rather than the smaller organisms which are their food. There is much much more in the book which by turns curls my hair (the findings) and warms my heart (Moore’s continued commitment to making the change from a consumer disposable to a durable conserver society because it is The Right Thing to Do). The book is dedicated, “To the generation, not yet born, that creates a world where plastic pollution is unthinkable.”

More Debris courtesy of plasticoceanthebook.com

He ends on the note that is all most US environmentalists these days can muster: “we have the smarts, the know-how, and the imperative. The ocean planet will thank you if you help end its plastic plague….I am a patient man, and I have learned the art of seeing….I know how a few well-placed nudges can alter a course, the way a slight tug on a ship’s wheel will point you toward an entirely different destination.”

If you can take it, please read Plastic Ocean by Charles Moore. ( www.plasticoceanthebook.com). Then go out and start nudging.

Ghost Net, North Pacific photo courtesy of plasticoceanthebook.com

A postscript: Check out this article from yesterday’s (1/27) LA Times about a plastic trashed resort beach in Mexico: www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-beach-pollution-20120128,0,2261593.story

(Suddenly) Winter

After weeks of unusual mostly dry weather, winter rain finally arrived on the Southern Oregon Coast. Storms began to roll in last week and by Tuesday, a day we had to travel north, rain began to fall in earnest.

Thursday, Port © AME

Wednesday weather’s was a nightmare forecast—slashing rain, storm force winds with gusts to 100 mph (!) at Cape Blanco, worst where we would heading—into a south wind down oceanside US 101. Areas of particular concern? Ours: Bandon, Port Orford and Gold Beach. The national weather service’s computerized robovoice warned: Don’t drive, Watch for road debris, Stay off area beaches (high surf, 25+ foot breakers) and jetties. Oh and BTW, surfing and swimming not recommended. (No joke, the computer said that too.)

Flooded Dunes © AME

Taking a chance, we returned. And yes, there were gale force winds on US 101. At Reedsport, we saw half a trailer house in transit, blown over on its side off the road, plastic sheeting waving, tires in the air. By the Sixes River valley the rain was sheeting toward the car as we headed directly into the wind. Cresting the next hill (at the Cape Blanco turnoff) it wasn’t at all hard to imagine 100 mph gusts just six miles west. Entering Port Orford, the Hazardous Winds Next 27 Miles if Flashing sign’s lights were definitely blinking. Stan couldn’t feel his hands for clutching the steering wheel.

Griffs Sandbagged © AME

We headed directly to the port to see if the parking lot was underwater, another of the worst-case predictions. Nope, but all was dark and quiet. Turns out all the dock businesses had sandbagged and left, literally turning off the lights (the electricity had been disconnected) behind them.

Once home, the County Sheriff’s Wednesday morning robomessage phone alert (a first) underscored the storm’s potential. All told we got close to nine inches of rain, over seven of it Wednesday.

Today, we hit the beach to view another high surf event, 25-30 foot breakers. Right now it’s sunny. But we’re just between the acts. We’re supposed to get rain for the next seven days.

It’s beginning to look like winter in Oregon.

Thursday Mists at the Port © AME

2011: A Naturalist’s Year in Port Orford

2011 was a banner year for the Southern Oregon Coast natural history lovers. We had rain (naturally), snow, a tsunami, a threat to one of our most treasured natural areas (stopped by citizen action!), a profusion of wildflowers beginning in March with trillium and skunk cabbage, followed by iris and  tangles of sweet peas and ending in fall in a burst of asters, a brilliant Fourth of July, blue skies and wind throughout summer, a delightful fall and a dry start to winter. We ended the year 21 inches behind in rainfall!

Take a look at our glorious coast as it looked across the seasons. Happy New Year!

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A Lost World: Southern California Dreaming—Part 5

Things of Memory

Think for a moment about a treasured photo of you as a child. Of the surroundings, of your smile or the frown. Maybe your childhood home is in the background of the frame, maybe you are playing on a swing at the park with friends. You get the idea.

Hide and Seek © SR Euston

In viewing even the most forlorn snapshot, tantalizing memories and strong emotions can be illuminated instantaneously. The dark cover of unconsciousness momentarily lifts. Certain parts of the brain become stimulated in strange and largely unknown ways. The result can be conscious memories that startle with their impact.

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That two dimensional memory-evoking photo you imagined above captured maybe 1/100 of a second of your life. In middle retirement age, this equals about two trillionths (10¹²) of one’s life so far lived. Seemingly even more impossible, those memories dancing on such ephemeral waves continually widen, like ripples from a stone tossed into deep azure waters. The waves move rapidly in mysterious ways.

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Sometimes the flashing memories break on one another, so to speak. A peaceful but undramatic black and white picture of sycamores somewhere in Southern California miraculously leads me to the Sunday drive along Los Feliz Boulevard near the Hollywood Hills to meet my Aunt, Uncle and cousins at Griffith Park in Los Angeles. I’m imagining we are going to have a picnic of potato salad and sandwiches. Are my grandparents going to be there? I’ll be playing softball catch with Uncle Vern.

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What about the photo of my brother playing “hide and seek” behind the tree? Was it only a pose? Or was my brother captured peering from behind the sycamore, my father yelling, “freeze — I got your picture, son” ? (Was there a call of “ollie ollie oxen free free free?”) I’m sure it’s summer. I can smell the lawn, the leaves, the air. And I wasn’t even there.

I know the other picture of Dick in the park was carefully composed — my father’s romantic 1930s photographic eye is in full play here.

Brother Dick, 1936 © SR Euston

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More than simple memory suffuses such mental wanderings. I can only explain it to myself–very poorly– as a complex of full body sensations, a sort of rapid fire full mind and body transformation of the past. How otherwise can these park photos next lead me to a change of seasons, scenes of October brown sycamore leaves. I see them under the mottled whitish bark of spreading sycamore limbs; I hear the sound of my crumbling the big tinder-dry palm-like leaves between my hands;  I smell the slightly acrid but wonderfully evocative autumnal scent; I see muted, subtle autumnal tints of a southern California October. The mental waves are dancing now. The time is late afternoon, and we are driving home from the park. It’s near Christmas. The San Gabriels are bathed in a mauve purple light. Our 7′ Douglas fir ornament-filled Christmas tree will be glistening in the low winter’s light that glances through the window.

What’s next in this cascading alter-world? I will watch the lights on Christmas tree lane out my bedroom window tonight. I love to look at them through a blurry rain-distorted window pain. Not tonight though, but sometimes it does rain around Christmas, even in Glendale.

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In writing the above few paragraphs, about 1900 seconds elapsed. This means my memory wanderings in a lost world of Los Angeles have lingered about 180,000 times longer than the time it took my father’s Kodak, with its folding bellows and strangely dimensioned

2 1/2″x 4 3/4″ negatives, to capture several 1930s pictures, the visual cue that seemingly started the above cascade of thoughts and reveries and sensations.

First Christmas Tree 1930 © SR Euston

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Photography is remarkable. The memory is more than remarkable. I’m glad it’s unexplained.   SRE

Was Thornton Wilder an Original Magical Realist? Part 2

So I obtained a copy of The Bridge at San Luis Rey. And read it in two sittings.

What about the movie? Had it captured the book? Oh yes. And even more so.

Cover of Original 1927 Edition

The book is a remarkably compact (less than 50,000 words) literary fable. Its style is flat and direct, although, in fact, the story is quite complex and nuanced. It examines what love is and (mostly) isn’t. It ruminates on literature as a “notation of the heart” and has characters who are scribes (semi-mute twins who have developed their own abbreviated language), letter writers (we’re told the Marquesa’s posthumous collection is a Spanish bestseller), book writers (the compiling of Friar Juniper’s gets him into the Ultimate World of Hurt), and a mysterious “I”  who in Part 1, “Perhaps an Accident”,  wonders if he knows things Juniper doesn’t and then goes silent. All this is carried on against the philosophical backdrop of God’s will and action in the world.

In retrospect, I’m glad in high school I was confronted only with “comparing and contrasting” the small town characters in Our Town.

But really. How could Thornton Wilder have morphed into a Latin American writer? That chronicler of Our Town’s everytown (at least in New England)—how could this be? Was I the first to “discover” Thornton Wilder, magical realist?

In my own mind I wavered. I wanted so much for magical realism to remain in its original purity, essentially a literary style a priori unavailable to any non Latin-American writer. I don’t want magical realism to go toward this—a definition I found in Serendipity, an online magazine devoted to magical realism: “So what’s the difference between magical realism and fantasy? Definitions of what magical realism is and isn’t abound, but for the sake of brevity, let’s say it should incorporate the following: a reality similar to our own, in which the impossible can occur without comment; and a self-aware narrator, prepared to embark on a relationship with the reader outside the one afforded by the story.” Later a passing nod is given to the Latin aspect, quoting another critic who considers magical realism “ fantasy in Spanish.”

No, oh no. To me magical realism isn’t fantasy at all. It’s life, magnified. There are no unicorns or elves or parallel universes. All that happens happens right here on Planet Earth to earthly creatures. To me magical realism just adds another layer of reality to our modern pragmatic, ostensibly empirically-based, one.

And, after a while thinking about it, to me it can only be Latin. The rest of us have darknesses too, but of other cultural types. The setting needs to include the overlay of a not-totally-eradicated native culture clashing with Catholicism, overtly or covertly. So I can (almost) accept Bless Me Ultima, good New Mexican that Rudolpho Anaya is, because the two issues meet. (And besides, New Mexico is only one step away from Latin America.)  But I can’t accept The Time Traveler’s Wife by  Audrey Niffenegger. For many more reasons than just wrong locale, wrong culture. Still, it appears on the goodreads list of popular magical realist novels and has been shelved over 50 times in the magical realism section of bookstores.

So what about The Bridge at San Luis Rey?

Wilder doesn’t come up on a Google search of magical realist authors. At least on compiled lists (Wikipedia and others), or up to Google search’s page 10 (about the first 200 entries.) Even in places where people cast their nets wide enough to include everybody short of J.R. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien.

In fact I had to query both his name and MR (as it’s known affectionately by its aficionados, myself included) to find anyone at all who’d seen the link. There are a few. Still, I seem to stand alone in my awe of the scene in which the Marquesa de Montemayor steps into a Velasquez painting to steal a necklace her daughter covets. The Marquesa, drunken ruin that she is, does it quite convincingly in the movie, conversing with the painter and his subjects. In the book she even ruminates about climbing into a Titian one day. And then the story moves on. To me, this scene is the very essence of what magical realism means.

So does Mr. Wilder, good humanist New Englander that he is, make the grade? Let’s see. Setting. Check. Native/Catholic. Check. Events outside mainstream reality. Check. Time altering. Check. Even Self Aware Author. There is that mysterious “I” in Chapter 1. So check.

In the end, that scene with the painting is enough for me. But it doesn’t hurt that it’s the Inquisition, the bridge is heading toward Cuzco, everybody wears black. And there are the llamas. What more could I ask for?

“Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”  from  The Bridge of San Luis Rey