Back To The Well - For A Piece Of Wood

Matins

0800

Thursday 

2014-03-13

Some wells we keep returning to because what we find there is not only essential, but refreshing and revitalizing. I keep coming back to certain writers – Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, Ursula LeGuin, Willam Stafford, Joanna Macy… I have pulled buckets from these wells and shared them as water this year. But if the matins I have presented have a theme, it is that of country – not music, not ‘tis of thee – but the common unity of land, plants, and animals, and the water and air that moves through us all, and the sunlight that drives the winds and weather and hydrologic cycles in and through which we have our being. 

In the essay “Living Dry” Wallace Stegner writes:

“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c, anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.

Therefore I ask your indulgence if I sometimes speak in terms of my personal experience, feelings, and values, and put the anecdotal and normative ahead of the statistical, and emphasize personal judgements and trial syntheses rather than the analysis that necessarily preceded them. In doing so, I shall be trying to define myself as well as my native region. “

Where The Bluebird Sings To The Lemonade Springs,

pp. 58-59

Driving to Chelan from Gig Harbor this last Monday morning, we left in the dark and travelled in the heavy rains of late winter. Up Highway 18 past Tiger Mountain, one of the Issaquah Alps, remnants of a mountain range older than the Cascades mountains that stretch from Mt. Si near North Bend to a smaller peak next to Hood’s Canal. Thence up to Snoqualmie Pass, with the heavy rain changing to heavy snow. By the time we were ten to twelve miles east of Snoqualmie Pass, we were moving into the range shadow of the Cascades and into the more arid intermountain west. The trees were a mix of Douglas fir, pine, spruce, and hemlock, with cottonwoods replacing the alders along the water courses.

Holden is also about ten or twelve miles from the crest of the Cascade range, and we live in a woodland of similar mixed species. But of all the trees here, the doug fir stands out.

In an attempt to bring more than the sense of hearing to this matins, I have brought a baulk of wood to pass around that we may bring other senses to bear upon this notion of place and country. It is an ordinary piece of Douglas fir which I pulled out of the firewood stack when I stoked the furnace in the dark hours this morning. We burn literally hundreds of cords of this wood in this valley, and have perhaps come to take this wood for granted. That would be a mistake. It is a wood of rather extraordinary properties, and grows nowhere else in the world. [Pass the wood around.]

A Baulk of Wood for Breakfast (Matins)

This wood is valued for its long straight grain and moderately easy workability. It is pretty tough for a softwood, and it gets harder as it gets older. Many carpenters have found they need to drill pilot holes in old fir framing. Shipwrights love it for masts and planking: the largest wooden ships ever made were made with Doug-fir. These scond-tallest trees in the world can reach four hundred or more feet tall – good for masts, and only replaced when we learned how to make steel thin enough and strong enough to replace wood. Some shipwrights say that if we did not have wood, we would have had to invent it and call it miracle W or some such. Lucky for us, though, it grows on trees.

In the rest of the world, this wood is known as Oregon pine, but it is not a pine. The common name of Doug-fir is also misleading because it is not a true fir either, not of the Abies species. The binomial name Psuedotsuga menziesii hints at another confusing thing – tsuga calls out the hemlock family, but it is not a hemlock either, as the ‘psuedo-‘ prefix should tell us. And finally, the species name of menziesii refers to the naturalist Archibald Menzies who actually figured out that this tree was not a pine, nor a fir, nor a hemlock, but something more subtly unique.

Take a look at the piece of wood wending its way through the dining hall. It has a naturally occurring salmonish color – a beautiful kind of coincidence, as the range of the tree pretty much overlaps the range of the local anadromous salmon and trout. The salmon go out into the ocean, and pickup nutrients that are returned to the streams in which they were born – but that is a subject for another matins. The wood has a distinctive smell – perhaps even varying by watershed, solar exposure and and elevation, kind of like wine grapes. But I don’t know that for sure, I have not smelt nor tasted enough Doug-fir to say with certainty. This piece, unfortunately, was cut so long ago, and has been in the wood pile in the basement for so long it smells more dusty than Doug-firish.

The soils of these surrounding woodlands are not particularly fertile. Most of the biomass is in the trees themselves, where the chloroplast takes in the carbon dioxide from us animal-types, combines it with water and sunlight, sequesters the carbon in the wood cells and fibers, and returns the oxygen to the atmosphere.

Take a breath – go ahead. The oxygen molecules that we need may have come from a Doug-fir, they might have been part of the breath of a pine marten, or a western tanager, or maybe even a trout. At the level of our cellular respiration, our body uses the oxygen in several kinds of chemical reactions and then hooks excess carbon atoms onto the oxygen molecules and when we breathe out, we feed the plants around us. We are intimately connected to these trees, even as we are intimately connected to the soils of California’s central valley, or to the cornfields of Iowa, or to the wheat fields of Kansas.

The trees breath, we breathe.

We breathe each others breath.

In each other, we have our being.

Thich Nhat Hanh says that breathing well is a good thing to do. Let us breath in and out intentionally – holding the notion of ‘good’ in our minds as we breath in; and then the notion of ‘thanks’ as we breath out. Let us do this three times, maybe more if you need or enjoy the air.

[Breath: In: good. Out: thanks]

[Breath]

[Breath]

Go in peace. 

Sometimes An Exception Illustrates The Rule

Errata: 

Douglas-fir  - of particular interest is the section on how big these trees can grow, towards the end of the page.

The naturalist Archibald Menzies

The naturalist David Douglas

Playlist for today (Saturday 15 March): Dvorak's 'American' Quintet, some Greg Brown (live),
Compositional note: the format and content are not exactly as presented at matins this last Thursday morning. That morning I forgot to lead with the Stegner quote. So it is not quite the same as it was then, but then neither is the author. C'est la vie.