"To Wake Up In Eden"

One morning in December I stepped out onto the front porch to see how the air felt, and to see if any new snow had dusted the old. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of movement – a dark brown critter with short legs, long nose and tail and the brightest dark eyes one could imagine was staring back at me from across the road at the base of Chalet 6’s porch. The pine marten regarded me for a moment and then went up the stairs onto the porch. It looked at me over the porch wall caprail, and through the scuppers – playing a kind of hide-and-seek or perhaps marten-in-the-box.

Martens have to be about the most intensely alive creatures ever: they this aura of wild energy that radiates in a way that is hard to describe. As they go about their business, they are absolutely still one instant and then in fluid motion the next.

Wallace Stegner describes an encounter with martens this way:

How is it to wake up in Eden? Our sleeping tents are pitched in a half circle facing the cliff and the east, but the weather is so fine that we sleep outside. Night after night we awake at odd hours to see the black sky with big bright stars burning holes in it. We watch the Dipper and Cassiopeia do their slow dance around the Pole Star, and the misshapen boat of the moon sail up and over and down. Finally, we wake to find the east lightening, going pink, the flat clouds in that direction taking fire. Lying snug, we wait until the sun surges up over mountains far to the east. The green-and-brown camp, the white tents, come clear, long shadows stretch, and on the cliff edge, haloed with pure light, the martens have appeared.

There are seven of them, half-grown, apparently left to amuse themselves when their mother takes off before dawn to forage. Their fur is a rich, sleek brown, their throats nearly white; their eyes are black buttons, their whiskers bristle and glisten, their bodies are so slim and undulant that they might be swimming instead of running. In the strong, flat light they appear to leave streams of bubbles behind them as they pounce, wrestle, scoot suddenly into holes, chase each other up trees and out onto limbs. Though their round ears perk in our direction if we move or make a noise, they are more curious than afraid. We have walked within twenty feet of them before they retreat, and they never fully disappear; their button eyes are on us from among roots or behind trees.

“Crossing Into Eden”

Where The Bluebird Sings To The Lemonade Spring, p. 38

As I stood watching the marten across the road, I had that feeling of being watched, of something behind me, and heard a small scratching sound. The hair on the back of my neck and on my arms raised, and I turned slowly to see another marten on the porch just six or seven feet away. As we made eye contact it froze for a moment then spun around and disappeared over the edge of the porch. A few moments later it popped up to look at me and then disappeared again. This continued for a few more episodes and then the marten whirled and disappeared around the corner of Chalet 14. I turned back to the first marten which had been watching me watch the other one. It dashed off the porch and sniffed around the skirt boards and then loped up hill to Chalet 7. As I watched it flow and freeze, I got that feeling of being watched again. I heard a scratching sound right at my feet and looked down – slowly – to see a marten peering up at me. It had quietly jumped from the ground to the porch, and was looking up at me from under the porch rail, directly between my toes. The look on its face was both curious and calculating: “Is it tasty?” It whirled and jumped off the porch and then popped up again, several times. Then it loped down hill, ran up the trunk of the big old vine maple that is bent and pushed out by eight decades of roofalanche; and then disappeared around the corner of the building. I looked up to see the first marten disappearing around the corner of Chalet 7.

Pine marten at base of Chalet 14 vine maple 8 December 2013

Again, from Stegners Crossing Into Eden:

Pine martens, first cousins to Russian sables, shy and rare and coveted and hunted, held to be intolerant of the human presence, share that peaceable kingdom with us for the length of our limited stay, and on Eviction Day, as we walk the trail back toward civilization with our eyes looking back over our shoulders, we see their silhouettes looping and undulating along the cliff edge. Like the Ancient Mariner burdened with his albatross, we bless those happy living things, and some weight drops away, leaving us freer and better than when we came.

Where is this place? somebody asks. How do we get to it? (p. 39)

This place for me, is of course Holden Village, and we have been sharing this valley with martens for decades. My first encounter with them was during the winter of 1988 – 1989, when they would get into the winter kitchen of Koinonia (formerly Dorm 5 in the mining days). We would trap them in live traps and send them down valley, or even across the lake – but they would come back, looking for mice, and for the compost that feeds the mice.

During August of 2012, we helped remove the compost from the bins where Holden has been composting food waste for three or four decades at least. We needed to remove it because the location is part of where the mine remediation process will be revising the topography. As we shoveled, an adult pine marten watched us, curled up in a corner of one of the empied bins, only three or four feet from where we worked. Even this winter, when we take food waste to the temporary compost bins, we are sure to startle them from their self-appointed rounds.

Marten tracks in snow

Marten tracks on porch of Lodge 2

One final quote from Stegner, musing about going back to the place he met the martens:

The martens would almost certainly be gone, for even as permanent wilderness, the basin receives many more visitors than it used to, and martens will long since have been either illegally shot or trapped, or have retreated deeper, into country that is not only without roads but without trails or frequented camps. But what pleasure it is to know that there is back country for them to retreat to, that nobody is going to push roads through that wilderness, that no RVs or trail bikes or tote goats will roar through those forests and stink up that clean air. The best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years of contact with the American wilderness is restraint, the willingness to hold our hand: to visit such places for our souls' good, but leave no tracks.  (p.39)

One of the things that sets Holden apart, I think, is that even if living here year round, we still come to this place as visitors. Even the mining company that ended up with the liability for the mining operation is trying to erase those footprints, or at least reduce the footprint the operation has left on the valley. I am reminded of the Rene Daumal poem about the Eleventh Essential – but that is a subject deserving of its own post.