"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. 

A Walk In The Snow January 2014

My brother came to visit us here at Holden during mid-January. Actually he came here to do some framing in Lodge 3, the dorm for guests that we are remodeling this winter. But we enjoyed the visit aspect too - it had been twenty-five years since he had been up here - which, understandably enough, was how long it has been since we were last here as long term staff. And getting to spend a whole week or nine days with him is a rare treat.
This has been a curious winter for weather. By the time he came here, we had only had thirty inches of snow - and that had compressed to just a few inches or even to bare ground. It looked as if we were not only on track to match the lowest snowfall on record, but set a new low as well.

The Hotel from Main Street Early January 2014

 Here is how the weather played through early winter: the classic weather pattern here is snowfall followed by rising temperatures and sometimes rain- but also often accompanied by clearing skies and a rather warm wind: a chinook, in the jargon of those folk who have lived here longest. The snow would consolidate and compress.
This year we also had a lot of very cold weather, for here at least. I know our friends in the mid-west don't call 10 or 12 below zero (Farenheit) very cold - but for here it is cold. The snow would sublimate - simply disappear in sunlight at those temperatures. Or it would turn to ice - and hard, shiny slick ice at that. Chains or trail crampons on our boots were needed unless one had great balance and reaction time (those under thirty, by observation).
The cold has also affected our power: decreasing the volume of water coming out of Copper Basin, and thereby decreasing power to levels we usually don't see for another two months, toward the end of March. Cold enough, one time to actually freeze the water flowing over the steel grates at the hydroelectric diversion structure and requiring us to fire up the fifty year old diesel generators (at a cost of some $1,000 to $1,500 per day...). Without deep snow to insulate the buildings, we were also using up firewood at an alarming rate. Whereas on a normal winter day we might stoke the furnace three or maybe four times each 24 hours, we needed to stoke six or eight times - and that kept the temperature up to a tropical fifty-five or fifty-six degrees.

Annual Power Graph - Red This Year

But somewhere in the middle of January, the weather got nice: that is to say it snowed, and on the weekend at that. Friday the snow started coming down - kind of sparse at first. By Saturday afternoon it was snowing hard and by Sunday morning we had about sixteen inches of snow. The consistency was somewhere between powder and the customary Cascade Concrete (heavy wet snow). On went the snow shoes, and off we went. 

Looking Up Valley from the Vehicle Bridge
West of the Village

My Brother: View North toward Martins Ridge

Tracks in the Snow on the trail to the Ballpark
(Douglas' Squirrel, I think, a.k.a Chickeree
makes chirrupy little chirps or chip sounds; dark
brown top, orange brown chest and tummy).

The snow has continued to fall, breaking the record for February: one hundred forty some inches. And during the first two days of March, we have had about sixteen inches of snow already. It is beautiful. But the snows of February are deserving of a post of their own.

Three Views of a Pelton Wheel

What goes around...

Holden Village is in a rather remote place. How does it get electricity, you ask? Glad you asked that, I happen to have an answer written down. Got it right here next to my heart....
The original company town of 1937 was mostly electric: the electricity came uplake from the dam at Chelan Falls. Heat for the buildings came from diesel, but the rest was electric. Even the Hotel Dining Room kitchen was all electric up until 1989.
The power lines were taken out, were salvaged when the mine shut down. Most of the other easily removed metal was also taken for salvage; but that is fodder for another post. When the village became the Village in the early 1960s, the only electrical power came from diesel generators: noisy, stinky, expensive diesel generators. So the Village got a hydroelectric system dating to the 1920s - about 40 years old at that time. The heart of the hydro is a Pelton wheel, or in this case, two wheels. Each wheel is has a series of double cups mounted to the rim. And here the two wheels have different diameters, and make differing amounts of power depending on the season and demand. They run at about 600 RPM, and that is where the 60 hz (cycles per second) of alternating current.
The water that drives the turbine comes out of Copper Basin - the iconic hanging valley between Buckskin and Copper directly south of the village. A diversion structure drops some of the water into a collection box which has a couple chambers to let the sand and gravel settle out. A pipe goes about a quarter mile (400 meters) down hill to the hydro plant - but the elevation drops about 600 some feet over that distance. So - a column of water about the height of the Space Needle in Seattle gets squeezed through a needle valve (kind of like a brass hose nozzle) and hits the double cups and spins the wheel.
But the settling chamber don't settle all the sand, and over time the cups on the Pelton wheel get, well, sandblasted; and have to be replaced. In one case, the worn wheel became garden art, at the SE corner of the Hotel.

Pelton Wheel, SE Hotel Garden

 We can all agree, I think, that the north central Cascade mountains are not in France, and do not have a Mediterranean climate. Yet someone planted lavender beside the wheel, and it grows very well here, despite being covered by snow for five or six months of the year.
One day in late spring, the snow is gone and the plant is shooting up. Next thing you know, there are flower buds swelling out. And then another day you walk by, and the buds have blossomed and there are at least five different kinds of bumble bees buzzing in the lavender bush, and about a thousand of those beautiful little coppery bronze butterflies with wings about the size of your fingernail. They are so very quick - and then so very still...

Three Kinds Of Lavender? Maybe Only Two...

One day there are not so many flutterbys on the flowers - but they still come by, sometimes. Tonight, as I was walking up to dinner about ten after six, I saw four chipmunks rolling in lavender. Okay they weren't rolling and in fact, they were hardly moving around much at all. They were pretty much just pigging out on the lavender seed heads. Now, these chipmunks are usually pretty twitchy. But tonight they were not going to budge a bit from their nutritional interlude in the lavender.

I guess I misled you - I said there would be three views of a Pelton wheel. But this last picture, fuzzy as it is, and taken in pretty low light with my phone, does not have the wheel in it. Guess you are going to have to click on that link to the Pelton wheel reference at Wikipedia if you want a third view. Or keep coming back - I am sure something else will catch our attention around or about that wheel. And it will show up again.

If you got the reference to something kept next to my heart, I've got a car for you. Call BR-549.
And with apologies to Hokusai -
Peace and balance,
Matt

Context Part One

We always enter the story of a place through the narrative of our individual lives.

- John Elder

Inheriting Mt. Tom

Orion Spring 1997

I first came to Holden late in the summer of 1988. We were moving back to the Pacific Northwest from Colorado, intending to take a year off before going to graduate school somewhere. Our stuff was boxed up, and we put it in a storage unit. We came to Holden, intending to stay three or six weeks as volunteer staff: we really needed a tax dodge, and keeping our income down was the best way to dodge the tax. We ended up staying for a year. 

Oh, and the tax dodge worked pretty well, too. That was the decade of "live simply that others may simply live." Holden was, and still is, a good place to explore the relationship between simplicity and richness.

That Was Then: 1988

My family was part of the great ‘unchurched’ northwest – people who preferred to spend their weekends out hiking or camping, or on the water: “This is cathedral enough for me.” “I am closer to God out here than in there.” We did go to church; but we knew where we preferred to be…  

I was probably 10 or 11 years old before I realized that other families had tuna sandwiches like we had salmon or steelhead. My Dad and my uncle Jim filled their salmon and steel head cards, and filled our smokers and our freezers. My Dad (still) has a very low five-digit REI number: I remember when REI was two rooms in an old warehouse storefront and the coolest thing was Toblerone and Sailor Boy Pilot Bread (long, long before Clif Bars, I must admit). The second room was up a ramp with wobbly vertical (end) grain fir floors. And Mom & Dad were members of The Mountaineers, too: I was probably 5 or 6 years old when I learned that we do not step on ropes. I thought it was normal to have a copy of Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills on the shelf.  Even then, Holden was well-known in the back-country community as a place to get a shower, a sauna, or ice cream, just a mile outside of the wilderness, but still surrounded by wilderness.

My wife was raised in a Lutheran family, and they knew of Holden as a family retreat destination; but I do not think they had been there. They had been pretty much everywhere else in the Pacific Northwest, though. Like much of our life together these past 32 or 33 years, we traveled to a new place, together.

So we came here, this new but not entirely unknown place: expecting to stay three or six weeks. And we ended up staying a year. This is actually a pretty familiar story plot in the Holden community. Some end up staying 5 or 8 or 10 years. Most of us never leave, not in our hearts anyway. 

This Was Now (or at least it was back in June of 2013)

 An Aside: 

Gearheads with an appreciation for vintage design will recognize an early Kelty Redwing in the 1988 picture: not the original, but a pretty good improvement, and we still have it. We use the latest model for everyday, though. The Redwing is a great design that has continued to evolve but has not lost the core features that made (make) it cool - especially the ski slots. The REI pack had been modified with bilateral Dana Design (Bozeman MT) add-on pockets; the combination approximated the ski slot functionality, but not as well as the Redwing, nor our crazy idiosyncratic frame-less YakPaks. We still have the Dana pockets, but the grey pack is long gone, worn out by grad school, travel and trail.

 In 1988 we could travel pretty lightly - not so bogged down with stuff. But back then we didn't know we would stay the year. This time we are expecting, we are hoping, we are grateful for the opportunity to stay the year, and have packed accordingly. 

We know you can't really go home, and that you cannot step in the same river twice. But when the invisible parts, the intangibles are good enough, and vital enough, and whole enough - why, we don't need to sweat the little stuff, do we. 

After Rain

And after thunder and lightning. 

The air is clean and the sky is bright. A bit muggy, but I can live with that.

We have had wonderful lightning storms the last two nights. Each time we could hear them coming from afar, and watched the clouds build up as they rolled in. Friday nights storm reached its local peak between 0430 and 0530 (Saturday morning). At first the flashes were just that, but as the storm grew closer, the rumbles started: first just a far-off grumble, than more insistent.

Looking Down Valley

The village is located at about 3,200 feet elevation (975m) in the glaciated Railroad Creek valley. There are several peaks between 6,000 and 9,000 feet (2,200m - 2,700m) within just 2 to 4 miles (3-6km), with several hanging valleys or basins between the peaks and ridges. So the sound gets bounced around a lot.  You know how it goes: you start counting the seconds between flash and boom - five seconds is about a mile. Once the strikes start hitting less three seconds away, the sound is enough to vibrate buildings and sometimes the ground too (resonant frequencies, anyone?). At some point, the strikes are close enough together in time and in space that it is hard to tell which flash goes with which rumble, and echoes overlay each other.

At The Soundless Dawn

Saturday evening (last night) we could see the storm coming again. Our son Aidan played some of the Bach Suites for Uaccompanied Cello at dinner in the Hotel Dining Hall for the Villagers and mine remediation workers. I didn't know that he was going to do that... and missed it. He and some of the other college-age folk decided to sleep under the stars (clouds) until they felt rain on their faces. I think that happened about midnight or so... By half past midnight the rumbles were overlaying each other, and the rain was falling hard. The intensity of the storm tripped a fire alarm (we keep them at a very highly sensitive level here), and so all the villagers that respond to those events got to enjoy the storm at a more personal and communal level at once. The night time kitchen staff had coffee and pastries ready, and tea and toast were available at the table in the middle too.

Coffee, Pastry, and Light on Chalet Eleven

This morning the air is clean, and smells really, really good. The dust has been knocked down pretty emphatically, and the the ground squirrels are out grazing the lawns. A western tanager (or two) has followed me around this morning, it seems. It landed on the porch rail just an arms length away and gave me the eye for 15 or 20 seconds. Another(or the same?) just landed in the native raspberries (blackcaps) that grow out of the rock wall just outside Chalet Fourteens dining room, where I am writing this. I tried to take a picture at full zoom, but shooting through glass and the screen - well, that seems kind of optimistic, doesn't it. The pastry is a sweet dough spiral with chopped walnuts, dried cranberries, raisins, and just enough cinnamon and cream cheese frosting to balance each other.

Copper Peak & Thin Linear Cloud

Today is kind of a day off for me. I do have some stuff I want to get done before I feel good about heading out of the village for the small adventures that are waiting out there. I want to go fishing in some of the pools upstream which formed when trees fell into the creek during the storms of 2004 and 2006. I was going to file the barbs off the hooks, but cannot find my little diamond hook sharpening tool. No matter - I will take the fly rod anyway, and maybe use the tiniest flies and nymphs in my pocket box - #14s or so.

The playlist this morning includes:

• Fishing Blues - Taj Mahal
• Gone Fishing - Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby
• Fishermans Blues - The Waterboys

And for good measure: the ending credits from The Cider House Rules (Rachel Portman). Kutumbarara (Spreading) (The Kronos Quartet, Pieces of Africa);  Robin Trower (Bridge of Sighs); Dvoraks 'American' Quartet; Concierto de Aranjuez (The Modern Jazz Quartet); and some John Lee Hooker to keep it real.

So - I am off to look for little fishes, and wish you joy of the same.