All By Myself

I gave up real vegetable production gardening when I came to northern coastal California in '74. I had had real vegetable gardens in the Midwest, the last, a half-acre spectacle in the countryside north of Milwaukee. I got it going, got the local farmer to disc the ground, fallow for years, and I sweetened up the soil with lots of manure. I planted it out and then departed for California. I surrendered it to the care of others in our big group house to weed and harvest but they smoked too much and left it, I heard, overgrown with festering and rotting unpicked tomatoes and broccoli, potatoes molding under the nice straw mounds. It was sad to hear that all my hard work, that potential bounty, had succumbed to ruin. I had taken courses at the University of Wisconsin AG School in soil science, soil chemistry and vegetable production. My gardens were bountiful and surprising in their productivity. I felt a bit like a pro.

In California it was all different; challenges I’d never faced. First, the clay soil; the addition of sand to loosen it up as I had done in Wisconsin created an aggregate; turned the ground to concrete. Soil in the West needs a huge amount of work to make a go, with the addition of deer proofing and the constant irrigation needed in the blazing summer and the cool foggy nights made it difficult for fruit to set, gave vegetable gardening a new set of problems. Gophers 'll kill off any remaining drop of enthusiasm. I was spoiled by the deep topsoil and moist warm nights of the Midwest.

I don’t have production gardens any more but, of course, it’s done very successfully here. We subscribe to the local vegetable box once a week and from May to October we get fresh veggies, organic heirloom varieties. We've got a few tomatoes set out every year, sometimes peppers and squash and popcorn for the dramatic big stalks, but no garden you'd rely on for food. Mostly we grow flowers with a few fruit trees. Lots of flowers the deer don't bother, four kinds of lavender, rosemary, ceanothus and bunches of daffodils the gophers hate—sometimes they even dig them up. You’ll find a bulb or two dug up and laid out on the grass every spring. This morning on my walk about sunrise I see a clump of Iris' growing in the little circle garden at the top of the drive, it’s got daffodils and lavender growing under an adolescent oak. This clump has a couple of low growing big white lettuce-y flowers, pristine and dewy with lots of buds about to take off their tight green pants and show you their goods. These you couldn't plant, they are the wild Douglas Irises. I call Judith over to look; she says, "Gosh they did that all by themselves."

Special thanks to Martin Taylor for his photograph of the white Douglas Iris taken on the Mount Tam watershed near the Phoenix Lake Reservoir. To see more of his work: http://digitaylor.com/1pages/gallery1.htm

Blonde Misty Curls

Blond misty curls, spun white gold, all around her head in the late sun. It’s sweater-weather crisp. Twilight is coming on. I am holding her familiar weight tight up on my hip, my forearm making a chair. Her hand is on my back for balance.

We are walking toward the marsh, the headwaters of the local reservoir; the cattails are dense, seeding out with those big mallet heads—brown velvet sausages, flaking out with downy fluff. The flat pulpy reeds have gone to orange-gold in the slanted light. Some of the seed stalks are crisscrossed and woven up into little loose baskets for the Redwings that nest here and go south to the southern Central Valley for the winter bug-fest there. They are the bi-color variety with a simple red on black epaulette. The males are the first to show and the last to go. Very territorial with the glossy black males singing their watery churrr all spring long. We'll be back come spring to this spot for all that opulent singing.

The way she looks out, her gray eyes—piercing, intense, she seems like some creature on the hunt. What I know about her now, you'd not be surprised to recognize back then, her instinct, solid and intact. She's looking at a bird over my shoulder, and then quick to not loose eye contact, she whips her head around mine and keeps following a raven oaring along, a winging dash against the blue.

We gather up a couple of nests, souvenirs, curiosities, sculptures really. Her mom likes nests. “What's that for,” she asks? “We're gonna bring 'em home.” “Why?” “Aren't they pretty?” “Yes”, then looking in the sky again. Her cheek polished deep rosy pink, cool against mine.

Bald Eagle

I saw a big pine tree, gone to a snag in a spreading lake, the trunk knee-deep and root-drowned. I was on one of my nature hikes into the woods in Northern Wisconsin. I am 9 in 1956 at an all boys’ summer camp, wandering off, as usual, to get free of all the sporty hoopla.

This lake was a wild sister lake to "our lake" Big Finley, tamed with a U-shaped swimming dock set with racing lanes on strings of floating bobbers. A few summer cottages squat at the far end.

This “sister lake” Little Finley was unpopulated with few suitable places for building and was growing slowly, making wetlands from forest. There were lots of spooky snags sticking up, trunks standing in water. The trees close to the shore had suffocated.

I heard a whooshing. There's an eagle with its stark white head, flapping and rising up to land with sudden softness in a nest perched in the crown of the snag. A new stick that must have been 6 feet across was being brought to the nest tangle. This big-as-a-dog eagle spooked me. I'd never seen anything close to this wildness. I quick-trot a quarter mile back to the safety of ordered camp life.

This is six years before Silent Spring was published. I learned by the late Sixties, all the Eagles had vanished from Wisconsin. The miracle bug-killer DDT had made their eggs soft-shelled, laid in a mush. The eagle I saw that day would have no chicks—the last to nest there for a long time. Every Sunday night at the summer camp, one of the custodians, a handyman, would wheel a cart, a self-driving gas motor with a big fan blowing thick clouds of blue smoke. Mosquito control for the ferocious North Country pests- quick blooming opportunists in the short season. He'd work the machine all around, weaving a pattern so nothing remained un-smoked. When he was finished a low haze would settle blanketing everything. It was DDT.

DDT was banned in 1972 and the eagles are back. As of 2004 a full recovery has been declared.