Greenstorm's Journal

"2,286,972 hectares – 22,869.7 square kilometers – have burned in the Prince George Fire Centre so far this year.

The highest number of hectares burned on record before this year in the entire province was 1,354,284 in 2018 [...]

We also have to consider our fire centre is 33.6 million hectares in size.”

I'm in the PG fire center.

The ground is frozen and we didn't get substantial rain, so we'll be going into year 3 of drought in spring. Things will be dry under the snow, so like this year we should start pretty quickly unless we get a very rainy spring.

You can walk across the confluence of the Nechako and Fraser rivers right now.

A couple potential jobs have come up recently.

One is in the area somewhat west of me-- same employer but a different area, so a different set of supervisor/management structure/decision makers (each region is basically a fiefdom). Housing prices there are a little more expensive than they are here; there doesn't seem to be an equivalent low end to the housing market, but the homes one step up tend to have a lot of useful stuff: heated studio or workshop, coldroom for hanging meat, pond, artisan or gravity-feed water, barn or pole barn, things like that. The area also has more of a farming community, including a multi-farm shop and farmer get-togethers, and it's where I take my geese to be processed. There's also an airport in the region, a nice music festival, more people and some nice restaurants including nice sushi restaurants, a lovely downtown, and fiber optic cable goes along the highway so some homes close enough may have it. New cell towers were built in the area. Plus a fairly significant white supremacist movement, social polarization, a very very contentious relationship with First Nations, and it's pretty much not accessable from the city in one day. I could almost certainly get this job. The posting closes at the end of this month; I haven't yet contacted the person in charge of that team to ask questions. Some good questions might include: what is the actual work (sounds like there might be a big monitoring component, which would be fabulous), what is the relationship of the work to the Nations, who else is on the team and what do they do, what is the policy on remote work and flexibility (could I work from over here until I can relocate, and if so how long is that expected to be).

The other is for a Nation that's heavily partnered with a large forestry company, I'm not sure if my credential is sufficient. The Nation is pretty remote but have an office in the biggest city in the area; I imagine the work would be fairly significant telework with an equally significant element of travel. This would be an extremely different employer; obviously a smaller company with I think no other foresters. Small companies, especially "family" (/band?) companies often run very very differently and I suspect I would be able to work to my own hours as I much prefer. Probably I could relocate throughout the region as I chose. I suspect I would be a really significant jack-of-all-trades and that would be challenging with a steep learning curve and no mentorship(?) but might also let me follow my interests a little more. Some questions I should ask: what are the goals or outcomes of the position? How are the decisions which this person will implement arrived at, and how often do they tend to change? Who manages this position? How much travel is expected? How does this position relate to the forestry company with which the Nation is partnered, who does which parts of the process (operational, strategic, landscape)? Will my credential be sufficient? How much mentorship and training budget is available?

Possibilities. None of them are clearly perfect. I probably can't actually afford to move, in the end. But maybe I should talk to some people?

I had that conversation with the employee line counselor the other day, and I kind of have one foot out the door at work in my mind.

A lot of my life I just haven't put a lot of weight on "just because" social norms. It's important to me not to weaponize weirdness in order to deliberately make people uncomfortable, it's important to me to do things that strengthen social fabric, and also I've never really tried to fit in for the sake of fitting in.

I guess I'm returning to that place. Reporting the employee line issues were part of that place; I was no longer trying to avoid making waves. Telling the story to all the people I got bumped to was part of that place. The way I interacted with the employee line counselor, where I was basically putting everything out there and gave myself permission to hang up the phone if I felt like it, was part of that place.

And buying a bunch of t-shirts this morning. The last round of t-shirts I bought was in 2015, with the first money I got from my first summer forestry job in Fort; I think it's a way of orienting my outer persona and aligning my intentions. Definitely what I wear is a big part of my mask; I used to dress slightly unusually partly because I liked the aesthetic, partly to screen for the people who talked to me, and partly to steer people's expectations in the "slightly weird but harmess" direction so they'd be more accepting of me when we interacted further and could select out if it was going to be a problem.

Actually, let's list the shirts, shall we? Yes, it's a lot, I like to buy clothes in big batches very seldom.

These ones are when I want to flag/provide security to neurodiverse folks:

Autism rainbow infinity sign that says "be kind" (I completely love that polyamory and autism are converging on the same symbol)
Autism rainbow infinity sign that says "neurodiversity is beautiful"
"Infodumping is my love language"
Rainbow brain with "great minds think differently"
Rainbow celtic knot brain design thing
Brain with plant/botanicals growing out of it
The word "neurodiversity" with rainbow plants growing out of it

These are for when I'm feeling less human:

Two different last unicorn "am I truly the last" designs
"Never run from anything immortal" unicorn shirt
"Schmendrick's school of magic: magic do what you will" (I wore my last one out so this is a replacement)

These are for when I'm trawling for gardeners:

"introverted but willing to discuss plants"
"Gardener" with a graphic
"plant whisperer" with a graphic
"easily distracted by plants"

The rainbow goose t-shirt is when I want to feel like me and don't care if I'm sending a message.

The as-yet-unnamed property. Viriditas? Maybe, maybe not. Hole in the wood? No. Greenheart? Maybe, maybe not. Its heart is the meter-in-diameter trees that guide a very flashy creek across it. Big. Old-ish. Mossy. Trickles of water over rock in summer, a roar at certain times of winter. That's the heart.

Before you come to the heart you are on a logging road that mysteriously starts being paved. There are plantations all around: second or third growth (probably second) all well-spaced straight uniform conifer trunks with jagged stumps of shaded, partially-jettisoned lower limbs, all dripping with green moss and undergrown with sword fern (polystichum munitum, stick'em like you do with a sword, munitions like weapons: sword fern). The road is pretty straight for a bit. Then the trees are less uniform, there's a spot that wasn't replanted by a forestry company, and a driveway goes in both directions: east and west.

Follow the driveway up west and, after a narrow band of bigleaf maple and spruce and improbably large alder there's a thicket of salmonberry (rich moist indicator) with some young bigleaf maples and spruce and alder coming up through it. This is where the fields will be. The soil is sandy brown under dead winter leaves. The end of this space is marked by a little lean-to-camper-shelter building that someone was living in so we couldn't poke around; that's the edge of the rich sandy soil full of salmonberries, the demarcation between that and the heart.

The heart is cautious. I'm not sure if it's beyond words or if it's waiting to see what I'll do before giving them to me or if I was just busy, my whole body an antenna picking up every scrap of information from the land while a human was trying to talk to me at the same time. It's a place that, if given my full attention, could fully occupy it. The big potato-chip bark spruce trees, the braided stream through mostly-soil-sometimes-rock, the start of skunk cabbage: the heart. It's not to be disturbed by the likes of me and my farming machinations.

Keep going up the driveway; it's definitely got a slight slope up now. The heart flows under the driveway through four culverts, three side-by-side and one additional. The forest opens out onto a wet lawn, brown and slippery with winter rain and dog poop. Here the soil is clay; ramshackle plastic fencing encloses an expanse of woodchips in which small trees and perennials are planted; beyond them woodchips surround some long thin unraised but undoubtedly heavily amended garden beds cradled in the curve of the question mark shape the driveway now assumes. On the other side of the grass from the garden is a small cobb structure with goats, surprisingly enclosed in equally ramshackle fencing and with little disturbance to the grass despite their couple-years-long tenure. That's for the best; a hole here betrays slick grey clay with no texture when rubbed between the fingers.

At the head of the lawn and garden is the house, but behind the house a steep sandy hill looms. It's covered in alder, leaning a little bit out for the light that is one of the major limiting factors here in the cloudy grey, and goes up about eighty feet: sunset will come quickly with that hill to the west like that. Anything that needs to have very dry roots will need to live on that hill: chestnuts, grapes.

The house itself is a rectangle studded with uniformly-sized windows. Irrigation for windowboxes hangs off it. The roof is flat. If it had angled wings instead of a straight rectangle, or if was stone, it would feel like a grand manor house. As is it's a big building waiting to see what happens next.

To the south, past the goats, less-even but still dense trees press up against the property line. In the milky-overcast noon sky they don't cast shade onto the middle of the lawn; when the sun is low in winter at least the deciduous components jettison their leaves and allow a little sun through. Hill to the west. Pass a waterfall, then a scatter of alder through grass and brush and a chainlink fence not far north: there's a neighbour past there that likes their privacy. Maybe a willow fence will end up there? And completing the circle, to the east, the driveway plunges into the deep shadowed green of the heart. Up here the property is about 200 feet wide, widening from the heart through down to the road to 400 feet. The house can feel the presence of her neighbours, of that plantation and of the privacy-loving neighbour of open fields screened by light brush and trees.

There's more, of course: the house has an inside, turning east from the forestry road leads to another several acres. I'm not there yet, though, I can feel the information and possibilities swirling and forming and re-forming into patterns and possibilities. Several things at a time, not every thing at a time.

So regardless of what happens I enjoy the problem. Er, problem I meant in the sense of something to solve but I don't like that word to refer to a land relationship. I like the process anyways.

So here we have a property.

Cool, wet, zone 8ish in terms of freeze but with:
1500 base 5C degree days historically, moving towards 1800 in the next 20 years at a conservative estimate (all this is based on Canadian gov data, including Canadian gov climate change models, I have used the most conservative in all cases)
600 base 10C degree days historically, moving towards 800
100 base 15C degree days historically, moving towards 200
Frost-free season 200 degrees historically, moving to 240
200 days with rain per year, anticipated not to change
Mean maximum August temperature moving from 20C to 22C
Mean minimum winter temperature moving from 0.6C to 0.8C
Mean winter temp moving from 2C to 3.2C
Mean summer temp moving roughly from 15C to 16C

Mean annual temperature (which is an ultra weird measurement, but sure) moving from 8C to 9.4C

More usefully,
70 days with some time below zero (frost days) historically, moving to 42
9 days where it doesn't rise above zero at all during the day, moving 6 days
0.4 days below -15C, moving to 0.2 (obviously a notional concept, but it means it should hit that every so many years)

0.7 days with some time above 30C, moving to 2 days
8 days above 25C, moving to 18 days
There are zero expected nights above 20C in near future
Highest temperature of the year is anticipated to be right above 30C

As you can see, it's not warm very often, but there's also not a lot of freeze. Sunlight is an issue in winter with the level of overcast.

There is plenty of moisture, though I haven't figured out the actual precipitation I'm expecting it to be relatively high, and to follow the mediterranean pattern of the west coast: lots in winter, sometimes a bit of "drought" (many days in a row without rain) in summer. Humidity is around 80%. This means that growing without irrigation is definitely possible with correct breeding and varieties BUT there's hella disease. I know of my own knowledge that powdery mildew is a big problem in the area: the general humidity keeps spores around and the drought stress of summer makes the plants susceptible.

The soil is listed in the BC soils survey as silty clay loam for much of the property, but that's a pretty high level survey.

The property is on a slope, with the main garden area in probably a 100-to-500-year floodplain for the Salmon River as far as I can tell from maps. The garden is at the base of a slope (there's a waterfall on the property coming off the slope) so it's water-and-nutrient receiving from the slope flow.

Just listing off this information you can see this is a leafy green veg paradise. Lettuce, kale, carrots, parsnips, all will overwinter here easily without cover unless there's a rare -15C cold snap, and even then it might just bite back the lettuce a bit. There isn't a ton of heat in summer -- that's the base 10C and base 15C growing degree days -- so squash and tomatoes will have the same trouble ripening that they do here up north and their prime growing temperatures coincide with the least amount of moisture and that powdery mildew issue. Crops that need to dry down in the field (beans, corn, small grains) need to be carefully-timed so they ripen within that dry window or they, too, will mold.

Perennials, including woody perennials like trees, need to be able to survive freezing. They also need to be able to ripen fruit in cool weather, if they are fruiting trees, and most importantly their microsites need to be assessed for drainage and/or have high moisture tolerance in winter. I think quince rootstock is good for this, for pears and quince?

With no snow cover in winter and little freeze, a clay-leaning soil will be sensitive to damage through overworking. This isn't a place to cultivate heavily. It is a place where annual and perennial weeds won't get easily knocked back by frost, so keeping the soil covered/weeded is a year-round project to avoid banking weed seeds and root propagules. Up north it's ok to let the soil be bare under snow and in spring before ploughing; down there I'm not so sure.

Therefore my first instinct is, when the land is cleared, to seed any bare soil with two things: a mix of desireable leafy greens (kale, lettuce, miner's lettuce, corn salad, spinach, chard, chicories) immediately in cool weather and then, when summer begins to heat up a little, planting squash, potatoes, corn, and other smothering warmer-weather crops through the greens mix to keep continuous cover as the earlier greens go to seed. Hoe out the first 30-50% of the greens to throw up flower shoots, then let them flower and seed to contribute to a seed bed of desireable greens as the squash etc is growing.

The first goal is to maintain a fall/winter/spring in-ground seedbank of harvestable greens (a yield even the first year of both seed and food) that both don't need to be planted and serve as a smothering mulch for other weeds. Yearly maintenance on the genetics of this greens mix is required: just remove anything that bolts before it produces tasty leaves. If that maintenance isn't followed then earlier, bolting genetics will take over and the usefulness of the greens seedbed will be lost. These greens can easily be ploughed into the soil in later years once the seedbed is established, but some good (non-bolting) specimens should be left to seed most years to maintain the soil seedbank. Further genetics work is as easy as eating leaves rather than cutting the whole plant, and leaving the tasty ones to seed while hoeing out the less tasty ones (or whatever the desired traits are). This might just mean carrying a couple wire flags when harvesting and putting them next to the best plants.

The second goal is to keep the soil covered with potatoes, corn, etc while getting off a crop for animal feed/winter storage. When the greens crop goes to seed the annuals like spinach and lettuce will die and/or reduce to stalks rather than ground-covering rosettes. The squash/corn/potatoes are all crops that don't require well-tilled seedbeds and can be popped in through existing greens. They also don't require much maintenance so in the first year of the project can happily produce some yield and cover the ground without a lot of intervention; it's to be expected that crops with the least person-energy requirements will do best in the first year when setting up everything else will keep people busy.

During this time assessment of water tables, soil fertility, microclimates, microtopograpy, local genetic resources, etc can occur in preparation for putting in perennial crops. Having known crops in place over the cleared area will also allow rough assessment of soil capability: nutrient or oxygen deficiencies will show up in a recogniseable way which should allow remediation before perennials are put in.

Anyhow, this is what I do for fun but I do think I want a cup of tea now.

Maybe not so settled as all that. Any grounding thoughts you can spare my way this week would be welcome. Maybe look at the shape of a leaf or touch the ground and think of me.

Spent a lot of the weekend with Tucker. Around and around and around and the story will always be: we're good when we're together, we can't really sort out the stuff outside that. We can't agree on a set of commitments we can both put our backs into.

I've always bent heaven and earth to make things I want, happen. Over time I've learned that bending people to make things happen is terrible, so I don't do that. I've tried to make people something I do deliberately nonetheless: being up-front with my intentions, with my window of uncertainty, with what I want. I like knowing where I stand.

What I need to accept now is that I do not know where I stand and I won't, with him. I can't bend heaven and earth to make the thing work; that's not in my power. Even if I had access to a couple million dollars (!) to live closer to him and still have access to land it doesn't buy me any certainty because it's not matched on his side. So. Uncertainty.

My energy is an investment. I put it in things I'm working towards, and in things I'm certain of. Tucker doesn't offer a direction to work towards. I'm relatively certain right now that when we're in the same room we're good, and when we're not in the same room there's no certainty. So what I need to do is sever my habits around leaning my heart towards him when he's not around. He needs to be a thing that happens in my life like a rainbow, that's nice when it happens but there's no point chasing it. I need to chase my certainty elsewhere; goodness knows there are plenty of ways to chase security that doesn't involve a known poor likelihood.

At times like this I worry about losing my links to feeling human on any level at all. This isn't my society, it doesn't bring me joy in the general or the specific these days. Hopefully Kelsey coming up, and then Josh (his visit has been moved to right before Christmas, since the highways are all still closed and maybe they'll be open by then?) will both reconnect me a little and reaffirm me in my nonhuman aspects of self. Maybe one of the hardest things about Tucker is how much of dominant society he's internalized: he carries so many "shoulds" and so little softness for what actually is, and what actually can be so beautiful. Both Josh and Kelsey are a good antidote to that. Normally my life is also a haven from tat destructive attitude, and it should remain so.

Anyhow. I've succeeded in this transition with Josh previously, though he's a very different person. I have a roadmap, or maybe a destination anyhow. The journey is begun.

It looks like he'll always do the thing and tell me after.

What does the connecting look like going forward, knowing that?