Greenstorm's Journal

Last night I slept terribly. I woke up at 3am and showered because I felt gross. I only got a few hours of sleep altogether. It reminded me of when I was a pre-teen on paxil and I'd wake up at 2 or 3 and just... not sleep. Hours of breathing exercises and deliberately relaxing everything, night after night, and no sleep. Just more hours. No one told me that was a side effect.

That means I'm probably taking my pill too early; it's done that to me before. If I take it at 10am I seem to sleep fine the next day but if I take it at 7 or 8 I I wake up at 3 and am AWAKE for several hours, while feeling awful. Not recommended. It's basically impossible for me to do things at 10am though, at least things I need to carry an object for. I can't reliably take the pill in the bush. If I can get myself biking or yoga-ing on most non-field days I'm thinking about stepping down the pills to zero.

So anyhow, on no sleep I drove an hour and a half on honestly pretty good forestry roads with the summer student and we got to the block and... climbed something halfway between a rock face and a hill. I wish I knew more about the geography of the Inzana to tell you but I can describe the scene. The whole area is an old, old, lake bed and so it sweeps out in a long, gentle landscape ringed with what I think of as small, older mountains. It's not a valley, exactly, because it contains many riverlets. Instead it's a very shallow soup bowl.

We don't have smoke here so the air is hazy-blue and relatively clear; fall is coming and the light is already golden closer up which creates a great sense of scale. I don't think anyone can quite understand how much space there is here and how few people. Huge layered rocks round up into the valley at intervals of several miles. The one we climbed was the biggest one near and I didn't have to lean far forward to use my hands as we scrambled over fallen tree-trunks. Sometimes the rock broke through the soil, and the trees that fell brought up the scant few inches of topsoil with them.

Ringing this hill, this outcrop, this 30-minute-climb to the center of the world, there were moose swamps. They were mostly dried up but the occasional glint of blue water made it through brilliant green reeds; all was just little glimpses between tree trunks. Beyond that was cutblock and trees and swamp and cutblock like a patchwork draped inside the bowl of the Inzana. By contrast the top of the knoll was crispy, still green with kinickinnick but columned with a short open forest of chasm-barked dust-orange douglas fir and a few vivid birches. As the elevation fell off down the hill the trees were taller and taller, while on top they were scarce enough to give a little shade without obscuring the view in the least. Off the crown of the hill lodgepole pines joined the douglas fir and near the toe the pines remained but the douglas fir were replaced by moisture-seeking spruce.

Fall is coming. It wasn't loud with insects. There was no traffic hum. There was just the glint of occasional water through dusty trees. The Inzana stretched out all around.

Every area in Fort has its own particular character. Sakineche is mountanous with tall, narrow trees. Tchentlo is rich and lush with a riot of growth and huge trees mixed with little ones. The Kiwalli is pines on shallow hills like a prairie full of grass. The Cunningham is winding and hot and dotted with little lakes. But I think I love the Inzana the best, love that gentle patchwork bowl with its rocky crags long since ground into arcs by glaciers, love the water that lays out expanses of bright swamp, love the relatively sedate flow of its creeks.

Or maybe not? The Driftwood also lies close to my heart, densely forested and craggier with fire-scarred flanks of shallow mountains hemming it in and such fast-rushing streams that steam in fall mornings.

Then again, Mackenzie had so many beautiful places.

Anyhow, the climb was hard and we were on and off blowdown trees in shoulder-high bush, maybe a third of the time walking narrow trunks like balance beams or hitching over them when they crossed our path. I was tired and I hadn't slept and my body knew it, and my side felt and feels weird and my shoulders hurt because they'd been holding tension and then they had to hold my pack too.

But it was beautiful, and it was a place few people have ever been or ever will get to see, and it showed up for me today. I am grateful.

Well.

My language is shifting to match people here. Speech is slowing down, my accent is altering. I'm such a chameleon that way.

Two notable things have happened this week: I've been let out into the bush to work, and Dave came to visit for the long weekend.

I was/am hired to work out in the woods, but in order to do that I need to be trained; I have more-or-less no idea what I'm doing. The work itself is conceptually pretty easy, mostly measuring, a little bit of tree and fungus ID. I could learn that pretty quick. The catch is, I'm doing this in the bush. I could call it trackless wilderness, but that would be misleading; there are plenty of moose tracks, sometimes bear, occasionally wolf. The tracks aren't useful to me, since I need to move in a straight line from one place to another while navigating from random sample plot to random sample plot. Moving through the forest -- heavy with underbrush and blowdown, since it's territory where the pine beetle came through and left dead standing trees 10-15 years ago and half of them fell over and the other half had no canopy so the underbrush wasn't light-limited and came right up, densely in some places -- that's another thing.

Lots of things have thorns in this forest. Roses, gooseberries, other roses, raspberries all have mild scratchy thorns that leave my thighs looking like I washed a cat with them. Devil's club thorns go in and cause infection, they need to be pulled out but they break off pretty easily. Stubs of branches on dead pines aren't meant to be thorns, but they gouge and bruise pretty good when you need to climb over a pile of a couple trunks or more (this happens often in some areas).There are mosquitoes that get at me when I'm counting hair-width tree rings (I'm pretty well covered otherwise). I'm sleeping lots, getting sun, eating well, and pretty happy, so I'm healing really fast, but I sure do look pretty beat up at the end of it all.

I wear caulk boots in the bush, that's logging boots with spikes on the bottom so I can walk on logs without slipping. They're great, but I need to re-map surfaces in my brain: bare logs or bark are stable surfaces on which I can balance amazingly well but dry rocks are slippery. I suspect it wont take me long to be walking along logs high up from the ground; right now a tree lying 3' up is about as high as I can walk along. Walking along logs is great, though, because it's a quick, smooth path across the bush if you can find a tree going the way you want to go, and don't let me get started about swamps.

So the skill I'm learning is walking quickly and safely through the bush. I have been practicing it two days. By the end of each day I feel like I can barely lift my feet on those boots, let alone lift them to climb over the frequent 3' high tree trunks or tangles of tree trunks that block my path. I am so. Slow. It's been a long time since I had to learn a brand-new skill, and it's frustrating. I want to be past this part and actually able to help contribute rather than slowing everything down.

But... I get to be outside. In the woods. I have figured out how to dress comfortably (3L hydration pack in the vest that holds my many lbs of equipment, headscarf down my back under my hard hat for mosquitoes, long light men's dress shirt for mosquitoes and sun, light gloves, I wonder if they have thorn-proof kevlar I can put on the front of my army pants?). I see moose tracks every day. I eat sitting on a log surrounded by only the sounds of the forest. I get to see the understory proceed into spring one day at a time, leaves unfurling out of the litter, flowers starting up on the stems, the way I understand time passing in my bones. I come home smelling like pine and "balsam". I sleep well. I smile often. Walking around the office after work feels good in my legs and my hips.

I am making friends with this place.

And so I was very happy for Dave to come up and see it, for him to visit and learn what kind of place I'm staying. I wanted him to meet the woman I live with, who's lived here all her life and is friendly and independently interdependent and interesting. I wanted him to se my smile when I got off work. I wanted to show him the woods and the lake.

He came up. We slept a lot, went out and bought beef from the ranch up the hill, used the BBQ every night, had a fire and got too tired waiting for the stars to come out so we went to bed by 11pm, had lots of sex, made s'mores, got slightly but not seriously lost in the woods and bitten by mosquitoes, snuggled, fit into the little shower together, tried to make plans with my supervisor/colleague and never succeeded, walked on the beach in the heavy cold wind, and drank a milkshake. It was pretty close to perfect.

I love him a lot.

Then he went home, and I can feel his absence pretty strongly tonight after even just a few nights sleeping together. It's better for me to be here alone right now, it's what I want, but I miss him. I like how the rhythms of our lives intersect and influence each other.

So it's bedtime here anyway, and I don't feel like writing too much about it, so I'll go down to bed now and curl myself around the warmth that he leaves inside me and read wildcrafting books and smell the smoke left in my hair from last night.

Be well.