A Storied Wind Reveals the Way of Beauty

On July 17th, I had the pleasure of giving a reading at the historic Wallowa Lake Lodge, thanks to Wallowology and the Lodge. My prose and poetry accompanied 35 of artist Robin Coen’s spectacular and exquisite watercolors. Our Refugia of the Blue Mountains exhibit opened this past May at the Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise. Robin and I created our work through the Wild Blues Artist-in-Residence, a new program of the Greater Hells Canyon Council. For upcoming showings and to learn more about the residency, please visit Wild Blues Artist-in-Residence. The opening starts with this piece, A Storied Wind Reveals the Way of Beauty. I’ll include three poems at the end to go with paintings.

A sagebrush-scented wind whirls up from the mighty Snake River flowing free through Hells Canyon, deepest gorge in North America. Bighorn sheep rams poised on a dizzying bunchgrass slope raise their heads, alert to the breezed scents of animal and plant kin. Far below the bighorns, endangered chinook salmon battle upriver to their home tributary—a journey from the ocean of more than 500 miles and past eight dams. Some will spawn in the wilderness-fed waters of the forest-lined Imnaha River. Above the bighorns, a golden eagle spirals ever higher on rising columns of warm air. Two backpackers on the canyon rim hold hands in twinned wonder.

This is refugia. Home. Shelter. Headwaters. Places still big, wild, and connected for birds, animals, and native plants to cling to life and to move to cooler realms as our climate heats up. Places with dark skies and solitude. Places indigenous people have known since time immemorial — honoring the intricate web of life and the seasonal round in ways of reciprocity.

The wind ruffles over the rim and spills across wildflower meadows of paintbrush, lupine, and penstemon. Gusting into shadowy forests of grand fir, larch, and ponderosa pine, the gale softens to brush past a great gray owl—largest in North America. She is protecting her fluffy chicks within a stick nest on a sturdy branch of a wide fir snag—a dead tree enlivened by woodpeckers, chipmunks, and beetles. Eventually, the shelter snag will fall to nourish a new forest.

This, too, is refugia–Forests that seem messy, dense, and in need of tidying up. Yet, for the great-gray owl and all her companions, “mess” is bliss. Here, too, big trees capture and store far more carbon than smaller trees and for far longer. Wild forests are climate allies and biodiversity sanctuaries.
Slowed yet not stalled, the wind sighs through the cool, lichen-draped woods and flits across a warbler jazzy in yellow and black feathers—a tiny rambler freshly arrived from a winter in Mexico. Like clouds are to rain, bees are to pollen, and sun is to shadow, so Townsend’s warblers are to lush and cool ancient forests. Their sweet high melodies give voice to the wind stirring the spring’s unfolding of bud, cone, and hatching insects.

Refugia lies, too, in the pockets, sleeves, buttons, scarves, socks, shoes, underlayers, and overlayers of wild trees and their interlacing roots. A long-toed salamander slips below the loose bark of a fallen fir by a tumbling creek. Mushrooms, moss, lichen, and orchids flourish in the gift of trees returning to earth with the help of beetles, ants, and an entire world in miniature.

A pine marten races her fallen tree runway and pauses as her nose wrinkles to discern every message in the frisky wind that soon will bluster away to rumple the riverine homes of beaver, river otter, belted kingfisher, cutthroat trout, and bumblebee on wildflower. Trace the origin of our precious freshwater to alpine springs below snowy peaks. Know the haven of pika, mountain goat, and the rare wolverine.

Enter Refugia of the Blue Mountains with the wind always at your back.

PLEASE VISIT ROBIN COEN’S ETSY SITE TO ORDER PRINTS: ROBIN COEN ART. THANKS FOR CONSIDERING A DONATION TO GREATER HELLS CANYON COUNCIL, TOO. ROBIN AND I ARE BOTH PROUD BOARD MEMBERS.

BONUS POEMS/PROSE WITH ROBIN’S ART –ALL IN OUR EXHIBIT

Praise for Dog-Pelt Lichen
in the Mosses of the Eagle Cap Wilderness

Here’s to your foliose freckly pelt
Not like a dog, more like rubbery felt

How do you live always in relationship?
Never a hiccup in your companionship?

Algae for converting sun to food. Fungi for structure
Symbiosis of give and take without ever a rupture

Remember with this saying: Algae and Fungi took a Lichen
to each other. A little like sharing snacks when hiking.

Living a hundred years high in wilderness nestled in mosses
Drinking clean air safe from pollutants, suffering no losses.

Here’s to your lobes smooth and emerald when wet.
Crusty crisp and pale sage when dry. Never in a fret.

How sweet is the lichen. Algae sipping sunshine
held in the arms of fungi. Doesn’t that sound divine?

Ode to the Rydbergs Penstemon
With Botany Translation

A botanist pulls out her hand lens. Steps back. Gives way to the bumble and buzz of native bees—tiny to fit into Penstemon rydbergii luring only tiny bees into her tiny tubes.
She watches a bee crawl in and vanish to lap nectar and emerge with feet dusted in pollen from the stamens (male parts). Off the bee wings to the next penstemon, where the pollen will cling to that flower’s stigma (female part). Pollination accomplished. Gratitude to native bees.
When the coast clears, the botanist is ready to magnify beauty with her hand lens and murmur her praise:
Your inflorescence (flowering) is a sky singing to the night.
How glabrous (smooth) you are like a pour of honey.
And my, your lance-shaped leaves are so sessile (stemless) nestling up to your rouged stalk.
Deep within your corolla (shelter of petals), your beards tongue is a golden fuzzy staminode (sterile stamen). How could a bee resist?
Even your basal rosette (swirl of leaves at the base) is tantalizing.
Stamen. Stigma. Inflorescence. Glabrous. Sessile. Corolla. Staminode. Basal Rosette. Oh my!