botanizing

Insouciant

I had been engaged for hours by paintings.  The exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum examined the sources of inspiration the Impressionist painters had found in art of earlier eras.  As usual, I was struck by the boldness of Manet—here, especially for me, seen in his painting of Victorine Meurent, which dated from 1862.  Her brightly lit face with its subtle yellow light and ochre shadow was hardly simpler, hardly more complex, than her white blouse with its black lines of detail and quick swishes of gray shadow.  Despite the bright face of this working woman our gaze was pulled upward to the blue ribbon in her hair.  The ribbon was a subtle challenge—the will of a working woman to find elements of beauty and a painter’s will to compose and use color beyond expectation.  In the Renoirs was the pillow of pleasure.  The indulgent softness of his paintings always for me excludes all possibilities aside from the joys of pleasure.  Despite the offering of flesh in the Renoirs, my favorite of his works in the show was “Still Life with Bouquet,” which was overwhelmingly, brightly orange.  The still life had red and yellow flowers wrapped in white paper that shown with crisp creases and angles of bright light along with two leather-bound books and a Japonisme vase that held a Japanese fan and a feathery plume.  In the background of the painting, hung against an orange wall by a red ribbon, was the image of a Manet etching, which was itself a copy of a painting by Velasquez. 

I grew hungry and went to the museum café for a late lunch.  I selected an over-priced, fashionably unusual, but still basically ham, sandwich and a bag of lightly salted chips.  I stood at the register to pay.  The young man behind the register tapped at its keys with his right hand and his left hand lay lightly on a seating chart.  As I watched his right hand work at the register, I studied the tattoos of orange and black fish that seemed to swim on the pale flesh of his forearm.  The tattoos had the softness of Renoir’s brushstrokes.  He did not look up at me.  I began to stare at his face in the hope that he would register my presence and let me pay for my food.  There was a small loop earring in each of his ears.  The earrings reflected his white shirt and stood in contrast with his well trimmed black hair.  I thought about the black and white contrast that Manet used to call attention to the subtlety of a face as I waited.  It seemed I waited several minutes, standing still and almost patiently.  The young man seemed delicate.  I began to wonder how delicacy shaped his life and how parts of his life must further refine the delicacy.  I waited in a calm challenge to the storm of my growling stomach.  How long had it been when he finally looked up at me?  The stud in the flesh just below his lower lip glinted like a sliver of glass in the café’s sallow light.

“Have you been helped?” the young man said. He looked at me as if I were an inconvenience yet inconsequential.

“No,” I said.

He tilted his head a little.  I offered my sandwich and chips.  “I would like a cup of tea.  Please.”

He flipped light-handed a laminated tea list to me.  “An Earl Grey, please,” I said.

His turn was as slow as a painted pirouette, as if he was one of Degas’s pastel ballerinas, and he was gone.  I knew I would wait several minutes for my tea.

*  *  *
The exhibition was "Inspiring Impressionism:  The Impressionists and the Art of the Past," which is currently at the Seattle Art Museum.

No 'Damned' Memories: The Nooksack River

Memories are surreptitious.  Like the Nooksack River, which hides under maples and cedars, memories run fast in leafy shadows. 

The highway flickers.  We have driven east past Deming and into the foothills, where big leaf maples crowd the road.  The leaves of this maple, which are larger than my hand, stand folded, like the gable of a house, one side yellow in the sun and the other blue in the shade.  What light slips past the maple canopy has hard shadows.  Yellow ovals of light fenestrate the darkly shaded highway.  I close my eyes against the flickering light as we drive.

The folded maple leaves remain solarized on my closed eyelids.  With my eyes closed, memory wells and quickly flickers no less than the light on the highway.  The morning’s scenes flip past, and the maples themselves emerge hung in a yellow mossy fur that is dotted with epiphytic ferns.  The morning’s maples merge with my first and other experiences with big leaf maples, making a kind of botanical collection of memories.

The Nooksack River is here, hiding among the hills. I am curious about the Nooksack and want to experience the river, want to walk on point bars, flip stones, and scoop river water into the palm of my hand.  I look forward to memories of the Nooksack.

Views of the river are fleet at bridges and the few breaks in forest where the channel is near the highway.  I sense the river’s shallowness and a glacial source in fast views of flat water with stone ripples and a flatter gray green color.  When I can’t see the river, I sense its channel at a hill’s edge.

The hills are high and steep.  Our highway meanders like the river around their ends.  We drive in a flat-bottomed valley, accumulated surely through centuries of floods.  Christmas tree farms tuck against the slopes.  The trees are trimmed into tight cones.  The hills, too, have been trimmed.  There are scars of clearcuts among patches of second growth forest.  Houses, both ramshackle and well kept, sit along the highway.   Logging trucks park at some.  Signs that proclaim support from the timber economy are tacked on frail sheds.  There are empty houses partly reclaimed by shrubs and young trees in this lush, wet place.  We see more horses than people and assume the horse economy to be robust.  At the Equine Breeding Clinic, young colts romp in pasture.  Up the road at Black Mountain Ranch, horses in paddock have their leisure.  Further on, a young girl paces her horse among red barrels in a farm’s dirt enclosure. 

“Flat scattered farms in the bends of the Nooksack” is how Gary Snyder described the place in his poem “Nooksack Valley,” which he dated February 1956.  Snyder was situated “In a berry-pickers cabin/At the edge of a wide muddy field/Stretching to the woods and cloudy mountains,/Feeding the stove all afternoon with cedar” when his mind came to a stand-still.  The smell of the cabin brought the memory of a childhood farmhouse and brought his 25 years awake in

                  damned memories,
Whole wasted theories, failures and worse success,
Schools, girls, deals, try to get in
To make this poem a froth, a pity,
A dead fiddle for lost good jobs.

The young man’s memories get mixed-up with expectation.  Snyder slips the memories and the place with salmonid drive:

     Steelhead run now
    a week and I go back
Down 99, through towns, to San Francisco
                and Japan.

Memory enjoins motion.  There are thick, sludgy memories like wide, deep rivers that are impossible to wade, and we turn back from them to walk away.  Other memories may be logjams, impounding our motion but building pressure, and, finally, we jump the banks to take a new course. How often has each of us wanted to remake ourselves in a new place?  The enjambment in Snyder’s poem has the effect of logjammed memory—held-up in the moist cabin, his memories build-up, causing him to back-up along old paths before adopting a new course. 

The old Nooksack River was like a metamorphic god, a shape-shifter. Its channel once slithered easily across its floodplain, but berms now contain the river against the loss of property.  Near its mouth, logjams would impound the river, building a lake and the pressure to flow, and the hold would be temporary.  Breaking the logjam could open new channels, and the Nooksack has moved its mouth from north to south, going from Lummi Bay and to Bellingham Bay.  The new channel opened old wetlands, creating a new delta to spit logs into the southern bay.   The old Lummi delta became wetland, overgrown with rushes, like a memory distilled from the rush of life, where the river no longer flows. 

The Nooksack is quick to the sea.  From the tips of any of its three tails, falling 4500 feet from glacial cirques, it runs to the sea in less than 75 miles.  We follow the north fork, a tail that curves north and slips up into the North Cascade Mountains.  The tail tip of the north fork turns south and lies cold against glaciers on the north face of Mount Shuksan.   I can see the mountain when I walk on a plain below the peak to the edge of the river.  The cobble bars at the river’s edge are light and bright and, when I step from the forest, I feel the frontal strike of heat reflected from the stones.

The milky river is also stone.  The cold water pours gray from the palm of my hand.  The turbidity comes not just from the fast water of snowmelt but also from the grinding of the glaciers and the sliding of snowfields on the slopes of Shuksan. The palest green of the river’s water is the finest stone, ground from the mountain and now suspended in the current.  In the shallows, the river’s stone bed has magenta edges in brown water.  It is only in the shadows, where the slow pools are overhung by forest and in the main channel where the current creases, that the river seems watery enough to be blue.

What I dislike about memory is the expectation it builds.  Memories like the purity of pleasure, the dredge-like drag of regret, and the blueness of water lead us astray.  Memory can ruin a river, although I doubt I shall ever forget the light pale loveliness of the Nooksack’s green water and cerulean shadows.

We stop where the Nooksack falls fast—dropping six feet in a reach of 50 feet—and the narrow channel of the river is contained in old forest.  The forest feels as wet as the river.  Fallen trees are soft as sponges; their barkless wood is slippery.  The standing trees encased in moss have lineaments of dangling lichens.

Trees fall into the river channel and not all of the fallen have drifted to the river’s mouth.  The trunks of thick cedars, some with crowns of root stumps, rest clumped high on the bars at the forest margin.  I wonder how far a cedar trunk, two or three times as long as the width of this mountain reach, moves when it falls into the river at fast, high flood.  The violence of cedar trunks banging boulders and shooting cataracts is unimaginable, especially when I rub my hand over the weathered trunks that lie, silent and gray, supported at river’s edge on boulders.  These rough, drifted trunks are the driest objects of the river’s forest.

Fallen alders hang, pointing downstream, over the channel.  These slim alders are topless, denuded of all branches, and partly stripped of bark.  Unlike the gray trunks of drift cedars, these alders have freshly fallen this season, and their exposed wood is as ruddy as warm, live flesh. Crouched with my back against the slant of a boulder, the fleshy alder stabs like a premonition, a twisted memory construed forward.  I look behind me.  There is nothing bad—only teacups and a few of my wishes strewn about the stones. 

Nothing changes as much as a river.  Walk a river and every mile is different.  Slumped on a Nooksack boulder, I watch the river strike a stone and spray. A run of memory splatters.  Water tumbles in foam.  Sheets coalesce, more resilient than memory, slide and divide as the water slips over the side of the stone.  The waters run together too much like memories.  How will I remember the Nooksack?  Reach for a memory and it changes like a river.

*  *  *
I thank Pete McGregor for calling my attention to Gary Snyder’s poem “Nooksack River,” which I have used to develop this sketch.

“Nooksack River” by Gary Snyder was published in Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems (1965, Four Seasons Foundation).

Eclipse

In the late afternoon, I visited Eclipse Bookstore, which is in the Fairhaven district of Bellingham, Washington.  This box of a store is well lit with a spread of large windows across its front and an equal spread of windows across the back.  The back windows provide a broad view of Bellingham Bay.  This afternoon both sailboats and yellow crinkles of reflected light stood on the water. 

A woman flipped through a box of one dollar books that sat outside the store.  Inside, old dub reggae played, setting a languorous mood for book-looking.  The few shoppers moved slowly along the shelves.  A man sat reading in an armchair aimed at the bay and the afternoon light.

I like a bookstore in which one can comfortably maneuver.  The high shelves in Eclipse were well spaced, and I could easily bend or squat to see the volumes on the lowest shelves without bumping a shelf behind me or knocking over a pile of books.  And there were piles of books.  What respectable used bookstore wouldn’t have piles of books?  The piles in Eclipse seemed steadier than those I’ve seen in some places.  I thought about Eclipse’s book piles as architectural elements, like columns along a stoa, rather than disheveled backlog long waiting to be shelved.  In the art section, I rifled piles, finding the first volume of Hilary Spurling’s biography of Matisse (which I bought) and a biography of Whistler, which I decided not to buy.

Eclipse had clean, well kept books.  It had an excellent selection of modern and contemporary novelists. Eclipse is neither a place of dusty old volumes nor antiquarian jewels.  The jewels in Eclipse were mostly made recently.  Among the older volumes I examined was a hardbound copy of William O. Douglas’s My Wilderness, which I was tempted to purchase but didn’t.

I would like to have purchased several things.  I leafed through books that have been on my mental list of possible buys, but most I replaced on the shelf, tempering my acquisitiveness.  I had only a short stack when I went out the door of this lovely store.

*   *   *
[I’ve begun to collect bookstores (at least in a series of snapshots), and this post initiates my catalogue of the collection.]

Wet

The north fork of the Nooksack River, obscured from view by depth and thick conifers, rushed below us.  The clatter of the river flowed up-slope and seemed held against us by the canopy of cloud.  The river sound was as moist and cool as the gray air.  I shivered in shorts and t-shirt and pulled on a fleece sweater and anorak. 

We walked upward through forest, switching back and forth, going from patches of strawberry bramble to clumps of foamflower. Inch-tall seedlings of a conifer—each with a propeller-like ring of green cotyledons radiating atop a slim hypocotyl—stood in the brown needle duff like abandoned tops.  Also like abandoned tops were the cone-shaped and lemony yellow jelly fungi on the trunks of fallen trees.  The forest opened to a wet meadow, where a line of marsh marigolds grew along a rivulet.  We stepped lightly along the muddy trail, which turned to go up through the last trees.  Juncos swarmed in the trees and shouted, ‘Tsip tsip tsip.’ 

Knee-high blueberries made a broad cirque a field of pale green.  Towering lousewort stems tucked among the blueberries flashed spikes of light yellow flowers.  Marmots whistled shrill warnings in a boulder field below us.  We picked our way slowly over patches of rotten snow that had melted around boulders. 

The blueberries thinned.  The creamy tepals of western pasque flowers dotted the slope.  Just a few weeks ago high in the mountains above the Selway River in Idaho, these pasque flowers had globose floral buds and a few had recently opened; here in the North Cascades, the pasque flowers had already begun to fruit.  The cowlick of twisted styles in the shaggy mane of fruits held water drops.  Tiny and large, each drop reflected the white hairs of the fruits and a sliver of yellow from the sun. The sun was brief.  A wedge had opened in the clouds, allowing yellow light to spread across the cirque and around the water bubbles lodged among the hairs of the pasque flower’s fruits, and then closed, dissipating shadows.

A light rain began.  We stopped below the south face of Yellow Aster Butte and, on the leeward side of a little pinnacle of rock, tried to huddle below the wind’s chill.  We fixed cups of tea.  I held my cup in the palms of both hands and spread my cold fingers around the sides to absorb as much of the cup’s heat as possible.  The rain strengthened, and my anorak held the wet against my back.  As the rain gathered even more strength, we collected our cups and packs to return down the trail. 

When we reached treeline, the rain stopped.  By the time we were back to the trailhead, the clouds had parted, and sun shown on the peaks across the Nooksack.  We drove home in the warm evening light.