the cassandra pages

Earth Day

Today I've been thinking back to the very first Earth Day in 1970. I was a senior in high school, and on that day we went over for a program at the new Rogers Environmental Education Center that was being built in my rural central New York town. It was an entirely new concept: an "environmental education center" under the auspices of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, built on property that had once been a state "game farm" raising pheasants, quail, turkeys and other game birds for release on state lands for hunting. During my childhood, this was a place we went for picnics and to see the enormous native trout in the concrete ponds, feed the wild ducks, keeping a safe distance from mated pairs of Canada geese protecting their offspring, and wander around the cages that housed displays of "fancy" pheasants, game birds, and screeching peacocks.

On Earth Day, our class heard about concepts like recycling, sustainability, organic gardening, environmental pollution, and ecology, that were actually relatively terms at that time. The presenter was a charismatic state field biologist named Herm Weiskotten who had been hired as the center's first environmental educator. I loved everything I heard, and admired him, and that summer and for all the summers and some vacations through university I worked at the center as an intern. For two years after graduating I worked full-time as a naturalist and artist/exhibit and graphic designer under the CETA program, sharing an office with Herm, who had become my mentor, teacher, and friend. I was incredibly fortunate to know him and work so closely with him; he taught me a great deal, gave me confidence, and steadfastly encouraged me in my art and my love of the natural world. We went all over New York State together, laying out nature trails -- another new thing at the time -- and talking. I was responsible for sketching and drawing the illustrations for trail guides and exhibits, but Herm and I also shared a great love for native plants, especially the so-called primitive plants like ferns, mosses, horsetails, lichens and liverworts, and we searched together for rare species. During those years I'd work all day, come home, cook dinner for myself, and spend the evening in solitude practicing drawing and teaching myself how to paint detailed watercolors.

The field guide in the top picture was his. He gave it to me after it fell into a stream once when we were down in some gorge looking for limestone-loving ferns. The fern I've laid on the cover has always been pressed between its pages - it's an ebony spleenwort from one of those excursions. I took the book off the shelf today to see if it had Herm's name in it -- it doesn't -- but that's his handwriting inside the back cover: a note about where the species on pg 112 -- the silvery spleenwort, Athyrium thelypteroides -- was to be found.

He was born in England in 1922, orphaned, and adopted by American parents. He died in 1977 of a sudden, massive heart attack in his sleep; we had spoken by phone the night before with no hint of any serious problem, though he had had heart issues for a number of years. Now, almost ten years older than he was when he died, I still think of him nearly every day, and when I'm in the woods I feel his presence; I've sometimes wondered if his was a soul that didn't depart but has always stayed here, whether as a protective spirit or simply because he loved the earth too much to leave. I should write more about him someday -- there are hundreds of stories -- but I'm not sure I will, or really want to.

This warped and water-stained book is precious to me because it's one of the very few mementos I have. I have only a couple of photographs, none particularly good. The first gift he ever gave me was a paperback copy of Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac; he also gave me a large book of American Wildflowers. But mostly we constantly brought each other interesting things we'd found: fossils, rocks, bones, wildflowers, feathers. Not long before he died, he showed up at my parents' home at the lake -- I had moved to New England -- with a couple of Iroquois arrowheads that he said he wanted to give my mother and me - he loved to roam the freshly-plowed fields by the Chenango River after work, and often participated in archaeological digs in the area, looking for artifacts. But that's it. The most important things were the intangible ways he helped me discover and be myself.

How would Herm feel about our earth today? I hate to even think about that question. He'd be happy for the strides we've made in sustainability, recycling, organic farming and local food, waste disposal, and certain resources that have been protected and cleaned up. He'd be sick about the decline of species, blatant disregard for biodiversity, about genetic engineering, continued pesticide overuse, and all the abuses of creationism and non-science -- but most of all about climate change. He would despise the politicians and their wars, deplore religious fundamentalism of all kinds, and be dismayed about the refugees. He'd also be sad to see that New York State has closed all their popular and well-attended environmental centers, which educated two generations of students and teachers, for lack of funds and, frankly, lack of political will and commitment.

So much of my art and spirit spring from nature, my first and purest love. In much of my work, I realize I'm simply trying to say "Look!" with the same wonder and appreciation I did when leading people on nature walks, years ago. I was in love with the natural world even when I was a little girl; my mother and grandmother and aunts loved the outdoors and knew a lot about it. But it was Herm who gave me greater knowledge, a voice, and new ways to communicate what was inside me, and what was important. I thought I wanted to be a field biologist myself, for a long time, but my creative side won out; that's fine. But there's so much work to do, and so little time left; I feel the urgency, and the call to try harder -- those of us who are still here.

 

The Vulnerable City: On Weather and the North

The province of Quebec, with Montreal at lower center; image from Google Earth. James Bay and Hudson Bay at top left, Gulf of St Lawrence at far right, center.

A storm is coming.

I walked to work today, knowing it may be the last chance for a few days to walk quickly and easily on bare sidewalks. The sky is grey, low; the temperature just below freezing; the air slightly damp and still. Even without a weather report, northerners like me would be likely to say, "feels like it's going to snow."

Along Avenue Mont-Royal, I passed the jewelry shop where the bare fingers of a white mannequin waited for their ten o'clock adornment; past the bakery, always closed on Mondays, the librairie with its window display of mandala coloring books and blank notebooks covered in Italian papers, and stopped in at the Intermarché to buy a can of tuna for lunch. At the light I turned left and walked up Papineau, a wide boulevard full of commuter traffic, past the earnest early-morning exercisers on their treadmills at EnergieCardio, and through a zone of abandoned buildings, boarded up and pasted with film posters. There was an empty lot filled with snow and faced by a chain-link fence and a tangle of city barricades, the sort that get put up when there's a street closure for a march or a race, each bearing a vertical sign with the city's name and logo. Suddenly - was it that unexpected expanse of snow? the slight but insistent wind that I'd begun to feel after turning north? --  I felt the city not as a self-contained zone of urban activity, but as a vulnerable fortress set in a wild, raw landscape surrounding it on all sides. I immediately thought of the early French settlers, building a literal fortress near the river, the walls of which still remain: while it may have protected them from angry Hurons it certainly didn't do much against the harsh winters, except to give the colonists a place to huddle together with some protection from the wind.

I thought of other cities I love: Reykjavik, with no defense but evacuation, should Katla erupt; Mexico City, surrounded by volcanoes and devastated by the huge earthquake in 1985; New York, deluged by hurricane Sandy and vulnerable to rising ocean levels. Human beings have tried so valiantly to protect themselves from outside threats, all through history, whether it's by making walls or vaccines. Here, in the big cities, there is an illusion, maintained by concrete and glass and steel -- the mountains and valleys of our own construction that we populate and animate by artificial light and constant movement -- that we are in control, that this, not nature, is the true reality. Perhaps it's an illusion easier to perpetuate in more populated areas with gentler climates, where an entire life can be lived without venturing into life-threatening wildness, or even driving through it. Are far-northern cities and societies different, I wondered? Why have Canada and the Scandinavian countries committed themselves to such a high level of social welfare for their citizens? Is it merely wealth, or does something else, perhaps more elemental, contribute to a collectivist mentality? An awareness, chilled into our bones, that beyond this outpost are the vast forest and frozen tundra, the bears and the wolves, the unchecked arctic wind, the iceberg sea?

The Air We Breathe

 A clear day, two years ago.

Mexico City's air quality has improved in the last two decades, but it is not exactly good. On clear days, the view from our hotel room included the mountains in the distance, but during this particular stay, that was an exception.

A typical recent day.

The city is at 7,000 feet, and fills the Valley of Mexico: once surely one of the most beautiful places on earth, surrounded by mountains including active volcanoes more than 17,000 feet tall.

Above, The Valley of Mexico from Del Rey Mill, by Jose Maria Velasco, painted in 1900. The Chapultepec castle is in the middle and the city itself is the small white expanse in front of the lake. Today the castle and its woods are a park, with the city extended all around them, over all the green space you can see in the picture above. Popocatepetl, on the right, erupted recently and has no snow cover at the present time.

Looking in the same direction on a pretty clear day, from the Torre Latinoamericana: nothing but city fills the entire valley.

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For the first couple of days, travelers from lower altitudes, like us, generally experience some breathlessness, especially when walking fast, carrying luggage, climbing stairs. I don't usually have too much of a problem with that. But I was very aware of discomfort in my lungs, and found myself coughing. After a week, I came down with a respiratory flu. Whether it's something I picked up on the airplane, or in the crowded metro, I'll never know, but I'm convinced that my lungs were already struggling from the pollution. Now at home, a week later, I'm still ill but gradually getting better. Yesterday when I looked out of the airplane at the frozen fields of Quebec, I wasn't shuddering like many of my fellow passengers: I couldn't wait to take a breath of that cold, clean air.

I was on the street every day, both as a cyclist and pedestrian. Every day, trucks passed us belching black smoke, buses filled the air with diesel fumes, the highways were choked with car traffic. In our neighborhood and all through the city, many people work outside or in spaces that are open to the outdoors - there's no way they can avoid exposure to the air. The effects on everyday health must be devastating. I don't think I couldn't survive there, but for the 22 million citizens of Mexico City, there's no choice. What about all the people who live in the Maximum Cities of the world, and can't fly away to places with better air, let alone water and sanitation? I have a close friend in Beijing. She has no options in that very polluted city.

What I observed, and the fact of my own fragility, have made me think a lot this week about us as biological organisms, with simple needs for air, water, and nutrition: things the earth naturally provides in abundance. Most of the time, we don't even think of ourselves in this way - like a plant or a bird or a goldfish - so dependent are we on our technologies and the ways they keep us removed from and oblivious to the cycles of life. I've thought about what we are doing to ourselves and all the living things, and it's been more appalling to me than ever. Air to breathe: the most basic requirement of all, and yet for millions and millions of human beings, even this is impossible.

What do the indigenous people think? First the Spanish came and violently took away their land, massacred thousands of people, decimated their rich and highly-developed native culture, and converted the people to Christianity; then industrialization destroyed much of the natural world with which they had always lived in harmony. And now, many of the indigenous people are forced to come into the city for work, to sell their foods or handcrafts on the street, or worse yet, to beg. In Mexico as nearly everywhere, the darker one's skin, the more discrimination there is, the more menial the jobs, and the fewer chances for education and economic advancement. There's more than one way to suffocate, and unfortunately the people with the least power are always the ones who suffer the most.

As I hope is obvious, I love Mexico, and I don't mean to be negative - simply realistic about some of the very real problems that became even more obvious to me during this trip. The legacy of colonialism continues, and we have to look it in the face if there is ever to be a hope of addressing what we've wrought.

Road Trip 10: Vatnajokull/Skaftafell: Svartifoss and Stuðlaberg

In the morning, still dark and drizzly, we drove just a few miles from Hof (just off the bottom right of this map) to reach the access road for the Skaftafell wilderness in the Vatnajokull National Park. From the road, we could see the Skaftafellsjokull glacier lying in its valley beneath the giant glacial cap, across the sands and tundra:

The parking lot was full, and tour buses bound for glacier walks were loading, but not too many people were actually around. We went into the visitors' center to look at the trail maps, and get the lay of the land. It was pretty cold and raw, but some native Icelanders in their Lopi sweaters seemed to barely feel it. The Japanese, on the other hand were bundled up in parkas and high-tech rainsuits from top to toe.

Concerned about the weather, we decided to climb up to the Svartifoss waterfall first, and if we had time later, to take the flat trail that ends very close to the Skaftafellsjokull glacier. As it turned out, we only did the first hike, but were very glad we'd made that choice. So we headed out in the opposite direction of the people above, to the north and west, up the mountain.

The mountains are split with gorges, each of which seemed to contain numerous waterfalls, cascading off precipitous cliffs skirted by the trail, mostly without ropes or rails, only an occasional warning:

Once we'd gained some height, we could begin to really appreciate the extent of the glacial outwash plain below, so large that we couldn't really see the sea beyond.

Finally we got our first glimpse of Svartifoss, the Black Falls:

We drew closer.

From the bluff on the right near the falls, a trail led down to its base.

These astonishing rock forms are columnar basalt, which results when an unusually thick basaltic lava flow cools and cracks. It's such an iconic feature of Icelandic landscapes that  national poets have written about it, painters have painted it, and architects have emulated the five-and-six-sided columnar forms in their buildings. But before I saw Svartifoss, one of the most famous and dramatic examples of columnar basalt in the world, I hadn't recognized what I was seeing in less-dramatic places. In fact, one of the drawings I had done a couple of years before was of columnar basalt, but I didn't even know it. (Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and the Giant's Causeway in Ireland are other examples of the same geologic structure.)

From Svartifoss we continued to the left, up the mountain, on steps formed from sections of the basalt, which looked just like ancient ruins.

I found out something interesting when looking for references to the Icelandic Stuðlaberg which is their much more beautiful name for columnar basalt. The word Stuðlar means pillar-stone or basaltic pillar and stafr, which means approximately the same thing. The Old Norse alphabet, or Runic Alphabet, contained straight lines also called pillars or staves. Studul is a characteristic of old Norse song, referring to its rock-fast form that allowed it to be committed to memory. I should ask Language Hat for more about these word origins, in which the early words for these basalt pillars seem to have become terms for unchangeable, steady forms that gave structure to oral Norse poetry and in music. And guess what? Even Icelandic knitting patterns draw their inspiration and name from studlaberg; it's part of the bedrock of Icelandic consciousness. Once I had made the connection, through Svartifoss, I saw it everywhere.

Road Trip 4: a video near Eyjafjallajokull, and a corridor of waterfalls

First, let's backtrack to a video shot near Eyjafjallajökull. I'm hoping this may give you a better sense of scale than the still photographs do. (Best if watched full-screen.)

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After my early morning walk beneath the double waterfall at Kirkjubæjarklaustur, we ate our breakfast, and set off: we had a lot of driving to do that day and were determined not to stop too often. However, the landscape immediately changed yet again: we left the lava fields and volcanic cones behind, and entered an area of dramatically-sculpted green cliffs punctuated by tall, shimmering waterfalls. Captivated, we pulled off the road again and again to absorb some of this beauty. 

The quiet pastoral atmosphere I'd felt during my morning walk persisted until we reached the far western end of Öræfi, which is marked by an iconic mountain called Lomagnupur, a favorite subject of Icelandic painters. I hope to join their company soon.

Lomagnupur, looking east.

Here the scene changed yet again. We stopped at a long bridge, amazed...

Road Trip 3: Kirkjubæjarklaustur

I thought it might be helpful at this point to post a map of the island. Iceland is about the size of the state of Kentucky. You can see Reykjavik, the capital, on the lower left. The road we were driving runs all the way around the edge of the island. We traveled east, through Selfoss, along the southern coast below the big glaciers of Myrdalsjokull and Vatnajokull, not quite as far as Hofn, which you can see on the coast at lower right. Kirkjubæjarklaustur is a little village between those two glaciers (the name is below the word SUDERLAND in the lower center of the map.)

I woke early at our simple guesthouse (above, beneath a gorgeous double waterfall), and went for a walk by myself along the river. As had been true the day before, I realized I was seeing strange formations, but didn't know what they were. I've since learned that the region surrounding Kirkjubæjarklaustur has been devastated repeatedly by volcanic events, throughout recorded history since the settlement of Iceland (around 900) and long before that.

"Kirk" is the root that means church, and "klauster" ("cloister") refers to two religious foundations - a monastery and a cloister of nuns - that were there long ago. There are stories about impropriety between the monks and nuns, and of good nuns and bad nuns who are buried near significant rocks (above) or swam in the lake above these cliffs.

The Systrastapi (sister's rock) is where two of the convent's nuns were buried after being burned at the stake. One of the nuns was accused of selling her soul to the Devil, carrying Communion bread outside the church, and having carnal knowledge with men; the other was charged with speaking blasphemously of the Pope. After the Reformation, the second sister was vindicated, and flowers are said to bloom on her grave, but not that of the first nun. (Wikipedia)

As was true in many places where Christianity was introduced, pagan religion and folklore became interwoven with the new faith. This persists even now. In one area of strange volcanic cones, the interpretive sign (below) carefully explained the geology, and then went on to caution visitors to show respect because "the hidden people" had been seen near these formations. (You can see the volcanic cones behind the sheep in the last photo of the previous post.)

It all makes sense to me: in such a strange landscape animated by inexplicable and sudden, life-altering events, and where the rocks take human-like forms, I too could believe in elves, trolls, and magic.

This sparsely-populated region has a name, Öræfi, that means "wilderness." For many years it was cut off from the rest of the island; this was the last part of the ring road to be completed. The reason is that this area contains two volcanic sand deserts: huge expanses of black sand that is subject to sandstorms in the summer, and to "glacial bursts": flash floods that arise when water that has built up under the glaciers (melted through the heat of the volcanoes that lie beneath them) reaches a critical mass. When that happens, the glacier actually lifts up, the water spills out, and rushes down across the sands, taking out roads, bridges, and anything in its path. There was a glacial burst a few days after we returned to Reykjavik, making front page headlines, and undermining one of the bridges we had just crossed. As we drove across these vast plains, I thought about the early settlers, crossing on horseback or even on foot: it seems incredible. But it must have been even worse to have to cross a lava field.

Öræfi has been a no-man's land because of its history of catastrophic volcanic activity; the most active volcanoes in Iceland are located beneath these glaciers. To the west of Kirkjubæjarklaustur is a huge lava field that was laid down during the 1783 -1784 eruption of Laki, or more correctly, the Lakagigar, a volcanic fissure that's part of the Grimsvotn volcanic system. This eruption was absolutely devastating: it released clouds of poisonous hydrofluoric acid and sulphur dioxide that killed 50% of the island's livestock, and the resulting famine killed a quarter of the population. Basalt lava flowed over a huge area, 14 cubic kilometres. The eruption caused a drop in global temperatures that caused crop failures in the Northern Hemisphere and possibly as far away as India; it changed the monsoon patterns and caused a famine in Egypt that killed 1/6 of the population there. It's estimated that six million people died as direct result of the Laki eruption, making it the most deadly eruption in recorded history. I only learned this after we traveled through that lava field, now covered with thick moss that makes it, ironically, very beautiful.

Still winter...but there's hope

This picture is for my friend Leslee in Boston, who writes, "The snow here is all bunched up (and dirty) between buildings, as I imagine it is in Montreal." Yes, you're quite right, Leslee. Today is still frigid - minus 14C - but I did go out to Little Italy and the Jean-Talon market yesterday to do some shopping, and managed to take my gloves off long enough to take this photograph. It was OK in the sun, but the wind was straight from the arctic and very strong, blowing my furry hood off my head whenever I turned to face it and sending clouds of dry light snow whirling off the roofs of buildings.

Some of us are still pouting, curled up in wool and fleece...

But others, like me, are starting to feel the pull of outdoors and the increasing intensity and healing power of the sunlight. The lack of light up here is really no joke. Canadian are all urged to take Vitamin D because we tend to be deficient simply by virtue of our latitude, and a lot of people suffer from SAD (seasonal affective disorder) and are helped by special lamps. Nearly everybody is affected one way or the other by the sheer length of the winters, let alone the extreme cold like we've had this year. I just begin to go stir-crazy with what we always called cabin fever in New England, and no matter what, I have to get outside and moving. I miss downhill skiing, and wish my knees had held up so that I could have continued!

But in the studio, our plants are clearly telegraphing the message of lengthening days:

That's not just a forest of avocado plants, but a batch of cherry tomatoes that came up from seed that must have been hiding in the planter, a gift from my gardening friend Eric F. back in October, and are now spilling over. I've thinned them and am pinching them back. On the left, the four-year-old lantana is bushy and vigorous after I cut it way back around Christmas. On the right is a geranium I rescued from a neighboring studio after they moved, along with this massive cactus:

And the bougainvillea is still pumping out its gorgeous blooms, delighting me up every morning when I walk into the studio...

...and reminding me that soon, I'll be here:

And when we return, it really will be almost-spring.

How are you holding up, if you're in the north? And if you're in a warmer climate, what are your first signs of spring?

Boulder, Stream, and Mossy Rocks

Boulder, Stream, and Mossy Rocks. Acrylic on gessoed paper, 10" x 9".

Over the past few days I've finally had time to do a little artwork, inspired by our recent stay in the mountains. This isn't a literal interpretation but it gets across the feeling of a particular spot. I'd like to do some more explorations of this composition, maybe using different media. I was fascinated by the huge glacial erratics in the middle of the woods -- poised so precariously, it seemed, but actually very solidly positioned right where they've been since the glaciers retreated -- in contrast to the flowing stream, but the forms had their own abstract interest that I've only begun to explore here.

Below, a few preliminary stages in the progress of this painting.

 

 

 

Messing around in the Milkweed

While parking the car at the studio today I spotted this snail in the milkweed forest that's growing between the parking lot and the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks. At first I thought it was a monarch caterpillar, curled up, but when I got close I saw it was a snail. It's a fairly large one, and not familiar to me.

I haven't seen a single monarch butterfly yet this year.

But there were more antics going on below.

"Let me call you sweetheart..."  But I'm wondering: is this an interracial insect couple, demonstrating against the odious, recently-proposed Quebec Charter of Values? And are those eggs, or tiny aphids? Guess I need to go back and take a closer look, but maybe someone (Dave?) can enlighten me about the identities of these beetles.

The Quirkiness of Memory

When I came across this watercolor from the late 1980s I still liked it, but had no recollection of the scene. It reminded me of twisted trees I saw last year along the coast of Florida, but I knew that couldn't be it. I studied and studied the painting, and then suddenly it came to me - these were the branches of a Siberian peaberry in our Vermont garden, and the ferns that grew underneath them. When we sat on our terrace in back of the house, you'd see this view up underneath the branches. I must have been trying to capture the energy and busy-ness I found in the mixture of foliage. Once the memory snapped into place, I was right back there.

The painting also reminded me of a recurrent dream: I am seated at the piano, or preparing to sing, but the music in front of me is a painting or picture, not a score. I have to "play" or "sing" the painting.

This watercolor looks like music to me! The rhythmic punctuation of the spiky vertical foliage at the top; the twisting branches could be chordal structures; the curving ferns a repetitive, looping pattern of melody. Last night at choir we worked for two hours on works by Stravinsky for our upcoming annual fundraising concert, November 2. We worked hard on a piece called Credo, which has a complex rhythmical structure that our director parsed for us; we went rhoguh,marking our scores, then saying the words in rhythm, then singing them. It took a lotof concentration, and it's no wonder that my mind went in that direction this morning even though the dreams were a while ago.

My bedtime reading lately has been a book called The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places, by Bernie Krause. Krause is a musician, recording engineer, and scientist with a PhD in bioacoustics who has spent a great deal of time making recordings in very wild places, capturing and studying their particular "sound signatures." In a lot of ways, his premise seems pretty obvious to me, and has since I was a child - of course music came from the natural world, of which we (and our voices, our talent for mimicry, and our ability to make sounds with tools) are an intrinsic part. I read the first half of the book, and skimmed the rest. Of course, Krauses' book is all about animals and the natural sounds of water, wind, and rain -- he doesn't say anything about playing or singing inspired by foliage or rocks! But visual rhythm and pattern exist everywhere, and I see no reason why they too can't be translated into sound, music, dance and movement.