Two Weeks

For the last two weeks I’ve basically had no time to myself, so I didn’t post for the last two classes. Now I’ve got a moment, though, so I’ll just do a rapid-fire rundown of my latest activities.

NativeEyes Student Life lately:

Previous class on Oct. 14th and 15th:
We rode out to Bolinas starting predawn because one of our crew had to be there at noon. The ride was utterly amazing.



I hit a “wall of grief” that, at least for me, took precedence over the class activities. While the rest of the class went on a wander, I discussed my state of mind with one of the instructors. What follows is my internal process. The details are specific to me, but I think the core of it is a pretty common spiral of thought that many get into when they hit their walls. Either of the first two can feed into either of the second two, which can cycle back to either of the first two. It seems complex and overwhelming when one is caught up in it, but it’s really just a feedback loop of “everyone sucks”. And it’s really hard to get out of.

I’m paying a bunch of money to be in this class, and because I'm in this class and interning at another nature studies class, I don't have time to work enough to support myself, so I'm constantly stressed about money.

I’m just a student with no access to the information or decision-making process that the instructors work with.

I’ve got few skills and abilities when it comes to nature connection, having been raised in a city. I missed out on my birthright by growing up on concrete and now I’ve got about a three-year-old’s understanding of my environment. Therefore I suck.

I’ve spent a number of years working very very hard at learning about my land, mostly on my own but sometimes with teachers. I’ve seen amazing things, discovered wonders in my own backyard, and amassed much more depth of knowledge about my land than many of my peers. I’ve conquered many fears and endured extremes of weather and emotion. I’ve earned my knowledge, I want to bring that knowledge to others as a mentor/facilitator, and I’m not getting the recognition or support for that personal work that I think is warranted. Therefore my teachers suck.

I talked this over with one of our instructors and finally got most of the way out of the cycle. I think one of the voices in my head is still caught in the loop, though, since on a certain level, it’s all true. But most of the time I understand that the truth of the above statements doesn’t mean they have to be the overriding understanding that shapes my mood and perception in the moment. I have other understandings of the world that I can operate from, and that tend to be much more fun and functional, such as beauty and gratitude.

After that I joined the wandering group, looking for signs of water on the landscape. We wandered down to the beach and built a solar still. First we dug a shallow hole, about the same size as a plastic bag cut open along the side. We found some goopy green water and used bull kelp bulbs cut crosswise to hold the water in our hole, and placed a Frisbee in the hole as well. We covered the whole thing with our cut-open plastic bag, weighted down on the sides with rocks, and placed a single small rock in the middle to offer a focal point for the drips that would form and (with luck) fall into the upturned frisbee. We did get drops from the condensation that started as soon as we covered over the hole with the plastic, but never a drip.








For the record, I think the principle of a solar still is sound, but we may have started too late in the day and/or used too small a hole.

We also went and looked at tidepools.





Bioneers:
Networking.
Got a coal from my bowdrill with some kids who were wandering around the event.
Michael Meade is worth listening to.

Personal time:
Stolen bike! Holy crap my neighbors suck. I spent all of Monday working on my bike, putting on three new Blackspire chainrings, a new 9-speed cassette on the back, and a new chain, as well as tightening up the bottom bracket and ordering new rims and a new BB tool. Then I got up Tuesday morning and found a dangling cable lock in my backyard where my bike should have been. God knows what they did with the Kryptonite Evo U-lock. I really do not like living in this neighborhood full of crackheads and thieves right now.

Last class on Oct. 21st and 22nd:

We made a fire with a deep-red-barked maple that one of my classmates brought down from Covelo. The wood was both beautiful and sonorous when knocked together, and burned very brightly.

Our morning bird sit was an intro to raptor world, with a Cooper’s Hawk, Sharp-Shinned Hawks, and Kestrels making appearances.

We moved into midday with basketweaving, and finished our baskets with some time to spare for tracking.



Our mission then was to find 25 tracks of different animals in the space of about two and a half hours. We went down to the salt marsh and actually wound up finding 10 different animal tracks, both mammals and birds.

In some down-time some fellow students and I worked on the beginnings of buckeye and blue elderberry bow-drill kits. I’m very happy with my elderberry-on-elderberry kit. It’s an uncommon wood, it seems, for bow-drill, but I’ve been very successful with it so far. Next I’m trying out a buckeye-on-buckeye kit and will report back.

We finished the day with some grinding activities, first grinding natural pigments to paint with, then grinding acorns. We had to leave before the pit-baked acorn bread would be ready, though, so I'm trying to collect more acorns to do the whole process myself.

Basketweaving and Creekwalking

We held this class at Venture Retreat Center once again, with Jay Sliwa as our instructor, taking the opportunity to study up on some of Jay’s skills while Jon is in Germany. We arrived to news that one of the group had a whole salmon to share for our dinner. We spun up a coal and built a fire as the bringer of salmon had an impromptu filleting demonstration. Yum, sashimi.



We used the carcass to bait a trail camera southeast of the retreat center, in the edge between a coyotebrush stand and a grassy area, near the road, just up from the creek. We caught some critters chowing down. If I can get those photos I'll post them here. Until then, post a comment with your guess about who found the carcass and why you favor that particular critter.

The next day, after a damp, chilly, and peaceful bird sit, we came back to the fire circle and found piles upon piles of straight, supple green willow shoots. These were not like the standard twisty forky branches one commonly sees on trees unmolested by disturbance, but long straight canes at least three feet in length. Where could one go to find this much basketry material? What makes a tree produce long straight shoots? Could I find the right materials near my home in Oakland? Could I manage trees near me to produce this kind of growth?



Then we got down to the business of making burden baskets. Here’s a how-to of our process:

We started with four short lengths of thicker willow shoots, and four longer ones. We split each shorter one lengthwise, from the center partway to the ends, creating openings in the middle of otherwise whole shoots. We lined the openings up and pushed all four longer shoots through them at a right angle, creating a grid.



Then we began weaving the bottoms of the baskets. Taking two long thin shoots, we wedged the tips in the latticework and began twining. One went behind a thicker grid piece as the other came forward, twining around in a twisting pattern. Ideally one would spread the longer, thicker grid pieces as one wove, giving the whole an overall oval shape. I didn’t manage to do that part very well.

By this time the sun was toward the south and stomachs were growling. We stopped for lunch and I found someone to join me in climbing a tree.

When we returned, we started on the sides of the baskets. First we sharpened the butt ends of 16 long shoots, and shoved them in parallel to the thick grid pieces, producing a giant spreading hexadecopoid shape.


We then started “pricking up” the 16 long shoots, which entailed stabbing them through with a knife, near the base, but not cutting them, and then bending them up at a right angle. The pierced area bent rather than broke (if we were lucky) forming a vertical wall of weavers that were anchored in the horizontal base. We drew them together and tied them in a teepee shape over the base.

Then we began twining three shoots at once for the sides. We started by shoving the thin ends of three long shoots in adjacent crevices. The pattern was “skip two, under one,” though I found it more useful to just look for the next opening and tuck my furthest-away cane in it.



And that’s as far as we got in one day. By four-thirty we were all tired and a little bit grumpy from wrestling willow shoots all day, so we went for a wander up the creek.






One of us tried to jump and instead took a tumble when the bank crumbled. Waterproof shoes are great – for holding the water in when you’ve just belly-flopped up to your waist. Sploosh!

Laughter helped to release the tensions of the day, as did simply walking the creek. I hadn’t realized how tense and micro-focused I’d become, until we were strolling along the creekbed and I started to unwind. I felt my chest open and my back straighten. My weight settled down as my muscles loosened. My head came up and my neck released and stretched a little, and my focus began to spread out. I began to feel better, after not really realizing that I had been feeling worse.

As fun, addictive, important, necessary, interesting and useful as basketweaving is, I need to remember to walk the creek too.

Children's Universal Passions

We were duly stoked.

Scats like Golden Eagles

The morning after our fire adventure began our first day of scouting for RDNA, looking for cougar kills at Cloverdale Ranch.



First we scoured the willow thickets, thinking that those may be good places for cougars to drag their kills for privacy. Each thicket sported a number of buck rubs, but no cougar sign that we could find. The grassland surrounding the thickets was dry and brittle, crackling loudly with each step, and we speculated that a hunting cougar might avoid such noisy conditions.

We continued west along the main trail with some of our number fanned out on the landscape to the left and right. Brown, bounding shapes caught our eyes, and solidified into one large and two smaller deer, running west along the southern side of the valley. They held their heads and tails high and moved with a springy gait that covered the open ground quickly. They reached the edge of the grasses and slowed to a trot, looking over their shoulders toward our group, then disappeared into the thick brush on the north-facing slope. One of our scouts came out of the brush to the South and ran up to us on the trail, breathless. “I just saw a huge buck! Did you see him? Four points on a really tall rack. He had two does with him.” Perhaps he was the buck responsible for the rubs on the willows?

Further west, we came to a dry creek bordered with more willow. A culvert passed under the path, and the willows shaded it well, offering an inviting rest area to confer about our finds and strategize on finding cougar sign. As we began discussing, we also began noticing the sign around us. The trail was full of scats, large dense tubes in a segmented shape, some of which appeared lacquered and smooth. One was astonishingly moist and black, emitting a strong odor of rotten meat. Cougar scat? Bobcat? Another carnivore? The size was just on the edge between the two feline suspects.

One of us spoke up, “You know, cougars have scats like Golden Eagles.” The group met this statement with uncomprehending looks. “Every time I see a bird and think it might be a Golden Eagle but I’m unsure, I have to assume it’s not. When I’ve seen a Golden Eagle it’s so obviously a Golden Gagle, that if I have to ask it’s probably not. The same with cougar scat. When I've seen confirmed cougar sign, it's so obviously cougar and nothing else. So cougars take poops like Golden Eagles.” Hm. This was not a very Golden Eagle scat.

Also along the trail were bird pellets at least three and a half inches long and white splats of bird scat. The pellets were large enough to indicate a very large predatory bird, but the willows offered very little in the way of attractive roosts. Following our curiosity, we poked a little further in under the willows, looking for more concentrations of whitewash. When we brushed aside the leaf litter at the base of a large old willow, we found something far more interesting than bird scat.

Tucked under the tree was the half-covered carcass of a canine, empty flesh tented up on sharp bones, unmolested by scavengers and still curled nose-to-tail as if in sleep. The teeth were long and sharp and white and the large ears lay at a relaxed angle. The hide still held a thin covering of dusty-tawny fur, hairs ticked with dark and light like a deer’s coat. We admired our find in silence for a time. Later, another student took measurements of the skull: 8.5 inches.



When our questions about the area had piled up to frustrating levels, we left and spread out over the landscape on a wander. I walked out along the trail to the reservoir in the company of a fellow scout. We passed coyotebush, and scrubby oaks, tall bunchgrasses, and dusty patches of path rich with animal tracks. As we passed through another willow patch, something happened in my companion’s body language, a change small enough to be indescribable but still perceptible. I felt something shift in my posture, too, and looked at my companion, asking “what does your body radar say about this place?” He looked back with big eyes and a grin, “Yeah! Something just changed. A transition spot?”

We stopped and looked more thoroughly around us. Bucks had savagely – and recently— shredded the willows just off trail. Then we noticed that another trail of deer tracks crossed this spot at an angle, cutting across the trail of tracks we had been following along the path. Not necessarily a transition spot, but a meeting of two routes and a signpost. A fun find, but still not cougar sign.

We rounded a bend in the path and came face-to-face with a buck. He stood with his neck outstretched, his body up and forward on his forefeet, and leaned sideways at an almost comical angle to get a better view of us around the bend. Or rather, his pose would have been comical if not for his attitude. His radar dish ears focused unwaveringly on us. We stood frozen but he had been well aware of us long before we walked up on him. Huge dark eyes glared at us, and he shifted on his feet to give an indignant stomp. Then another of our scouts came around the bend behind him, and with a snort he bounded up the slope to the East.

The day was winding down into afternoon, and though we had a collection of stories and questions to show for it, none of them featured a cougar. We were trudging back toward the gate discussing our options for tracking stations, when someone pointed toward the south-facing slope. “What’s that? Is that a kill?”

We clambered up the slope to find a desiccated and dismembered deer carcass. The limbs were detached and strewn about, and all of the soft tissue was gone. Even some of the bones had been eaten – the vertebrae all had their spinous processes raggedly chewed off and the ribs were considerably shorter than natural, chewed off in a consistent line cutting across the ribcage. The neck was twisted in a tight corkscrew shape and the velvet-covered spike antlers had dry grass tangled and twisted around them. We circled the area for a bit, trying to piece together the sequence of events.



We moved on to sit and listen to the birds while we waited for the rest of the class to arrive. After searching all day and finding no trace of our goal, we’d finally found it out in the open right next to the path that we’d walked in on, just as we were preparing to leave. Typical.

Fire Drill

This week Native Eyes and RDNA journeyed down the San Francisco Peninsula to Pescadero.

We arrived at Venture Retreat Center in late afternoon, greeted by the heavy smell of the nearby creek and an overabundance of housecats.

Our first job, as usual, was to start a fire to cook dinner. One of our number suggested we make a new bow drill kit from the land to get our fire. We scattered and returned with a motley assortment of sticks as well as some kits others had brought with them, just in case. I whittled down the spindle from a dead limb of Alder while another person fashioned a board from a conveniently flat chunk of Box-Elder. We found a bow from one of the other kits, and began burning a well into the fireboard.

After all that, though, the resultant powder was tan, not black, and not a wisp of smoke showed itself. By now the sun was low, and bellies were growling. Jon Young meandered on over, sat down and began questioning us about what we were doing.

At Jon’s instruction, we switched kits and became a five-person fire team, two people pulling the bow, two steadying the board, and one helping to apply extra downward pressure to the spindle. The twist of the spindle in the socket now ground out a fine black powder and emitted tendrils of smoke. The tempo increased and smoke billowed, then main bowman lost his grip and the spindle flipped out of the socket. We sat back to see if the powder would become a coal. Dying smoke then gave out totally, revealing a pile of dead black powder, no spark of life left in it’s heart. We heaved a collective sigh and prepared to try again.

Before we began Jon spoke, “did you give thanks or ask permission?” We all looked at eachother. “No.”

As we fitted the spindle back in the bow and set it in the socket, we said a prayer aloud, asking humbly for fire to help us cook our food tonight. Strokes of the bow soon brought smoke billowing from the hearthboard. Renewed hope fueled our bowstrokes until again the spindle flipped away. And again no coal.

“Ok, time for the Mulefat!” We switched kits a third time, and began again, this time with a mulefat spindle on a cedar board. Two strokes and we had smoke curling around us. But in ten strokes the string snapped, and we all sat back, chagrinned at the idea that we might not be able to cook tonight.

The smoke, however, didn’t die. A red coal appeared in the powder, breathing smoke fromwithin the little pile. We had our first successful fire from friction.

Our second lesson of the day: punky spindles and Box-Elder boards do not a fire make. Our third lesson: just get a mulefat spindle. In the words of one of our team, "Mulefat: as good as a lighter."

And I'll let you figure out the first lesson.