Native Creativity

We began this week with a visit to a pond. We waded the muck and cut cattails again, with a boat crew and the youth contingent all helping out to harvest more than we had the previous week.

We hauled the thatching material back on big garden carts and on our backs, and got about the project of finishing our shelter.


I was having a hard time being social and productive, owing to a perfect storm of challenges in my life. I needed time away from the thoughts of the human world so I took off and went wandering while the construction continued. I trailed renegade deer tracks out of the garden and up Wish Creek, squeezed through a deer-sized hole in the fence (I wanted to avoid the gates where I might encounter other people), and followed the creek up between the ridgelines.


The landscape was a riot of edibility, usefulness, beauty and of course toxicity. In four square feet of stream bank I found something like nine edible and useful species. I remember noticing miner's lettuce (yummy leaves), chickweed (leaves), cleavers (leaves), cow parsnip (stalk), Oxalis (leaves), stinging nettle (leaves), yerba buena (leaves), strawberry (leaves), and bracken fern (young fiddleheads). They were mixed liberally with highly medicinal and poisonous species such as hedge nettle, figwort, wild cucumber, and poison oak. Nearby the milkmaids and pink flowering currant were in full bloom and Anna's hummingbirds sang at each other across their flower patches. I was interested in the edibles since I brought no vegetables with me for dinner, but I walked on.


Following the creek I came to a fern-draped ravine. When I was 13 I dreamed of a ravine almost exactly like this one. In that dream I became a buck deer and followed a red fox into the creek canyon. In that dream, which I still remember with perfect clarity, I became lost and transformed in the maze of caves behind the watercourse. In this canyon I found my feet on a deer trail, and there in the churned earth was evidence of the trickster that had passed here before me.



I followed deer trails up and around ridgelines, along steep banks that threatened to crumble and avalanche from under me, and after a time began searching for tinder and food for the evening's fire and meal. I continued upward toward the pink-fringed, darkening sky. I carried no timepiece but something internal told me that my friends at camp had finished and would now be starting both fire and food for the evening.



Now with purpose behind my wandering, I crawled from the oak woods, through a blackberry patch that fringed a clearing, and into the light of the setting sun atop the west ridge. I was greeted by an old friend, Yerba Santa, waving in the evening breeze. All around me were dead bracken fern fronds, crisp with the day's sun. And under the cover of last years dieback, sprouting from the live rhizome, were fiddleheads. I had both my tinder and my dinner.

The photo to the left shows the three-part structure of bracken. It does show a fiddlehead, but one that has unfurled to a point at which I question it's edibility. The photo below is of a fiddlehead in it's most delectable stage. I collected a modest amount. I eat them sparingly, and only once or twice a year, since consumption of large quantities has been correlated with certain cancers. I have not yet found a report that identifies any constituent of the fern as carcinogenic, however, and they are a prized edible in many cultures.


The rest of Native Eyes had completed our shelter while I was away. I brought the small bounty of my wander back to camp, helped to light the fire, and shared the new taste of spring ferns with everyone.


I found deep satisfaction at returning from my solo time and bringing home what resources I found. I was satisfied in spinning up a coal from sticks harvested by my own hand and blowing into flame the tinder I carried from the ridgetop. And I was satisfied in sheltering under grass and the soft lines of tree limbs that may, in life, have served as a nursery to the hawks that circle over this valley.




The next morning, after a rainy and predator-oppressed bird sit, Ane Carla Rovetta joined us for art and taxonomy.


We started with a look at taxonomic divisions: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (if you're an animal). Following the Chordata phylum, we made simple sketches of frogs and discussed the changes that occurred in chordate evolution from aquatic to terrestrial forms. We sketched an egg and discussed the revolution of "enclosing the pond." And finally we sketched a bird.

As we began drawing the main units of bird motion, I heard an urgent squawk from outside. A scrub jay swooped in and said, with phrases in Jay-speak I haven't heard before but an unmistakable tone of voice, "something really intense just happened!" The jay kept squawking. Ane Carla kept sketching and talking about birds. Everyone else kept chalk to paper and sketched away, trying to keep up with Ane Carla's presentation. But with the jay's voice louder in my mind than Ane Carla's, I simply couldn't pay attention. I got up and snuck out the door to see what the fuss was all about.

White-crowned and song sparrows popcorned around the garden veggies, alarming consistently. The jay perched on a spindly shoot from a pear tree and stared down at a spot among the brassica patch, silent now, and intent. On the slope just feet from the garden, a remarkable sound: every wrentit alarming at once, the brush on the hillside seeming to purr and click with their agitation. A Bewick's wren added his alarm from higher up the slope, and a spotted towhee as well. Above us two redtailed hawks circled, one with a forked stick in it's talons. Could they be causing such a disturbance? But that didn't make sense. These redtails were over this valley all the time, and I have never seen them take birds. I have never seen the birds respond to the redtails this way, either. I waited. The jay got bored and flew off, and the sparrows calmed and dispersed like rubberneckers deprived of street drama. I was about to give up and go back to sketching when the sound of wings burst out of the brassicas. A tiny hawk no bigger than a robin, clutching round, brown feathery prey in it's talons, flew up and away to the shelter of a pine.

I went back inside and sketched a sharp shinned hawk.


We finished out the day with natural inks, paints, and chalks with Ane Carla. We cut our own turkey quills (dyed festive colors by Michael's Craft Supply) and made pens, sketched with acorn and iron, black tea, and black walnut. We ground pigment, made plant-based paintbrushes, and mixed paints with vegetable gum, or egg yolk, or milk binders. Finally we took the excess earth pigments, added a dribble of soap and water, and rolled them into sticks of pastel chalk. We rounded out the colorful, crafty, art-filled evening with stories told and performed by our own RDNA-ers.