Ghost Supper

We started this week off with a wander in a new area, with the goal of familiarizing ourselves with the landscape and resident organisms. Voles were present in plenty, their little feet already having worn long, deep runways in the grass.

Coyote scat greeted us at the road in, but above the entrance road bobcats seemed to reign as the common small predator. We named the owner of this scat and scrape Pointy Butt Paul, to go with his feline neighbor on the Blue House Farm side, Big Butt Bob. Every scat of his contained quite a bit of rabbit fur and bone shards, and was long, ropy and pointy like a coyote scat. But each sat firmly in the V of a bobcat-like scrape, each was coated in a slimy shellac-like layer, and each emanated noxious rotten meat and sour milk stink.


On the plateu of the high lands, we encountered more vole sign and wondered aloud where the badgers were to take advantage of this vole proliferation. We found this big dig quite soon after.


Note the deep scrape marks on the inside walls of the tunnel.


Continuing over the plateu, we found this small, chunky scat composed of what looked like Jerusalem Cricket parts.


Further along, nearer the fire road, we found many little circular digs in the grass. Nearby we found a Jerusalem cricket, and later another.


On our way back we found a downed Monterey Pine and experimented with peeling the bark to make containers. We tried the bark on the trunk first, using our knives to cut down and peel the bark, but found that the craggy parts cracked and the knife kept slipping to pierce the inner bark. We decided that that slab would be food, rather than craft material. We revised our strategy, and tried with the smaller, younger, less craggy branches. We used a lopped-off branchlet with a wedge-shaped end to separate the bark from the limb. It worked beautifully, and we returned to camp with our bark slabs in hand.




That evening we celebrated our first night of Ghost Supper. Like many traditional holidays celebrated at this time of year (Samhain, Dia de los Muertos, and others), Ghost Supper is an ancestor honoring ceremony that invites one's dead relatives to mingle and socialize for one night. Based on an Ottawa tradition, this ceremony employs an all-night sacred fire and copious amounts of food. The fire represents a portal to the ancestors, and is intended to be opened (lit) at dusk, and closed (cooled and out completely) by dawn. The hosts make food for all comers, serving their ancestor's favorite dishes and greeting guests as if the guests were the host's departed relatives. All food must be given away, eaten, or burned as an offering to the fire and the ancestors, and the fire must be cold and out entirely by sunrise the next day.

The instructors feasted us and hosted us at their fire in fine form on Tuesday night. We ate and drank and told stories of our ancestors, of ghosts, and of the season. The fire burned long into the night, and was just cold as the sun crested the Eastern ridge.

After our morning bird sit, we devoted the entire next day to preparing for our turn at hosting a Ghost Supper. We had much organizing to do, and just enough time to do it.

Traditionally, men gather the firewood, light the fire, and tend it. Women carry the water, cook the food, serve food and drink, and beautify the site. I had my own conflicts with this system, but I was willing to give it a try to see what hidden teachings might be passed on in this way of doing things.

I wore my Firekeeper tee shirt as a sort of consolation prize, and to symbolically show my dead grandparents, who I'd be serving their favorite apple pie and cheddar cheese, what I'd been up to lately. Our clan discussed the fire, and determined that at least some of us wanted to keep it going all night. Then when we called for fire tenders, only three people raised their hands. I thought that this couldn't possibly be enough to get us through the night, so I raised my hand and said that I'd be willing to tend fire if we needed another hand.

When the sun dipped low and it was time to light our fire, all others with fire kits were absent. I had my elderberry and cedar hand drill on hand, so another woman, myself, and a man all cooperated to spin up a coal and light the teepee that the men hand made.

The final flurry of preparation came, and I was the only fire tender without final prep to do. I tended fire until we all gathered again to greet our first guests. I asked the other fire tenders if any of them would like to take over, but none of them felt called. They said they would like to take over when I tired. We launched into our serving and stories, and I tended fire while the guests sat and ate and talked.

Others took over while I visited other fires, but late into the night most people wanted to snooze or chill, and I was enjoying tending fire. Orion rose in the East, announcing the early hours of the morning. The half moon set in the West, and in the deepening darkness Orion's bow shone in a sparkling arc. I tended and waited for my clan member who had wanted to tend fire into dawn. As I waited I stared at the coals and began to see a vortex spiraling down into the earth. I fed the ancestor's food to the fire, and saw it go up in spirals of smoke to Orion and the shooting stars that peppered the night.

Finally, I decided that I'd stayed up long enough. My clan member wasn't coming back. I let the fire die down to a coal bed, got up to fetch my sleeping gear, and nearly stepped in my pie. I'd forgotten to burn all the food.

Another clan member woke up to help me stoke the fire again and burn the food. We finally managed to burn it all, but the fire was now big and blazing, and my stamina had run out. I passed the fire stick to my clanmate and fell into heavy sleep.

I woke up well after dawn, next to a still red-hot and smoldering pile of mostly-burnt wood, and felt pretty disappointed in myself for not fulfilling the tradition. But I figure that for most of the night the ancestors got a first-rate comedic performance, so it wasn't all bad.

The experience has left me with many questions, and put a sharper edge on one of my sacred questions that RDNA has thus far been honing to keenness. My question, though not entirely articulated in words, has to do with novel practices and traditions, and when one is appropriate over the other. In this ceremony, we chose to alter the tradition and bring in the novel practice of fluidity in roles. Would it have gone more smoothly, with more labor shared more equally, if we had abided by the Ottawa traditional gender roles? Would the fire tenders have been more organized, and would the fire have been put to bed at the right time? Would I have been able to see the twin spirals in the fire? Would I have experienced the on-point in-the-moment awareness brought about by seriving others with vital light and heat that I experienced as a fire tender, had I kept myself to the traditional female role?

Tracking Day

We’ve been on a three-week break, during which I’ve been, if anything, busier than while class is in session. So it’s taken me this long to blog our last class. But here, at long last, it is!

We met at Venture this week. After romping with Mojo the dog and playing a morning round of T-Rex Frisbee (which is the most awesome game in the Universe) we set off for the lagoon near Pescadero.



We ambled down to the beach to check out the morning’s stories. These marks were all over the sand, crisscrossing each other in little trails and sometimes funneling into a big communal run. I love sand tracking.






We continued on, tried to stick our heads into an old beaver den but found it blocked by a botanical guard. Though many of us are nonreactive to poison oak, we still didn’t push our luck. We consoled ourselves by investigating this interesting mark and fairly fresh scat near the den area.



When we stopped for lunch we found these beautiful prints in the mud of the channel bank, still fairly close to the den area.



As we moved on, we kept on the look out for beavers or beaver sign. They continued to prove elusive, despite the fact that I’d brought my beaver-cut walking stick with me that day. We did get close to a wary, plain-looking turtle. He looked like he was enjoying the sun so we did our best to go quiet and slow and respect his space.



Finally we found our way up the hill to an open area full of grasses and wildflowers. The ground there was peppered with big holes and massive throw mounds. We spread out, looking for the freshest mounds.

On the way, I encountered this butterfly. I’ve never seen this type near my home, or in any other urban area.



Finally we found a fresh looking mound that lolled from the mouth of a very big (perhaps 9 inches across) hole. The mound showed deep lumbering tracks across its length. I took these photos while standing uphill from the hole, with the hole in the lower left corner and the mound extending up the photo, downhill from me.






These tracks raise a lot of questions: Are all of these from the same animal? How was the animal moving, to leave such a jumbled pattern? When was the animal last here? Was this a one-time or repeat use? Why was the animal in the area? Is it still here?

We still had further investigations to carry on elsewhere, so we dragged ourselves away from the tracks and the wildflowers, and moved on to the hypericum zone further south on the coast.

Once at the hypericum area, we all took Cybertrackers and dove in. Our last many attempts have been aborted for one reason or another, and as of this afternoon we hadn’t yet placed any hyperucum data points on our map. Our mission for the last hour or two of the afternoon was to catalogue whatever biodiversity we could. For reference, this is what the interior of the hypericum growth looks like:



Not very diverse. The hypericum is especially strange because one will push through and through the unending monotony of hypericum stalks, and then find, engulfed in the center, the skeleton of a long-dead tree or shrub, shaded out under the thick canopy. After such a find the hypericum seed capsule rattling that follows all of one’s movements often takes on an eerie sound.

But we did find some interesting things. I followed the edge and found a stand of poison hemlock, a plant that I’ve never seen wildlife use very extensively. In the middle of the stand were clipped stalks of hemlock, smoothly cut at an angle very much like a rodent’s or rabbit’s work.



I continued on into the hypericum, and found a woodrat nest uphill from a dead elderberry tree. The net was constructed almost entirely or elderberry sticks, with little hyperucum material. I wondered if the woodrat had such an aversion to hypericum that it would try to use hemlock in the absence of good elderberry or other more commonly used material. When I heard the rat skittering and rattling through the hemlock stand, it sounded to me like he moved with energy and health. But my ears are not well trained in woodrat skitters, so I could be wrong.

We returned, our cybertrackers finally full of good data for our maps.

Battle at Starling Hollow Cypress

Last week we tried to udate the base map of the field at Commonweal. We divided up the area and spent a large portion of the day on solo walks drawing out the runs and other track and sign on our areas.

When we came back together, we noticed a bunch of sticks poking out of a hollow in a cypress tree. Half our group clambered precipitously into the tree under the pretext of getting a closer look at the (possible) bird's nest, though really as an excuse to climb a tree. The other half of our group, logically, used the climbers' rear ends for target practice as they were climbing, thus sparking off the most epic battle of Starling Hollow Cypress (just down the hill from Double Skull Cypress) ever witnessed. Though the tree fort's defenders were deadly marksmen, it was only a matter of time before thir supply of cypress cone ammo ran out. Two hemlock spears and a dramatic death scene later, we were on our way back to our fire circle.

In the afternoon we worked further on the base map, discussed how awesome Native Eyes is going to be next year (it will, of course, be totally awesome), and gathered wild radish and nodding onion for our potluck dish. Wild radish is a bit fuzzy, but the young leaves are tender enough and very flavorful. With the onion, it made a delicious contribution to the meal.

Mighty Trackers Catch a Frog

We went looking for more cougar sign this week. As before, after identifying the spots on the map where we’d found cougar sign previously, we tried to find other spots, using a topo map and Google Earth, that display similar characteristics. There was much back-and-forth, discussion, and little agreement. It was well into the morning by the time we agreed on a game plan.

Our first stop was along Gazos Creek Road. The landscape was spongy, moist and lush, cut through with waterfalls and rivulets. We found no cougar sign here, but this plant was pretty neat. The three-parted flower looks like something from Venus and smells like a fishmonger’s gut pile. Weird! I wonder what uses it might have for human beings, besides being fascinatingly bizarre.



Finding only a rank splat scat, very similar to the splatty nastiness in this video, we concluded that we weren’t really able to find and log definite cougar sign here. We piled into the car again and set off for Cloverdale Ranch Gate 2.

We found many deer and a number of other cool things at Cloverdale, but nothing that I would identify as cougar sign. We spent most of our time making jokes and laughing at each other.



This golden-crowned sparrow was lying in the grass as we approached. It was dead, but the eyes were still bright and a tick still fed from it. How long ago did he die? What did he die from? We couldn’t tell, but had many speculations. The bird was frozen in a crouching position though we found him on his back, possibly having toppled over at the point of death. We propped him back up and the little body stood easily, braced on wide-spread feet and drooping wingtips. He looked very much like a distressed but still living bird. Creepy.




As we continued up the hill we noticed a small creature hopping rapidly away from the nearby pond. One of our group shouted “Red Legged Frog!” and pounced on it.



We followed it for a while, snapping pictures through the grass.



I finally picked it up and examined it.



It doesn’t look like a bullfrog or an African clawed frog, so that leaves one of our three (possibly) local native frogs: Rana boylii, Foothill Yellow-legged Frog; Rana draytonii, California Red-legged Frog; or Pseudacris (=Hyla) regilla, Pacific Treefrog.

R. boylii seems to like shallow, slow-flowing water, of which there was none around. Also, there was no yellow on this frog’s legs.

R. draytonii seems to also like flowing water, but I’ve found it in still pools before, too. And this frog did have red legs, as well as dark stripes over the thigh and calf and a dark streak over the eyes. R. draytonii also has two distinct ridges running from behind the tympanum down it’s back, and well-webbed hind feet with no toe pads. Also, the dark streak on the face seems to rarely if ever continue past the frog’s eyes toward the nostrils.

P. regilla, on the other hand, seems to be confusingly variable in coloration, with some being strikingly similar to R. boylii and R. draytonii. Most, though, seem to have that dark mask over the eyes, and distinct toe pads on all four feet, as well as an absence of lateral ridges. The adults are also much smaller than adults of either Rana species.

I’m still not entirely sure what this frog was, but I have a better idea now that I’ve done some research.

On our way back, we saw a group of deer feeding on a ridge upwind of us. We decided to test our stalking skills. When we came over one ridge, there was the largest deer silhouetted against the sky, radar-dish ears pointing right at us. I guess we weren’t quiet enough.

On the way toward the deer, I passed this little inch-and-a-half-wide hole. I liked the occupant's little south-facing porch. Who made it?



I followed the deer downslope and skirted the edge of a big gully, hoping to find cougar scrapes along the drainage. I trailed the deer as I went.



This track is less than ten minutes old. I know it’s age because I found the deer at the end of their trail, not because I’m that good at aging tracks. But I did select my path according to the freshest tracks, and confirmed they were the freshest when I saw the trail leading to the animal’s hooves.



The deer led me past an interesting little cave in the vegetation, sheltered by young pines on the northwest side and coyotebrush surrounding the other edges. In the little clearing was an old buck kill, nubs of antlers shoved into the earth, spine twisted, and ribs chewed off. Most of the bones were still in the vicinity of the kill but well-gnawed. Was this cougar sign? And if so, when was the cat last feeding off of the kill? Some scraps of skin, still flexible and a little slimy, clung to the bones, but all other flesh was gone. Some of the bones had gone green with algal growth.

After the Cloverdale shenanigans, we decided to try one last place. The south side of the Candelabra trail in Butano Park has brought us to cougar sign before. We decided to go up the north side of the trail in an effort to connect the dots of previously-seen cougar sign in Butano and Cloverdale.





Once again, we found no cat sign that we could positively identify. We returned to Blue House farm to end our day with a bird sit.

Meet WAS

This week Wilderness Awareness School (WAS), our sister school up in Washington, came to visit. They outnumbered us 2 to 1, and were quite a scent to behold fresh from a weeklong plus van expedition all over California. They had some strange customs, such as tying shoes while hanging their butts over benches, but we practice many of the same cultural points in our programs and in general we felt a solid kinship between our two groups.

We greeted each other with songs in the evening. We sang WAS into the garden, and greeted them with hugs befitting old friends.

We began the day with a wander in the morning. I took my burden basket, the one I’d made in one of the early NE classes, because I intended to gather firewood for a solo fire meditation later that evening. We found lots of cool things on the wander.



What is this plant?



Check out this wasp!






Whose hole is this? It was approximately 9 or 10 inches wide and 7 or 8 inches tall at maximum. The throw mound was huge. (Now with knee prints! A WAS-er had stuck his head in just before I got there.) The tunnel curved back to the right a short way, opening up into a round chamber. I wonder if it’s occupied, and where the digger is now.



These digs were just west of the big one, approximately 6 feet near. They were also large.



I returned to camp early, laden with firewood that I’d gathered on the way.



A nifty trick: if you need short sticks but all you have is long ones and no tools, wedge them in the crotch of a tree and push. A little sweat, and they snap quite nicely. Remember to thank the tree.



That afternoon, Native Eyes worked hard to prepare for our fires. We set up tarps, split wood, gathered kindling and tinder, and worked communally on lighting our central fire.

Finally, as dusk faded to dark, we separated to our individual fires, to spend the evening in personal meditation.