A Cloverdale Whodunnit?

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This week was the Mentoring Nature Connection intensive at Venture. I could only stay for three days of it, but in those three days we discovered a murder mystery.

We were wandering Cloverdale Ranch with RDNA Essentials and Cultural Mentoring people. Many of us found ourselves drawn to the large willow thicket just south of Gate 1 and across the thistle-filled flats (ouch!). Two of the Native Eyes crew were the first there, and led the rest of us to their finds. They scared up a day-snoozing barn owl from the thicket. The owl flashed it's ghostly facial disk at the trackers, scaring them in return before taking wing.

We circle the thicket and enter from the south. Upon entering the thicket, the atmosphere changes. The willows and blackberry vines hold the air still, moist and cool. The ceiling of willow leaves filters the light to a dim green. The hair on the back of everyone's neck stands up as we enter, feeling watched. Is the owl still eyeing us, or is there another creature still in residence?

Our first find is a flattened spot covered with deer hair, with a pile of dried black goo in the middle. Our immediate thought is: blood.



Drawn further into the thicket along a well-packed animal run, we next come to the skeletal remains of dismembered deer parts. A set of hindquarters lies spread-eagled in the first clear area. It would look painfully vulnerable if it weren't already dead. Directly west is part of a ribcage, well-gnawed and picked free of meat. Just southwest of the ribs is a shoulderblade and foreleg.





Continuing along the well-traveled run, we duck through a tunnel in the blackberry undergrowth and come to another chamber. The ground is packed flat and vegetation is worn away. A cave of vegetation shelters the most worn spot, about deer sized or a little larger. We recover some hair from the trailing blackberries. It's short, tawny, fine, and tough to break. It does not kink when bent.



The northerly breeze carries the scent of rotten meat. We leave the willow cave and circle the thicket again to the east, and then north. At the edge of the trees lies more deer parts, these fresh enough to stink. A head, complete with polished antlers. The neck may still have ample meat on it. Spinal column still intact. Ribs all accounted for, but well chewed. Forelegs tenuously attached, one flung over the eyes. Hindquarters flipped and tugged a few feet away. The little bits of meat that remain are dry, feeding mites more than maggots. Just northwest, a small pile of fibrous stuff contained within a thin, dry membrane. Guts?







Following the eastern edge of the thicket north, we come to still more deer parts. This one has antlers in velvet, an attached neck and part of the ribcage. Legs are not in evidence. The face and ears have been chewed and eaten, and ribs are present but well-gnawed. This one is old and dry enough to have a much milder scent.



We explore the willow thicket and surrounding thistle flats for some time more, looking for clues. One person finds what he calls a drag trail leading from an animal run by the road, straight up to the polished-antlered buck. We try but cannot find any cougar or coyote scat near the carnage. Finally we settle down on some soft grass at the edge of the thicket for lunch, and tell stories until it's time to return to camp.

I've put together a map of the thicket's most interestingly morbid spots. I've placed each area of interest using memory only, so they may be inaccurate. But it'll give the general idea.



In addition to dead deer and ghostly owls, there was abundant sign of other animals in and around the thicket. All the blackberry, especially the tender new growth, was browsed by deer. There was lots of deer hair caught on many blackberry tendrils.



A woodrat left scat near the willow cave, and nipped some twigs. Just outside in the thistle brush, the land was thick with vole runs, tunnels, and dry scats. Rabbit runs, browse and scat lay everywhere. Deer runs, rubs, browse, and scat, too, was littered thickly all around.

natural events log

Some interesting things have happened recently, that I thought worthy of a little post.

First, we had the first rain of the season, a very early, bombastic and drenching thunderstorm on the night of my birthday. It may have even been thundering and flashing lightning at the very hour I was born. Kinda cool. I think this is the earliest and biggest fall storm I can remember. Here's to hoping for an early and quenching rainy season.

Second, the Live Oak acorns in the East Bay cities started dropping last week! Huddart Park on the Peninsula is also starting their Live Oak and Blue Oak acorn drop. And I found a single, fat, fuzzy Tan Oak acorn. It was whole, and unmarred, without even a wevil hole. Yay acorns!

Orientation

We opened this week of Native Eyes with a wander. Breaking into groups of two, we set out for some hours to see what there was to see, get the lay of the land, orient ourselves, and collect firewood.

We saw many birds, a possible peregrine falcon, heard lots of bird language, practiced tracking, and got a little lost. We found a good view of the whole of Commonweal from the East ridge but couldn't find a good way down, so we were a bit late to our fire.








We gathered at the fire circle, newly excavated to make a pit large enough for the 9-15 of us. This year there are about 9 Native Eyes students, a new kid's group, a mentor who'll hang out with the kids all day, and more Native Eyes mentors. Our little group is multiplying!



We lit the fire with a mullein stalk hand drill I'd picked up in Michigan (it's so far outperformed any Californian mullein) and a cedar board that another of us picked up in Washington. Not exactly native, but harvested wild and handmade by us. Three of us started off helping to warm up the kit. I tried to finish and get a coal myself, but I lost stamina before the coal formed. There's still something I'm not getting right with hand drill.



Cooking dinner on the fire with so many people was a challenge. We'll need to strategize further to get this process more efficient. We also made Tuareg-style ash bread on the coals. Basic bread dough was mixed up, allowed to rise, and tasty things like sauteed onions were mixed in. Then balls of the dough were dropped straight onto the coals, where the coals had turned a little white with a covering of ash. We kept moving the bread around in the ashes with a stick to heat them evenly. They turned out delicious.



The next morning we left Commonweal early to set up our beginning of the year Tourist Test, renamed as an Awareness Adventure to take the sting off the test format. Here are a few of our stations.

We started with a denuded Ceanothus branch, sticking out into the trail. The question: What happened here, and in what season?





Next we stopped at a mud puddle. Our question here was, "how many species are represented in this puddle, and who are they?"







Further down the path, an apparently unmanned station. Backpacks and sandals lay abandoned by the trail. Finally, a bush spoke.



The stationmaster, having revealed his hiding place, introduced us to this turd on a rock. The turd on a rock was greeted with extreme interest and fascination.





After a long trail of tracking stations, we gathered at the lake for lunch, swimming, and general downtime, in which the Native Eyes crew finally got to meet and socialize with the Essentials people. We finished the day out with a game of Nutty Squirrels, which is essentially an exercise in competitive, blindfolded, gleeful buffoonery. The game is a great test of scout, ninja and/or jedi powers.

Mind of Mentoring and Village Builders Training

The new year of Native Eyes kicked off with a Tweeker – a two-week training retreat, the intensity of which may tweak participants out by the final day. The first week, entitled Mind of Mentoring and Nature Connection, was awash in flip charts and lecture. The second week, entitled Village Builder’s Training, was much less structured.

The first week appealed greatly to my analytical, logistics-preoccupied mind. We sat in lecture most of the day, watching various people draw various versions of a circle with eight radiating lines, and writing various words about these diagrams. We hung the charts together on the wall. Toward the end of the week a visitor remarked that it looked like we were designing the Death Star. The name stuck – I still can’t help but think of Darth Vader when I look at those diagrams. But I did learn a great deal about the ideas and structure behind this 8-Shields approach to mentoring and culture building.

We had a free weekend between the two weeks, in which some of the other Native Eyes crew, some Cultural Mentors, and some other attendees got some unstructured time together. We went to the beach and skinny-dipped in the chill ocean at sunset, played tag, sang songs and told stories. We hiked around the woods near Santa Cruz, found beautiful manzanita and huckleberries to eat, climbed trees, and goaded complete strangers into running around like kids with us. Though the people we met on the trail started out intimidated by the mere thought of eating wild berries, they finished the day with tongues nearly and purple as ours, grinning, climbing trees, throwing stones, hiding, seeking, and chasing each other like 8-year olds.

We launched into the second week still exhausted from the previous one, and it showed. The Acorn (our support team who managed and executed the event) still had bags under their eyes. This week had been planned as an exercise in village culture, rather than an educational program with lectures and flip charts. I think that varying interpretations of what that meant, along with the evident fatigue in the leadership group, and the ambitious project we had set for ourselves, made this week much rockier than the previous one.

Essentially, we took 60 or so humans from Western urbanized, individualistic, capitalist and technologically-dependant cultures and attempted to create a communal earth-based village culture using consensus, peaceful action, and positive words, within one week. We fell into many pitfalls. We also built beautiful, supportive, and regenerative relationships among our temporary village, which will continue to build independent of that retreat. On this week, we lit the embers of many future village fires.

Finals

Up in Bolinas this week, we had our Native Eyes final exam.

We started with the standard cooking fire. I began thinking about making a fire at around 4:15, and worked on it slowly and rather lazily. I gathered dead twigs from the alders near the creek, found bigger sticks of standing dead wood on the trees and cut wood in the brush piles, and then broke out the hand drills. We had a communal coal very soon, from a mugwort stalk and buckeye board, and our cooking fire was blazing by 5:30. I think the hot weather and long daylight helps hugely. I'm still working on my hand drill calluses, but right now I’ve just got blisters.

Our assignment the next day was to find elk cows, new calves, and cougar sign on the land. We divided up the landscape, each of us taking a patch, and we set out solo for the day, harvesting stories for the RDNA village.



I saw many things out there, but the most striking was the elk.

I started by getting tangled up in a coyote brush maze, and then I found a coyote trail at the edge, on the ridgetop, and followed it down the ridge to the bay. From the ridgetop I could see a lone bull elk, nubby antlers still in velvet, and I wondered how close I could get to him.



As I followed the coyote trail (also a well-used elk trail) I found California mugwort plants trampled by elk hooves. I took the broken tops and rubbed them all over me, masking my scent. I continued down the coyote trail, which was marked with twisty furry ropes of old coyote scat. The trail dipped over the lip of the southern drainage and ambled down to the bottomland.





The wind took my scent east by southeast. I was walking with my back to the wind, but the elk browsed southwest of me, well out of range of my scent. I walked softly and carefully and the elk never paused in his browsing. Arriving at the edge of the elk’s willow thicket, I looked at the short wind-flagged trees and the giant deer. I remembered my mission to find elk calves, not bother lone bulls, and wondered if I could make my way around the elk without alerting him. I sat down to consider my route.

(I don't have any better photo than this. I wish I'd been focusing on the elk, and not the grass.)

As I sat, the elk raised his head and focused southeast, across the drainage. Something there alarmed him, and he began walking quickly upslope, zigzagging more or less toward me! I realized that I’d sat down right on his trail. He closed in to thirty feet, and noticed me sitting there, a nondescript lump in the trail that had never been there before. He stopped and sniffed but couldn’t catch my scent. He lowered his head and nodded up and down, trying to find a better view of me. Acting intrigued rather than alarmed, he walked closer, head low and nodding. And he sped up. Finally hundreds of pounds of bull elk was trotting straight toward me, antler nubs lowered, soft dark eyes fixed on me. At fifteen feet I realized he wasn’t stopping, and I stood up to give him his space.

When he saw me stand and recognized me as human, he turned tail and ran. Though my spine and palms tingled with adrenaline and my knees trembled, I wished I’d let him get closer.

I found lots of other cool stuff that day:


the bull elk's bed which was worn in to the dirt and full of elk hair and shaped like a deer bed but huge,


wildflowers of all colors,


cicadas like intricate bronze jewelry,

a spotted towhee nest with one egg and one new-hatched chick, an osprey with a fish in it’s talons,and many more elk. But I never found a cow with a calf, and the sheltered zone I walked in was well devoid of cougar sign.

Bird Language Intensive

The Bird Language Intensive was held over the week of April 21 to May 2, and yes I know I'm two weeks late in blogging it. I'm actually later than that since this isn't a Bird Language Intensive blog, but an excuse.

Since it was a solid week long, I didn't have my usual evening or weekend moment to write and post. So I haven't written anything yet. I will, but for now it's all I can do to keep up with regular class posts. So look for a Bird Language Intensive post after the end of Native Eyes. Hey, that's only two weeks away...

Update 9/12/2009:
The Bird Language Intensive was just that: intense. A solid week of bird sits, debrief, and lecture on bird language. I learned many new things about birds and tracking the landscape through the eyes of the birds, and I relearned more. If you have never heard of bird language, this is a good intensive to take. If you have heard of it and would like to know more, this is a great instensive to take. If you have been studying bird language for a year, have listended to the Advanced Bird Language CDs repeatedly, and do regular bird sits on your own (like the Native Eyes crew does, for example), then I found this intensive to be an essential part of that education. Community and group cooperation opens up so many more possibilities for tracking and learning.

Cat Trails

This was the last class of the year that we visited the south location, and we arrived to drama. A cougar had killed a calf, the rancher received a depredation permit, and the rancher killed a cougar. The cat was a large male, very much like the one we’d been tracking at Old Woman Creek.

So one of our goals was to visit the cougar scrape area on Old Woman Creek and look for fresh sign, in the hope that the killed cat was not the big male resident of Old Woman Creek. Another goal for the morning was to determine what route the cougars were taking to get from Butano park to Cloverdale.

We split into three groups: Old Woman Creek investigators, ridgewalkers, and creekwalkers. The Old Woman Creek group took a trail camera and headed for the well-known cougar zone. The ridgewalkers took a high route from the road at Cloverdale’s Gate 2 up toward the ridgetops of Butano. And the creekwalkers, consisting of myself and one other Native Eyeser, Will, looked for a low route through the riparian zone up to the Butano ridgetops.

The creek we found to be impenetrable right off the road, so we paralleled it up the grassy hillside. We walked through hip-high wild oats, pressed down everywhere with deer lays, thick with deer scat and ticks. Along the way we passed the old schoolhouse, now sunk into the earth. We saw many snakes and birds, and countless signs of deer, but nothing catlike.



We tried repeatedly to push into the riparian zone but were blocked everywhere by poison oak and walls of brambles. The sounds of sharp footfalls in the brush, the odd snapped twigs, and intermittent breathy snorts moved up the creek a little ahead: the sounds of deer watching our progress. They, evidently, had a way through.

Finally we came to an open area, a light green willow cavern by the creek. The ground was entirely covered in short blackberry vines. Deer droppings and tracks were scattered everywhere. The peace of the place, a feeling of a shelter and haven, crept from the earth into our bones and we paused silent for a while, letting ourselves settle into the space. Will commented that he would like to make this place his sit spot, and I agreed. Then I said, “No cat energy here.” “None whatsoever,” he agreed. We continued up the hillside looking for the cougar’s path.





Over the sun-beaten ridge, through coyotebrush and wildflowers, and we came to the edge of a stand of Douglas fir trees. There was a low passage through the brambles and poison oak, and we could see clear duff and tree trunks on the other side. We ditched our stuff and dove through.



On the other side, the world was dark, still and cool. I crouched under the low branches and took a minute to let my eyes adjust. This space was entirely different from the deer haven. As I sat and stared into the twilit understory, I felt a tense crackle of energy up my spine. This place definitely had cat energy. And when we moved past the edge, we immediately found a large and old scrape in the duff. And another. And another.





We were briefly distracted by a rubber boa, lying fat and docile over the duff.



We moved upslope to more mature trees, and found more sign. This area allowed for more air movement, and for us to walk upright, but it was still dark and surrounded by shadows.





We continued along the edge of mature trees and soon found a subtle, soft trail. The trail looked different from any deer trail I’ve seen – deer used it from time to time, but I don’t think they were it’s primary creators. The trail seemed to be the result of years of soft, round, padded feed pacing along it. As we set foot on the trail, the hairs on my neck stood up. I felt the presence of a predator, even if only in the trail he left behind.






The further we went on the trail, the more scrapes we found. Many had scats in them, smallish furry lacquered looking tubes, less than 3/4 inch in diameter. We followed the trail through the young trees again, stooping low and winding through the thick shadow. I kept wondering if a soft-padded carnivore was watching us from the shadows beyond our vision.







We finally popped out of the young firs and into the grasses again, dazzled by the sun and immediately parched by the heat. We were thirty minutes late, and had to race back to our meeting point.

Food and Medicine

This week we were at Venture again, and spent the day with the RDNA crew. Our focus for the day was herbs, herbal medicines, and local and wild foods. The day was so creative and varied that I think this’ll have to be one of my longest posts ever. Apologies for the unbalanced text-to-photos ratio.

(We found the snake while wandering the grounds. He doesn’t have much to do with the day’s activities, but I thought he was beautiful enough to share anyway. I think his Latin name translates to “fierce bush snake from Hell.”)

We started the day with a blindfolded string walk. The Cultural Mentoring group strung a string down paths, around obstacles, and ended at a group meeting point. We were blindfolded and allowed to guide ourselves along the string using touch.



I found that I was far more comfortable going without shoes than with, and given the extra tactile connection to my environment, along with the string guide and the other sensory information from scent and sound, I felt totally comfortable, safe, and happy walking the landscape blind. With sight deprived, textures and temperatures, rather than sights, furnished the beauty in my landscape. Even the clammy grass and sharp gravel felt good on my feet, as it gave me that much more information about the world.

The one source of frustration I found was with negotiating my path in the presence other people. I found it easy to tell when the person in front of me had stopped, but harder to tell when they started up again. I didn’t want to bother the person in front of me by touching them if they were still there, but sometimes there was so much shuffling going on that I couldn’t tell if the person in front of me was walking or just fidgeting, or if an instructor was moving in front of me instead. I found myself worrying and fretting about holding up the line by waiting too long, and anxious about annoying the person ahead of me by poking her too often. This social worry was so strong that by the time I got to the end of the string, I was fuming about the bad design of this exercise, and how the presence of other people ruined the sensory immersion experience.

When we debriefed the exercise, an often-repeated point about nature connection practices came to the fore again: the stuff that comes up in these exercises is the stuff that participants bring to them. Likely, the blockages one comes up against in nature connection are the same blockages that one repeatedly engages in life. Like so many other personal practices, nature connection brings one’s blockages out of their familiar context and into a new and different light. I went into the next exercise musing on these thoughts and hoping to erode my anger with new understanding.

(Unlike other personal practices like martial arts or meditation, practicing nature connection allows for more feedback than that provided by one’s individual point of view and that of the mentor. Nature connection brings one’s blockages into an environment where not only mentors and students can reflect them to you, but where birds can shout at you about them, fox and mink can honor you for your progress, and trees can offer comfort and grounding in a crisis. And practicing nature connection with others on the same journey offers that many more eyes and ears and hearts and minds to perceive that feedback, push you when you’re unwilling to push yourself, and help you incorporate the feedback into your development.)


(Photo from CalPhotos)

The next exercise was a simple plant sit. We were told to find a plant, sit down with it, and talk with it, aiming to get to know some of the plant’s “spirit medicine”. We were advised to begin with a question, such as “what’s your name?” or “what story do you have to tell?”

I wandered away from most of the group and sat down by a big, beautiful Scrophularia plant. My question was, “what’s your role here,” a variation on the get-to-know-the-stranger line of, “so what do you do?” After sitting with it for a time, spacing out and being distracted by very cool looking hoverflies, I was feeling a little unfocused and ineffective at my task. I reconsidered my question, and sent a wordless request for communication with the plant, opening this “conversation” to let it say whatever it needed to say. Quietly, I watched bugs crawl over it, saw the discarded skins and honeydew excretions of now-absent aphids on a young stem, inspected leafminer tracks in the newer leaves, and noted that most of the mature stalks and leaves were free of insects. I inspected the flowers and wondered about their pollination.

Holding the plant stalk between my thumb and forefinger, I realized that physically, the plant’s body and my body were part of a continuum of matter, that the divisions of individuality between human and plant were arbitrary and that in fact one body merged into another and into the air and the earth, and more, in a continuum of matter and energy. I thought that perhaps spirit might be similar, and wondered, with silence rather than words, about participation in plant spirits and the continuity of spirit between apparent individuals.

Then the coyote howl came to gather us back, and we moved on to another project.






After a fun communal journaling session and a lunchbreak that included more journaling, (I got to learn about the medicinal and toxic properties of Bleeding Heart wildflowers) we launched into the afternoon activity, a lesson on intuitive cooking from one of the Cultural Mentors.



We had each brought at least one food local to our homes, meaning harvested less than 100 miles away from where we live. I brought snow peas and fava beans from my former garden (I had to negotiate with the landlord to get in an pick them), winter squash from the last fall harvest in my garden, and duck eggs from the Eco House nearby. Others brought many citruses, greens, peas and other vegetables. One person brought some ground beef, another some kefir, a jar of dried huckleberries (yum), and the star of the show was fresh abalone from Bolinas.

Our challenge was to create an appetizer dish for the rest of the class using only these ingredients. We grouped into teams and selected our ingredients. My group wound up with the kefir, the huckleberries, and lots of veggies. We were frustrated at first with our luck, getting such an odd collection of ingredients, but we came up with a plan and created a dish. Vibrant, energetic chaos ensued in the kitchen.

Our dish, a sweet stirfry using greens, sugar snap peas, celery, and apple with a sauce of huckleberry kefir flavored with lemon zest, nettle, and lemon balm herbs turned out to be an improbable success. Others made equally delectable dishes: herb meatballs with dipping sauces made from fava beans, tomato soup, or mustard; toasted kale chips (delicious and simple creations that result from tossing kale with oil and salt and toasting the leaves in the oven); stuffed beet leaves; carrot and greens salad alongside abalone that was breaded (with locally dumpstered bread), seasoned, and fried in olive oil; squash, herb and dandelion flower fritters; and squash stuffed with an herbed duck egg scramble.







With dinner over, three rounds of dishes done, and the sun setting low, we gathered in the main room for more herb work. Some of our musicians jammed with drums, guitar and mandolin while we milled about and waited for everyone to settle. Only settling never quite happened, and finally the energy of the music took over the room with dance and improvised song. Rather than fight the energy, our instructors began to sing their instructions for the next activity. Demonstration flowed into dance, questions came out sung in time to the beat, and spontaneous poetry erupted. We learned and processed herbs for the next hour with music fueling our motions. This was by far the most fun herbal class I’ve ever attended. My grandmother would be overjoyed to see this kind of learning going on.







Finally, we finished out the evening with a council circle, discussing sex and gender issues. The men asked the women’s circle questions, and vice versa. It raised many more questions, and opened new avenues of communication that I think will continue to be explored for these last five weeks of class.