Notes on Getting Here
An Essay by Peter Vogt
Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her paradigm shifting book, Braiding Sweetgrass, mentions that plants- flora- have been evolving on earth far longer than the mammal lineage that bore homo sapiens. She thinks the plant world’s miraculous adaptations express a special wisdom regarding their sense of place in the world. In story after story she demonstrates how flora have shaped the planet and the human cultures that now threaten it. No plants, no habitable planet, no people; it’s that simple. This story is about that.
We have this tree on our property, a ponderosa pine: Pinus Ponderosa. If you stand under it in the hot summertime it smells like a spice forest. It stands alone and it’s big- 100’ plus. It’s a couple feet through- flaky red bark to flaky red bark. On these old guys the bark is more plate than flake: reddish, reptilian islands of corky bark that always have holes drilled in them by woodpeckers hunting insects. You can see a photograph of this tree in the Twisp Community Center in Twisp, Washington. It’s a large format black and white picture of the great flood of 1948 taken from the foothills. There are, actually, two great ponderosas in relative proximity (one on our property and one on our neighbors), wading in water that hasn’t risen that high since. The trees were already huge when the picture was taken 74 years ago. The ‘48 flood was cataclysmic and remains fixed in the memories of residents born long after the fact. In the past I’ve fantasized about experiencing such a flood but I’ve gotten over it. Without boreal competition the tree commands attention. There’s a bat house nailed to the bole that my friends Ryan and Melissa gave me so long ago it’s grown skyward a foot. Let me tell you something; trees receive the story of time with aplomb but for humans it’s a bomb.
* * *
The sagebrush on the bottomland of this same property has come back since the horses from the previous owner moved out. For a few years the cheatgrass and mustard prevailed but sage knows it’s place. It’s Latin name is Artemisia Tridenta. In Greek mythology Artemis is the goddess of the hunt, of wilderness, of nature, of childbirth and the care of children. There’s nothing more mysterious and enchanting than the scent of sagebrush after rain. It has this effect…
When I walk the foothills of our valley- which are fine habitat for sagebrush- I run my hands through the top leaves and rub the scent on my neck. The clean smell feels like a spirit bath. Sage steppe is the name for the plant community defining the Methow Valley on the East slope of the Cascade Mountains. Steppes are grassy, with tough, low growing shrubs, and forests sprouting along rivers and lakes. Steppe climate is high and dry, seasonally windswept, with vast temperature extremes. They’re too dry to support forests but not dry enough to qualify as desert. Most of Mongolia and Nevada are steppes. Horses, dust devils, and stars- as well as sagebrush- love steppe life. People born in the East like me often think steppe climate too dry. Not me, I love it.
* * *
I first registered the name “ponderosa pine” off State Route 242, on McKenzie Pass, in Oregon, in 1985. Exiting the basin and range of Eastern Oregon ponderosas start popping up tree by tree as you climb the Pass. It feels similar to entering the high desert of Southern California when you first see one lonely Joshua Tree and then the tribe.
I was driving West to find my life. A cashier at my food co-op in Buffalo, NY, told me “every third person” she knew was moving to Seattle. I think she was trying to curb my enthusiasm, but she did just the opposite. For a long time I felt pulled west, and toward Seattle in particular. I wasn’t the only one. The writer, Tom Robbins, once told me he moved to Seattle because he’d heard there were men living in trees in the Olympic rainforest. That probably sounds silly to anyone who hasn’t walked through an ancient rainforest by themselves for a few days.
At a certain point on the road to McKenzie Pass the ponderosas form an airy aromatic canopy. Like sagebrush, the warmed foliage has a mind cleansing effect. The clustered crowns of giants like these modelled for the naves of European Cathedrals. If you’ve ever been inside of, or seen photographs of the Cologne Cathedral, you know what I’m talking about. I guess with enough peasant tribute and slave labor you can re-recreate what’s free in a healthy forest. On the other hand, if you want to invoke the sacred majesty of ancient forests, maybe you should take better care of them in the first place. Just a thought…
Slant shadows of trunks striped neighboring trunks; the visual effect being similar to a Franz Kline painting. Light bounced heedlessly about, pooling on bleached bunch grasses. The boles glowed russet in near dusk. Mesmerized, I got out of the car and sat on a rock. A squadron of Clark’s nutcrackers flew through the understory in spooky silence. The word primeval comes to mind when I try to understand my complicated reaction to this magnificent forest: of or resembling the earliest ages in the history of the world. It’s not quite true, of course. There are species of trees and geological formations that are truly primeval: the bristlecone pines of California, Vishnu schist of the Grand Canyon. Still…
A breeze stirred under the ponderosas. As the sound rose I had the sensation of being lifted. It doesn’t take much breeze in a pine forest to create a sound eerily similar to ocean surf. The rising and falling wind sounded like cresting, distant waves. I rode it through peaks and troughs to a place I wanted to stay. Something mournful and beautiful unfolded. Goodbye self, hello breeze that whisks my bones into the ash of sunset.
I couldn’t hold onto the feeling. But that was okay because I knew it was real and I knew it was deep and I knew I could swim in that ocean again if I maintained a certain kind of presence. I’d sensed before, but never so powerfully, that I was both tiny in the mind of Nature but also, vividly, wildly, authentically connected to it.
You can have this same experience almost any day in a ponderosa forest, by the way. But you have to go alone. Or should. If you do go, I’ll give you a tip: follow the sound of the gusting wind all the way to the end of it’s exhale. You’ll hear a hollowness dissolving into a vortex that is the eye of the spin cycle of the universe. It’s a sacred vagabond sound that roars into your soul with the weight of immense grief. I think- maybe- that sound/space is where we go when we’re done here. For me it’s a beautiful thought.
I think that haunting sound provokes some atavistic memory: a pre-existing light flickering in the cave or our collective unconscious, a paleolithic flashlight scouring for berries and prey, full of fear and a sense of the sacred. Maybe that’s the primeval part. It’s like going home to a place you’ve never been; fresh heartbeat and faint echo. I’d felt something like this in church when I was a kid. But this was on my skin and in my hair and straight into my heart. A window opened and whatever was “out there” would be forever more “in here”.
E.O. Wilson coined the term “biophilia” to express his deep connection to the wild beings he studied and wrote about. But after searching for a word that would summon the feelings I had in the ponderosa forest (and subsequently in many other places) I discovered a very impoverished corner of the English language. Which explains a lot! Going back to roots we might make something out of the Latin for love- amare- and earth- terra. Terramare maybe? Further back, the Greeks had a number of words for different kinds of love, but one for earth- Gaia. A physical love for the earth would combine Gaia with eros. Friendship with earth would combine Gaia with philia. And agape combined with Gaia would declare a sense of selfless love and commitment to the earth. I like Terramare for now because it rolls off the tongue and sounds good with a hearty marinara sauce. But we need some wordsmithing in this space if we are going to drill down into the emotional reserves that will save this planet.
I was crossing McKenzie Pass to meet up with a girl in Eugene that I had a crush on in college. I thought she might have a crush on me too. And, for a couple years we had a tempestuous, glorious, disastrous relationship, as all young people should have at some point. We were young and inexperienced and in real love for a hot second. And we were both sad when it didn’t work out.
But those trees- the ponderosas- stuck with me: that sun warmed scent, that ancient holy sound.
* * *
I first remember encountering sagebrush on an earlier road trip, after my sophomore year of college. My roommate asked me if I had any Summer plans. I told him I’d probably work at the printing factory I’d been working at for the past few summers. Can you ride horses, he asked? I did know how to ride horses. Well, why don’t you come with me to Arizona and teach at this cool kid’s camp? Trail rides, camp outs, all kinds of cowboy stuff. Who could refuse?
We drove his beater Camaro west from Colorado Springs to his home in California, then south to Arizona. I’d never been west of Colorado. Never knew about or even thought about what “west” meant. I don’t know if such an eye opening trip would be possible in this day and age. The vast information vortex we dwell in makes “experts” of us before we’ve actually experienced anything: dispiritus pro info. As Suzuki Roshi shrewdly writes in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts, few”. “Ignorance is bliss” may also pertain.
I’d never drunk from such a firehose of landscape grandiosity; park, pass, mesa, promontory, aspen grove, cottonwood bend, slickrock, thundercloud, mustang, spiraling minaret of rock. It all felt so strange and spiritual, and most of all, insistent. “Look” this landscape pleaded, “and keep looking; my trickbag is bottomless”. When I bowed in gratitude before the Wasatch Mountains, a dust devil whispered kinship into my ear, then dashed off to sweep the salt flats clean of original sin. My voice sounded sharp and clear here. At night coyotes sang in the void. Clarity felt mysterious. I saw the Milky Way for the first time.
In the basins between ranges this pale green shrub began appearing in great numbers. In places the spacing was so uniform it seemed like they were planted by hand. For miles this went on. All that SPACE was mesmerizing. We saw pronghorn antelope. I felt like I was in touch with an America worthy of the myth; not the bellicose, global superpower America; the other one, that HD Thoreau, and John Muir, and Gary Snyder write about, which precedes all the hokum. The one Native Americans call Turtle Island.
Gorgeous, tortured sagebrush seemed, to me, to be part of Turtle Island.
* * *
After passing through the holy ponderosa forest, State Rt. 242 climbs and climbs and the trees begin to disappear. At first I thought the Pass was above treeline because the ground looked so barren. On second look I realized the giant black rocks that overtook the landscape were remnants of a (geologically speaking) recent volcanic eruption. There was some shrubbery and a few spindly trees, but the landscape was mostly black lava rock, impassable by foot. It felt very lunar. I’m no geologist but it seemed like a good guess the lava had come from one of the brooding Sisters (the mountain range nearby) that loom over the Pass.
There’s an overlook at the top of the pass and I chatted up an old hippy guy there. I told him I was going to Eugene to fall in love and then to the Oregon Coast to swim in the mythical Pacific. He nodded, stroked his hobbit beard, and said, “It’s debatable whether the Oregon Coast is ever swimmable.” The first words I’d heard since Denver! I asked him about the trees on the East side of the Pass. “Those would be ponderosas. Beautiful tree.” I agreed, repeating the name. He pulled a joint out of his shirt pocket and we smoked it.
Driving down the West side of the Pass the flora changed again. Doug fir, hemlock, and cedar took over. They were magnificent but I missed the magic of the east slope dry- especially those spicy ponderosas. Light wasn’t emanating from the bleached blonde grasses. I couldn’t hear the generative void of the universe. For whatever reason the pine forest had inspired a peak experience. It took time for me to understand it though.
A new life had begun. I did fall in love. I swam in the Pacific and it was shockingly cold. I moved to Seattle. There was a lot to see and do for a young person in a young city; friends to make, parties to go to, wilderness to explore. My hero Gary Snyder grew up there. I explored wild places he wrote about and climbed mountains he climbed.
One night I read a poem by Kenneth Rexroth, Snyder’s teacher and fellow poet, that mentioned the Methow Valley. I’d heard about the Methow, this rugged valley on the eastern slope of the Cascades. It was a cowboy poem that described Rexroth and another man on horseback driving cattle from the sage steppe over Washington Pass to Marblemount, before Highway 20 was built. It was a poem that expanded the world by nailing the details.
I couldn’t wait to visit.
* * *
I’m pretty sure we were still Nevada when we rolled our sleeping bags out under an insanity of stars. It was the first time I felt myself floating in the universe. It’s a deep thing, this first communion in the blessing of starlight. Eastern skies are too hazy to see that many stars. It’s transfixing and bewitching and inspiring and hair raising to come face to face with the icy universe. I laugh when people bemoan the lack of “authenticity” in the world when all they need to do is escape the city lights, look up, and fall into awe.
That night, a fast moving storm whipped sand and grit into our hair. I burrowed into my sleeping bag, gleefully girding myself to ride this wild mustang. Then it started raining. Shit, we needed to get into the car to sleep off the night. Two grown men trying to sleep in a beat up Camaro in basin and range country is, as they say, “type 2 fun”.
At sunrise, I stumbled onto the rainswept plain to take a piss. In dawn light the landscape radiated a new coat of paint. There was no one and nothing in sight but light trimmed sagebrush. And then the scent hit me- the perfume released by artemisia/sage. It cut through everything with a message sent straight from the gods. In mythic astronomy Artemis represents the moon, another object possessed of seductive magic.
When we talk about landscape we almost always talk about vistas. This was different. I waded into the immense field of sagebrush giddy and high. It preceded me, followed me, pervaded me. In this “wasteland” I had one of the most powerfully mystical encounters with the garden planet I’ve ever had. There was nothing to be said. The questions I wanted to ask didn’t have an answer. There was nothing to do but close my eyes and surrender to enchantment. Nothing else existed. In my young, impressionable mind, I’d found true west.
* * *
Not long after I read the Rexroth poem, I visited the Methow Valley. A four-hour drive from verdant Seattle, it’s another world entirely; dry with tawny voluptuous foothills, and the brawny Cascade range beyond. A wiggly strip of green ran through it, where rainbirds, center pivot irrigation, and the Methow River delivered water to emerald green fields of alfalfa. It was a hot summer day. The first things I did was find a swimming hole. Several giant ponderosas mothered over the spot and I marked their presence.
The second thing I did was find a real estate office. I couldn’t afford a place. But I kept in touch with an agent I liked. Three years later, on a sunny day in April, as I drove around the Valley with real estate listings in my lap, I pulled over in front of a charming farmhouse clad with cedar shakes. It overlooked a dramatic bend in the river. I walked the lines noting sagebrush in the wastelands and a lone, charismatic ponderosa. There was a goat doing yoga poses under a silver maple tree by the river. I bought it the next day.
So much of my life has happened in this place, this shrub steppe paradise; kids, pets, bumper crops of chilis and garlic, wildlife sightings, river trips, ski trips, wild parties, solemn ceremonies. And stars. Lots and lots of stars. Aurora Borealis flares up with surprising frequency. Such exuberant life! I am thankful for all of it.
This past summer, the thirty third I’ve spent here, I took a walk around the place after a rowdy thunderstorm. By the time I got to the wooded path that leads to the river, the sun had come out. And there it was: the scent of sagebrush rising up from the humid earth. And there they were; a dozen cropped and crooked sagebrush shrubs drying in the sun. I was immediately transported to that day long ago, to the basin and range of Nevada, when this same sharp scent spun me for a loop. That summer I spent as a camp counselor in Arizona was memorable. But nothing was more memorable than the intoxicating scent of that sagebrush. They say that our sense of smell associates with our strongest memories and I think I agree.
That same day, on the same walk, I climbed the hill separating our home from the hundred-year flood plain. Where the path rises stands the great ponderosa pictured in the Twisp Community Center from the flood of ‘48. Like the sagebrush, the needles under the tree were drying in the hot sun. There was that scent, that spicy turpentine scent. A breeze came up and I lifted off, following the call of the wind sighing in the pine. I listened for the last gasp of gust, that hollow, mournful song that sings the generative power of Gaia. Moments like these renew my citizenship on the garden planet. I don’t pray like I did when I was young in church. I do understand the complex reasoning and magical thinking that underlies faith in a transcendent God. But I have trained myself to ride woodwinds into the maw of Creation. And for me this is enough.
And I had this crazy thought! Had these soulful, aromatic plants- pinus ponderosa and artemisia tridentata, which had made such a huge impression on me so long ago- long before I even knew their names- called me to this place? My neck hairs raised up. Was I the (lucky!) victim of some long unfolding floral conspiracy? I looked the majestic ponderosa up and down. I wanted to interrogate it like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver: “Are you talking to me?”. I looked toward the sagebrush by the riverside wanting them to explain exactly what their game was and why it had taken me so long to catch on. Was I just a tumbleweed summersaulting across the continent when I ended up in the Methow Valley or did ponderosa and sagebrush light my path? I laughed out loud. What stupid questions! But they lingered- gnawing on that part of my brain that balances curiosity, knowledge, and faith.
* * *
There are things I can say about my theory of seduction via biophilia. I can tell the story of two journeys I made as a young man: the first, a trip across the flats of Nevada when I first encountered sagebrush; and later, my encounter with the whispering ponderosas of McKenzie Pass. My senses opened wide to these natives and I felt overwhelmed with wonder, connected to a way of being that I continue to cultivate. That is real.
There’s a third story: the one I’m telling here, about walking our property lines many years after the first two stories. This is the story of a lightning bolt of recognition ignited by vivid sense-memories. It’s the story of time and space collapsing in a mind shocked into recognition and acceptance of the non linear qualities of consciousness. Proust wrote about this phenomenon in a slightly different way. For me, it’s the story of an epiphany that expanded the size of the ocean I swim in.
Folklore, myth, and more recently science confirm there are currents of energy surging through the plant world (and the world in general) which decide things we think we understand and control but don’t. There are limits to the use of language in explaining these events. I have no grand theory to propose, but I can say this: the scent of sagebrush after a good rain, and the mournful voice of the universe issued by a wind inspired ponderosa, changed my life. Twice.
These lessons of planetary citizenship are about us every day; in the woods, in the weather, and especially in weeds thriving between cracks in the sidewalk. Our senses- the wind on our skin, the delicious flavors and scents of the world, are the road in. Of the many things I am grateful for in this parsed, pressed, and programmed world, I might be most grateful for the secretive, seductive, shape-shifting gifts of our live, wild, garden planet.
A bow to artemisia tridentata and one for pinus ponderosa. A bow to Earth Household: yours, mine, and ours.
Filmmaker for over 30 years (peterjvogt.com) and farmer/steward of 60 acres of land in the beautiful Methow Valley of Washington State. Family man, mountaineer, poet.