Pacific Northwest – JT McKenna Writes

You Know You’re in Portland

It has taken me too long, I realize, but I’m beginning to get a feel for Portland, Oregon and just generally the Pacific Northwest. There’s much still to be learned about the region, but I embrace the challenge. I had the use of my daughter and son-in-law’s car during my most recent week-long visit to Portland, which — among other things — allowed me to immerse myself more fully in the experience, make me feel (almost) like a Portlander. I thrilled, for example, that I was able to conduct a highly nuanced, scientific comparison; grocery stores and bakeries were my test subjects. The comparisons with New England are inevitable.

*Example of a Portland truck “in fine fettle”*

Each day found me, as well, doing daily strolls around the University Park neighborhood where I was staying, presenting me with delightful opportunities for discovery (despite invariably drizzly weather conditions). Keep in mind, my friends, I’m a country girl, so part of the challenge is learning how to navigate (comfortably) in a major city.

Observation #1: Once you understand that homeowners have the responsibility for the upkeep of the space directly in front of their houses in between the sidewalk and the street, you can’t help but observe how those intervals are tended. It becomes readily obvious which homeowners chafe at the responsibility and which ones view their assigned space as an artist’s canvas.

Observation #2: Skill in parallel parking is essential, as is threading the needle to manage the gap between the street and one’s driveway (if there is one), inevitably crowded by at least half a dozen cars parked impossibly close. Every night when I left my daughter and son-in-law’s house to head back to my rented apartment, I recited an impassioned dear Lord, please let me get out of here safely without hitting one of those cars. (Truth is, my appeal to the Good Lord sounded more like: The fuck’s wrong with people?! Why can’t they give you some fuckin’ room?! Fuckin’ dickheads!) By the end of my visit, however, I had learned the calculation well enough so that I didn’t have to apply the brakes countless times, and my exit took fewer than ten minutes. The memory makes me smile.

Observation #3: You can buy avocados and actually have faith that they’ll be perfectly ripe, and taste as one would hope an avocado should taste, not like cardboard or wallpaper paste, which is how avocados purchased in New England generally taste. (I’m only imagining what cardboard and wallpaper paste taste like. At least I think I am. There may have been a period in my childhood when I “experimented” with things not customarily earmarked for human consumption.) When I was unable to find nectarines, I asked one of the stockers at New Seasons if they had any. He replied, “No, they’re not in season; we won’t have them for a couple months.” Not in season! When has that ever stopped our Market Baskets and Stop & Shops from making attractive arrangements of imported, tasteless, out-of-season fruits and vegetables?

Observation #4: Through either peer pressure or inheritance, Portlanders eventually own an old truck. Said truck must be installed permanently on the street or as a yard ornament. They run the gamut of eras (70’s through 90’s, mostly) and can be found in various conditions, from the worst state of decrepitude to the most pristine. Walking through the neighborhood, I could easily distinguish between “proud truck owner” and “embarrassed owner of an albatross”.

So ubiquitous are these trucks, that over time they lose their sense of novelty. Through transmogrification they become part of the urban landscape. Until recently, for example, a little red Toyota truck sat mute and motionless in front of my daughter and son-in-law’s house. No one could say when it first appeared, and no one knew who owned it — everyone imagined that it belonged to some one else. Only when it became the casualty in a hit-and-run accident by an RV “behaving in a suspicious manner”, was one of the neighbors moved to call the city’s traffic division. The city promptly arrived to tow it away. The uncharacteristic speed and alacrity with which the city responded led all the neighbors to conclude that the little red Toyota truck must have been a victim of some high jinks and ultimate abandonment. Accounts such as these produce only desultory shrugs of the shoulder. It’s a Portland thing.

I’ll be back in Portland in May. At that time, just as we in New England will think to cheerily recite, “Mother’s Day, plant away”; bursts of color will already be everywhere. The spaces between the sidewalk and the street will once again be showcasing the creative talents of spade-wielding Portland homeowners, (or vexing the more reluctant stewards of the inter-spaces).

I’m very much looking forward to more opportunities to expand my understanding of the region.

William Clark Did Not Reward York with Freedom. . . at Least Not for Several Years

Yes, it’s a pile of rocks. I came upon it while walking around the University of Portland campus one day this past week. Each day of my week-long Portland stay began with a walk around my University Park neighborhood before I headed over to my daughter’s house to hang with my new grandson. Anomalies always inspire curiosity.

To the uninitiated (such as myself), one of the first things you notice when you visit Portland is the abundance of memorials to Merriwether Lewis and William Clark and other reminders of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Corps of Discovery. Until my daughter moved to the Pacific Northwest ten years ago, there was really little substance to my understanding of that stage of what many of us call “American history”. (And of course, that understanding had been shaped by a K-12 Eurocentric curriculum.) If you asked me to explain what I recalled about the whole Lewis and Clark thing, I’d probably say something like, “One of them was Merriwether, and they wore buckskin outfits and traversed wide swathes of wilderness in our country’s vast interior, forded wrathful rivers, came upon hostile Indians — whom they either subdued or befriended if there was something to be gained through such exploitation — and they eventually arrived at the Pacific Ocean, whereupon they exclaimed, ‘We have thus succeeded in manifesting destiny.'” (My lack of genuine understanding is shameful.)

Multnomah River (aka Willamette R.) from bluff at U. of Portland

For a little over thirty years (from 1988 to June of 2020), the north campus of the U. of Portland held a bronze sculpture of William Clark, his black slave York*, and an unidentified Native American who had served as Clark’s guide. The sculpture showed a reverential Clark peering into the distance and pointing, with York and the Native American following his gaze. No matter that “Seekseekqua” (the object of Clark’s interest) was well-known to the Native bands who populated the area — and had been for thousands of years, Clark had “discovered” Oregon Country’s second highest mountain, which he pronounced should henceforth be called Mt. Jefferson.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, social media got busy by providing lists of potential “targets” for those wishing to express their frustration through acts of protest. When the University of Portland’s sculpture appeared on one of the protest lists, authorities removed first York’s figure, and then a day later, the Clark and Native American figures. What remains now is a pile of rocks, a list of original donors for the funding of the 1988 sculpture, and a very interesting interpretation of events. Read it yourself here:

In my mind, what is lost by the removal of the sculpture is the opportunity to supply a more accurate depiction and analysis of events and a more authentic statement about its symbolism. The sculpture should be returned. The plaque that accompanies it, however, should be refashioned to echo the historical truth.

*Like most sons of plantation owners, as a boy, William had been given a black slave — similar in age — who would serve as a companion and valet. Because York was not only trustworthy, but showed exceptional promise as a wilderness “survivalist”, he was deemed a creditable candidate for the cross-country Corps of Discovery. It didn’t hurt that he was tall and powerfully built, a reassuring presence in the expedition’s camp. Despite York’s contributions to the enterprise, he was not rewarded with manumission (release from slavery) for several years. (The record is unclear as to precisely when it happened, just that it is likely to have occurred before 1832, nearly two decades after the expedition.)

Read about York here.

Source:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/york-explored-west-lewis-and-clark-his-freedom-wouldnt-come-until-decades-later-180968427/

Learning About How Trees Talk to Each Other (Another Book Report)

Whenever I make the 90 minute drive from my house to my sister’s, I turn on NPR and thus convert what might be a stressful trip into one of enlightenment. The trick is to leave earlier than I need to or to never have a fixed arrival time. Having removed that stressor, I’m usually not bothered by stop-and-go traffic, which, let’s face it, through Boston and down to “The Split” is pretty much a given. I’m a fan of “Hidden Brain” hosted by the honey-voiced Shankar Vedantam and “Fresh Air” with the endearing Terry Gross.

On New Year’s Eve Day I was delighted to find myself with Ira Flatow and his “Science Friday” program. (For years I thought his name was Ira Plato — it was only in looking up the correct spelling for this post that I made the discovery that I’d had it wrong all these years.) His guests were two science editors, and the three of them had a congenial share session, rhapsodizing over their favorite books released in 2021. (That’s one of the things I love about Ira — he always conducts such cozy and benign interviews, never the “gotcha” kind. One imagines a coffee-house setting, with everyone ranging around a low table, sipping craft coffee while burrowed into deep, pillowy sofas.)

Of the twelve “favorites” being reviewed, I was most intrigued by Suzanne Simard’s memoir, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Buying the book was a bold move for me, as I was acutely aware that three science minds were recommending it. I feared I would quickly become adrift in the technicalities. Well, yes, I did get rather lost in the weeds — no pun intended. But I congratulate myself that, for once, I persevered despite my ignorance in all things dendrological. I just finished the book this week and FedExed it across the country to my daughter, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, therefore ticking the relevancy box (as will quickly become apparent), and being further reassured that I was gifting it in the right direction because she’s someone who casually throws around words like ecosystem and nitrogen in the same way that I invoke terms associated with ice cream flavors and toppings.

Suzanne Simard grew up in the forests of British Colombia, descending from a family of loggers. Her close physical ties to the land inspired her educational and career choices, ultimately earning her a PhD in forest sciences from Oregon State University. Throughout her story we have a sense that, as convincing as the findings from her field studies were, she was forever seeking the blessing of the logging industry policy-makers, who for the longest time remained obtusely resistant to her peer-reviewed studies and her prescriptive solutions to the sickening forests that they were sanctioning. To her enduring frustration, she also was repeatedly and unfairly challenged simply because she was a woman doing serious work in a male-dominated industry. Despite the specious denials by the old guard, her work was meticulous and groundbreaking, flowing naturally from her own curiosity about the underground interactions between trees, both same species and different species. From the beginning, she suspected that trees communicated with each other through a network of mycorrhizal fungi, and that these conduits provided mutual aid when trees underwent stress. I must pause here to reassure you that “mycorrhizal” is as science-y as I dare to get, and I only use it because it is so essential to her work (and because I read that word about 5,000 times in the course of reading her memoir.)

As her story wended its way through decades-long studies and efforts to stimulate sustainable practices, I began to understand her sense of alarm over the fate of North America’s forests. Even though she shuns the spotlight, she has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to inform not just the science community, but the shapers of policy as well as the general public. Central to her mission is educating about the harm inflicted when clear cutting is followed by single-species restock protocols. I now understand, for example, how the “free to grow” practices that the logging industry swore by were failing to produce healthy forests; the strategy of single species cultivation, whereby any and all “competitors” are systematically removed, is an (expensive) exercise in wasteful depletion. Backed up by her own and others’ experiments, Simard has proven that diversity is essential. (Mineral exchanges, for instance, of nitrogen and carbon through the underground mycorrhizal network assure the health of “the neighborhood.”) I can’t help but think of her discoveries as magical. That there’s this whole underground world of tree communication — a mutual aid society, if you will — just blows my mind. It makes me want to dig around some of my trees to examine the mycorrhiza! (But I don’t want to hurt them.)

Later in the book, Simard turns her attention to the predatory crises posed by bark beetles (the mountain pine beetle and the Douglas fir beetle, in particular.) As forests are weakened by both logging practices (directly) and climate change (generally), the beetles have gained the upper hand. The scale of the invasions should have us worried.

Simard’s life’s work has been an effort to encourage conservation. She’s not a combative, in-your-face contrarian. Rather, she takes a nuanced approach, understanding that there’s a workable solution that acknowledges the goals of the logging industry, but remains sensitive to the critical needs of the environment. Her heart is so fully in the fight to get her message out there and, ultimately, to save the forests.

The book has given me a lot to reflect on, and I’ve been looking at my surroundings differently. The most visible evidence of this is that, more than once, someone on the rail trail, in trying to move around me, has had to interrupt my tree gazing as I stand still in the middle of the path with one dog sniffing on one side of the trail and the other (of course) stretching his leash to the other side while I study the crowns and understories of interesting trees (that I’ve made a mental note to learn the names of.)

I highly recommend this memoir, going so far as to say it is an “important” one. That it is relevant and the conclusions credible is a certainty. Don’t be deterred by its scientific bent — I wasn’t, and I’m a baby when it comes to technical reading. I’m much more mindful now (but maybe only slightly more knowledgeable) about ideas such as energy transfer (energy can neither be created nor destroyed) and the whole notion of ecological balance. It forces one to look more carefully at larger contexts when faced with natural (as well as man-induced) events, and to wonder — in the end — about how everything connects.

As my final reward I followed up with the author’s TED Talk, “How Trees Talk to Each Other“. It does a great job of synthesizing her work.