Notes from the Wild Folk: A Visit to the Alpine

For a week of days and of star-thick nights, I was steeped and clarified both by the Sierra Nevada air, by the wind down the granite passes that sang the trees to oceans, by the sight of ancient ragged ridges 9,000 feet high and more, by the company of my family and of my new friends—juniper and aspen, rowan, goldenrod and chickaree. I am still adjusting to sea-level. I never thought I'd say such a thing, being such a lover of wild coast and fog! The last time I was in the Sierras, closer to 11,000 feet, I was desperate for the lower elevation because I found it very difficult to sleep. This time, I felt like Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain, when she writes, "I am a mountain lover because my body is at its best in the rarer air of the heights and communicates its elation to the mind [...] At first I thought that this lightness of body was a universal reaction to rarer air. It surprised me to discover that some people suffered malaise at altitudes that released me, but were happy in low valleys where I felt extinguished." (Page 7). While I certainly do not feel "extinguished" in the low valleys where I live-- and in my heart am an ocean-side, misty forest kind of girl—I did experience the "feyness" of the heights that Nan Shepherd so joyously describes. I felt giddy at the end of each day with the richness of our rambles on the high ridges, to the clear lakes.

Goldenrod, yellow herald of late summer, bloomed everywhere (well, mostly near water, though not this ridge-top adventurer), so sun-bright it was impossible not to smile at the sight of her. 

For the first time, I met mountain ash, aka rowan, a native variety of that small tree of mythic proportions. I've known about rowan since I was a young girl, reading books full of medicine women and Celtic magics. Once, I thought I spotted a rowan tree growing in the front yard of a strange, stained-glass windowed house around the corner from the home where I grew up. I'm not sure if it really was, but I was certain this tree meant that the woman inside was a witch, and possibly one of dubious intentions.

 Up here, in the Desolation Wilderness, the rowans provided sudden bursts of scarlet amidst a landscape dry with summer,  colored mostly with the dusty silver shades of granite and juniper, the fawns of bark and stone, the evergreens, the sharp blue of the sky. I gathered some berries to string up over our front door, for protection, though some say that rowans attract fey folk as well as guard against them. Mostly, that string of red will stir my blood with the beauty of those alpine waterways where she grows, singing soft songs of protection to the ducks and the grouse, the beaver and the mountain chickadee, come night.

Thanks to my trusty Laws' Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada  (a fabulous book I've had since my time at Heyday, but hadn't really found the opportunity to use until now, full not only of the usual flora and fauna but also insects, lichens, mushrooms, stars, tracks, clouds, all hand illustrated with both character and accuracy), I fell into an ecstasy of identification. There were so many new plants and birds 7,000 feet in the air, and some 200 miles east of my usual haunts. This coffeeberry, for example, I could identify as such, but something about it was different-- the shape of the berries, that array of autumnal colors-- and then I learned that the Sierras have their very own coffeeberry (no doubt a favorite of the gray foxes as well as the Sierra red fox, as it is down by the sea too), Rhamnus rubra. After a day long ramble, upon returning, I would grab my Laws' Guide, make a cup of tea, and flip through it pleasurably, seeking the new friends I'd met.

And then there were the aspens. Their trunks white-dusted and full of dark eyes, their leaves a dance and a shimmer in the wind. As my mother said, there are certain winds that you only notice because of the aspens, who pick up the slightest breezes and ripple. Their full name is quaking aspen, or Populus tremuloides, and the flower essence of this tree is used for panic and anxiety. The latter I can understand, but not for the reasons often used—there is nothing about the dance of the aspen that reminds me of fear, of tremors, of quaking. Not at all. This tree is all light and water and lilt. It shimmers and flickers. It does not quake like a man trembling in his boots at the sight of a bear, such as the name evokes. Aspens remind me that in the face of a wind, sometimes the best thing to do is come totally and fully alive.



The sight of aspens dancing thus is immensely, immeasurably calming. It has the same effect as the sight of water rippling or waves spreading with foam. Why these things are soothing and centering, I cannot quite articulate. Aspen leaf stems are flattened at the base, so that the leaves may move back and forth, fluttering in the slightest breeze. I wonder why the aspens have chosen, over many millenia, to grow thus. And why one side of the leaf is dark green, the other silvery, so that in that flutter is the effect of light on water—this is a Great Mystery, indeed.





At Lily Lake, rimmed with aspen, alder, cottonwood and willow (how I love the water-loving trees!) my mother and I shared morning tea, a short walk up from our cabin, and spotted the home of a beaver, probably made from the silvery aspen branches, a beaver favorite!

The original architects, those fellows, inspiration, I'm sure, for the earliest tents and houses.

High up the ridges, I fell completely in love with the tatterdemalion silhouettes of the old, wind-tossed junipers. The more gnarled and silvery-barked, the more ancient—and the more beautiful, in my mind. These trees seem to grow straight from the granite. 

Their dusty blue berries are a favorite of many birds, especially robins, as well as the numerous species of chipmunk and ground squirrel who live here, and the black bear too. 

The juniper is a sacred, wise plant, and I am writing an in-depth column on the subject for the wonderful EarthLines magazine, so I shan't give away too many tidbits here. Suffice it to say, juniper's berries and boughs are at once medicinal and magically powerful—clearing, cleansing, warming, and rooted in underworlds of stone. I spent a fair amount of time with my hands to their bark or rock-bound roots, wondering what stories they held inside.

Beyond the first juniper ridge, we ventured to Grass Lake. My brother (above) and I both swam to a little island in the middle. The water was cool but refreshing, not the gasping temperature of snowmelt that I've felt before. 

However, I learned about halfway across that I'm a mediocre swimmer at best, with no technique and little stamina, and that it was really quite cold. I experienced a somewhat sobering moment in the middle, humbled by the dark blue expanse of water under and all around me, and remembered that floating on one's back in the water provides excellent respite. So I dog-paddled and back-floated, breast-stroked and frog-kicked my way to that granite island, and arrived trembling from head to toe with the effort. There, my brother and I lay on the warm, mica-flecked stones and felt the peace of wild things flowing in through our skin. A chickaree (little tassel-eared squirrel) called, and a kingfisher. The wind hushed through the trees. The stones held the warmth of the sun.

The Sierras are defined by granite, it seems to me. It is foundation and bare bones. When you walk these ridges for a day, your feet get sore from the hardness of the ground, the granite jarring your bones. I am put in mind of more of Nan Shepherd's words:

I have written of inanimate things, rock and water, frost and sun; and it might seem as though this were not a living world. But I have wanted to come to the living things through the forces that create them, for the mountain is one and indivisible, and rock, soil, water and air are no more integral to it than what grows from the soil and breathes the air. All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain. The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird--all are one. Eagle and alpine veronica are part of the mountain's wholeness. (The Living Mountain, 48.)



Even the grasshoppers have come to look like the rust-hued stone. They leap and click through the summer air.

In places, the rocks are newborn and sharp, all edges and rifts.

The air everywhere smells of the dry butterscotch sap of Jeffrey pines, which rises up from those bark clefts like a sweet mountain brandy.



You can almost feel the presence of snow, even in the height of summer, in the way the slopes are shaped, the hardiness of the low shrubbery. All that green, which looks like moss from a distance, I believe is a combination of low growing huckleberry oak, manzanita, and bitter cherry.

Bitter cherry, growing more lanky here, is a new plant to me-- the first wild cherry I've ever met, with tiny vermillion berries and glossy bark.



And I was very surprised and delighted indeed to find a smooth acorn amidst the little leaves of this shrubby plant, which I was desperate to identify for at least half an afternoon. It's the small pleasures that matter...

Like a teardrop stone, a juniper, and a cloud.



Or the very last bloom of the mountain heather, a deep and ravishing pink.

One afternoon, we climbed to a lake high enough that we could look back across the other lakes we had visited. They appeared like blue footprints, trod in granite. Nearer us, on the boughs of fir trees, the cones glistened as if made of ground crystal or the glinting green of certain rocks. "Each of the senses is a way in to what the mountain has to give" (97), writes Shepherd.

The taste of little dry thimbleberries, sweet and tart and full of seeds. The smell of butterscotch and dust, and juniper. The wind down the mountain passes and through the many pines and firs a rush as loud as oceans, with the calls of chickaree and flicker, Stellar's jay, kingfisher, inside. The heat of hot rocks under a lake-cold skin, or the fibrous juniper bark against the fingers. Blue sky, blue lakes fallen from it, sharp granite, the evergreen, the goldenrod, the rowan red. Yes, Nan, I have found my way in.

Come dusk, my brother, father and I went religiously to sit on the boat dock with a pipe of Highland whiskey tobacco (a guilty pleasure) to watch the bats come out, and then the first stars. Of all the small pleasures, this one must be supreme—bats, stars, the lake water painted with wind and crepuscular light. Night is a whole new country, full of stars thick as the mica in granite. Night is when the black bears roam nearer, and the Milky Way makes a path through the mountain passes. Night, and the air had autumn in it, cold.

It is the hinge between dusk and night that I love best. And here we sit, on the edge of it, my brother and I hunched in precisely the same posture (it must be familial), watching the night come in. No matter the myriad distractions and stimulations of this world, nothing can replace the feeling of one's eyes, searching and searching the dusk blue just the same color as those dusty juniper berries, until at last—ah!— they find a star, a chip of quartz, and relax. That first star, Vega, clear as the alpine air. 

Notes from the Wild Folk: Coyote, Her Fur, and the Flowers of the Dunes

Out at Abbott's Lagoon, where the summer fogs hang thick and a family of river otters splashes through the fresh blue water, there is a narrow path at the base of a great sand dune, flanked on the other side by cattails and lagoon, where not so long ago a bobcat patrolled up and down on the regular, presumably from a resting place in the willows, catching marsh birds, the mice who run the dunes, the rabbits out in the scrub.

Recently, I heard tell from other trackers that there seemed to have been a change of guard—the bobcat seemed to have gone elsewhere. Yesterday, a tracking friend and I went rambling along the lagoon edge and through the dunes. We followed the trail where once the bobcat(s) walked. The tracks in the sand were loose and indistinct, and we could not determine whether they were bobcat or coyote. The tiny footprints of deer mice skittered everywhere. 

Then, we began to find small clumps of fur. 

Above is the largest clump we found. All of them contained some combination of coarse, sturdy, long guard hairs banded black, white, golden or rust, and a rough, wavier undercoat. Guard hairs are generally the hairs that lend an animal's coat its characteristic color, while also wicking away moisture and retaining body heat.

Whoever was scratching herself, snagging on bushes, or shedding, she left an excellent trail! I've never tracked by bits of fur before, but when we crawled into a thicket of willows that comprised the entrance to some sort of resting place, or den, or hideaway, we found several more matching guard hairs caught on the bark or in the humus below our hands and knees.



Guardian oak (or poison oak) characteristically guarded the thicket about seven feet in, so we didn't make it very far, but the stiff guard hairs in our fingers were like little treasures, with the story of a recent creature's passage in them.

We didn't want to linger long, because we felt we were trespassing on someone's secret and guarded front doorstep. (And what a doorstep! You can see the willows below to the left, and the beginning of the lagoon to the far right.)

While it is always a good idea to keep the mind and heart full of questions and myriad possibilities when tracking, and while I am no expert in the identification of small scraps of fur, we were very much reminded of the pelage of the coyote as we examined the hairs, and felt their coarseness. That banded black-cream-rust color very much matches the general coloration of these clever, quick beings. 

Coyote portrait, by Christopher Bruno

Out on the great sand-dune above the willow-den, where the coyotes sidetrot, the bobcats prowl, the deer wander, the deer mice skitter, the raccoons amble, all leaving the stories of their passage in lettered trails, we sat for a time amidst this netted skein of wild lives. At our feet, the dune strawberries made their own constellated nets, somehow surviving on sand, in salty air.

Tiny dune primroses (a fraction of the size (probably 1/10th!) of the evening primroses so similar in appearance that are flourishing in the garden) reached out through the sand and bloomed their bright primrose yellow. They must be drinking the salty fog alone, for there is no other water here at this time of year. 

Together, it seems to me that the dune strawberries and dune primroses must know the secret stories and lives of the animals who pass through the sand at dusk and dawn and the middle of the night; they probably know if it is a coyote or a bobcat who, for a little while, rules over the willow patch with its magnificent front porch. 

And we wondered, all along—was there a coyote watching us from just beyond, in the thick scrub of the hills, bemused that we would crawl on all fours into her hideaway, and take a few of her hairs like pieces of an old enchantment?

For Coyote is a wise old Creator, and knows well the ways of humans...

There is an old story says the world was made by Coyote, who got stranded at the top of Mt. Diablo when the ocean waters were high and right up around its craggy neck. He threw down mats of tule. These became land. He blew feathers from his paws, different kinds, and these became people. His wife, little Frog Woman, helped him, swimming. The world, born right out of Mt. Diablo, a womb of schist and granite, silica, sandstone and coal. The world, held up in the paws of Coyote, nudged gently by Frog.

There is an old story says once there was no death in the world, but Coyote brought it, saying yes you will hate me for this, but how else will there be renewal? How else can we all fit?

There is an old story says Coyote lost his daughter, and went to the Land of the Dead to bring her home again, alive, but in the last moment, carrying her up a mountain, he slipped, he looked back at her, he lost her truly, forever. Then, he cursed the laws he had made, but it was too late to change them, and so he howled long, knowing now the sorrow of humans.

- excerpt from my The Seven Dwarves of Mt. Diablo

The Juniper Way & Some Changes Afoot

A year or so ago, I wrote here about one of my very favorite books, Wise Child, by Monica Furlong. Those ramblings sum up rather well my adoration for the wisdom, the wildness, the strange beauty, of that slim book. Since around that time, a little phrase, "the Juniper Way"  has hung about my heart and mind, my feet and my hands like a guiding light. I can't articulate precisely what walking the Juniper Way means, but it is surely a way, as in the Taoist concept of the term. It is inspired by the wise Juniper, mentor to Wise Child, who is a doran. 

Juniper and Wise Child, from the cover of Wise Child

Juniper explains to Wise Child that a doran is the true word for what she is (not a witch, which can mean many things, and only sometimes what doran means). She tells Wise Child that a doran is one who has found a way into seeing or perceiving, and that the word comes from the old Gaelic root dorus, an entrance, gate or way. When Wise Child asks what is seen or perceived by these dorans, Juniper tells her "the pattern," and I imagine she means the great web of connection between all beings, that hitches the bobcat to the brush rabbit to the oatgrass to the dry soil to the earthworm to the magma heart of the earth, and the other way too, from the bobcat to the fir tree its carcass will one day feed to the oxygen the fir tree makes and the moon far above. And us, too, tangled somewhere in the middle of it all. 

When Wise Child asks what dorans do, Juniper then tells her: Some of us do healing things, like me and my herbs. Some of us sing, or write poetry, or make beautiful things. Some don't do anything at all. They often stay in one place, and they just know [...] how things are" (83). 

Each day, she schools Wise Child subtly in the ways of the doran. They gather herbs together, process them, milk the goat, learn the stars, the old stories of the world, the lives of animals. They engage deeply, joyfully, and with great hard work, with the simple everyday tasks of life, from sweeping to root-scrubbing to wildcrafting. 

Pearly Everlasting along the Muddy Hollow Trail-- a native summer medicine!

I try to bring the wisdom of Juniper into my every day, and so I've decided to share a bit of that Way in a slightly more orderly manner here. If you all enjoy, I shall carry on with it! My plan is to have three to four different themes, under which I will post new thoughts and images two to four times per week (!). They will obviously be little bit shorter than usual! And yes, things are going to be much busier around here than before...

The categories are as follows: 

Catskin, by Arthur Rackham

Patchwork Coat of Muses— in which inspirations, learnings, and small scraps of my own stories are shared. This will generally mean passages from wonderful books, ranging from fiction to ancient, medieval & indigenous history, ecology, natural history, folklore, etc. The personal writings will generally come from my morning exercises, in which I often choose a painting (from all over the place) or symbol (from my Book of Symbols) to spin a small yarn. (Wise Child learning astronomy, geography, poetry, calligraphy...)

Hands & Hearth— in which makings of the hand, held within the sphere of hearth and home, are explored, from felting to embroidering, herbalism, spinning, plant-dyeing, rabbit-tending. Tea too. (Wise Child milking the cow, sweeping the floor, learning to weave and dye, tending the herbs in the garden)

Notes from the Wild Folk—in which the Songlines of the wild land beyond my back yard are explored, from the tracks of coyotes, brush rabbits and ravens to the fruiting of the manzanita bushes, and the language of wrentit, towhee, robin, & more, and their places in the great web of being. (Wise Child and Juniper wandering the woods and heath, wildcrafting and learning the ways of the animals and plants of the self-willed land beyond the fence.)

Elk Lines— in which I share more occasional explorations of my latest Wild Tales by Mail project, this rewilding of the Handless Maiden fairy tale. Insights into the process, excerpts and some illustrations will be posted like small windows into this strange writerly realm. 

And finally, I would like to invite all of you dear and blessed readers to come join the strange blue gathering-place of my new Facebook page for Wild Talewort. This was a very big and difficult decision for me. I have resisted and avoided this for many, many years. Sometimes I want to throw in the towel and flee from the entire internet, for the way it dissociates and deadens, distracts and destroys, as much as it also connects and empowers individuals, artists, activists, in ways never seen before. And yet I must thank it, that I can make my living and my path as a tale-weaver in this world. This is an enormous blessing, a great gift, and sometimes a very difficult way to walk, let me tell you! 

And yes, surely Juniper had no blog, no Facebook, no none of it, but this is the world in which I live, and you live, and I am trying to navigate it the best I can, because it is where we all seem to increasingly gather. I know it is a very complicated and fraught issue, but at the end of the day I say to myself—yes indeed, old girl, you & your love could run off alá Juniper to the woods and meadows happily for the rest of your days, making do, milking goats, growing herbs, tending fires, off the human grid and deep in the wild grid (no easy feat, I should, and also one that I do dream of, and see somewhere down the line, if a bit far off), and maybe one day the world will shift and these Internet webs will be no more, nor many of the structures we so depend on. But for now, I am a writer, and a tale-maker, and it is no fun writing stories for yourself, nor is that quite the point, not in my heart. So there you have it, and here I am, on the Book of Faces, trying very hard not to run away again with my tail between my legs in terror. Do come and say hello!

If you would like to read some truly brilliant and more in-depth thoughts about said Book of Faces (a term I borrowed from Rima Staines), come along and read her excellent post on the subject here. You won't regret it. 

And you can expect the first of these Juniper Way sharings tomorrow!