and with special emphasis on sustainability, arts and ecology. We are based in Spencer Creek Valley, southwest

of Eugene, Oregon. Join us as we celebrate twelve years online.  Write us at “publisher at westbynorthwest.org”.

Our Mission

To give voice to “ordinary” people .

To build local and worldwide community

through the tools of Internet technology.

To be open to the work of the spirit,

To remember our past and rethink our future.

To celebrate our here and now.

Douglas Moss by Brooke Stone

Spring wears the clothes of winter and a smile
the coats and capes of gray, billowing rain

the pale muffler of chilly daybreak mist
the hat brimmed round with frost, or even hail

the fashion seems unchanging month to month
but yet, what of the smile which lingers now

is it sardonic, mocking our desires
for blue, for bright, for green, for fresh, for young

or is there something more in sympathy
with vernal dreams, silent like crocuses.

Jordan River at Nightfall by Patrick Hudson

I just put down (no puns intended) one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read, reluctantly saying good-bye to my new friends and neighbors of the fictional Coastal town of Neawanaka (in reality, Neskowin?) by the poet-novelist Brian Doyle. Now, I read parts of his lovely book The Grail: A year ambling and shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir in the whole wide world, and it was very good and insightful and brimming with that sharp taste of place, but nothing prepared me for the flights and heights of this new Oregon novel. It is the best book, steeped in the poetry of its characters and place and time, since Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion with an even wider, more magical vision of a particular place, mostly the Oregon Coast and some scenes travelling through the stages of landscapes that lead east, to the magic mountain, Mt. Hood.

Mink River, destined to become the quintessential, post-modern novel of Western Oregon life, embraces magical realism as the only brush possible to paint all the colors seen. Even though it takes place at the Coast rather than the Valley, City or High Desert, and is very embedded in the strata of the Pacific Marine ecosystem, its themes of timeless stories that live through generations and the changes that time works, is an everywhere theme, an anyplace kind of experience. Maybe that is one of the factors that makes Mink River so universal in spite of specific terms of unique place.

And the place becomes alive through the shamanistic compounding power of words, chants invoking the light, the seasons, the feel of air and touch, the contours of the mind, the beloved body and the beloved landscape, the animals, trees, and the sea and all of the sea. Love, death, pain and loss. Time and no time. Healing and no healing. And the celebration of people, human and other species. The plot weaves generations through Ireland, The First People’s NW Coast, and modern Neanwanka’s cultures, languages, and includes the point of view of Moses, the talking crow, who Doyle makes very believable. Really. Does this sound too good to be true? It ain’t! Check Mink River out. “The Department of Public Works” may never mean the same thing to your ears again. This book deserves to be read by every literate citizen, madman, madwoman and Pacific Northwesterner to become sooner than later the shared treasure that it already is. I was lucky to find a copy at the Eugene Public Library while it slowly circulates through the neighborhood book club, a cherished read.

I can see conversations where people will argue with passion who is the most significant character. The dying old nun, the sad doctor, Mike the dilgent sheriff or Worried Man, the sculptor … or … There may be a festival with people coming as their favorite characters. I’d like to see Moses the crow costume. Bryan Doyle deserves a coast highway named after him, along with his memorable characters.

Slug breaks fast

Native Land

Its outer contours I know well,
though altered by time and infirmity.
It is the inner landscape I turn to now.

Intending to roam the fertile
convolutions of mind, I find
only the fury and anguish
of overharvested terrain.

I listen for the faint breath
of muscle, nerve and bone,
bare scaffolding of being.

Deeper still I open
in welcome for whatever
wildness needs to emerge—

green shoots from the severed roots of history,
the heady scent of newborn hope,
the patient spores of species
Darwin never imagined.

Kathryn Ryan

Moments

When I think about joy,
where I have known it in my life,
what I remember are moments

when the illusion of separateness dissolves
between myself and any part of Creation,
when fear and haste leave me long enough

to be held by the song of a sparrow,
the canopy of trees, the arms,
or paws, or presence of another being,

to see into the universe through a starry sky
or the eye of a wild creature,
to be surprised by laughter—unexpected grace,

to slip into place,
for a moment,
into the joy of Oneness.

Kathryn Ryan

Ascending Manna

Small, loaved heads rise with mythic grace
as the earth parts to reveal
delicate caps of sepia, tan
and eggshell, elegant and silken
or stiff and roughly fluted.

In a dew-lapped field two caps appear
half risen edgewise, the larger curved
protectively above the smaller
like a humpback whale and her calf
arcing from the sea in holy synchrony.

Slowly they edge their way into morning,
fruit of the earth perched on silent stems,
till, sodden or sun-bronzed and crisped,
they disappear once more into the dewy depths

Kathryn Ryan

Forest in Spencer Creek Valley

One night walk we felt a huge bird fly right over us for a short distance over the picnic area, then call in a coaxing, almost sweet voice. A smaller bird flew through the dark to the large one. They cooed. We thought we were witnessing a parent owl teaching its young one to fly. Ten years ago one dark and overcast early spring morning, we spotted (no puns intended) a giant, all-white owl. This winter we are reading about Arctic Snowy Owls being spotted much farther south than usual. Climate change effects, winds and weather happen. Actually we suspect this kind of event has been happening for a while. We have not seen many owls here in “our” forest in the daytime. Rarely, one will be disturbed during the day and fly across the meadow from forested hill to forested hill. They fly low –swiftly and silently, beating the air with huge wings then glide to refuge. Big, white and brown blurs, we haven’t seen enough definition of features to tell what kind of owls they are. Now the question of what kind or species of owl has new implications of life and death for the owls. Not only what kind, but does it “really belong here?” Do the barred owls have the “right” to mate with spotted owls? In fact, one definition of a species is that they are a discreet population that cannot mate with another. If they can, they are not separate species.

The barred and hybrids owls may well not be the “aggressive” or “invasive” bully species they are being portrayed as, ruthless and destroying the spotted owls. They may well be the spotted owls’ one last chance at survival and passing on its genes. The spotted owl’s gene pool (read population numbers) shrank due to human-generated loss of old growth habitat. What little mature forest is preserved may take more time, maybe decades to re-establish the whole and complete ecosystem that sustains one species and all species, let alone a sub-group of species. All life is always interdependent, as we all have learned. Maybe allowing the wolf recovery that US Fish and Wildlife started is wiser than anyone knows yet. One reason that the spotted owls are still declining (even after a temporary halt in old growth logging) may be that the lack of intermediate predators like the wolves who eat a lot of rodents removes a biological drive for the various rodents to reproduce at higher rates that is necessary to sustain owls, also. No wolves, fewer rodents, fewer owls, spotted or otherwise. If the spotted owls find their cousins the barred owls acceptable, why do we arrogant humans think we know better?

We have seen big ravens act aggressive as most other birds do during mating times, chasing away competitors. It is more dramatic when a bird has a long wingspan.  We have also seen ravens coo and woo like love-birds, during the courtship period near Solstice. Are the ravens an aggressive species? Depends if you ask a meadowlark or a corvinologist. The answer is, sometimes, in some circumstances, like discouraging mating competition. Are barred owls aggressive and/or invasive?  Maybe, during mating fights with other males, or…? Or is the real scenario more complex? One man’s aggressive or invasive species may be a Northern Spotted Owl’s mate and its only hope to pass on its genes. (We don’t know many details yet… maybe it is the females fussing and driving off the competition.)

Over long years of observation we have heard at least five distinctive owl calls, suggesting five different species of owls have come through this valley where two branches of Spencer Creek meet. Over a period of thirty-five years we observed calls that suggest owls seem to deal with shifting territory as a given condition of owl life. We have collected a few different species of owl feathers, seen lots of owl barf under tall old trees, which has a high amount of little bones and fur in it. (You can always tell owl barf. Dogs love it.) They seem to eat mostly the small rodents, a useful diet as far as humans are concerned, otherwise we could be over-run with gophers and moles.

On Feb. 28, 2012 a new federal plan from the Interior Department and an accompanying presidential memo to save the spotted owl (in and of itself a worthy goal) was announced: we can have our forest cake and eat it too. Yes, we can save the spotted owls and continue to log in critical habitat. How you may ask? Isn’t loss of big old trees and the total forest habitat a major factor for the decline of the Northern Spotted Owl? Why no, it is really quite simple. The decline of the Northern Spotted Owl is really due to their mates, the Barred Owls. Just shoot the varmints, those pesky barred and hybrid owls. Never mind that we are once again telling the natural world whom to mate and how and where to live, how to behave. Let’s log again. That will solve all our economic problems. Hey, habitat may not be so important. It is the barred owls fault.

Sadly, the industry is just that; an “industry” whose operations are on a vast scale. The world wide Timber Industry does not use eco-foresters, low impact techniques such as draft horses, or skilled North American labor. In the 1980s, the timber industry blamed the spotted owl, a convenient scape-”bird,” while shifting industrial operations to S.E. Asia. Out-sourcing has been the real culprit why hundreds of thousands of union jobs were lost and logging towns have been dying on the vine. I would not trust the timber industry to spit to Avenue K let alone manage environmentally-sensitive logging in critical habitat. Now that they have over-logged British Columbia, Malaysia and Brazil, the Timber interests are looking back to the U.S. Pacific Northwest for raw logs that they can ship to markets like Japan, etc.

So, can we go back to industrial-scale logging if we only shoot the barred owl to save the spotted owl from its new mate? The scientist, Eric Forsman, a USFS researcher who started it all was quoted in the Associated Press story by Matthew Daly and (our brilliant) Jeff Barnard as saying,”There are not enough shotguns. It would be just like trying to wipe out the coyotes.” I guess the folks in Washington are trying to get prepared for an economic upswing. With commercial and residential construction, forest road building, heavy machinery manufacturing, etc.  A jobs (–note our repressed excitement and reverential tone of voice–) making policy by this current Administration, or the next? Yeah! There is only one little problem. What comes first, the spotted owl or the owl egg?

There is a light in the meadow tonight
burning fiercely bright,
like Jade herself.
Two candles on the new grave
under the old oak tree.
This morning I saw a dog-tooth violet
near the dog play-place
late blooming after all its fellows
have faded away this year.
I feel it bloomed for Jade Beauty,
jagged edges and sweet essence.

Jade Beauty, a doomed rescue

Obituary for a Collie
Notes from Collie Rescue, Spencer Creek Valley,  SW of Eugene

This afternoon a rescue collie named Jade Beauty, seven-going-on-eight years old and lively as a puppy, was put down. To outsiders the simplest way to explain the cause of this action by humans (myself, my husband and the vet) is she had a brain tumor. She may have had such a condition. That does explain her odd behaviors. Almost like rage seizures. Then afterwards, contrite mildness. Her madness and beauty are extinguished.

In spite of her troubles that drove me crazy at times, I miss her terribly. Yes, she barked in jags that went on and on, at the resident cat in our bedroom, often in the middle of the night. Yes, she attacked poor old Molly and then sweet, “co-alpha” Leia.  The other dogs are sporting scars from Jade. They became afraid to be in their own den (our home). Yes, Jade was aggressive around food. Yes, she was unpredictable and unadoptable. Jade was constantly needy and demanding. And yet I loved her. Jade had an almost human quality of relating to humans. She would look you in the eye, soul to soul, or so it seemed.

Her brightness, eagerness to learn, her extraordinary beauty, were sadly over-balanced by her protection instincts driven to the extreme (by attacking fellow dogs), her prey-driven relationships with smaller animals (except Hobbes who was raised partly by dogs) accompanied by her endless barking fits, and barking and vigorous frolicking to the point whamming into my cartilage-deprived knees for joy upon humans risings and returns, were all “tolerated to some degree” in the attempt to make life better for her and for the others in her life. But something literally in her make-up made her subject to sudden, violent mood swings. All the clicker training, behavioral and environmental modifications, better nutrition, anti-depressants, good walks and training sessions could not modify it. At the core of her doggie madness, I could not get through to her. She would lose herself in a fit of rage and or aggression. So who can I blame for her condition and who made her what she was, only this morning?

The careless backyard breeder who made a few bucks? The first family who adopted her and after great frustration with her, left Jade Beauty mostly alone in the backyard for five years? Myself, for not being able to have an other, pet-less world just for her? Not being a saint? Not being solely focused on her? Was she exposed to drugs as a puppy or in utero? Alcohol? Meth? It’s possible. I am so sad. I’ll never known why Jade was crazy and why we couldn’t make the difference for her. God knows we tried intensely for over six months. She loved our walks in the forest and was mostly well-behaved on the leash. Her last night on our nightly walks nearer the house (with leashes) Jade attacked Leia dog for no humanly understood reason, except maybe jealousy. When I reacted immediately to break it up, she turned on me, grazing my hand that was on her leash with her teeth. This morning she was the first one to spot a deer. She was straining against her leash eager for the chase. I had made the horrible decision that Jade must be put down. This unpredictable craziness could not go on. I could not have my other animals (or humans breaking it up) at constant risk of attacks. I brought her to Dr. Bob this afternoon, my heart heavy with failure and guilt.

May Jade’s spirit be chasing, running and barking with joy. May she be joyful forever with God. Perhaps someday, things like brain tumors or poor breeding practices, or exposure to drugs, lack of love and attention, or whatever it was that crossed your wires, will not interfere with our joy of being together once more. Good girl. Good Jade.

MG Hudson is editor of WxNW.org, occasional contributor and local Cascade Collie Rescue.org  Eugene Area Volunteer.

Rain Clouds Over Spencer Creek Valley by Brooke Stone

This article was written before the triple tragedy in Japan, March, 2011. Now with a large radioactive plume moving farther out in the North Pacific currents every day, the issues examined here mean even more. -Editor

The ice and snow that has persisted all week here in the hills is thawing at last. The air is still. The profound quiet tells me that the easterly air flow has weakened. When the wind is in the east, we hear the hum of the distant freeway and  the pleasanter sounds of train whistles. Perhaps it will rain in a day or two. I’ll miss the pretty patterns of thin ice stretched across puddles, the ice sculptures and tiny castles rising out of the mud, and the glistening frosty mushrooms which I know will dissolve into black slime once they thaw. But rain will be welcome. Even though the soil is saturated and the creeks and rivers are running full, our land wants more. West of the Cascades the Pacific Northwest is a water world. Its trees and all the green things in the forest want lots of water for as many months as possible. The summer is almost a dormant season. In the Valley, those sodden lawns and squishy paths are telling you; “We are wetlands. Once we were swamps and the river swallowed us many winters. We want to touch the water before it flows to the sea.”

The sea. In all my life I have never lived farther from the sea than I do now. I crave it to be near it, to wade and swim in it, to smell the brine and scents of life, to stare at the endlessly changing wave patterns and colors. It is the source of such incredible life. It seems eternal, a comfort, though not comfortable. Home to the first life, teaming with countless plankton, photosynthesizing plants and their predators, producing oxygen, storing carbon. What a perfect balance. It is inconceivable that we could ruin the ocean, that anything could fundamentally change it.

Of course we know that we are changing the ocean. The water that flows from the land is filled with chemicals and toxic minerals which we produce, and which are to be found in the tissues of creatures in the remotest seas. Rivers which once flowed to the sea like the Colorado, flow no more, and the Sea of Cortez is more saline and stagnant because of the dams and irrigation projects that rob a river dry. Closer to home, imagine the huge delta that passes San Francisco as it enters the sea. Imagine it without dikes, salt evaporation ponds, elaborate patchwork quilts of housing and farming projects. Imagine it clean, teaming with birds and fish, its waters edged with beautiful grasses and trees. Imagine it the color of real water. We know what we have done. We know that human induced global warming is causing sea levels to rise and coastal estuaries to flood. We know that the huge increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide in this century is acidifying the ocean waters to such an extent that mollusks grow thin and fragile shells. Species like cod that once fed the world are now close to extinction. But what most of us do not know is far worse.

We assume that the oceans of the earth have always been as they are now, oxygenated from surface to bottom, suitable for life as we know it, dependent on oxygen, if of the animal kingdom, or if of the plant kingdom, using carbon and sunlight to photosynthesize, producing oxygen as the byproduct of this metabolism. The Black Sea is not quite like this. Its deep waters are anoxic. Like the dead zones we have created off our Gulf Coast, no species dependent on oxygen can live at its depths. There, species of bacteria metabolizing sulfur and producing hydrogen sulfide thrive. Imagine what would happen if the Black Sea became entirely anoxic. The sulfur-dependent bacteria would multiply faster in the surface sun and warmth. They would send out clouds of hydrogen sulfide gasses, poisonous to sea and land creatures alike. Imagine if the depths of all the oceans became anoxic. Or if all of all the oceans became anoxic. It could happen. It has happened, according to many paleontologists.

Peter Ward specializes in extinctions. He has published on the Permian extinction with Greg Retallack, and has done much to refute the notion that asteroid impacts can explain all mass extinctions. Under A Green Sky, Smithsonian Books, 2007 is a splendid but chilling analysis of our planet’s slide towards another mass extinction. Ward recalls that though  the world’s oceans were thoroughly anoxic in the earliest days of life on earth, fossil sedimentary rocks contain chemical markers indicating the  dominance of sulfur metabolizing life forms in later times. Oceans experienced periods of anoxia during the Permian extinction and the Jurassic-Triassic boundary extinction. Other lesser periods of extinction  such as that ending the Paleocene epoch, also show indications of ocean anoxia. Should the surface waters of the oceans cease to be oxygenated, the results are mass extinctions. Clouds of hydrogen sulfide gasses rising from the sea destroy the earth’s ozone layer, and the sun’s un-filtered rays kill the photosynthesizing plankton and land plants alike. On land and sea, animals starve or succumb to the difficulties of living in a very low oxygen atmosphere.

How could this happen to us? We take for granted our wonderfully oxygenated oceans but this is perhaps their less common state over the history of the planet. Today’s ocean currents carry cooler fresher water down from the icy north, mixing it with equatorial currents bringing warm water to the surface. But what if there were no cold icy waters, if all the glaciers were gone? Then warm oxygen-poor saline water would settle to the bottom. The currents would slow, the winds would die. And sulfur loving bacteria would become dominant. But what could cause the glaciers to melt? We can all answer that question; rapid increases of greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane. Volcanoes spew forth gasses. So do the activities of six, seven, ten billion humans. We cannot explain  away the possible near future mass extinction phenomena on  eruptions of lava over thousands of square miles, such as formed the Siberian Traps at the end of the Permian. But rapid though the changes to our planet may be, we will not live to see the end of life as we know it. And we can do a lot to slow the rise of greenhouse gasses, to mitigate our destructive practices on land and sea, to help others get closer to nature and to feel as passionate as we do about saving species. And when it all just feels too depressing, go to the beach. Take deep breaths and check out the pelicans. They used to be so rare. Now they are everywhere. See, we can do good things, sometimes.

Reida Kimmel gardens and raises animals on the Fox Hollow side of Spencer Creek Valley. Many of her articles first debut in <a href=”http://biology.uoregon.edu/enhs/frame.html”>The Eugene Natural History Society</a> Newsletter. See some of her article listed under Writers.

First published March, 2011.