I had just arrived at Main Camp for the Summer--I remember reading the papers after breakfast, friends with sad faces....

It snowed again--I have pictures. I might post them when the papers are written and the finals taken. In the meantime, I am finally starting to feel at home. It isn't PT, but I do love this place. Tonight I have been camped out in the Stimson Room, Williston Library (picture above)--at a big oak table in front of the arched window in the picture--there are icicles hanging from the windows and snow on the ground outside. This is a quiet room so there are others here studying, but no chattering. The shelves in the room include the modern poetry collection, and original poems submitted to the Glascock Poetry Competition. Former "contestants" include Sylvia Plath, Katha Pollitt, James Agee, James Merrill...all undergraduates and mostly unpublished... and most come back to judge later contests. There are pictures of judges and poets sitting at the tables or on the couches: WH Auden, John Crowe Ransom, William Carlos William's notes to contestants are framed, Syliva Plath's typed entry is here, and a beautiful picture of her with Marianne Moore (who judged the year she won)....

I haven't been writing poetry or even reading it this night--rather I have been working with water schemes in Victorian Wales--dams, reservoirs, sunken villages, water politics played out in the popular media and Parliamentary Papers...and I have been learning the intricacies of finding journal articles--both online and here in the library--Mount Holyoke has had subscriptions to journals and newspapers since 1837--and a lot of those papers are still here...as well as journals from scholars all over the world writing across disciplines and with great insight--I get lost in books, and have to remember to go walk around the lake--if it freezes hard enough tonight I might even be able to go check on the beavers...last seen when canoe-ing in the Fall.

Happy Advent (of Winter, of Solstice, of all the festivals of lights that guide us through these darkest days...)

Yeah! Woke up to snow this morning
The snow girl (cuz this is women's college), was gender appropriate, but as the day wore one, she became a campaigner for human justice, too--she was given some signs asking for clothes, that would then be donated to a relief effort of one sort or another....by evening, she was fully outfitted.

The picture is from inside the library with snow outside. I got a phone call from a Port Townsend friend (Jay Pine) while I was standing here. Thanksgiving is designed to make people homesick, and snow adds to that. Tomorrow I will fly to Wash DC and see Aster!

I know I need to post about the trip across the country and something about school--suffice to say that it is wonderful and a LOT of work , a lot of reading and a lot of learning French...I am studying Urban Africa and Environmental Change in Victorian England and Forest in France, and World Politics and how to build maps in GIS....however this afternoon I took a few hours and went canoe-ing and that was very wonderful.

(I guess I can only post one picture...the rest are on my page...)

Red Dragon Summer Fete
Sunday August 19, 2007
3pm --till the fire fades and the songs stop…

Ande’s driving across the country
Betsy’s home from the Park for good
Eric and Randy are on call with Marine 1-6, Batt 1-6, etc
Gus and Anders are on Summer Vacation
Breskin is OPEN
Laura and Megan,
Leslie and Jerry are all home enjoying the garden
Evan and Bob are working
The peacock is losing his tail feathers
Fluffy is mousing,
The deer ate the sunflowers, but there are plenty of others….
the grass is still green
the blackberries and apples might be ripe...

And we are all celebrating!

Badmitton, volleyball, new potatoes, grilled fish, open grill, potluck, giant perpetual salad, (bring salad ingredients and watch it grow)--we will provide some beer and root beer and root beer floats and bonfire, bring instruments,

Friends from far and away (and nearby) are welcome to camp. Sat Morning hike Mt. Townsend, Sunday bike to Fort Worden Bunkers, other good PT Stuff in the works--

There is talk about boating (kayaking, sailing...) to the Ajax Café on Saturday evening—call or email if you want help finding a vessel or to be included in the dinner reservation

Emergency responders on-call only --- park at 3723 San Juan driveway
All others -- park 3737 San Juan Ave or at Blue Heron School

R.S.V.P.

I love Spring, and I love the lengthening days, and the green, and the flowers, and sweet scents, and the long lingering twilight, longer each night, and my delight is made richer and more complex by forethought of Summer-- dry grass, harsh yellows, the days shortening. When it is Spring, I think that I don't like Summer. But today it was warm, a languid, long slow warm, and it truly felt like Summer, like there are hot days, and less clothes, and joy to be found in seeds and fruits ripening.

I have been stuck here in Port Townsend, because it is such a wonderful vantage point for Spring and Solstice, and I was starting to worry that I was too stuck, and that I was going to have a hard time leaving. But the promise of Summer is warm, and dry and cutting the dry grass and stacking the bales and making the lots ready for the Fair, and so I am ready. And I am ready to go to New England for the Fall---I am glad that I am going for Fall and that New England is famous for this season, I am not sure why Massachusetts feels stranger than England--but it does--however Oxford is not famous for Fall, it is a Spring place too.

Lots of concrete and asphalt between me and both these places---4th of July highways, and cross-country drives and needing to find concrete curb makers to finish my work...

(picture: The Boys of Summer--OCF Big Boy Crew)

As many of you may know, spending 15 years as a land use planner watching people fight over fence lines and water systems extensions and 21 years at the Oregon Country Fair watching people fight over camp sites and booth relocations, I have developed a fascination with land use disputes on a global scale. One of the longest running such disputes, little known in North America, involves 160,000 Sawahari living in refugee camps for 32 years. The Sawahari Refugees are nomadic people, and traditionally they roamed in the Western Sahara, in lands now included in Mali, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania.

The Moroccans and the Sawahari are talking (in New York)!

Reuters Alert Net --Breaking Africa's longest Running Land Dispute
www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/...5455-1.htm


photo of Dermi El Kasr--border of Western Sahara and Mauritania posted by Western Sahara Project/Flickr

More Info if you wish:

International Crisis Group: Western Sahara-Cost of Conflict
www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm

Western Sahara: Out of the Impasse,
www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm

A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal;
And every blossom on the bush
Adjusts its tumbled head --
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy morning's ride.



Where you at?

This question spun me around the other day—just an electronic query from an electronic friend—might have meant—geographically, where in the world are you? Or a regionalist version of How are You? Or maybe not a query at all, a comment—You’re crazy, girl.

The Where and When—I am very much at home, I leave my little cottage and garden to bike out to the bluff above the bay. I carry my fire pager, and respond to the Fire boat, if rescuing is required, otherwise, I am reluctant to leave home. I am eating my cupboards and freezers bare, inviting people to share meals made from my stores of bulk beans and rice, spices, frozen berries, ice cube trays of coconut milk, shrimp and salmon, adding fresh greens from the garden, garlic and onion thinnings, avoiding shopping, like it is a sacrilege to go the “stores” when my world is so abundant.

There are only 17 days left until the solstice, only seventeen days of the light lingering longer, past evening, light until night time, not dark until 10 pm, light again at 4am . Only seventeen more days and then it starts back the other direction. And so it seems a duty to stay put in this place where I have such a perfect vantage point.

If I am north of the 45th parallel, at a point particular on a sphere, that is in a specified orbital relation to a larger, far distant sphere, and I am spinning at a known rate, what kind of math do I need to learn to calculate if this is indeed the perfect vantage point for the lengthening of the days? And where do I find the dictionary that defines perfect?

Leaving flowers on your electronic doorstep

I was riding my bike down a trail, on the way out to Fort Worden the other day, happy that it was spring and sunny, a little disappointed that there was still a hint of winter chill in the air, when I was overcome by the scent and colour of Black Cottonwood leaves, freshly unrolled, still damp and glistening, like moths drying their wings. The scent haunted me the rest of the afternoon, so sweet and fresh and new.

Years ago, I met a Canadian Native American herbalist, Norma Meyers, who taught herbology through the art of "Simple-ing"--she taught us to choose six plants that were present in our region that we saw in our daily, weekly or seasonal activities. and learn how to use all parts of the plants, what they looked like through the seasons, how they smelled, how to process the roots, the leaves the flowers. At the time, I lived in a small cabin with a giant patch of comfrey in front---the comfrey had been planted by Ryan Drum, a retired professor of botany and biology who had departed Fairhaven to live in seclusion on top of Waldron Island in the less visted waters of the San Juans. The yard included some other exotics as well, hops that had been grafted onto cannabis plant root stocks for an experiment in brewing, and Chinese peonies with flowers the size of dinner plates. In uncharacteristically underachiever mode, I choose just one herb to study, comfrey. I dug and peeled and chewed the roots, I used the flowers are toothpaste, and made tea from the leaves. Comfrey became a friend.

Another notable quality of Norma's teaching was the idea, echoed by Bach Flower Remedies and Homoeopathy, that you can "invoke" the spirit of the plant, the healing qualities, just by remembering them, thinking about the way the sun shines through the branches and leaves of the Willow tree to relieve a headache, or the straw-green colour of sun tea made from summer-picked raspberry leaves as an tonic for cramps.

I have created in my mind an elixir of April-born, damp-green Black Cottonwood leaves. I will build an imaginary blown glass perfume bottle, and remember to unstopper it when I am in the those dark, grey places that seem to have forgotten the hope of spring and nature.

And I will send it to all the missing bumblebees, in case it is what they need.

www.globalforestscience.org/rese...OPLAR