In the Bleak Midwinter

Winter’s threshold approaches the northern hemisphere this week, the time of year when the subsolar point–the point at which the sun meets the earth at a 90 degree angle, its greatest intensity–reaches the Tropic of Capricorn at 23.5 degrees south of the Equator. The earth’s tilt in December holds the arctic zone of the northern hemisphere in complete darkness. 

A Midwinter day in Western Washington, at about 47 degrees north, comes with eight hours of low-angle (i.e. low intensity) light and sixteen hours of darkness. An inverse of Midsummer, often paired with amplifying meteorological conditions like the atmospheric river flowing above us this week, this time of year has been appropriately dubbed “The Big Dark.”

Heavy rain is falling now, a staccato on the metal roof. The woodstove ticks along with its own rhythm, like an enthusiastic concert goer who can’t clap to the beat. The dog has given up on outside and has parked herself in front of (and at times, and alarmingly so, underneath) the wood stove. An inch and a half of rain has fallen in the last 24 hours; an inch and a half will fall in the next 24 hours, too.

Stay Social, Stay Busy, Stay Active, Stay Out

Ask a Northwesterner how they make it through a winter, and you’re likely to hear something along these lines: 

“Make plans with friends. Keep them. Force yourself to stay social.”

Or, “Pick a hobby–build a wooden kayak, knit a sweater, take up artisanal bread baking, build a bicycle from parts–and keep busy.”

Or, “Exercise a lot–you need the endorphins, you need to stay in shape.”

Or, “Get outside, as often and for as long as possible.”

All good advice, and I remind myself of and practice these things annually. Especially the last–getting outside for long stretches–for its particular effectiveness at battling winter blues as well as other ailments and illnesses.  

Nadir

nādᐧir – the lowest point; the point on a celestial sphere directly below an observer

The term Midwinter is confusing today because we recognize four seasons. But the year was once conceptualized as halves–summer and winter. The seasons changed at the autumnal and vernal equinoxes; the solstices were the halfway points in the bi-seasonal annual cycle.

In the case of Midwinter, the darkest hour is also the inflection point. The moment in which the earth’s axis reaches its most extreme tilt is followed by the moment in which it begins its slow tilting in the opposite direction. With each degree of tilt, an extra measure of daylight, meted out in minutes over the course of months until we arrive at Midsummer.

Stay Alone, Stay Idle, Stay Rested, Stay In

I have to wonder, considering the rest of the living world in winter, why we pretend as if winter changes nothing. As if we have no excuse to be less productive, less goal oriented, less driven, less social. As if summer was an ideal, one we were obligated to operate from, regardless of the external conditions.

There is less, far less, light in the winter. Every other living thing (though I say this hyperbolically, not definitively) is affected by the halving of solar energy around the Winter Solstice. But when we experience the symptoms of less sunlight–depression, low energy, increased sleep requirements, increased caloric intake, slowed cognition–we pathologize it as seasonal affective disorder. As in, How dare you be affected by the season!

While every other living thing slows or halts its living processes entirely, we fight our inclinations to seek solitude, welcome stillness, rest more, stay in. 

Weird.

I want to practice resilience, not denial. I want to learn how to accept what is, whether that inspires me to tarp up in Goretex and brave the elements or nap under a wool blanket in front of the wood stove. 

(Em)Bracing Winter

I love etymology. I love word families. Like this one, which root derives from ancient words for arms: brace, bracing, embrace.

Brace: noun–a supportive device; verb–to support, to prepare for something difficult or unpleasant

Bracing: adjective–fresh and invigorating

Embrace: noun–a hug, the act of accepting and supporting something; verb–to hug, to eagerly accept

I love to braid these definitions into a wintery mix of an invitation. I love the thought of deriving fortification (if joy is too big a stretch) by facing difficulty with open arms. 

One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji

About a year ago, I attended a Hokusai exhibit at Seattle Art Museum. I waited until the last, maybe the second-to-the-last weekend to go; the line of the faithful, eager to pay homage to Hokusai’s iconic work The Wave in person, began at the second floor escalator. The procession ascended the spiraling escalators to the fourth floor Simonyi Galleries, where an attendant, tracking the foot traffic exiting the show, ushered us in, one, two, three at a time.

What struck me the most about the exhibit, as had struck me while an art history student receiving my education on Japanese art one fall semester years ago, was Hokusai’s series 100 Views of Mount Fuji. I was struck by his daring departure from the school in which he was trained, with its emphasis on portraiture. I was struck by his devotion to this place, this land feature, to showing up again and again and again with the intention of seeing it anew in all its constancy.

Hokusai was on to something. I felt it strongly. I sensed its kinship with the pull I felt toward the mountains here, toward the woods, toward the places I’ve seen and visited a hundred times yet still feel called back to again and again.

Early in the morning, my song shall rise to Thee.

When I was a girl, my family gathered in our living room at six o’clock each morning for devotions. We stood–my three sisters and I in matching flannel nightgowns our grandma sewed for us, my parents in pajamas and bathrobes–and devoted the day to God. Devotions were opened with the singing of a hymn, after which someone read aloud a chapter or a number of verses from King David’s Psalms or King Solomon’s Proverbs. They concluded with prayer. 

I remember always being cold in the winter, drafty as our hundred year old house was, frugal as my dad was with the thermostat. My sisters and I wrapped ourselves in our down comforters (which we called Dicke-deckes–a made up German term my mom coined in her first generation childhood, roughly translating to “fat little blankets”) and huddled over the cast iron grate work of the heat ducts, creating pockets of warmth while we waited for devotions to begin.

When I was older, our next door neighbor Addie told us that she could hear us singing on summer mornings when her north facing stairwell window was open, and our south facing living room windows were too. She’d been listening to us sing at six o’clock on summer mornings for years.

Devotions has been a trigger word, a cringey three syllables for me ever since. Tied up, irrevocably I thought, with all the triggering, cringey lexicon of my childhood in a high control religious group. So I was surprised to find myself again turning to the word last week on Cascade Head.

Eagle Poem 

(part I) by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear,

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

…

Devotions

I think I knew I’d walk the headland each morning before I even left for the coast. I didn’t know the specifics of the trail up Cascade Head–how long, how arduous–nor the weather I would encounter. But I knew I’d want a regular encounter with this place while I was a guest at its base. I knew that, like Hokusai, I sensed a devotional pull, a call to a depth of experience available only with repetition and attention.

So up I went, first thing. On most mornings my friend, host and collaborator, Josh joined me. A couple mornings I walked up by myself. I tried to empty my mind of anything that was not of the place each morning as I walked. I expressed gratitude.

Back in the little cabin at Sitka Center, I thought of the devotions of my childhood. The important thing seemed to be that they happened first thing each morning. Before anything: teeth brushing, dressing. Before everything: caffeine, breakfast. The first moments of consciousness, the very best, those moments were for God. 

I wondered, in the little cabin, what would occupy the overlap in a venn diagram of my childhood family devotions and my week at the base of the headland. Something of both the format and the primacy of devotions; something unnamable but originating in, essential to, the headland itself.

What’s your love language? I wondered of the place one day as I lingered in the wind. Is it quality time? Acts of service? Words of affirmation? Physical touch? What can I give to you?

One morning, alone (which is meaningless in a place like this other than to say without another human around), I read Eagle Poem out loud on the summit. To the summit. Some mornings I wrote. One morning I laid down on the damp ground next to the summit marker and syncopated the pounding in my head with that of the surf that echoed below me. One morning I stared into a fog so thick I couldn’t see anything beyond the line where the summit ground sloped away.

+

And one morning Josh and I met up with a pair of conservation technicians with The Nature Conservancy. Together we pull- hack- and chain-sawed encroaching Sitka limbs at the edge of an important butterfly habitat meadow. I’d joined Josh for the week with the hopes of visiting Opal Creek together, but it’s still closed to the public and we were unable to gain access. Then we found ourselves in the company of friends who cared for a different place–the one we were in–who invited us to join them in that care. 

We’ll go back in the summer, when the headland is blooming, to join our new friends and watch for the flashing iridescence of the Oregon silverspot butterfly. We’ll go back to pull blackberries from the headland and Scotch broom from the meadow. 

We’ll keep pulling on the thread of this story until it’s done unraveling. Then we’ll stand in the pile of wonder we’ve co-created and know that this must be the place. Just as we knew it in Opal Creek. Just as is always the case, no matter where we find ourselves.

A pair of eagles circled us on our sixth and final morning together on the headland.

Eagle Poem, continued 

by Joy Harjo

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we 

Were born, and die soon within a 

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.

Cities can crawl over forests…but they can’t sprawl into the sea. Not much. Not yet. And that wildness shimmering at the edge of things, lidded and liquid, how lucky those who live near it are to have such a gorgeous reminder of our connection to the unbuilt world.

Cascadia Field Guide

The Lay of the Land

I arrived here, far from home, at the wild threshold between Oregon and the ocean, an hour before sunset on Monday. I’d been driving since sunrise and I wanted to land a bit upon landing. 

I met my dear friend and photographer Joshua Berman in the parking lot of the Neskowin Beach State Recreation Site. Together we walked along Kiwanda Creek to where it enters Neskowin Creek to where it enters the Pacific Ocean. The air, which had been still and sun-warmed all day, began to cool and move. Gently, at first, and with increasing adamance as we walked north, away from the setting sun behind Proposal Rock. 

Without a cloud on the horizon, the sun dropped fast and without fanfare. We stopped to witness the day’s end, and, in the tidal flux, spotted a gull working hard to wrest something from the surf. We watched as she dragged a fist sized object higher and higher onto the beach. We walked toward her, she stayed her ground. She stayed her ground when the waves lapped at her feet. As they receded again, she worked furiously to relocate and continue hauling her quarry through the sand. 

A crab! As we drew closer we made out ten legs kicking and clawing at the gull’s beak, which pecked back again. We watched, riveted, as the gull’s persistence overpowered the crab’s fight. She pecked through the carapace and gulped its contents as the crab’s legs flailed. The spectacle more than made up for the ordinariness of the sunset.

We made our way back to Sitka Center for Art + Ecology, where Josh is partway through an artist-in-residency. We stopped where the road ended on the edge of the Salmon River estuary in the complete darkness that is the Oregon Coast under a new moon–an entire mountain range and half a lunar cycle away from competing light sources. The Milky Way arced above us and Josh traced Cygnus, Lyra, and Aquila that constellated around it in the southwestern sky. 

Sea and starry sky continued to welcome me through the night. I slept on a window seat next to a window open just enough to admit a cold stream of air, the distant roar of the surf, and glints of starshine through the Sitka spruce branches. I dreamt of waking and dressing in layers and leaving at first light to walk up Cascade Head.

Sunrise

We woke, dressed in layers, and left at first light to walk up Cascade Head. The trail began by  climbing through stout, moss-laden Sitka spruce. We broke out of the trees onto the southern shoulder of the headland just as the sun crested the Coastal Range. It cast its slanting light across the foothills whose treetops raked it into golden rays and shafts. The Salmon River wound its way to the mouth of the estuary below the headland in molten pewter. Waves foamed where river met ocean and splayed themselves onto the sandy spit separating the two. 

We took a little spur trail to a peek-a-boo view of the ocean and the coastline to the north. A Sitka spruce jutted away from the slope just where the trail reached its edge, a continuation almost. A thick arm right at foot level, another a perfect seat–wide, flat, covered in moss, welcoming. I stepped out onto the arm. Hugging another limb with my arm, I tested out the seat. My legs flushed with the precarity of my position over the bank that fell away below me. I sat there, heart racing, legs quivering, until I felt myself recalibrate to a sense of safety. This tree was solidly anchored; this was an exposure to fear, not risk. I lay back, Rockabye, Baby in a treetop cradle.

But it was a cold, clear morning. Too cold to lay there for long. Josh and I continued up the trail, through the wide open, nearly treeless headland, to its summit at 1,217 feet above the estuary where we began.

A few years ago, at a reunion of my Opal Creek community just south of here, we passed Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass around in the evenings, after my friends’ wee ones had gone to sleep. Over the course of two nights we read her essay “Burning Cascade Head” to each other. In it, she recounts the first people of this place, the Nechesne, who, as part of their ritual for inviting the salmon back to their natal river, burned the headland annually. 

“I cannot tell you more of that high and holy place,” she writes of her own ascent on the same incised trail. “Words blow away. Even thought dissipates like wisps of cloud sailing up the headland.”

We began our descent. Back on the shoulder where we first broke through the trees, we encountered a pair of hikers bundled in gear embroidered with The Nature Conservancy’s logo. They carried a chain saw, a pole saw. A bow saw and hard hats were strapped to their packs.

I smiled and walked by. Josh, a decidedly different creature than I when it comes to encounters with strangers, stopped and struck up a conversation. At the click of his camera I turned around to see him snapping shots of the pair–Catherine and Chase, they told us when I backtracked, reluctantly, to join the conversation. 

They worked for The Nature Conservancy and they were pointed toward a meadow on the north slope of the headland, just off its summit, where they were limbing the encroaching Sitka spruce. The meadow, protected as it was from the summer’s north wind by the Sitka, was important habitat for the threatened Oregon silverspot butterfly. 

“She’s a conservation writer,” Josh said, nodding toward me, “And I’m a conservation photographer. We’re here for a residency at Sitka, collaborating on a project that responds to this place.”

“Well, if you want to join us tomorrow, we’ve got two workdays planned up on the headland. We could use a couple volunteers,” Catherine invited. 

“Yes!” I blurted out, responding for us both. “Where? When? We’ll be there.”

Sunset

At the end of our day, after descending the trail and touring the 80 acre Grass Mountain conservation project the Sitka Center manages, we again climbed the headland for sunset. We ran into Catherine and Chase at the end of their workday and confirmed our plans for the morning.

“Did you see any elk this morning?” Catherine asked.

“We did!” I said, excitedly. “Just a rump, through the salmonberry thickets below us,” I added, pointing downtrail. “But I’ll take it.”

“They’re up on the headland now,” she reported. “You’ll see more of them, just up the trail.”

The very next stretch of trail and there they were, grazing above the pounding surf. We walked by slowly. Josh’s camera clicked away, and I tried to keep up with it, taking as many mental images as I could, hoping they’d take purchase in my mind.

I climbed back into my tree cradle. I laid there long enough to feel some ease, which came more quickly on the second visit, and the roar of the surf in the hollow cavity of my lungs. I laid there reflecting on the enormous gift that my first 24 hours in this place had been: this tree, our encounter with Catherine and Chase, the opportunity that stretched out in the days ahead, the generosity of my friend to let me crash his residency, his studio and cabin spaces, the elk that seemed unperturbed by our cohabitation of this place. 

We watched the sun drop into the ocean. Another quick, clear, affair. We began our decent. 

The elk had moved farther uphill and now straddled the trail, glowing in the golden light that lingered. I counted thirteen of them, one with two-points on his developing antlers. They watched us with placid curiosity, and we matched their energy and watched back. 

Day one, I thought to myself. Holy wow. (My favorite prayer.)