Flower Phoenix

By Michael H. Kew

Rains of Holy Week. The snows of Tax Day. Smelted skies hermetically sealed. No Pink Moon moods. Again a southern Oregon coast April as wet wing of winter. Mercurial light fights lights of the alive. No bees, no blooms, no butterflies, no botanical beatniks. Deciduous souls: red alder, bigleaf and vine maple, hazel, cascara, lichen-laced white oak—all bare and asleep weeks deep into this extended chill.

But there be murmurs. Cozy sanct of a warm rain without wind. An agreeable surf day—a raft of sea lions slowly lists south, scattering gulls to the ambient drift. Clouds split—silhouetting western ridges, bristling with firs, a topaz sunset saturates the innocence of froggy dusk.

Easter upriver. Piercing rattlecall of a northern flicker on a tanoak fills the banshee void left by a varied thrush and a pileated woodpecker that fled in the wee hour snow shower that cracked into another fog-dripped dawn swelling around secret misty mysteries. The center of my mind reverberates with the woodpecker's siren, his wild provincial cry split by resonant heartful drumming, establishing his territory. His third consecutive spring here shrieking to mate, hammering down on that old hollow crooked madrone.

Murmurs—Aprilese.

And windows.

Rebirthese.

Hollow—the opening—maybe an equinoctial metaphor—time prying warmth from the cave of frost—new hopeful leafiness looming—softening balming of air and my attitude.

Since late-January I've drawn weekly drives in the large white diesel pickup owned by my neighbors who are away for three months. They asked me to maintain their truck. So I do.

Another roady fling to peel eyes to the higher Sun. I zoom pass lurks of dirty snow in dim crannies. The two paved lanes thread miles of dense unnaturally uniform Douglas-fir stands (units) of varying age. When a unit is left to grow approx 40 years up from seedling the site will be slain for local sawmill. Then replanted. Cyclical industrial monoculturing since the harmoniously diverse areal forests—many of them redwood—were last century leveled.

Elsewhere conifers were granted by white man and his frantic wildfire suppression. Fir seeds quickly spread across windy slopes. Land-clearing was unneeded per millennia of wildfire and indigenous care. Wide fertile upland Coast Range prairies and meadows were convenient canvases throughout the lower Chetco River watershed. Hence modern map misnomers: Stump Prairie—Horse Prairie—Yank Prairie—Lookingglass Prairie—Northern Prairie—Mislatnah Prairie—High Prairie—Long Ridge Prairie—Quail Prairie. None now true prairies to the naked eye. Rich erstwhile habitats a checkerboard of sterile South Coast Lumber (SCL) plantations and Bureau of Land Management/National Forest swaths featuring overwhelmingly young- and middle-aged fir stands, covert tree farms themselves far removed from the virgin yorescapes of Curry County.

Earth Day. Atop Nook Creek's concave once-lush watershed I park the truck on a gravel logging road. Squint into a daylit mode of astral trinity—Sun, deep lagoon of sky, its cloudreef whites mirroring my far islands of thought.

Flecked with black snags and stumps and five-year-old firs lays the flaxen post-snow-smashed grass of Wilson Prairie. The grass looks sad but the stumps sadder. They elicit Kerouac and one of his many Big Sur anthropomorphisms: "The tree stumps say 'We are the tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth.'"

Here in April of epochs past were many tendrils but few if any stumps. There were wide undulations folding down into redwooded canyons and up to raw distant peaks and ridges draining the heavy winter rains and snowmelts nourishing infinities of pollen and nectar, of green wind-kissed brome and thistle urging winged singers and buzzings in crystal winds, and purple lupine and irises were popping and manzanitas bursting and tiny blue petals blinking in the bristling ceanothus. There were huge soarings of raptors over green seas of prey, avian song as reverie, bears and elk and deer grazing in edenic afternoons. It was all happening. All dripping from an opening in deep natural time.

Speaking of. The month's name may have stemmed from the Latin Aprilis which was the second month in Rome's ancient calendar, Aprilis culled from the also-Latin aperire ("to open"). Circa 6 CE, Roman grammarian Verrius Flaccus created the Praenestini, an elaborate inscribed fasti (calendar) stating that, in April, "the fruits and flowers and animals open up, both by sea and by land."

At Wilson Prairie too last spring I'd puzzled over human intrusion through biodiversities and industrial historicals, ecosystems of supplies and demands, of weather averages, of unnatural natures in reverse that suddenly were in fact stopped and jerked forward, reopened—freed—by fire.

Lightning-lit, that fire (Chetco Bar—191,197 acres, July-September 2017) spent most of its life on public lands, from the roadless heart of Kalmiopsis Wilderness out to within five miles of Brookings. Before the fire was fully contained, Curry County Commissioner Court Boice waxed hyperbolic at a community meeting. "It's absolute, immeasurable devastation," he told the crowd. "We just lost 200,000 acres of some of the best land in the state of Oregon."

Lost?

In the end Chetco Bar left a mixed-severity burn mosaic of which 98 percent thankfully has been left alone. Within a year though in these precise abused earths beneath my feet, every inch of affected SCL land (1,868 acres) and 2,222 acres (slimmed from the proposed 13,626 of which 9,000 were wild intact never-logged ecosystems) of affected National Forest in the lower Chetco watershed were completely and prematurely scalped in a contentious blitzkrieg euphemized as "salvage logging."

Inadvertently for SCL was the unveiling of a huge slumbering golden antidote. Oceans of herbaceous seed and rhizome asleep for decades, sealed by heavy equipment and Douglas-fir plantations and resultant duff, were at last liberated to burst like diamonds into the sunlit air. Native shrubs shot from archipelagos of old roots. Large dreamy meadows were phoenixed, the flames fissuring and combusting perverse grove uniformities, unleashing colorful frenzies of old, resetting an ancient ecological clock.

Briefly.

Arbor Day. Midmorning. The past few days have bled a blast of fantastic warmth. Highest temps since October. Air without edges. The land and wildlife slowly reopen. At dusk a female cougar has prowled and chirped and screeched for a mate in the healing woods below my home.

Again I rumble the neighbors' truck up onto the logging roads wefting through reborn coastal prairies. After the 2018 salvage logging, sadly, all were promptly replanted only to be (barring another fire) clearcut in about 40 years. Today many of the new firs are up to my ribs amongst low groves of new manzanita and last year's brown flattened grass. The new grass is still just an inch or two high and wildflowers remain dormant. Because of consistent cold and snow, everything is late.

Dry northeast breeze shooshes through the baby trees and melts the late snows from distant brooding bulges of the Kalmiopsis—Vulcan Peak, Chetco Peak, Red Mountain. Worshipful Sun soaks into my face—ears are soothed by the familiar comfort twee of a spotted towhee, the sweet whist of white-crown sparrows, trill of juncos, squeaky kee-aah of a red-shouldered hawk gliding and scanning above the giggling tributaries of Panther Creek.

What's lost is found and will again be lost and found. To humans, both are subjective. That's the bough and the bloom and the brome. The forever biome where roots converse. All of this amongst valuable debris of burnt snags and logs. A lost landscape found in transition.

Atop a blackened stump I find a manzanita inflorescence that could be mistaken as a chewed piece of pink bubble gum. The tiny bell-shaped flowers smell of soft perfume. Oddly placed there by something winged or clawed, or the wind. Or a spring flower fairy. We can all use one of those.

Douglas-fir plantation.

Photos: Kew.