I’m working on taking pictures that are worth looking at, and maybe even tell a story, without needing captions. Here’s some of the things that I saw at the Puyallup Fair this summer (different and larger and more crowded than the Thurston County Fair, which was earlier in the year).
I am so excited about this!! I think it’s brilliant, and if I saw this flyer, I would totally sign up. But since no one else is doing it, I decided I’ll just have to do it myself. Click for a bigger image, where you can actually read all the text. Feel free to repost anywhere you like. And here’s a higher-resolution version to print out and hang up anywhere.
I’m so excited!
I’m back from summer camps, and I plan to write up my experiences from the second week, but a lot happened (all good) and I haven’t yet processed it into a linear format. So in the meantime, I want to tell you about one of the oddly synchronistic experiences that has happened to me since I’ve been home. I’m telling you about this one first because it’s the cutest 
Tuesday evening, I was feeling restless. It’s hard to adjust back to a desk job after running around in the woods for a couple weeks. I went out for a bit of a wander around the neighborhood as it was getting dark. I wandered around and smelled people’s flowers near their front walks. I watched a buck and doe wander down the street, meandering from apple tree to apple tree in various front yards until a dog chased them off down the street. Eventually, I circled around towards home, it being nearly completely dark. There’s a house a few blocks from ours with a really big front lawn, as as I started walking past it, I noticed a 20-something girl in the front yard. It took a minute or two for me to walk past the width of the yard, and just before I turned the corner out of sight of the girl in the yard, she called out, “Excuse me…”
I paused, and she came over to the edge of the lawn with something in her hands. “Um, I know you’re just out for a walk in the neighborhood or something, but, umm, I have this baby bird and I was wondering if you know what I should do with it.”
She has in her hands a complete nest with a gawky little baby robin in it. The robin is sleeping soundly, taking slow even breaths, and seems content. He is fully covered with downy feather, but definitely hasn’t fledged yet. His flight feathers are just starting to come in, but they are still in the shaft. His beak is by far the biggest part of him. It turns out that the landlord was there cutting down some trees on the property earlier in the day, and the nest and baby had fallen out of a tree when it came down. The parent birds were around then, but the people didn’t know what to do with it, so they hadn’t put the baby out where the parents could find it. Of course, at dusk the parents had gone to roost and weren’t around any more.
The girl’s name was Christina. I told her that I have a wildlife rehabilitator friend that I could call. I thought that the parents would come back in the morning and look again, but I didn’t know how long baby robins could go without eating, or if he was old enough to keep himself warm though the night outside. I called Tammy, and she confirmed that if we could get him into a nearby tree near dawn that the parents would probably be back. But they definitely wouldn’t fly at night, and the baby should be kept somewhere warm and quiet for the night. He wouldn’t need anything to eat for the night, but if the parents hadn’t shown up by 9am or so, he would need food and I should bring him in to her. Neither Christina nor any of her roommates was able to be there at dawn or at 9am to check on the little guy, so I took him home and he slept peacefully in my craft room for the night. Preston and I got up at 5am and took him back to the house. Preston climbed up in the tree nearest the one the nest had come out of and hung it up there in a hanging planter box.
Preston walked back home to go back to bed, and I settled in to watch the nest and see if the parents showed up. Nearly right away I heard a lot of robin commotion. Lots of chipping, and a call that I haven’t ever heard from a robin before. I couldn’t tell if it was coming from the baby or from one of the two adults circling the general area. Sort of a high-pitched squeeling whistle. One male and one female bird spent a long time checking out the whole area. They landed on the stump of the tree that was cut down and peered into every nook and cranny of it. They seemed to see the nest in the adjoining tee, but they didn’t land on it. Afer 20 minutes or so of patrolling the area, they seemed to start hunting. One or the other of them was always in sight of the nest in its new location, while the other would do that little robin dance (scurry scurry, head tilt…scurry scurry, head tilt) across the lawn, or would fly into the nearby trees. I watched one eat two whole salmonberries off the bush. After another 20 minutes, I was starting to worry that they weren’t going to feed the baby, but just after I started to wonder, I saw the female robin stop briefly on the nest and seem to feed something. I wasn’t sure, so I hung out another 10 minutes or so until she did it again and this time I got a better view and saw for sure that she had been handing over some food.
I left feeling pretty good about the world, and like that is the sort of meaningful work I want to do. I left a message on Christina’s phone letting her know about the success, and also tipping her that in a week or two the little guy would probably fledge and she shouldn’t worry if she sees him on the ground then, but if she sees him out of the nest or on the ground and there are no parents around, she should feel free to give me another call.
Interesting that this is the second close encounter with a baby robin I’ve had this year. Maybe I should do some looking into what robins are all about.
It is purely a testament to how well this model works, and nothing to do with my skills, that this week turned out really well. Overall, I felt really out of practice. It’s been almost a full year since I’ve done any work with WAS, and it took me up until Wednesday afternoon to remember that *Blindfolds Are Magic*. I remember now that that used to be my number one trick in previous years. When you can’t get a group of kids to calm down and focus, just put blindfolds on them. I’m guessing this works with adults too. By Thursday at lunchtime, they were willing to take the Lunch Challenge, and a group of eleven 6- and 7-year olds actually chose to spend their whole lunchtime blindfolded and silent. Can you even imagine!?
And I remembered also, that sometimes you have to let kids fail at an activity before they’re willing to learn how to make it work. If the challenge is for them to all line up alphabetically without talking, and I can see that there’s no way it’s going to work, it’s so hard not to help. But if I just tell them where to stand in line, then they haven’t learned anything except that they aren’t capable and they should rely always on adults to tell them how to figure things out. If I let them fail at it, and then we talk about why it didn’t work (that part’s the key), then they’ll be able to do it themselves the next time. And when I say “talk about it”, I really mean that. Even this group of six-year olds can tell me exactly what went wrong (“everyone was telling everyone else what to do, but not doing it themselves” “No one would agree on which side was the beginning, even though it didn’t matter” “some people were pushing”). I don’t need to lecture them on what they should do differently, but have a genuine dialogue where everyone gets a chance to say what their experience was, and I maybe subtly highlight some key points (“so, are you saying that next time everyone should agree on where the beginning is before they start trying to get in line?”)
So the way that I got them to *want* to try a blindfolded lunch was to try a silent-but-not-blindfolded lunch first. The goal was to make it all the way through lunch without talking. If you’ve worked with kids, you know how unlikely this is. One kid makes faces at another, the other giggles, a third kid hisses at the second one to be quiet, a fourth kid sees a bug, and soon all hell has broken loose. I was actually surprised that they made it ten minutes the first time, but someone couldn’t help remarking about the cricket they found in the dirt. So the next day, when the subject of the silent lunch came up again (they were trying to earn the chance to make a fire on Friday), I offered the blindfolds (introduced as part of a fun game earlier in the day, so they were already familiar with them) as a way to make the challenge easier. If your friend is making faces at you, you won’t know. And so we spent a really nice 25 minutes sitting in the grass, in the dappled shade, spread out from each other a ways (far enough that one kid couldn’t “accidentally” bump into another kid), eating our lunches and feeling the breeze. When I told them that it was time and they could take their blindfolds off whenever they were ready, one kid took off his blindfold and looked around in wonder. “That was so beautiful!” he said. Another one chose to leave hers on for another 10 minutes or so.
Hobostripper wrote recently about making God human in the strip club, and that’s how she knows she can do anything. I know I can do anything because I can get eleven 6-year old kids to *want* to sit silently for 25 minutes. And both of us, Tara and I, are teaching people how to be human. Hopefully, if they learn how to be truly present in the world, and in their bodies, and in community, now, then they won’t need to be taught the hard way later, when someone like Tara has to take away all their cash in order to show them what’s real.
OMG! IT’S A BABY SQUIRREL!!
He fell out of his nest, and I think maybe he was too heavy for momma squirrel to carry him back up to the nest. I heard a squirrel in a tree near the neighbor’s driveway making a sound that I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t an alarm, or any of the usual chatter that I hear squirrels make. It was a low grumbly, talky sort of a sound. I stopped to watch for a minute, and the squirrel was looking down at the ground, but I was in the middle of doing something and I didn’t walk over to see what it was. A few minutes later, I was in the back yard and I heard Preston yelling at Magoo to “drop it!” (Magoo is such a dog sometimes, cuz she totally dropped it.) Preston scooped Magoo up and I headed toward the little fuzzy grey form squeeling on the sidewalk.
Of course, I expected it to be bad. Magoo has a history of inappropriate behavior with small fuzzy baby wild animals. (the link is to an archived version of the page, with some wonky formatting, but it’s still worth reading). But I picked up this little guy, and I could see by his fur that Magoo had just been holding him by the scruff of his neck. He was small kitten sized, and his distress call was like a high-pitched kitten distress call, and I wonder if Magoo thought he was a kitten. In any case, I couldn’t see any puncture marks. Within a couple seconds after I picked him up, he relaxed and curled up. His little eyes weren’t open yet, but he seemed to fall asleep. Every minute or so, he would wake up again, give a little distress call, and then fall asleep. We brought him inside, put him in a little box with some towels and turned to our #1 emergency resource, Google. We learned that you should keep them warm, that baby squirrels have very high metabolisms, and that if you leave them under the tree where the nest is, momma squirrel will probably come pick him up within an hour or so.
I also knew, from an interview a year or so ago, that the local human society contracts with a wildlife rehabilitator, so we called them to get the rehabber’s number. Her name is Tammy, and she said that we could try putting him in his box with a jar of warm water at the base of the tree and see if momma would come get him, but it was really cold out that day, and she didn’t think we should just leave him out. I think the way this is supposed to work is that the baby is supposed to be concerned about his safety and making distress calls so momma hears where he is and comes to get him. But this little guy is pretty comfortable with the world, and as soon as he was warm, he just curled up and went to sleep with nary a peep. Momma never knew he was there, and we started to worry that he would get too cold even with the towels.
When Tammy got off work, she came by to pick him up. She has the resources and knowledge to raise him. But she and I got to talking, and it turns out that she needs a fair amount of help with web design, and marketing, and maybe even a certain amount of feeding baby animals. It came up that Preston surfs, and she said, “Oh darn, it’s too bad I didn’t know you all last year! I had a baby river otter and I really needed someone to teach him to swim.”
!!!
Can you even imagine how cool it would be to take a river otter surfing with you!? I guess they are not born knowing how to swim or how to catch fish. Tammy ended up using a rescued raccoon to teach him to fish.
Anyway, so I’ve been working on some web design for her, and some brochure stuff, and she works during the day at the local vet hospital so I’ve been stopping by in the mornings before work to say hello to the little baby squirrel, who she carries around in her pocket. So cute! His eyes are open now, and he tries to suck on my fingers when I hold him.
So a snake-handling faith-healer and a Presbyterian minister walk into a tent revival meeting…
If you don’t get why that’s the setup for a hilarious joke, you might not get the rest of this post, and possibly you won’t understand why I spent a week of rock climbing and camping in the desert feeling like an uptight Presbyterian surrounded by people speaking in tongues and writhing in the aisles. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I would be working as a camping/climbing instructor for a group of sophomore girls. You can read in that link about my intentions to just model enthusiasm and competence, rather than try to “teach” anything. Things didn’t turn out quite as I had planned.
All the instructors get together for two days before the trip starts to plan the trip and make sure we’re on the same page as far as boundaries and rules (can the girls have their own snacks, do we eat meals together, how do we decide who’s turn it is to clean up the kitchen, etc.). The rest of the staff is all amazing, well-qualified, and fabulous. There are 6 instructors (2 to a team) as well as 2 rock specialists who will be there for part of the time setting up climbs and monitoring big picture site safety. 5 of the instructors and one of the rock specialists are women, one of the instructors identifies as genderqueer, and one of the rock specialists is a man.
The first sign of conflict happens in the first day when one of the instructors points out that the male rock specialist is going to have to really be aware of the fucked-up ways that all these sophomore girls are going to want to interact with him. He is an attractive rock climber in his late 20’s with a South African accent. He says he’s aware of that, and will be careful to be appropriate, but “at the same time, I won’t emasculate myself”. You could watch the hackles go up on the hardcore feminists in the room. This women’s empowerment stuff tends to attract fairly hardcore types (not necessarily feminists, but hardcore climbers, hardcore survivalists, just really intense alpha personalities in general). In this group, 3 of the women had worked together extensively before, two of the three were in a committed relationship (with each other), and all three considered “smash the patriarchy” to be an apt description of their basic platform. Wow. Try being the one man in that crowd, and find a way to not be emasculated.
Instructor teams had been decided for us, and we broke into those teams to get to know a bit about the person with whom we would be sharing responsibility for the physical and emotional safety of ten 16-year old girls in the desert for the next 5 days. I will call my partner Ashley, in part because that satisfies a childish and petty desire to call her something that I think would bother her, but mostly just to avoid using real names. Ashley and I are really different people. She’s a radical feminist, a lesbian in a committed relationship with another instructor on the course, a recovering alcoholic with tendencies toward anxiety and obsessive behavior, and has been running girls’ empowerment and wilderness courses for around 6 years. By the end of the course, I came to respect many things about her, and I learned a lot about different styles but, like the Presbyterian at the revival meeting, there was so much about her style that made me really uncomfortable.
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When I was in high school I went through a rebellious phase that involved regularly attending the local Assembly of God church and trying to bait my mother into debates about whether evolution was a supportable scientific theory. I went to church every week, and “got saved” (at least three times, cuz I was afraid that it wasn’t sticking), and went up for altar calls, and spoke in tongues at summer camp one year, and had a mad crush on the youth pastor (who later dropped out of the church and hit on me). At that same summer camp where I first spoke in tongues, we had a particularly charismatic motivational speaker. One evening, just as he was building up to a great climax, he suddenly stopped and focussed intently on someone sitting on the other side of the stage from me. I couldn’t see who he was looking at, but I heard the speaker say, still holding the microphone up to his mouth, “Is that your wife?” He was pointing at someone that I couldn’t see, but since we were all high school kids it’s unlikely that the boy was sitting next to his wife. I couldn’t hear his response, but he must have muttered that she was not. The speaker, notching it up a level both in volume and pitch, asked, “Are you going to marry her?!” The boy, probably wishing he could sink down below his seat, must have muttered something non-committal.
“THEN GET YOUR ARM OFF OF SOME OTHER MAN’S WIFE!!” the speaker yelled.
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After our first day of rock-climbing with the girls, we all stood in a circle to offer appreciations to each other. As you felt called, you could say something that you were really impressed by or thankful for from the day of rockclimbing. The girls said things like, I really appreciated how everyone cheered for me when I didn’t think I could go any further. After several appreciations, one girl said, “I appreciate Rob’s accent” and all the girls giggled. Ashley stepped forward into the circle, animated and pissed.
“There are girls here who rock-climbed for the very first time today, and ALL YOU CAN THINK ABOUT IS THAT ONE MAN!!” And she says “that one man” in the same way you might say “that turd that the cat knocked out of the litterbox”.
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I thought Ashley’s point was a good and valid one. In fact, I supported her intentions throughout the trip. But her approach made me so uncomfortable, with its roots in emotional manipulation, that I had a rough time playing along. Her approach was all about the emotional build-up, creating a scenario where the participant really starts to see how fucked-up they are, how undeserving, how sinful, (or in this case) how intolerant, how middle class, how brainwashed by society. And when you have people genuinely freaked out, you offer them an amazing solution, you throw out the altar call, you tell them what they need to do to be all right. If this had been church camp, we would have told them that they need to accept Jesus as their lord and personal savior. Since this was about girls empowerment and breaking down cliques within their class, we told them that they should eat lunch with the Asian students and stop acting stupid around boys.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally in support of breaking down cliques and not acting stupid around boys. For that matter, I’ve got no problem with folks practicing Christianity. I just don’t think that emotional manipulation is a very effective way to create long-lasting change. And I think it’s dishonest and, well, manipulative. Everything about Ashley’s approach to the week was about creating a situation where the students would be out of their element and vulnerable. They would not be allowed to go into their tents until bedtime; they would not be allowed access to their personal snacks except at one regular time after dinner (this is a big issue when half of the students are from asian countries and the only food we are offering is mac and cheese and pb&j); everyone must wait for everyone to have food at each meal before eating; there will be no downtime or time for personal reflection or journaling; we will run one “trust exercise” after another during times when we aren’t climbing or eating; etc.
There is no doubt that these are effective ways of creating community and breaking down barriers. When you make people emotionally vulnerable, make the group the only possible means of support, and create a situation where people will feel physically unsafe (like rock-climbing), you will have a rock-solid group of supportive girls after three days. But will you have a rock-solid community after 30 days, when they are back in their comfort zones with their pre-existing means of support?
Obviously, there are a lot of charismatic Christians out there, so this must be an approach that works for people. The emotional build-up and catharsis of it must be effective for people, but I never found it so. That’s why I kept having to get “re-saved”. The effects never lasted much longer than a few weeks past summer camp. Pretty soon, alone in my bedroom trying to pray, I would start to wonder what was the point of speaking in tongues anyway? If I didn’t even know what I was saying, could I possibly mean it? Why would God care what language I pray in anyway? And actually, while we’re at it, why would God even care if I pray? It’s not like he doesn’t know what I’m thinking, right? And why would God care what I’m thinking, since he already knows what I will do with my whole life? And that doesn’t even really make sense, so maybe this whole thing doesn’t make sense…and pretty soon I had headed down the dark tunnel to sin and iniquity, or at least to wearing too much lipstick and hanging out with the stoners.
These girls have been indoctrinated in the marketing of women’s empowerment from early on. It’s a pervasive part of our culture to give lip service to women’s equality in order to
sell shampoo, or tampons. (”Shouldn’t you be leading a carefree life?”) These girls know how to talk the talk, they know all the right answers, just like I knew how to explain to people how speaking in tongues is a valuable gift from God. But I didn’t believe it, and I don’t think these girls believe it either. And all you get with the emotional approach is people who feel it for a while, but there’s no intellectual commitment to it. The fervor fades. They’ve never seen anyone living it in the long-term.
On the last morning, I offered that if anyone wanted to get up early enough to climb a nearby bluff with me and watch the sunrise, I would be willing to wake people up for that. All but one of the girls agreed, and we woke up at 5am to hike up the hill in the dark and watch the sunrise. We sat, scattered in our own spots, while the sun came up over the far-off and flat horizon, past the freeway and the powerlines receding into the distance.
Afterwards we talked about the things we had seen and heard, and mostly about the things we thought about while we sat. Many of the girls had very interesting things to say, but the one who, unknowingly, had a message for me was the girl from Korea who said, “I mostly didn’t think about anything, I just wondered how the sun would rise. I have never seen the sun rise before.”
My mind was blown. Can you imagine never having seen the sunrise? Not even being sure *how* it rises? I felt really ashamed of how much I take for granted. I didn’t admit to them that mostly what I had been thinking, while we sat, was that I wish something good would happen. All there is is the sunrise and some cliff swallows calling, and I wish something really *exciting* would happen. Her thought made me realize, how freaking exciting is it that the sun rises every day!? How amazing is it that I have the opportunity to sit here on a windy desert cliff and watch it in silence with a group of people whose minds are blown by the simple fact that it is happening!?
And that was the most real thing that happened all week. And I was glad that I had a chance to share with them a real experience, one where a regular person chooses to get out of bed before dawn and experience the real world. Because that is what I believe in. I don’t particularly care about smashing patriarchy, or about who you share your lunch with. But I do care about creating connections, between people and people, between people and earth. If I had to choose something to smash, it would be civilization, and the idea that people need to be coerced into caring about each other and the world, and the fact that people don’t care enough about the sunrise to have ever seen one. I believe in the sunrise.
I had just got to my spot in the backyard, next to the garden, when I saw a dandelion leap into the air all by itself! It leapt up along with all the dirt around it in a neat mound and then settle back down into the ground looking as if nothing had happened. This seemed like unusual behavior for a dandelion, so I kept watching. This action repeated several times, and seemed to be moving underground across the garden bed, leaving a trail of slightly mounded dirt on the surface. A mole in the garden!
Or was it a gopher? It didn’t move any dirt to the surface, and I didn’t see any dirt hills nearby.
While it was fascinating to watch, I also don’t really want moles cavorting about in the garden, so I thought I might try a little test. I’ve seen those nature documentaries where the coyotes dig madly after some burrowing rodent and often come up empty-handed. But how fast can a mole really move? They don’t even really have legs to speak of, just big hands attached right to their bodies. So I thought I’d see if I could catch a mole, and also maybe give it a little scare to convince it that it would rather dig somewhere other than my garden.
I didn’t come anywhere close. The first time, I didn’t think strategically, and just started digging where I saw the motion. Of course, it had plenty of time to retreat before I got as deep as it’s tunnel (about 8 to 10 inches deep, but I didn’t measure so I’m just guessing). After uncovering its tunnel, and realizing it was long gone, I want back to sitting quietly. In only a few minutes I saw dirt being pushed into the exposed hole of the tunnel from the inside, blocking the entrance. And shortly after that, I saw the earth moving from further excavations in the same spot, only about 8 inches deeper. This time I waited for it to get a little ways further than where I expected the new tunnel to be and started digging behind the guy, thinking that I would collapse the escape tunnel and have him trapped. I’m not sure what went wrong with that plan, but there was definitely no mole or gopher or any other critter in the tunnel when I got to it.
I waited several minutes to see if he would come back again, but either he had moved his construction plans for the morning, or he simply outwaited me, and I eventually had to get up and go to work. I left the second tunnel uncovered, and I’m curious to see how the area looks when I get home this eve.
Also, I’m using this month as a kick in the pants to choose a new sit spot, since I haven’t done so after the last time I moved. I wonder if this is one vote against using the garden as a sit spot. Rather than just observing what’s going on, I have a vested interest in who resides in my garden and I am tempted to intervene.
It’s hard to say much about a place like this. It’s very magical and very foreign.
I’ll be down at the Oregon Dunes on a Tracking weekend Thursday through Sunday, so you won’t likely hear from me. Hopefully, I’ll have great stories and pictures upon my return. Here’s the link to the trip I’ll be on. I’m going along as the Teaching Assistant and Photographer for the trip. How lucky am I?!
In the meantime, here’s a picture of a track from two winters ago in Onalaska. Can you guess what kind of animal it is? Is this it’s front foot or back foot? Left or right? What was the temperature like when it stepped here, and has it warmed up or cooled down since then? Was this animal in a hurry? If you found this track, what sorts of other tracks and vegetation would you expect to find nearby?
