Last week, I travelled south of the international boundary, to Kettle Falls, Washington. Standing on a bluff overlooking the Columbia River, I watched the reservoir pool around a land mass exposed by low water. The indigenous word for this place is ksunkw, “island.” Sinixt and Skoyelpi fishermen, their families and the Salmon Chief once spent […]
The ghost-presence of John Muir
John Muir is widely viewed as the father of the national park system in the United States. A conservationist, naturalist and writer in the late-nineteenth and early 20th centuries, he was most at home in places where trees outnumbered people. Muir is best-known for his successful effort to save Yosemite National Park from development, and […]
The Generosity of Moss
During a recent writing sabbatical in Seattle, Washington, I spent many hours wandering the streets around Capitol Hill. Within this cultured environment of heritage homes and mature gardens spreads an unobtrusive, still-wild landscape of moss. Fed by the rainy climate, moss softens the hard angles of a staircase. It transforms rock walls into verdant mountains. […]
Leaf harmonics at Harrop Creek
The 19th century mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré was also a physicist, engineer and philosopher, aptly qualifying him to be a polymath, someone who knows a lot about many and varied things. In his writings, Poincaré spoke of a form of beauty that he believed to be more profound than that which strikes the senses. This […]
Planting Seeds
Redfish Creek flows into the West Arm of Kootenay Lake, close to where I live. This aptly named creek has long been a spawning grounds for the region’s kokanee, a sockeye species identical to the ocean version, except that it adapted to live in freshwater only when it was stranded here long ago by melting […]
Thank you, Mr. Sun
Today is the longest of the year in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice. When I stepped out onto my deck, a small sun greeted me in the form of a Zinnia flower. I have been watching it for several days as it tried to open its bright face to the world. What a perfect […]