Notes From The Field #3

Well I've been on the move for a good solid 6 nights and 7 days. Today is the 9th and i am making a quick stop back home to swap out some gear, dropping the extraneous weight of gear i have yet to use, and picking up some snow gear for the journey ahead. But before i get too far lets backtrack to when we left Olympia. We left Portland via a ride share we found on craigslist. Turned out she was a biologist from Berkley returning from a conference in Seattle. I took a brief nap but awoke to a rousing conversation of how fucked the ecology of the planet is and what little is being done to remedy it. Our in house scientist seemed to believe that effective strategies for saving our collective asses should come from politicians and as such told us that all means of combating these injustices are "policy matters". I am perpetually blown away by the compartmentalization that occurs in peoples minds. She believes that because she is a scientist her only role is to advise 'decision makers'; people whose sole job is to dictate how others will live. So lets assume for a moment that we see these individuals for what they are, corporate pawns. Politicians interests lie primarily in economics, not the general welfare of the populous. So if we can agree on this than what should truly be happening is that scientists should be dictating to politicians what must be done to ensure the survival of all life; instead they are on their knees waiting for economics to work it self out. For decades now we have been placing economics ahead of the environment, which at the end of the day is the only thing that matters. So if scientists cant get through to politicians, who can, whose responsibility is it to stop these systematic injustices? if you cannot answer this question yourself, then please step aside and allow those who actually give a damn to do their work.

Alright so back to the trip, we spent a week up in the Willamette national forest, it was absolutely gorgeous. We learned how to identify the nest of the rare Red Tree Vole. It only lives in old growth Douglas firs. The unit we were in had only a few hundred of these trees. The landscape was dominated primarily by Noble firs. We learned the process of tree climbing from start to finish. For those of you who are used to being able to throw your lines over the lowest limb, this is a whole different game. We used crossbows and compound bows to shoot lines as high as 150 feet. We would then thread a shot line over where the fishing line once was. The process is then repeated one last time with your climbing line. The line is then anchored and weighted, and then your ready to go. We used presic knots to ascend, seeing as ascenders would tear up the rope in short order, and we are poor forest activists. It was an amazing experience, climbing something that has been around long enough to see the end of hundreds of native cultures, a being old enough to have lived through the slave era and countless civil rights struggles, it has witnessed the slaughter of its own kind, it has seen whole forest hillsides chopped and burned so humans might have cheap disposable goods. Yet through all this they stand tall, still supporting the life that surrounds them, they provide sustenance and shelter for countless species. They are truly a noble being. We got rained in for two days, unable to hike out to the unit or climb. Shortly thereafter some of us decided it was time to hit the road again. We hiked out some 20 miles of logging roads, then hitched to Eugene where our ride, a kind gentlemen and proud father, offered to buy us a drink. Despite the cultural stigma surrounding this scenario, he was a man who admittedly was experiencing the 'empty nest' feeling, and as such, i believe wanted to offer us every hospitality he would his own children. We then found a nearby spot to crash out for the night. In the morning we caught a ride north to Salem and then onto Portland, where we found forest park to be an excellent spot for travelers to rest. We awoke to realize we were in the heart of bourgeois territory. There were dozens of couples and individuals jogging by on a nearby trail, all decked out in the latest, most expensive running gear. We strolled down the trail proud of our indecent odor leaving behind that bubble of American privilege. We would make it all the way to Tacoma by the end of the day. Our ride was from an enlisted man, but not the type of man i would have expected. He enlisted simply because he had a lack of direction in his life, and from what i could gather was looking forward to the day he got out. He explained to us that navy these days was a mere extension of high school, but with more physical labor. From this account and all the other interactions i had experienced over the past few days i was starting to hit a new realization. This may be obvious for some, for others this may be a complete revelation. People are complex. We got rides from some terribly patriarchal men, from some military men, a construction worker, and a grandfather visiting his daughter. All of them had their quarks. Some self pronounced capitalists, liberals, republicans, etc. The point I'm getting at is that they defied definition. They all seemed to want to help others, hence they picked us up, yet many of the lives that they had chosen would not have told me this. If i would have met the businessman who gave us a ride elsewhere, i would not have thought so highly of a man concerned primarily by his fiscal security. Yet this experience has taught me first hand that people are extremely complex. Capable of both perpetuating exploitation and helping alleviate others from it. The conclusions i can make are simple, preemptive judgments serve no one. The image that is constructed of another must be based on the immediate action that all parties are involved in. Our thoughts and assessments should be confined to action, not theory, which leaves little room for the organic nature of this world. There are of course lines and divides that will inevitably be drawn between people, but let them be based on ones reaction and opinion of a given action, or scenario. Hold true to your beliefs, but use them in the moment, instead of fore-judging another. I believe in change, both that we can change the world in which we live and that individuals can better themselves and those around them, sometimes they need only to be given a choice.

That's all for now folks