Here's the Good News...

I woke up November 9th strangely re-invigorated. I woke up with a firm resolve. To do what's right. To treat people like people. My sleeves are rolled up.

Doing what's right with integrity and treating people like people lost on November 8th. But that just means I've been complacent. I wasn't trying hard enough.

I was reading the real data and not paying attention to the phony, undisciplined polls, so I wasn't shocked by the results--I had already been horrified for quite some time. I knew it was going to be close. Really close. And that's the disturbing thing. I'm not sure how people got there--to be able to vote for evil. But they did.

Disappointingly, a handful of people in Ohio have more power than anybody else in this country. (Of course, the electoral college isn't going anywhere and there's a reason it exists, but...). Somehow we elected a bully antithetical to everything I am. Someone who doesn't do things with honor. Or integrity. Someone who goes against all of my teachings--from Sunday School to Star Wars to basic fifth grade history. I invite you to an intellectual exercise: Read this review of a book on Hitler's rise to power and replace the words Hitler and Germany with those of our current president-elect and the United States (just do the bullet point section in the review). So, worst case scenario: We've got 1930s Germany. Extreme, but plausible. Best case scenario, it was all "reality" TV bluster; we get a simplified tax code, which I'm all for if it won't be too disproportionately disadvantaging to the poor.

People clearly felt his mantra--"it's rigged against me"--even though nothing could have been further from the truth. He manipulated the media that created him. In a world in which glass ceilings clearly still exist, the candidate who won had a resume that boasted the following highlights: being too poor of a businessman to make a profit in the casino business (how pathetic is that!), so pathetic a businessman that he would be at the very least 4 times richer now than if he took the money he inherited and put it in index funds (we won't know how spectacular a business failure he was, because he's never been honest with us), such a poor businessman that the list of racketeering lawsuits and non-payment to partners list is so long (that's not good business, that's being a crook)...but it was rigged against him, right? And people felt that. I feel their pain. I don't like their solution--they were conned, but I feel their pain.

I'm just a humble fishmonger with no ambitions to be anything else. But here's what I'm going to do about it...

Beyond just having a firm resolve to do what's right. To treat people like people. (And it's going to take an extraordinary amount of focus to do that.) It's time to question our unquestioned biases. It's time to turn off the news. To turn off the hyper-inflated click-bait propaganda that comes from both the left and right. The fake news stories from Macedonia that made people think the worst. The much-ado-about-absolute nothing emails. When there was no there there. But the talking heads wanted us to believe there was something there. When you look at her emails, you see someone who had a strategy. Someone who worked hard for this country. Someone who was a centrist, like me, who was willing to make compromises. Who wasn't going to let perfect be the enemy of good. Who wasn't afraid of making deeply unpopular decisions for the better of the whole. The media created these well-meaning  people who pathetically kept repeating like sheep "Oh, but they're both just such horrible candidates." No they weren't. One was. And  they were conned by him, whose only qualification in life is being a con artist. The other candidate worked her whole life for justice and progress. She was flawed only because when you put yourself in the public eye for so long, the flaws are going to be magnified. I didn't want to elect a saint. I wanted to elect someone who was competent.

We can't shut ourselves off from the world. But before parroting the hyper-inflated propaganda that comes just as much from the left as it does from the right, we need to remind ourselves to take a step back. Question our unquestioned biases.

But here's the good news. The good news is that art means so much more right now. When Leonard Cohen died the day after a great dream of progress in our country temporarily did, I put on the prophet's music. And I was reminded that there have been dark times before. There will be dark times again. Indeed it's probably going to get much worse before it gets better. That's fine. "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

We went to the opera on Friday and saw Carmen. It was not only a great distraction--the music and singing--but the story a reminder that we're irrational, we're crazy, and we do things that harm ourselves.

We made a point to eat Mexican before the opera and it was great to see a restaurant full of people--black, white and brown, Americans all, all people whose ancestors wanted what mine wanted, a better life--doing the most basic things in life. Eating and enjoying each other's company. There was beauty in that. And that's some good news.

There are other basic things we can do. We just donated $200 to Planned Parenthood in Mike Pence's name. Here's his address so that he gets the Thank You note.

Officer of Governor Mike Pence
State House
Room 206
Indianapolis, IN 46204-2797

We'll do the same for environmental causes. Well, because as a humble fish monger, my livelihood depends on the health of this planet and its waters. I'm just a fish monger. I'm nobody. But at least I'm not brown, female, disabled, gay, trans, or any other type of person that's been threatened in America's course toward Hate.

Let's work to Make America Kind Again. Are your sleeves rolled up?

Cable News

A long time ago, we made the decision to forgo Cable TV. Best decision we've ever made. The Comcast guy comes by periodically and asks why we don't have TV. "You could get such a better deal on your Internet," and every time I respond, "I'd pay NOT to have TV," and I know we do pay for not having TV. Because society "rewards" us for sitting like zombies in front of the TV. 

There are a number of reasons NOT to have TV. The most important is that there are so many better things to do. Pick mushrooms, make tamales, walk through a forest, touch a glacier, identify animal scat, make sauerkraut, read a fricking book. 

But wait. "How do you get news?" Well, firstly, nobody gets any reliable or useful news from Network or Cable TV. What you get are orchestrated shouting matches designed to make your blood boil so you will continue watching. We love conflict. We love tension. We even desperately and masochistically love being tooled by the media. With TV news, we get the equivalent of click-bait, paranoia-inducing drivel not unlike the "Sponsored Stories" on the Weather Channel website. But they pawn it off as "news."

If I wanted an orchestrated shouting match, I'd watch the WWF. A lot of what you get on social media is fear-mongering click bait, too, so similar rules apply when it comes to looking for news on social. You need a handful of "curator" smart friends who can sift through the propaganda. But yes, we do need to be slightly informed about the world, though lately I've found it's nice to be blissfully ignorant--there are so many things I don't want to know, as curious as I am. Fortunately, we get nuanced stories that investigate multiple perspectives by listening to NPR. We used to wake up listening to NPR, but unfortunately in their efforts to be "balanced," they still include the voices of the bozos. It sucks waking up to bozos, so we've turned to the public radio all-classical music/minimal talking King FM as a wake-up. The stories on NPR are a little bit too humanistic, so I balance that out with The Economist--always nice to get an economic, worldly perspective from across the pond, or the Wall Street Journal. Because money talks and bullshit walks--for the most part, you do get a more honest perspective of the world through an economic lens. Sadly. But reading the WSJ, you'd think humans had all become robots, economic machines maximizing ROI. So we have to return to NPR to remind ourselves that we are indeed humans, despite efforts towards the contrary. And not everything is money and materialism. 

Do I miss sports? Hell yeah! But how many ways can you possibly stuff a ball into a goal? I'd been a sports fan for decades when I quit TV and I can't think of any new ways to make a catch, shoot a three, hit a ball over a wall, watch a tree stuff a ball into a hoop, nail a penalty kick. If you do a careful analysis, an American football game is 4 hours of advertisements punctuated by about 3 minutes and 22 seconds of action. To be quite honest, it's quite dull. I don't miss it enough to put up with all the hype. 

The news people learned from sports announcers doing the Super Bowl how to hype up any non-event, how to gab and make something out of nothing to get people's blood boiling. Our debates have dismissed policy in favor of character assaults.They declare "winners" in a political debate. But there aren't "winners." A political debate is about having a conversation in which we can learn a candidate's views on an array of topics and issues. Only subjectively are there winners, no matter how ridiculous one candidate sounds or how coherent another candidate speaks. A winner in a political debate should only be "declared" in the mind of the beholder. 

Marketing guru Seth Godin so rightfully asks,

"What if the fear and malaise and anger isn't merely being reported by cable news...

What if it's being caused by cable news?

What if ubiquitous video accompanied by frightening and freaked out talking heads is actually, finally, changing our culture?

Which came first, the news or the news cycle?

We seem to accept the hegemony of bottom-feeding media as some natural outgrowth of the world we live in. In fact, it's more likely an artifact of the post-spectrum cable news complex in which bleeding and leading became business goals.

There's always front page news because there's always a front page.

The world is safer (per capita) than ever before in recorded history. And people are more frightened. The rise of the media matches the rise of our fear.

Cable news isn't shy about stating their goals. The real question is: what's our goal? Every time we hook ourselves up to a device that shocks us into a fear-based posture on a regular basis, we're making a choice about the world and how we experience it.

They want urgency more than importance. What do we want?"

Here's what I want: I want a world in which we can calmly and safely debate based on facts, not dogma. Science, not deeply held irrational beliefs. We're not getting that by consuming Cable or Network news. It's important to remember that fear sells, which is why political candidates use fear. Which is what Hitler used so effectively to subjugate an entire people.

Our books are our grandparents

Far above the golden valley

After a windy, rainy night on Grasshopper Pass, our pilgrimage to see the golden larches of the North Cascades was successful and made special by sunlight coming through the unique deciduous conifers that can light a whole mountainside, truly one of nature's most beautiful spectacles.

A pilgrimage is a journey, usually a long one, to a sacred place as an act of devotion. And visiting the larches has become a annual pilgrimage for us. What we find is good, wild and sacred, and the trip made me think about what for me is sacred, a word that denotes something secured from violation or infringement and worthy of veneration.

Growing up, I listened a lot of stories from my grandfather, also worthy of veneration. as he inspired respect. My grandfather's stories marked me more than I know. I carry my grandparents within me and the stories they shared with me are sacred. And though we're different, from different times with different perspectives, we share some unquestioned assumptions.




Unlike most Native American societies, like the Inupiaq, I did not grow up in the same house as my grandparents. But I had books, music, movies, TV, and these all made me, just like my grandparents.

In The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder notes that in western society our books are our grandparents. They are the stories, the mythology that make us. He is making a point about how Americans frequently see themselves as solitary thinkers who come from independent thought. "In this there is no real recognition that grandparents, place, grammar, pets, friends, lovers, children, tools, the poems and songs we remember, are what we think with. Such a solitary mind--if it could exist--would be a boring prisoner of abstractions. With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free." Meanwhile, other cultures recognize that they are connected to those who came before them, the trees, the rivers, their myths. As Snyder notes, "No wonder the parents of the Eskimo children of the whole Kotzebue Basin posted the 'Inupiaq Values' in their schools." Earlier he notes the Inupiaq values listed on the wall of a classroom in Kobuk, Alaska:

HUMOR
SHARING
HUMILITY
HARD WORK
SPIRITUALITY
COOPERATION
FAMILY ROLES
AVOID CONFLICT
HUNTER SUCCESS
DOMESTIC SKILLS
LOVE FOR CHILDREN
RESPECT FOR NATURE
RESPECT FOR OTHERS
RESPECT FOR ELDERS
RESPONSIBILITY FOR TRIBE
KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE
KNOWLEDGE OF FAMILY TREE

In a hyper-pluralistic society, it's more challenging to come up with a set of values that truly defines us as a group, but the list made me think of my own values, many of which mirror that of the Inupiaq:

CURIOSITY
HONESTY
LIBERTY
EQUALITY
HUMANITY
COLOR
SPIRITUALITY
HUMOR
SHARING
HUMILITY
HARD WORK
AVOID CONFLICT
REAL FOOD
REAL PEOPLE
DEPTH
BUDDIES
RESPECT FOR NATURE
RESPECT FOR OTHERS
RESPECT FOR ELDERS
RESPECT FOR STORIES
RESPECT FOR MUSIC






Sometime a year ago or so I came up with my 3 mantras for life on this planet and they're also worth sharing: 1) Be Here Now; 2) Be Kind to Yourself; 3) Remember: We're all going through our own shit--please be kind to others and give them the respect they deserve.

Our little piece of heaven in the Columbia Highlands

The Columbia Highlands, which span a good part of Ferry County, are probably the most underappreciated and underutilized lands that I know of. Coming back from our most recent trip there, we told the guy at Smallwood Farms, a lovely fruit stand outside of Okanogan, where we had been hiking and he said, "You're probably the only ones to have done that hike all season." Which is sad because it was pleasant. Beautiful. The Sweat Creek Basin Trail probably isn't a 5-star vista trail through glaciated peaks. It's subtler. But an old growth forest of Ponderosa pines in rolling hills is also worthy of visiting.

A hoodoo in Hoodoo Canyon.

There are so many places in Washington state that are trampled and over-used. Admittedly, I've never been a fan of the over-use of national parks at the detriment of ignoring plenty of other public lands. Here in Washington state we have the North Cascades National Park through which we drive to get to the Columbia Highlands. The North Cascades National Park is an extraordinary place for mountaineers and hikers looking for five-star vistas, but there is little land hospitable for animals. For life.

The megafauna that make these places come alive need the grassy valleys and lowlands and intermediary zones. When we go to the Columbia Highlands, for example, the place feels alive. The clearest example was what happened when we came upon some deer near our camp by the Hoodoo Canyon: They ran away. When we spend time in the Olympic National Park, the deer are so docile they don't even move. They've never been hunted by humans and rarely by animals. There's also an overpopulation of them in the Olympic National Park. They've got mange. They're not really wild. They're not that impressive as creatures. They NEED predators!

The deer in the Columbia Highlands are part of a living ecosystem, where they might be hunted down by wolves or coyotes. Somehow the animals in some national parks have lost some of this life and wildness. Which is why visitors to Yellowstone sometimes confuse the place with a petting zoo and put their children on bison to take pictures.

Hoodoo Canyon.

Not long after we watched the deer run away from us, while watching sunset by our tent, we heard a chorus of coyotes howling. No, we're pretty sure they weren't the wolves the area is famous for, which we think would have a deeper howl. But the experience was wild. They started and it sounded like a dog whining but then they got inspired and sang in unison and it lasted maybe four minutes and stopped suddenly. They rendezvoused and the hunt must have begun and the singing stopped. They were clearly in the valley below us but we couldn't tell if they were a few hundred yards away, a quarter mile, or even a mile or two from us. It was a bit eery.

Our camp near Hoodoo Canyon. We heard the coyote chorus below. 

Emerald Lake, Hoodoo Canyon

This wildness is perhaps why we make the extra long drive through the 5-star vistas and glaciated peaks and staggeringly beautiful and daunting North Cascades to make it to this unique space, which we believe is possibly more important to protect. Because it actually supports life. Real life. It's also an intermediary zone between the Cascades and the Rockies, which is why the animals use it.

Sunday breakfast here, just outside of Republic, WA, was the best breakfast of my life.

The place is special. There's not a single traffic light or fast food chain operation or hotel in all of Ferry County. Not a mall or a subdivision of McMansions. What place can you say that about in this day and age?

I can't have a post on this special place without mentioning again the wolves. My mom gave me a wonderful book on identifying all kinds of animal scats and tracks, which is a very complicated endeavor and I can't say that I'm good at it, but we can make good guesses now on what we're seeing. The author David Moskowitz has an exhaustive book about the wolves in this region entitled Wolves in the Land of Salmon. On a very controversial topic that produces some of the most diametrically opposed views, he breaks the "wolf issue(s)" down with a lot of nuance. Certainly, he comes from the scientific perspective, though he's more a tracker than a formally trained scientist (he does do some work with the academic side of things, but it's clear he doesn't let that get in the way of thinking outside of the rigidly controlled academic thinking).

What's certain is that wolves kill elk and wolves kill livestock. In sometimes greater or lesser number than certain constituencies in the fight about wolves would like to admit. What's also certain is that when wolves kill elk, the vegetation of riparian areas improves, which is good for fish, stream flows, cutting down algae blooms, and the whole cycle of life in these places. What's also certain is that wolves cover vast territories (some packs cover hundreds of square miles, depending on prey density). These territories cover a patchwork of private and public lands--state, federal, etc. The livestock industry is allowed to use public lands if they do not damage, degrade or impoverish the lands. Given the damage done by cattle, which do an extraordinary amount of damage to riparian areas and cause lots of erosion, it's hard to say that the public lands are not damaged by the livestock industry. But of course it's for the "public good" to have beef to eat. Though Americans as a whole do probably eat way too much beef. What's also interesting is that the livestock industry romanticizes itself as ruggedly individualistic--ranchers are known for their anti-government tendencies, yet the land they rent from the government comes at rates that are essentially subsidized. What seems pretty clear is that ranchers put their livestock in wolves' territory and it would be ridiculous to think that an opportunistic hunter like a wolf would not kill this mostly docile livestock.

Barbed wire, Ponderosa pines, and pleasant views

Which brings us to a couple of fundamental contradictions that say a lot about how strange we are as a species and how complicated the wolves issue is or isn't: Wolves are a biological competitor for resources that we desire (elk), but their presence is invaluable for creating conditions favorable to many other resources we also desire: Fish, free-flowing streams, some would even say wolves' depredation of elk in the long term help the elk, but there are not enough studies to prove this with any certainty--documented elk numbers dwindling in wolves' territories frequently doesn't have as much to do with wolves as opponents of wolves say and has more to do with loss of habitat (to humans), overuse by livestock (raised by humans), and other animals, like bears and coyotes, but indeed, difficult to measure. So, wolves are a public resource that are killed for harming livestock, a private resource that grazes on public lands at rates subsidized by the federal government. An overwhelming proportion of the public in both Washington and Oregon (70 to 80%), whether for good or not, want to see wolves return to public lands. For the public good, I might add. Those who live closest to these public lands, though, in general do not want to see the wolves return, partially because they kill livestock and partially because of a mythology that's been propagated in the European-American for centuries before they even came to America. A mythology that has little basis in reality, but stories are what make us who we are, right?

Our little wolf Lupe on the Sweat Creek Basin trail.

What I know for certain is that wolves symbolize wildness and there's not enough wildness left on this planet. And wildness and open spaces are good for our health--both mental and physical, and for many of us, the wild is our spirituality. You cannot get any closer to a spirit--a goddess or god or whatever it is that gives meaning to our lives--than being out in the wild. And a wild place that is worth protecting and worth celebrating and visiting is the Columbia Highlands. See more about how to protect the Columbia Highlands here.

On "Strength" and Leadership

Sharp marketing blogger Seth Godin had an illuminating post the other day. He writes: "Sometimes we confuse strength with:

• Loudness
• Brusqueness
• An inability to listen
• A resistance to seeing the world as it is
• An unwillingness to compromise small things to accomplish big ones
• Fast talking
• Bullying
• External unflappability
• Callousness
• Lying
• Policies instead of judgment
• ...and being a jerk.

Well, once you put it that way, it's pretty clear that none of these things are actually signs of strength.

In fact, they are symptoms of brittleness, of insecurity and of a willful disconnect from the things that matter." 

Without saying it outright, I think what Seth's pointing out is that we are choosing between having a leader that is sober, pragmatic, who listens and thinks before speaking or we can have a not-so-crypto cryptofascist, megalomaniac, impudent, insecure, whining, screaming cantaloupe who claims to be strong but has accomplished nothing in his life but extort money from people, companies and charities through scams. For so long, Americans have been deceived by people who talk first and don't listen let alone think before speaking. Even while it has been shown that introverts make much better leaders. BECAUSE THEY LISTEN. As an introvert, it pains me to use all-caps, but it's been one of the fundamental truths of my life and one I have to emphasize. 

Susan Cain provides an exhaustive study of why introverts make better leaders in her book Quiet:The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. Her observation has been shown in plenty of Management Studies, though these were the same Management Studies that 30 years ago said you had to be extroverted.That world is thankfully dying. 

Ezra Klein has done a brilliant job of showing what Hillary Clinton's greatest strength as a leader would be--her listening. Klein's sane profile of her, which is actually one of the best pieces of journalism I've read in quite some time, rings especially true for me in a culture with media from all perspectives--left, right, center--that have demonized her for being private, being cagey, for being a woman, for not wanting to sit around and bake cookies--I don't either. Anybody who's been in the public eye for basically her whole life is going to have all kinds of faults, but being loyal, being pragmatic, and being a listener are qualities I can't wait to see in a president. That's real strength. I really don't want to see phony "strength." 

La mejor almohada es un libro

"Me conmueven los jóvenes que se duermen con un libro debajo de la cabeza. Un libro es la mejor almohada que existe.”--Bolaño


In the tent, I was using two pillows--Gary Snyder's Practice of the Wild and Craig Romano's Backpacking Washington, the latter for pragmatic purposes and the former for spiritual reasons. Snyder's Buddhist-influenced ruminations on the wild were a perfect accompaniment to my dreams and our environs, so I will quote below: 

"Wild is largely defined in our definitions by what --from a human standpoint--it is not. It cannot be seen by this approach for what it is. Turn it the other way: 

Of animals--free agents, each with its own endowments, living within natural systems.

Of plants--self-propagating, self-maintaining, flourishing in accord with innate qualities. 

Of land--a place where the original and potential vegetation and fauna are intact and in full interaction and the landforms ares entirely the result of nonhuman forces. Pristine." 

He goes on...

Without a doubt, we were in a truly wild land, by Snyder's definition, walking the Horseshoe Basin in the Pasayten wilderness,  north central Washington state just below the border with Canada. Wolf, coyote, cougar, bobcat scat abounded. Land was intact and the result of nonhuman forces. 

When things are going well, music plays loudly in my head and while walking these snippets of songs accompanied me while rounding corners to impending snow and changing winds. Sunny Pass wasn't so sunny--a cold fog greeted us. All of these songs have kept me going through life and they kept us going through the weather and the terrain. 

Icy sunrise and Windy Peak in the background

  

Windy Peak through the Tripod forest fire of 2006.

Multiple layers

 

Waiting for the weather to turn

"I was waiting on a moment

But that moment never came

All the billion other moments

Were just slipping all away..."

"As the dawn began to break

I had to surrender

The universe will have its way

Too powerful to master"

"Looking into space, it surrounds you

Love is the place that you're drawn to"

"Laugh in the sunshine

sing

cry in the dark

fly

through the night

Don't cry now

Don't you cry

Don't you cry

anymore

lalalada

Sleep

in the stars

don't you cry

dry your eyes

on the wind

lalalala

la........"

"Tell everybody

Waitin' for Superman

That they should try to

Hold on

Best they can

He hasn't dropped them

Forgot them

Or anything

It's just too heavy for Superman to lift"

On Surfing, Exploring, and Finding Meaning

I don't think I'll ever really surf, but William Finnegan's Barbarian Days contains everything there is to know about surfing without ever having to surf, which isn't really the point. The point of Finnegan's book is to tell a life through surfing adventures. Surfing is a life and life is surfing for a surfer.

I could relate to Finnegan's surfing life through my love of hiking. Like hiking, surfing is monomaniacal and anti-social. It can be so all-engrossing that nothing else matters. You drift through the work week, looking forward to nothing but getting away and doing it again. In a world increasingly devoid of meaning, surfing for Finnegan and hiking for me offer a new way to see the world.

Like hiking, surfing can be both hyper-local and a way to explore the entire globe. You could spend your whole life at one spot, getting to know it throughout the seasons, and seeing how it changes in response to natural and human-made changes. Or, you could go on a wild international adventure to far-flung places like Fiji, Australia, and Madeira, places that Finnegan learns by surfing, which gives him a unique view both at an ecological level and at a community level by meeting people there directly and indirectly involved with surfing. Surfing takes Finnegan to apartheid South Africa, an experience that marks him, as he becomes a reporter in zones of conflict, like El Salvador where, of course, he also surfs.

Finnegan is slow to reveal himself as a surfer to his reporter friends because he's afraid that people won't take him seriously, but what the reader gets from this book is how deeply you get into the world by surfing.

Like hiking, or anything else worth really doing--fishing, music, art, cooking--you could spend your entire life and never really master how to surf, to predict how waves will perform in a given situation. Jerry Seinfeld, who claims he will be doing stand-up comedy into his 80s compared himself to surfers, and nails the pursuit so well: "What are they doing this for? It's just pure. You're alone. That wave is so much bigger and stronger than you. You're always outnumbered. They always can crush you. And yet you're going to accept that and turn it into a little, brief, meaningless art form." It's this brief, meaningless art form that keeps Finnegan surfing well into his sixties as he writes.

Finnegan describes his surfing adventures with a Broadway dancer, who sums up the art and that searching aspect to surfing in a comparison to dancing: "With music as with waves [...] you are 'yielding to something more powerful than yourself.'"

When I hike, I'm also yielding to higher powers. You're at the mercy of the elements, which is a really pure feeling, in comparison to so much of the rest of my waking life in front of a screen in a temperature-controlled office.

On the surface, surfing, for Finnegan, and hiking, for myself, are an escape. But they're much more than escapes. They're a deep search for that meaning and connection to something more powerful. Connection to the planet. To the earth's processes and its life. To a spirit with higher meaning. As with music, I yield to the earth's higher powers.

The search for waves for any surfer is a great exploration. Surfers dig in deep like mad scientists. As Finnegan notes, "All surfers are oceanographers, and in the area of breaking waves all are engaged in advanced research. Surfers don't need to be told that when a wave breaks actual water particles, rather than simply the waveform, begin to move forward. They are busy figuring out more arcane relationships, like the one between tide and consistency, or swell direction and nearshore bathymetry. The science of surfers is not pure, obviously, but heavily applied. The goal is to understand, for the purpose of riding them, what the waves are doing, and especially what they are likely to do next. But waves dance to an infinitely complex tune. To a surfer sitting in the lineup trying to decipher the structure of a swell, the problem can indeed present itself musically. Are these waves approaching in 13/8 time, perhaps, with seven sets an hour, and the third wave of every set swinging wide in a sort of dissonant crescendo? Or is this swell one of God's jazz solos, whose structure is beyond our understanding? When the surf is big, or in some other way humbling, even these questions tend to fall away. The heightened sense of a vast, unknowable design silences the effort to understand. You feel honored simply to be out there. I've been reduced on certain magnificent days [...] to just drifting on the shoulder, gawking at the transformation of ordinary seawater into beautifully muscled swell, into feathering urgency, into pure energy, impossibly sculpted, ecstatically edged, and finally into violent foam."

Finnegan creates a haunting picture of how a place can change over time. In the pre-Internet days, armed with only ocean charts, he and a friend go on a wild search for waves throughout the South Seas in places like Samoa and Fiji. Listening to weather reports, guessing when swells would hit, and looking at the bathymetric charts, they attempt to find a spot and how guess how sets would hit it in order to create ridable waves. During "the search," a 2-year quest for the perfect wave in the South Seas, a "two-dimensional chart suddenly became a multidimensional vision of ridable waves. You could isolate half a dozen factors on the chart alone. But studying charts of places we had never even seen? We were flying blind. This was decades before Google Earth. We had to trust in Willard Baston, the great oceanographer, who wrote in Waves and Beaches, 'This zone where waves give up their energy and where systematic water motions give way to violent turbulence is the surf. It is the most exciting part of the ocean.'" Finnegan and his partner find the ultimate location by hitching rides with fishermen and comparing notes with yachters. A remote island. Tavarua, in Fiji. Filled with deadly sea snakes, they use bonfires to communicate with the fishermen who gave them a ride to the island. They spend several weeks in this paradise surfing the best, most consistent waves of their lives.

Years later, a surf mag falls in Finnegan's lap and there is the wave that probably only a handful of people had surfed before them. They learn that the island had been bought by Californian entrepreneurs who created an exclusive surf resort where guests pay thousand of dollars to have a wave to themselves. Finnegan's travel partner is especially sick to his stomach upon hearing the news and vows never to return. But decades later, Finnegan goes to the resort and finds the wave has changed a bit but there's an even better wave that you can only get to with a power boat supplied by the resort. These sorts of changes are constant throughout Finnegan's surfing life, as he witnesses waves literally ruined by the crowds, and the same goes for any other sacred places. There are so few of them left--we see trailheads for hikes that look like the parking lot of a Walmart. At least people are out and not staring like zombies at their screens. But we're seeing a breaking point. When you put too many rats in a cage or too many fish in an aquarium, you see the stress levels rise, bullies emerge, causing even more stress. Surfers and hikers and other outdoor recreationists are the first to see that we need more open space. And yet still we as a society build more malls and more McMansions, which are the last things we need.

It's important to note how fickle waves are--just like life, which can be senselessly cruel: "Here's how ridable waves form. A storm out at sea churns the surface, creating chop--smaller and then larger disorganized wavelets, which amalgamate, with enough wind, into heavy seas. What we are waiting for on distant coasts is the energy that escapes from the storm, radiating outward into calmer waters in the form of wave trains--groups of waves, increasingly organized, that travel together. Each wave is a column of orbiting energy, most of it below the surface. All the wave trains produced by a storm constitute what surfers call a swell. The swell. The swell can travel thousands of miles. The powerful the storm, the farther the swell may travel. As it travels, it  becomes more organized--the distance between each wave in a train, known as the interval, increases. In a long-interval train, the orbiting energy in each wave may extend more than a thousand feet beneath the ocean surface. Such a train can pass easily through surface resistance like chop or other smaller, shallower swells that it crosses or overtakes."

Surfing is a life and life is surfing for a surfer. Finnegan describes his time with an oncologist in San Francisco who is obsessed with the huge waves at Ocean Beach, an unlikely spot for surfing, where the frigid water numbs body parts and the waves literally crush human beings. The oncologist makes an important observation that he's not as interested in cancer as he is in people's response to it: "A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can't afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I'm really interested in is the human spirit--in how people react to stress and adversity. I'm fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface." This is how Finnegan fights through his life and how the oncologist surfer lives, surfing the enormous waves in the City by the Bay. It's not by living the fake smiling, superficial conversations. It's about a deep search that never ends.

On the set of a Western noir

On the "Trail to Hell" near Republic, Washington. Near the location of the Strawberry and Nc'cin wolf packs. Perfect location for a long chase on horseback, a wild animal encounter, or a hot hike.

The Tiffany Highlands: A Corridor

The Tiffany Highlands cosy up to the Canadian Rockies in a relatively large roadless area that includes a vast zone of dry coniferous forest dominated by Ponderosa pines, lodgepole pines, and Engelmann spruce part of the Okanogan National Forest.

Washington state's big-sky country provides an abrupt transition zone that encompasses the eastern flank of the rocky, glaciated Cascades and the beginnings of the high desert that spreads further east. Roadless and wild, its forests are only disturbed by fire.

The Tiffany Highlands meadows support reclusive and rarely seen lynx, wolverines and grizzlies.



A large mule deer, but no large predator sightings to report, we did however see large patches of lupine, Indian paintbrush, krummholz (densely matted trees stunted by wind and snow), a couple of boletes, honey mushrooms, the grasses and sedges that grizzly like to forage through, and juniper. From our panoramic view from the peak of Tiffany mountain, we could see the British Columbia's Snowy Peak, the glaciated peaks of the North Cascades, the Pasayten peaks, Loup Loup Pass, and a wonderful expanse of high alpine forest tundra mixed in with a high-desert feel.

























The Tiffany Highlands are an important corridor, both for large and rare predators, in addition to the unique flora and fauna that tend to thrive in these roadless places. Other major corridors include northern Idaho, where the Selkirk mountains cross over from rugged British Columbia.

Being in a corridor is inspiring--it gives hope that there are places on this planet still relatively untouched by humans. Their ruggedness gives the impression that they are places to visit and not dwell.

Because they're roadless, these corridors are lonely places. They're some of the last places in this country where you can truly see stars. (When we camp on the west side of the Cascades, for example, our star viewing is still impaired by light pollution from the Vancouver suburbs.) Even as seemingly wide open as the West is, still the furthest you can travel without hitting a road is something under 50 miles.




Here in the Tiffany Highlands, we ventured into roadless territory, just scratching the surface of roadlessness. But we could get a sense of the loneliness, which is the draw for us.

Roadless places, like the Tiffany Highlands, are so rugged and rare that one hopes they'll never be permanently inhabited by humans.

As human populations continue to grow, corridors and that unique flora and fauna that either dwell in them or just pass through disappear. And it doesn't just affect the grizzlies. Because there are too many of us, we've built upon the corridors, squeezing them ever narrower. Bringing terrible ethical considerations when it comes to fire. It's healthier for forests if we just let them burn. The fires clean up the debris and the overcrowding underbrush, allowing bigger, healthier trees to survive and thrive. But people build their vacation homes in places they shouldn't. Because they want their homes to be safe, like everybody else, these homeowners want fire suppression. Which makes the next fires even worse. When it hasn't been maintained by a regular routine of natural forest fires, the out-of-control underbrush explodes like a tinder box . But we continue building. The more we build, the more we squeeze the corridors ever narrower, creating even worse fires for the next year.




The corridors bring up another ethical question. According to a recent poll, most people in the Pacific Northwest would like to see the grizzly re-introduced into the North Cascades. I, too, would love to see the grizzly re-introduced here. And probably much moreso than the cardboard coffee-drinking polite happy talk people in places like Mulkiteo. I just wonder how much other information was presented. Because one needs to ask oneself: "Where the hell are we going to put these grizzlies?" East-West highways, like the I-90 and the beautiful Highway 20 that we all love driving on, make it very difficult, if not impossible, for large predators to move north-south along the Cascade crest. Nobody knows how many grizzlies use that corridor, but the 8 or 9 grizzlies that probably currently walk through the border to the U.S. side of the Cascades using the corridor, barely have room to themselves.

Daily, thousands of Subarus criss-cross the North Cascades, driven by well-meaning butterfly netters who think it'd be cool to see a grizzly while hiking but have no idea of what it's really like to run into a grizzly, which isn't to say I'm paranoid about running into a grizzly (one of the most heart-stoppingly amazing experiences one can have in the wild), I'd just like to minimize those experiences for the bears' sake.

Given vegetation and habitat needs, brown bears in this part of the world need something like 250 square miles each. I'd love to see grizzlies one day have this space to themselves again. And given potential political realities, maybe we'll eradicate ourselves from existence, leaving the bears and wolverines more than just a corridor to wander through. But before we have this re-introduction, we need to ask ourselves about just how much space are we willing to cede or at least come to grips with the noxious consequences we bring both intentionally and unintentionally to creatures like grizzlies when we encroach on their space. The human population will need education, in addition to a come-to-Jesus moment in which we realize that when we build vacation homes, when we procreate, we are encroaching on space that's shared with other animals. To establish ourselves too deeply, as we have, would mean continued extirpation of species over time or at the very least greatly reduce genetic diversity, as animals can no longer pass from one viable habitat to another. Which is fine, if that's what we want. We just to have balance in these considerations, weigh them in our priorities, and recognize that everything we do has consequences.

When we venture into these ethical questions of large predator populations and how they mix with humans, and how they use land and the corridors through which they travel, we have to weigh so many variables that are seen from so many different stakeholders' points of view. In the case of corridors, like the Tiffany Highlands, these perspectives cross international, state and other local jurisdictions' boundaries (parks, wilderness areas, recreation areas). We have to weigh in on natural resource extraction, impacts caused by recreation, among other impacts we have on this planet just by breathing. There are so many interest groups and their respective constituencies to consider that it almost becomes mind-boggling that we are able to co-inhabit places with animals like grizzlies or wolves, let alone consider the possibility of re-introducing these animals in places where they will more frequently run across human beings. There are no neat and tidy answers. The only thing we should know, and this is the only thing I can say with any certainty about every piece of knowledge I've gained in close to 40 years of existence and it goes for questions of predator re-introduction or climate change or land conservation or any real decision we make as human beings and I bold it to completely emphasize the only thing that I know for certain in this life and the only thing I'd really like to share with my fellow human beings: Every action we take as human beings, even with our best of intentions, is fraught with more problems for us to sort out.

The view from the precipice

Microcosms

There’s a feeling you get about an hour, hour-and-a-half into a steep hike. As you breathe, so does the world around you. Pulsating, taking on new shapes and colors, shapes and colors that were already there but take on new meaning as you travel deeper. The trees come alive. Clearly, they were alive before, except for the snags, but they might talk to you. Not necessarily in a speaking voice, but it’s like you have a telepathic connection with the trees, the plants, the tiny beetle digging through the dirt.

Frequently, I find myself lying down in the forest. There’s something that happens with depth of focus. If your eyes were a camera lens, they’d have a really wide aperture. That small beetle, the dirt, the undercover becomes a world within itself. You can see that there are many worlds in one when you lie down and hold your gaze at a pocket of ferns, which becomes a copse of large jungle trees when your eyes are 3 inches from the ground. If you focus with even more intensity, you can watch the ants climb up the branches of this pocket of ferns, which becomes like an Ewok village.



The sound of water from a small creek trickles in the background and may come to the foreground. With our senses in a hyper-sensitive state, perception changes.Look closer.