Writing by Katrina Barlow
Epiphany 2: The New West Linoleum
Other Writing:
» Doug McDaniel’s Pension Check Is Hung up in His Trees
» Tufa
» Yesterday We hunted for Pockmarked Pictures
» Things that Make Me Feel Dirty
» San Juan Sand and Memory Cards
» Beetle Migration: An Expiration Date for Mature Pine Forests
Epiphany 1:Manzanar : Hiroshima
I hear whisperings: daijyobu, kiyotsukete, abunai. They are voices suppressed by imprisonment. That Tuesday hit me cold when we walked into Manzanar: the home and the hell of Japanese-Americans in World War II.
It was the time the hydrangeas were blooming that the Japanese were relocated to Manzanar. Uniformed soldiers forced them to leave, saying it was for their protection but the guns were pointed at them. They abandoned their stores, their homes, their slippers, their pets to live in uniform. Look alike, live alike. It was American diversity, perhaps, a continuation of the Italian, the Jewish, the Mexican district.
The Issei were there: the generation that left their emperor and painted blue on their flag. Their children, the Nissei, were more American than me. More Japanese than me too.
My parents met at the atomic bomb research center in Hiroshima. It was a bilingual courtship, researching disease and destruction and drinking sake with the other American researchers to forget the death. They studied radiation poisoning and leukemia by day, and in the evenings toured the islands of the city. Photos show them holding hands at the only surviving building in the blast radius. The roof is blown out, the windows too. Some sides cave in, chewed up in jagged teeth. That building marks the epicenter of the blast; the blast blew straight down into the earth and expanded horizontally, leveling the city and its people.
They were the eye of the hurricane, the building in the blast zone. They fell in love in Hiroshima.
My birthright is the atomic bomb. I can stand at the entrance to Manzanar because of the war; I am the aftermath of that war.
Manzanar is another demolished site. I walk through its museum and see photos. There are snapshots of schoolchildren, of Nissei soldiers, and of the communal life of those at Manzanar. Women and men used toilets so close their knees touched where walls should have been. A man looks like my grandfather.
The blocks in the photos are gone. The living quarters, the public toilets, the mess halls—they are dismantled, torn apart for scrap money and conscience. The foundations remain, and the bodies of the dead.
Gardens still exist between the cement slabs. The internees created beautiful victory gardens for their hydrangeas and their soldiers, the American fighters. Man-made streams snaked by the mess hall in that desert land—they built an oasis under the auspices of the Sierra Nevada. The irises still bloomed in May, followed by the peonies in June.
Peonies were my grandmother’s favorite flower. Their absurd size and color made her see life after the bomb, my mother said. She died at an early age from cancer.
The year my mother turned the age her mother died, she began gardening. The first flower she planted was a peony, a giant yellow flower head tinged with red. She chose plants whose leaves turned color in the rain. For years, I watched her pick slugs off her plants with chopsticks. My grandfather, while he still lived, poured his leftover cereal milk over the hostas. They didn’t do too well.
Last summer, I traveled to Japan alone. I spent an afternoon sitting beside that skeleton building. I imagined my mother speaking to my father: daijyobui. I heard the cries after the bomb fell: kiyotsukete, abunai. They are cries of death undeserved. It is a haunting place, a scab of the past, and a place that I love.
My family escaped internment by forty years. Manzanar, however, feels like my family and my history. The photos look like my relatives. The flowers are the same. It is a site of destruction dismembered by the end of the war. It is a place of hell, but also of home.
I wonder, standing at the gate of Manzanar, who might return here and claim it as their birthright.
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Epiphany 2: The New West Linoleum
The grasslands of the West are no longer the grasslands of the Western past. They are transformed by exotics into another terrain, a transplanted Asian carpet frayed and worn. Many of these exotics originate from central Asia—hardy grasses adapted to disturbance and heavy grazers. Cheatgrass, crested wheatgrass, smooth brome, intermediate wheatgrass, timothy, Kentucky bluegrass, redtop grass—these are the plants of the West that we know. Exotics explode across the Western landscape and eliminate native plants: the bunchgrasses, willows, rabbit brush, sage brush, aspens, and cottonwoods.
Cattle grazing cause this ecological upset. Introduced exotics are cow or sheep feed, prized for their resilience and restructuring of the land. Some non-natives were introduced to reduce cattle impact, such as the canary grass in the Northwest. The canary grass provides a stable bank to deter erosion from cattle grazing. Its success has subsequently infiltrated the Northwest landscape to such an extent that it cannot be eradicated. This is true of cheatgrass too. Due to its disturbance-loving disposition, cheatgrass is the homewrecker of native grasses, moving in ubiquitously and unashamedly into grazed land. Cheatgrass creates a mat of duff that nothing else can penetrate; it does not coexist with anything except cattle. The exotic grasses are bed and fodder for cattle, displacing the historical ecosystem of the old West. The new West is a landscape of uniform density and appearance, a land of homogeneity and single-mindedness.
It is as if we removed a beautiful aged hardwood for the linoleum of the 1950s, or perhaps an Oriental rug trampled by too many feet. It is a restoration backwards, a cheapening of the landscape. Now, the ecological composition of the old West is impossible to regain. The exotics are too robust and too pervasive; we can never uproot them in a large-scale area. Don Harker, a land steward of Wallowa County, quoted, “Today’s problems are yesterday’s solutions.” Introduced exotics were the remedy to overgrazing and riparian damage; now, however, they are injury to the land and its function.
To find the old grasslands of the West, travel to the firelands. Native plants are fire-resistant and sometimes fire-dependent, such as the lodgepole pine. In native grasses, fire regenerates the native community; they are adapted and accustomed to fire. Prior to our European arrival, natives used fire for hunting, because it prompted new growth for deer and elk to feed on and increased visibility of the land. Ponderosa pine cross-sections show burn cycles almost every fourteen years, before extensive fire suppression was implemented in the 1950s.
Fire suppression, however, is now changing fire behavior. Habitual fire consumes the low fuel load at ground level, creating a low temperature fire that stimulates native grasses. Now, however, fuel load levels are so high that temperatures scorch the land. Blackened landscapes become more common than the previous lobate burn pattern, which jumped across the land leaving untouched fingers. While bunchgrasses survive low temperature burns, they are incinerated by these blazing fires. As these black burnt lands recover, cheatgrass is in its element, taking advantage of the opened space. Once rooted, the cheatgrass again transforms the land back to its linoleum floor.
The recently burnt landscape is perhaps the most pristine landscape of the new West, and the closest we can come to the original eco-terrain. It is darker, blacker, more sinister now, but it is without exotics albeit temporarily. It becomes a land of potential, of renewal; there is the whisper of elk and deer stepping quietly through the ash; the feel of old land, old hardwood, old sinew; and maybe, a rebirth of the bunchgrasses, the willows, the aspens that makes the land breathe.
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Doug McDaniel’s Pension Check Is Hung up in His Trees
The clouds hang mute and grey above, sinking heavily over the tree canopy. Felled trees litter the forest floor, sunbleached a lighter grey as if reflecting the subdued sky. The Ponderosa pine trees stand on the hillside like they have for decades. Some larches and Grand firs poke through, missing the characteristic red bark of the old Ponderosas. The Ponderosas are big trees, old trees, with cracked red bark revealing dark crevasses and grooves.
I smell vanilla itching around my nose, never becoming cloying but stronger as I sniff the creases of a tree. Looking upwards, I see the spindly and slender needles up above, dull beside the bark and the sky. They scratch the sky like shadowy fingers. Below my feet, a thick layer of needles makes a prickly sponge floor. I kick the needles back, only to reveal more below—yellow, musty, moldy.
The stand of trees does not seem spectacular or different; it looks normal, natural, like any other stand of trees. It is a man sitting on a saggy trunk that draws my attention. The man is Doug McDaniel, a rancher, forester, and local resident of Wallowa County, born and raised. His eyes water as he looks at his forest, an area that he hopes to eventually log for large timber.
“Loggers aren’t into big trees anymore,” he says. “They’re more into smaller logs that grow faster and can be cut faster. No one really cares very much about the big trees.”
He thinks that will change, however. With a rising popularity in sustainable logging, small trees will no longer fit the ticket for timber production. Instead, McDaniel believes that larger trees will provide more usable timber in a prolonged time frame. He takes another breath.
“Some people might disagree with me, but I think fire is bad for the trees. It stops the biodiversity of what’s growing here, and growing out of these dead trees.”
Fire suppression remains a contentious issue in the West. Large-scale fire suppression began in the 1950s, requiring an incredible amount of federal funds, fire service, and firefighting equipment. Prior to this time, fire-resistant species like Ponderosa pines show evidence of wildfires every fourteen to twenty years. These fires wiped out young Ponderosa trees, creating larger, less dense forests than the ones we know today. Fuel load remained low because shrubs, grasses, and small trees were burned frequently, which resulted in low temperature fires that did not reach the crowns of larger trees.
Fires today, however, behave very differently. Fuel load levels are now extremely high from a long-term buildup of plant debris, denser tree stands, and widespread exotics that burn rapidly. These create hot blazes that incinerate the land. Longer and more frequent drought periods and warmer temperatures from climate change are also connected to hotter, more destructive fires. These large fires burn tree crowns, effectively killing trees that were previously fire-adapted.
McDaniel may have a point. Today’s fires are no longer conducive to the native community, which once depended on fire to regenerate. Instead, native plants are torched, killed by these raging fires.
“Fire teams don’t do anything. They sit in their fire camps and let fires burn right next to them,” McDaniel explodes. “I’ve sat in my forest for twenty-five years now, every time I see lightning during the summer. I’ve put out more fires than anyone on that damn fire crew.” Fire suppression continues to divide opinion: whether land should remain unburned or if prescribed and controlled burns will return the land to a less flammable, and thus more productive, state.
He ends by saying, “These trees are going to be my retirement later.” His pension check hangs with those Ponderosa pines boughs. His watery eyes again trace the landscape, examining every tree and remembering every extinguished fire.
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Tufa
we walked among rock brains
at Pyramid Lake, that white day
the Paiute sang to the skunk
and we knew why.
they cemented their secrets
until the Truckee stopped—
an umbilical cord now hooked
to Reno casinos and neon glare.
they were rock brains eroded,
chipped away by noon,
cored by geologists who took to know,
those gold diggers of time.
now they stand tattooed
by spray paint and autograph
to sit on the edge of
a terminal lake dying
by diversion. I think
it is better this way
to see our legacy: a graveyard
of brains on the Paiute land.
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Yesterday We Hunted for Pockmarked Pictures
Yesterday we hunted for pictures,
pockmarked sandstone on Comb Ridge
of deer, of circles, of the headless,
of a tribe that left with no word.
We found a ladder of footsteps, small
footholds that only my six-year-old
self could have stepped in with
red Converse high-tops and its Snoopy decals.
In one sun, we saw the urine-soaked
history of the packrat mittens
and the Ancient Pueblans who arrived
from the sipapu: the hole
of creation,
of divination,
of sex.
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Things that Make Me Feel Dirty
The grey wrinkles in my feet, which crack dreadfully and bleed;
The sandals that make my feet sweat;
The pee splatter from urinating on slick rock and compacted desert;
Other people’s pee splatter from urinating too close;
The piece of egg yolk I pulled from my hair;
The piece of hair I found in my spaghetti;
The sticky leather of the Suburban;
The sandy rim around my water bottle;
The piece of gum I left in my water bottle;
The guilt from leaving another piece of gum in someone else’s water bottle, thinking it was mine;
The over-roasted coffee grounds stuck in my teeth;
The floss I found in my back pocket from last Monday;
The dish sponges;
Interruption;
The soft crunch of cryptobiotic soil beneath my grey feet;
The eyes that did not notice the sponge soil now dead.
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San Juan Sand and Memory Crabs
I watched a wall of sand charge across the river, creating an ephemeral dam from bank to bank. The wind remained solid for a few moments, a tan corridor, until the sand fell silent and the breeze clung against the canyon wall. I watched, crusted over like a discarded crab carcass, until my eyelashes hung white and the biting sand stopped against my back.
For a moment, I remained frozen on the bank of that river—the San Juan—a milky snake that winds through the canyon country of southern Utah. And suddenly, I was transported to another place, a nameless beach along the Oregon coast and I saw myself in my mind’s eye as a seven-year-old girl with long hair and cropped bangs. The clouds hung low, marbling the granite sky and muttering quietly along the cobbled beach. In this place, the sand clung damply to the grey rocks. I held one of these rocks in my cold-red hand, examining the veins that pulsed deeper when I shoved the rock underwater. The rock’s features sharpened, emboldened. Another object caught my childish eye, however, and the rock fell back in its puddle for another find: the spiny shell of a dead crab.
I opened my eyes, again staring at the canyon wall. The brown water mirrored the color of the sandstone, splotched by shadow and composition. Up above, oily shale blackened the rock edges. A lull in the wind, and I thought briefly of the animals and plants that lived here, died here, decomposed here into black rock that now shone dully like gunmetal. The pause ended, and another sand curtain descended upon the river.
This time, I found myself a few years older, ten perhaps, and I knew where. On the Tofino shoreline, the grey sky cried above me. My purple raincoat flapped noisily, and a man wearing thick rubber boots told me to stick my ear into the ocean water. I poked my head underwater, leaning off the dock while my mother held my shoes. “Those popping noises you hear,” he said, “Are rock shrimp, the loudest animals in the world.” He told me that they make vacuums with their pinchers to stun their prey, loud cracks that echo for miles and miles underwater. I smiled hesitantly, unsure if the fisherman was pulling my leg.
We boarded a small boat tied to the dock, my father holding my younger sister and me while waving to my mother on shore. We were going whale watching, hoping for humpbacks while my mother chose coffeehouse leisure over seasickness. The water was murky, turbid, and eerily dark. For an afternoon, I watched dark stepping stones emerge from the black water, their breath spraying us with seawater and stories, while our guide talked of history and of a people who knew the humpbacks as family. I imagined a native people rowing, carrying harpoons and navigating the same weeping skies. My child’s mind blurred the time continuum, so that another girl stood where my younger sister was, a girl wearing soft skins and woven cedar bark instead of my sister’s yellow ducky. The broad backs of the whales bridged time, warping my memory of the present and the past.
Again, I opened my eyes to see the sand bridge disintegrate over the brown San Juan. The time bridge collapsed and I noticed again the dark oily stains on the canyon walls and the bowing tamarisks on either bank. It struck me that the sand now whipping my hair was the canyon crumbling, falling apart with heavy history. This sand may still have been sandstone and limestone and shale on the canyon wall when another people walked this bank: the Navajo, the ancestral Pueblans, the nomads who wandered the Colorado Plateau. The tamarisks would be gone, and the Russian olives too—exotic plants that piggybacked on European migration—but the canyon walls would still poke the sky and the river would still mingle with the sand.
Standing on the river bank, I saw the time continuum layered in the canyon and the river, not refocusing on just the present. The weathered walls exposed time passing, a portrait of disintegrating place and remembrance. The river banks revealed the old people through residue: arrowheads, pot shards, stone tools. Organic ooze seeped darkly from the rocks above my head. Once more, the same wind snatched at the sandy ground and coated me in a hard shell, a crab again drifting through mud and memory.
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Beetle Migration: An Expiration Date for Mature Pine Forests
We kicked down pinon trees with the bottoms of our hiking boots, knocking off branches with the blunt end of axes and our soles. The pinon pines were dead skeleton trees on Arnold’s farm, many dead since 2002. They were dusty grey now with gnarled branches twisting anxiously upwards, a picture of contorted death.
That day, the Westies were performing a service project on the Navajo reservation outside of Shiprock, New Mexico. We tore down dead trees for firewood and distributed the smaller bits across cryptobiotic soil to prevent erosion. We stripped the trees of branches; Arnold ripping into the trunks with his Stahl chainsaw, a red nightmare a few decades too old with a loose chain; students hauling logs across slick rock trails, eyeing the blue tree rings, and wondering if Arnold, a Navajo geobotanist, knew why the pinons died off.
He said drought. A particularly long dry spell weakened the trees, followed by an outbreak of pinon ips beetle—a relative of the mountain pine beetle—that resulted in massive pine die-offs. The blue stain is an indicator of beetle kill: bark beetles carry a fungus which infects the tree and dyes the wood blue. The fungus will ultimately kill the pine tree. In 2002 and 2003, bark beetles killed an estimated 50 million pinon pines and 20 million ponderosas in New Mexico and Arizona. An article in High Country News confirms: “The pine forests of the Southwest are weak from years of drought; between 1994 and 2004, eight years were drier than normal in the region, and…2002 was the driest single year in northern Arizona in the last 1,400 years.” Unfortunately, rising temperatures from climate change are coinciding and aiding with possibly the worst beetle outbreak recorded in the area.
These pine deaths are not isolated in the Southwest. Bark beetles are killing mature pine trees across the West. Mountain pine beetles, perhaps the most commonly known bark beetle, attack lodgepole pines by drilling through the bark to the cambium layer. Once it reaches this nutritious layer, it sends a pheromone-based call to other beetles. The tree defends itself by attempting to drown the burrowing beetle in resin, but cannot produce enough resin to resist the thousands of responding beetles. In one tree, hundreds of thousands of bark beetles are hatching, growing, tunneling, or exiting to attack another tree. In British Columbia, an estimated ten million acres of lodgepole pines died off in 2002 alone, a size equivalent to Switzerland.
Lodgepole pines and mountain pine beetles have a cyclical relationship. During an outbreak, mountain pine beetles kill large stands of lodgepole, creating fuel for forest fires, which in turn begin the next generation of lodgepole pines. Several factors, however, are compounding beetle impact into the perfect storm. Decades of fire suppression created dense tree stands of comparable ages, making entire stands susceptible to the mountain pine beetle. Also, increasing temperatures in the West dramatically alter a beetle’s lifespan. Beetle outbreaks are controlled in part by temperature: colder temperatures (especially at higher elevations) extend the beetle’s life to two years, forcing the beetle to undergo a second winter. Also, colder temperatures interrupt the synchronized emergence of bark beetles such that only a few beetles attack a new tree at once. These healthy trees can ward off small-scale attacks; only diseased or weakened trees are susceptible. With temperatures rising more quickly in the American West than the world as a whole, beetles are shifting to a one-year life cycle and a more robust reproduction rate.
These beetles, about the size of rice grains, are peppering trees with their round, hard-shelled bodies. Walking along a ridgeline of Mount Joseph in northeastern Oregon, whitebark pines stood hauntingly red—the rust-colored surrender flag of a beetle-killed tree. Unlike the lodgepole pines, whitebark pines will not rebound quickly, since they mature over hundreds of years. I ease off a piece of bark with a knife, only to find dark pellets littering j-shaped channels. These are the galleries where the beetle deposits its eggs, the black balls the corpses of dead beetles. Carving deeper with the knife, the telltale blue wood stain offers the autopsy: beetle death. The beetles are migrating now, moving higher and northward into new forests with warmer temperatures.
The bark beetle has migrated within 60 to 120 miles of jack pine, a predicted food source that has never previously encountered bark beetles. Jack pine extends northward and eastward into Canada, providing a previously inaccessible bridge across the Great Plains. If bark beetles reach the jack pine forests, nothing stands in their way to the Eastern Seaboard, where stands of white pines and the loblolly pines of the Southeast have been protected until now by the Plains. Already, enormous patches of rust-red trees cover New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and British Columbia. We may soon see the disappearance of mature pine forests across the nation.
Climate change is skewing a natural process—the cycle of beetle death, fire, and regeneration—into a warped, disproportionate blanket of red crowns and red fire. When the forests do return, climate change scenarios predict tree lines moving upwards and northwards, such that the forests we know today will never return the same. The pinon pines at Arnold’s farm, the lodgepole pines in Colorado, the whitebark pines above the tramway line on Mount Joseph, the ponderosas above Frijoles Canyon in New Mexico, those trees are dead, cremated even, with black-beetled carcasses stowed in tree coffins. This semester, we attended funerals under faded white trunks and burnt red canopies, watching skeleton forests rot across the West and wondering how far the empty forest will go.
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