MCKENZIE RIVER RESTORATION AT FINN ROCK: A WATER SUITE WINTER COUNT FOR BARRY LOPEZ

 

MCKENZIE RIVER RESTORATION

AT FINN ROCK

A Water Suite Winter Count for Barry Lopez

Blessingway is used for everything that is good for a person, or for the people. It has no use other than that. As for the prayers, you say, “Beauty shall be in front of me, beauty shall be in the back, beauty shall be below me, above me, all around me.”

Frank Mitchell, Navajo Blessingway Singer

But...beautiful. Like kissed tears.

Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful [A Book About Jazz]

blessings to praise the stumbled on stone

Jane Hirshfield,

With Singing and Banners

The first

Water Poet

stayed down six years.

Gary Snyder

Turtle Island

I. FURTHER RIVER WALKS IN WADERS

First light pullover

Old growth moss-covered brown leaves

Colored water stones

II. SING RIVER BACK HOME

Sing earth Blessingway

Sing rivers meandering

Sing Good Fire’s Return

Sing floodplain beauty

Water blessingway water

Sing tree ancestry

Sing justice liturgy

Sing ethics of oxygen

Sing river trust green

Sing tree ancestry spreading

Sing red-legged frog

Sing Blessingway Singer, sing

Evocations of Barry Lopez, McKenzie River

I.

Walking Three Water

Digging out mud soaking stones

Building this house river

Landscape found in edge dreaming

To bring what is together

II.

Finn Rock tomorrow

Karen quilts face-fabric mountain

What fall emptiness!

Looking out over my hands

Unable to stay on page

III.

When his friend’s request

for a handful of small stones

became a question

River running so narrow

River runs like a fire hose

IV.

Reading you Barry

In the way I’ve been given

And this extra breath

Arctic whale ivory tusks

Edges of any landscape

V.

Slow this river down

Take out invasive berries

Those hungry bull frogs

Walking among tundra birds

I was camped close to the edge

VI.

Beside a small pond

Cranberry walnut cookie

My once-sweet country

Bowing with hands in pockets

Benign forgiving sunlight

VII.

Stops along the way

Literature at first light

Poet’s learning curve

Camera gets out of car

White living willow water

VIII.

Back home to poems

Flood plain, beaver and bullfrog

Back home to notebook

Don’t fall over in water

And now so short of knowing

IX.

Traveling through the dark

Barry Lopez on hunger

Bill Stafford country

Sublime beauty penetrates

Rigging wild shower of sound

X.

If chance darkened me

Darkness brought me to rivers

Textured landscape stones

The people who change nature

Trust chosen companions

 XI. ---for Kevin

When we came to Bend

How one builds a living faith

We found in your pomes

Three rivers running Lopez

One can learn fidelity

Jim Bodeen

31 October—14 November 2023

 ●

WHYCHUS CREEK TRAIL HIKE ON ALL SAINTS DAY

Accessing the trailhead in parking lot ten miles out of Sisters.

After putting on my boots, checking my pack,

I look for a nearby rock to sit with the notebook.

The book of poems iin my hand, new, Jane Hirshfield’s

New and Selected Poems, The Asking.

Before setting out I sit with the book for an hour

in the bookstore. I am asking these poems

to open me to this hike, and I open the book

without thinking of where my eyes might land.

I have opened to this,

Three Times My Life Has Opened,

and I begin a blind transcription of the poem,

reading as I write the words

that are opening before me on the page.

Once to the fire that holds all

becomes the good fire, first step, walking this trail.

Walking the fire right through this parking lot,

a man appears, walking over to me sitting

on the rock. He introduces himself,

says his name is Curt, asking about the notebook.

How he brings up Pádraig Ó Tuama

when I’m reaching for the name of Irish theologian

Glenn Jordan, after saying no to John O’Donohue.

This is live on All Saints Day. Jordan

died four years ago. I’m carrying him on this hike.

Curt’s magnetized by the notebook, and poems.

He knows these pines, this Whychus Creek.

These rocks take the trail up and away

from the creek and back down to it.

I’m guided by a promise, too,

to retrieve small stones for Barry’s birthday.

There are two Barry's on this walk.

An hour on the trail I still hear creek song.

It’s raining, and drops on my hat add

to the music of water. Percussion. This far in

I know that man who walked out of the fire

is Gary Snyder. I don’t make things up.

As a boy walking North Dakota coulees

I believed myself to be a Mandan Indian.

The Mandans taught me to break small branches

as I walked so that I might find my way back.

This is belief and practice.

Through this ice,

three small stones--

for my friend, B.G.

I stop along the way making miniature cairns,

smaller than my fist, pick up a broken twig,

burnt, and hold it up. Root ball

of the ancient Bristlecone Pine.

I’ve walked the Grove of the Patriarchs.

Setting it on the large stone,

photographing it, I almost miss

the tiny shelled seeds left by chipmunks.

I turn and turn the root branch

in my hand, asking, as I’ve been taught,

What is the front? What is the back?

The Iphone camera gathers it all,

and I place the miniature root

in the outside pocket of my pack.

Some cairns in the Arctic are twelve feet high.

Hiking, now, away from water,

nearing tree line, pausing

for a sandwich, two hikers

come around a large stone

from above, stop for a greeting.

A man and his wife.

Looking at me, he sees the tree

through the mesh in my pack.

What’s that? The man asks.

A tree, I say. It was in the fire.

A Ponderosa. When he looks

at his wife, she looks over at me.

No further talk. I will continue

until I descend again

to Whychus Creek, where

I’ll search for those stones

I promised Barry.

It is All Saints Day

and I remember my mother and father.

The world is on fire

and I am walking in woods

along Whychus Creek in Oregon

a fifteen minute drive out of Sisters.

1 November 2023

●

ALL SOULS DAY AT THE HEADWATERS OF THE METOLIUS RIVER

Streams and tributaries.

These are the streams and tributaries.

Streams and tributaries of the Metolius.

This is a surfacing of the underground river.

Walking again. Walking after driving.

Walking lost. Driving lost with maps.

Sixteen miles out of Sisters on 20 West.

Turning onto Metolius River Camp

Camp Sherman store

but that’s not where I want to start.

Water that comes from below,

from the monk’s vows,

obedience and bifurcation.

Far from the fish hatchery.

Surrounded by spring and bounce, so many

unreadable maps, the brown needles

from pines falling with each breeze

with so many options for grief,

I bow to the archivist, Sam,

who sent me the photo of fire's aftermath,

amd these falling needles bringing this bronze light!--

this river walk asks our ancestors

to follow story tellers

along this riverbank

canceling all fireworks,

surefootedness in mud.

Miss the turn and end up at Camp Sisters,

headwaters, but not the trail.

Among all that I don’t know, this:

a full-sized river, the Metolius,

flowing ice-cold, springs appearing

originating from beneath Black Butte

what park signs say.

Geologists call this misleading,

believing springs have their origin

in the Cascade Mountains to the west.

An underground river.

Free flowing, spring-fed.

These are singers who have traveled to get here.

Samhain. Dias de los Muertos.

And today, All Souls Day.

Singers have been asked to open the trail.

What music in cold water.

Water nutrient rich. Plants, insects, fish.

A restoration project before hikers walking in rain.

Resident and migratory fish thriving. Look.

Rain so steady I return to the car, change coat and hat.

Native Redband trout prey on insects.

Down river endangered bull trout

feed on small fish.

Fall colors splashing against the rain.

Red sockeye migrate from Pacific.

A man walks over to me, points

to still water, Kokanee right beside me

on the bank, not a foot away.

Cross the bridge to fish hatchery.

Signs on trail: Target invasive plants--

Reed Canary, Ribbon Grass, Perennial Pea,

Yellow Flag Iris. Herbicides used:

Polaris, Roundup Custom.

Tributaries and restoration sites.

Colors showing up for the camera in changing light.

The trail, all the way to Bridge 99

is no more than two feet from the river.

The man just picking up his mail.

Steady drizzle percussion drops on hat brim.

Big gulping water songs from deep river.

Standing bass jazz solos. Pressure rising.

Beside my feet, eight inch wood markers

with blue restoration ribbons.

Baby trees to the left of trail.

Grasses growing from fallen trees in the river.

Once, where the trail leaves the river

ascending to the left, a grandfather pine

has fallen between two elders growing together,

spitting their trunks, breaking in two

against the two, a perfectly

balanced confrontation. In return

for the river’s protection. The contribution.

A breaking before your very eyes.

Every step as tributary. Look at flow.

Kneel-down knee-soaked knees.

Look at the water moving to the side

in among fallen leaves, the slow swirling.

Walk as far as your feet will take you.

With you, contigo, contributing

to your bowing practice. You spring.

Take in what you can. You tributary.

Trust this restoration and when you doubt

the euphoria of this, hiking here,

smaller into larger, following,

look at the 100 photographs on your camera.

These pictures of November light a responsibility.

Not a response, all that is awe and before you.

The light is raw data, empirical.

Light as breath, your breath in the water.

2 November 2023

●

HOW FORTUNATE YOUR EYES

TO LIVE BESIDE THE HEALTHY RIVER

         --Barry Grimes at 77

Walking Three Water

Digging stones with character

Cairns for your birthdays

Jim

5-7 November 2023

●

I. WINTERCOUNT

“A cairn is mute and elemental as empty awareness. It orients. It recognizes, but says nothing....for it is about everything other than itself.” David Hinton, Existence, A Story.

He left early in the morning. Early November and dark. He would drive over Santiam Pass and McKenzie pass. He left from Sisters, Oregon, and after circumnavigating the wilderness, he would follow the McKenzie River to the restoration site at Finn Rock near the home of the writer Barry Lopez. Barry Lopez was the trigger that got him here. He Had driven to Bend to hear Lopez read just before the Pandemic in 2019. There had been a fire. The Holiday Farm Fire. Lopez died a little more than a year later, Christmas Day, 2020, days before his 76^th birthday on 6 January 2021. During that time of disease and political crisis, the voice of Barry Lopez, along with his writings that had been his lodestar. The fire, too, had burned through here. They had both known the Blessingway. Hózhó. Snow had closed the scenic way through the wilderness the week before. He would have to drive around. This way he would see the McKenzie River at its greenest, those early morning mosses seemingly lit by stars among fallen leaves.

Dark and wet when he gets in the car.

The artist-wife quilting in the famous fabric store.

Questioning your own desire.

Alone with lonely practice, what could be better?

Wanting to be up to the water,

and in it, in waders, up to the waist,

the cleansing still to be done.

Echoes of Lopez? Gone too far?

Lopez in a tent in Antarctica,

40 below after the morning warms up,

What could be more perfect!

River work. Inside and outside of a body of water.

The ear at work in a dark morning.

Slow the river, slow the mind.

The boots aren’t too big, she said.

Because of the wader’s stocking,

your hiking boots won’t fit.

One size larger, and balance in the river.

Slow the mind so you can slow the river.

Put these on before I change my mind.

You’re taking notes on the Forest Service map.

McKenzie Pass, Santiam Pass Scenic Highway.

You drove this green wilderness from Sisters

leaving in the dark. Traveling

through Stafford country, asking of rivers,

towards, and onto, the McKenzie,

Barry Lopez’ river, rivers of the poets,

ask yourself, What do you hear?

This catches me quite unaware this morning, mourning into the beauty of the heartbreak Terry sent it and here in this dark it is and diving into it, I'm doing this only because I was caught off-damnit, guard! This is no link! This beauty-way of a wreck is taking me with this re-entry into communal territory, oh, yes, I read that book, a friend gave it to me, I know exactly where it is on the shelf, in which book case it was Terry who gave me the book, Terry Martin, Consolations the name This David Whyte word into the watershed he loves etymologies--I have my etymologists, too, and they, too, wake and sustain me, oh, oh, oh, I see what you're doing now, you're escaping through the mind when you were on the right impulse track of heartbreak and friendship of forgiving watch out for animals coming for water then you knew what's what, you weren't trying to save yourself, but look at softly yourself you better you know you could soften all expectation no should, you're right, no should in this forgiveness stuff, where sustenance and hunger accompany your every real desire this river running two passes and somewhere the re-entry into time

What does the river say?

You’re not the first to ask these questions.

II. The Situation Surrounding You

          “We are leaping into a future that will go one way or the other.”

                     Jane Hirshfield

         “...it is his intention to look squarely into the factors that complicate the history of this place.”

                     Barry Lopez, Horizon

        “...for many minutes I didn’t notice the thrombolites. These pale hummocks 

          of ‘living stone’ in the lake are believed to be about four thousand years old.”

                     Barry Lopez, Horizon

       

Night driving with the new maps

is no help, it’s still dark in the car

and these voices come at me like deer.

Karen in her fabric room

preparing material

weaving into landscapes

of thread memory,

me driving away

searching river restoration reach.

Mirages can be described,

and memory? Mine, as a child

in North Dakota winters

from the back seat,

returning from Flaxton

to Bowbells. Jack Rabbits

in dim headlights, my Mother’s

voice in swirling snow

on the highway.

We were closer to Canada

than anywhere in the States.

Slow down and then

The Northern Lights

whiteout winds

and Lon Haley,

a child’s first barber,

drunk, head on into the semi

coming from Minot.

Lens, corrected

and empty space

among rays of light

the child’s eyes magnified.

Our school called us Eskimos.

Mirages are distortions

but the child-mind drives

the car’s heater loud

but there’s no warm air

getting to the back seat

where there’s ice

on the windows.

The mirage can be dis-proven

while the memory

must be lived out.

This, too, is Arctic dreaming.

 It’s getting light now.

This is where the fire came through.

The highway following close by the river.

I don’t yet know how the highway’s

part of the problem as it hems

and restricts the river,

keeping it in its banks,

keeping it from flooding.

Levees keep water

from coming over the highway.

This, too, is driving through darkness.

Fire-blackened trees in morning light.

I pull over to see.

I step from the car and cross the road.

Burnt tree, image after image,

providing instructions, stop, stop.

Stop again. Jump the curb.

This is the highway to Finn Rock.

III. This Driving in the Dark. Driving Over McKenzie Pass

      --The night before the day on the McKenzie River with river restoration people.

                --First Fridays at Finn Rock.

Last week at a family celebration

a man facing me who I don't know, 

recalls another man, an acquaintance--

You’re like him, he says,

and I nod, going along

for a time, before saying,

But I’m darker, than he is,

and he nods. I’m asking

for something I want him

to recognize something,

anything--something

there is granting me this walk,

this drive around these mountains

this wilderness where snow

closed the byway last week.

Something I'm not allowed to question.

I don’t know enough when I walk.

I never do.

Acuity for what comes up

arrives in the personal, in dreaming,

and I’m so dumb in the landscape.

Ears better than my eyes.

This knowing gives me awkward comfort.

What I know this morning

is far less than what I imagine.

I’m trying and make out

animals on the highway

Moments on the River

In waders, trying to remain standing

while listening and taking notes.

IV. ON THE MCKENZIE RIVER, THIRD RIVER IN THREE DAYS,

WITH THE MCKENZIE RIVER RESTORATION PROJECT, AN ACCOMPANIMENT

                               --for Sarah Wheeler & Sarah Hunter

      When asked about his desire to contribute to the literature of hope

      on the River, Barry Lopez responds: I would like at the end of my life

       to say that I had lived up to the expectation of that River.

                         --B.L. interview PBS, KLCC, 2016

When he asks,

Where have you been?

Some told him

of their travels.

He wanted to know

what took you so long.

The mind drifts, and I catch

just enough to ask the question

about the beavers.

They love the willows we’re planting.

They’ll replant them near their lodge,

dome-shaped from wooden sticks.

Willows a food source.

Beavers like their food close.

Dams slow water, keeping

it on landscape. Wetland creation,

from streams to form streams.

From harvesting willows. Farming.

This is river talk river-walking.

Taking notes on the Forest Service map

left behind by the others.

Careful with steps.

Can’t rush to catch up.

Don’t fall while imagining,

What if, and what ifs piling up.

Don’t drop these notes in the water!

Last night in the room, preparing,

questions asked of Lopez,

And when you apprentice yourself to the river…

it just keeps going, it absorbs everything.

Startled from the dreaming,

re-locating the others half-circled

around our guide all eyes on the water, half-hearing,

...and if you find water with an oily sheen on it,

poke it with a stick, if it’s natural it will shatter.

It’s decaying plant matter. Yes.

It’s called biofilm. If it clings together, it’s oil--

take a picture, note location, and report it.

Graduate students from Corvalis

don’t know Lopez, don’t know Synder.

Come to these rivers from all over the nation

knowing their hydrology, emptying themselves

from a single van, carrying Dogwood, Nine Bark,

Honeysuckle Twin Berry—that’s the big one,

these are native, for planting. Don’t need to bring up

the heritage of their backpacks. Talking

to each other about artificial gravel ponds,

regrading. Not the logging company

mining gravel for roads and levees.

Disrupt the land in order to create it.

Bury logs, wedge them,

dangerous work to rebuild the flood plain,

for the science of meander. Spontaneous.

An old man taking notes on wonder,

reuniting Elk Creek with the McKenzie.

Me? My father is a fishery biologist.

Take out the bass and bull frogs.

Bring in lamprey. Salmon numbers fry up to 300.

Lopez would cry hearing these kids.

On land and out of waders.

Cut those blackberries short,

Dig roots where you can.

Neat piles. They’ll re-root themselves.

Let Portland have these blackberries,

help them to remember the land they came from.

V. AFTER TEARING OUT THE BLACKBERRIES

ON THE MCKENZIE RIVER, THE WOMAN

APPROACHES HIM SITTING ON THE ROCK

EATING HIS SANDWICH

        for Sarah Hunter and Sarah Wheeler

Tell me about Barry Lopez, she says.

He said, Two things I can’t teach.

I can’t teach you hunger. I can’t teach you discipline.

She said, After we’re finished here,

Would you like to go over to his house.

30 October 2023–14 November 2023

●

“Existence, when there might just as well be none: the sheer presence of materiality, vast and deep, everything and everywhere. Existence rustles. It wonders. It wants to recognize itself, wants orientation. It must, for it evolved animals like us that feel compelled to do such things. Recognition, orientation: how could it begin? A cairn, perhaps. Stones gathered, the largest few settled on flat earth, and the rest built up from there: slow, one stone at a time, keeping things whole.” p. 22.

David Hinton, Existence: A story

●

DID IT HELP?

Well? Eyes look up

when the door opens,

Like questions

wanting to know.

●

THE QUIET WOMAN

Coming and going

returning over two passes

the same way he came

Karen’s fabric-cut landscapes

Roomful of women quilting

Woman weaving fabric world

Jim Bodeen

16 November 2023

●

THE MOON TONIGHT

     --The mind is trying to discover and to find its place within the land,

        to discover a way to dispel its own sense of estrangement.

               Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

      --Something else that is the case, one species--

        the one that uses fire—is remarkably

        like fire: insatiable…”

              Robert Bringhurst, The Ridge

  

When Horizon fully opens,

the mind born out of itself,

calls for cosmic prayers

from story tellers in their animal voices

from uncounted spirit forces

telling how in burn and breath

it was for them, I’d like to know,

the place in book or landscape--

and what it was and why,

and I’d like them, plant or animal,

to tell what happened in the reading,

in the living, in the rooting of horizon

and the reading and living outside

of the book and the soil. I’d like them

to tell, too, of their preparations

for the receiving of Barry Lopez’ work.

What prepared the way for this opening,

this epiphany, or blossoming.

What led up to the breaking open,

in other words than words.

                                          What stone witnessed?

This Barry Lopez singing.

This Blessingway. For there were several

light landings, places where the gods

might have set down had they been in the area.

And of many other things, several

readings of the horizon,

multiple ways of experience

separating circles of the line.

His boundary, his limit has been

delineated many times

before becoming life-work.

This singing and this falling.

The wonders of this sewing.

The weavings in the fabric. And now,

each new place within any

observer’s position or range

of perception. His, a place

preparing one for what’s next,

while waiting. Mine is the hand

of one writing with a notebook

held on the steering wheel while driving in the dark,

one passing through, who overheard

a man talking about a stand of trees.

Slowing the work, following river’s

demands of slowing the river. This.

Life and work intersecting

land and sky completely apprenticed.

Open to where conversation is surprise.

The listening. The notebook.

The Blessingway in notebooks.

When the moon is near the horizon

the scattering of blues, greens and purples.

Light with a longer distance to travel.

It hasn’t been said yet. This trail work.

Jim Bodeen

31 October 2023–26 November 2023

Sisters, Oregon, Finn Rock/McKenzie River, Oregon,

Yakima, Washington