Ammi Midstokke: Beyond our ecological boundaries
I used to love thunder storms. We called them “Boomers” and they came as a sign of spring, a collision of competing temperatures. I imagined the vernal gods wrestling the reluctant winter out of the skies so fruits of the forest could ripen for summer.
I’d grown up a city kid until the age of 7. In the city, we’d ride our bikes to the ivy thickets of the highway underpass and dig for dinosaur fossils beneath the whoosh-thunk of wheels. We’d get kicked off the rich folks’ tennis courts for riding bikes on them. To swim, we went to a chlorinated pool and my snow-white hair turned green, my skin scaly, my eyes a ragged red. I don’t remember if I ever heard a thunderstorm there.
Nature and autonomy called my parents to Idaho. Armed with the belief that everything in Mother Earth News was as easy as the sketches implied, we arrived in winter. It was a Dickensian time: Shoes held together with duct tape, porridge for breakfast (or celery if we did not finish our chores fast enough), beans forever soaking and cooking in the tiny camper where our family of five waited for the snow to stop snowing.
The snow snowed much longer then, which was not that long ago. I was not a pioneer peer of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Still, then, we had thick blankets of the stuff by Christmas. The idea that spring came in mid-March was preposterous. The trilliums did not show themselves until May. And sometimes, they would get snowed on.
The thunderstorms, they came later with their rumbling and tumbling clouds, rolling over themselves like great stones in the sky until they soaked the soil to a rich, almost-black against the green growth, until the air was thick with petrichor. Which is the smell of promise. Hearty thimble berry bushes quaked at their arrival. The birch shivered and the cottonwoods swayed and perfumed the wind. And we hunkered down with our 12-volt car battery power supply and read library books, pausing to count the seconds between flash and fury.
The storms were a phenomena of wonder, like so much we discovered in our new land. The forest held a magical abundance afterward. The wetness of June would give way to something warmer in July and we’d singe our cheeks in the rare gift of sun and heat. Then one day, just a few weeks later, it was over. We joked that summer happened on a Tuesday in July.
I saw dry lightening across the lake on rare late-night, late-summer swims, not real late-summer as per the calendar, but a season that was determined by a different clock of nature that did not always agree with the equinox. The lightning was a distant thing, in the mountains beyond: Beyond where the people lived, beyond in the wilderness where sky fire and earth water and mountain granite had a symbiotic relationship. The flashes were like watching a distant lovers’ spat. Weeping sky might calm and seek refuge, settling on those far away ridges, no wounds inflicted.
Our measly gardens, emaciated by the short growing season, frosted over on a crisp, early September morning. We seldom swam in September, for the lake and days were already too cold. Sometimes my father, feral hippie and show-off, would jump in and come out steaming and we thought he was invincible, incapable of feeling discomfort, and he would shake like a dog, his long hair spraying water in a ribbon around him.
It wasn’t that long ago, I think. I know these memories are true. They are stored in the same journals where I wrote my worry, because I’d heard there was a coup in the USSR and Gorbachev was being ousted. Like the flashes of lightning in the jagged peaks across the lake, I had little understanding but some intuitive wariness of an approaching threat. A home-schooled 12-year-old’s first awareness of a world beyond our 26 acres.
Walking in the same forest this week, I recalled a conversation with an arborist who is advising me on how to save a cedar tree on my land.
“It has grown beyond its ecological boundaries,” he said. A hundred yards away, the hill gives way to its summit, where the northern slope grows thick with the trunks and swinging boughs of cedars. But this one has staked its claim on the south facing side. On the far end of my five acres, a cluster of scrappy birch trees make a last stand in a gully that is dry by June. The cedar out my window looks like it has dipped its tips in rust. This does not bode well, but we soak the poor dear with water and hope it rebounds.
Can we change the ecological boundaries in a different direction? Is it possible to retake land that is lost? Would cedars create the shade needed to sustain themselves?
The forest is dry and the bushes are browned and red now, not by frosty mornings, but by scorching months. The trail is dusty, corners a mere puff of tracks. The dogs lie in dry creek beds, like maybe someone will turn the water back on and it will come rushing around their panting bodies.
When I am woken in the night by the thunder, my childlike glee has been replaced by a racing heart. I listen for the wind, hoping for the rain. I still count: First, the seconds between lightening and boom, and then how many minutes I think it would take for me to see a fire or hear a siren, how many hours it would take for me to pack my things, how many months to rebuild my home, how many lifetimes to regrow the forest.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com