The Snow Buckwheat Country:
All at Once
The Grass Country:
One…
…by…
…one.
It’s not indigenous if it isn’t expressing the energies of the land.
The energies are there for all to read, all together or one at a time.
So, you think you’re going to build a trail system across the porcupine’s trail to an orchard’s compost pile, eh, and water some trees along it to protect the people on the trail from spray drift from the orchard. Yeah, sure. You just go try that.
Trickle Irrigation Hose, Gnawed
Good thing the water was turned off to this system a few years back, due to lack of funds to maintain what was started. When a development goes bankrupt, all environmental promises are annulled.
The farmer continues to use the compost pile. The farm has been in the family for generations. I’m sure they know the score. All that was achieved, really, was a bunch of dead trees and a continually irritated porcupine.
Just to be clear: this is not a wild porcupine, but a relationship between a farm and a hill, with prickly bits and hose-cutting teeth.
Oh, hello.
It’s a thing. With legs like hers (she is, let’s say, about 7 centimetres from tip to tip ), you can jump from twig to twig, in three dimensional space. It’s not like a bee in the flowers, though. This is hunting. 
There were four in this bush, hunting together. So, here’s the thing: there are regulations for protecting indigenous landscapes, for the planting of bunchgrasses, mostly. These improvements are welcome, especially in disturbed lands in housing developments, but when the mule deer are locked into them and eat all the wild flowers down to their roots, and it gets on the middle of August, the place is close to a desert. Planting lavender and Russian sage helps, so does the dill in my garden, not to mention a bit of queen anne’s lace and some red orach, while we sort out how to make deer corridors, hack down the sagebrush, and replant the wild flowers, especially thistles and all the species that used to grow along the borders of valley bottom wetlands that are no more. Our wetlands are our houses now. The survival of wasps, like these beautiful gymnasts, is up to us. “Wildness” does not come into question. That’s just White thinking, and we don’t need that any more. Or maybe just some wild lettuce. We could manage that.
Or just some smokebush. Look at this tiny wasp below. She likes smokebush. 
And, hey, smokebush, that’s a pharmaceutical plant. We could do our lungs some good at the same time.
Smoke has replaced the sky. It is the way of things.
Here are the dry hills. Overgrazing, a reduction to three species, one native and two of which are as flammable as gasoline. Nice.
Water: forestry nursery in the distance, sport fields below, and a royal gala apple orchard. Nicer yet.
Below are the old wetlands that used to store water. Note the recent disperal to high evaporation house plots. Exquisitely well planned.
European culture sits uneasily but orderly upon this smoky land.
Look at the yellow dock gone to seed.
Look at a mule deer plant it in the sun.
There is balance in beauty and beauty in balance.
Everything leaves its trace.
The queen of the hill, that’s who.
Look at her blending in!
The Okanogan River (left) Entering the Columbia
At the mouth of the Okanogan River, which begins with snow melting on the rocks above my house in mid-winter, water is privately owned, whether flooding the old Hudson Bay Company potato fields in the background right above, or the southern flats of the Colville Federated Tribes’ Territory (foreground left). That’s the way things work in this stretch of my valley: the bounty of the earth is transformed into individual wealth, which is then leveraged for profit. The only land-based health comes through the process of flooding you see above, which is called wilderness, a term to indicate the romance that silences native land in the West. Strangely enough, fires on private land alienated from water, are fought with public funds, just as the use of fear and public funds were used to fight imagined native aggression in 1858 and 1891 at the site in the image above. When there is talk of wilderness in this valley, it is talk of the dispossession of people and water, which are the same thing.
What starts out cool and soft and evaporating out of stone …
… leaves stone behind, warm and hard and singing in the wind.
These are the mysteries.
If you want to find beetles, give them a soft bed, the complementary shape to a beetle, and wait.
They will come, because they made you that way.
She doesn’t know spring, summer or fall, drought or rain. She just knows the flow within twigs.
Her connection with the earth is that sure and self-contained.
