The sow and her three cubs that hung around with us for September, up in their forest in the Cariboo, sure did give this old tree a whack. Kind of Corn on […]
Picnic Time
In Praise of the Interior Douglas Fir, Tree of Memory
The Interior Douglas fir, now that’s a lovely tree. Look at her standing up high in the dawn at Big Bar Lake. Red Squirrels, pileated and downy woodpeckers, sharp-shinned hawks, bald eagles, […]
Big Yellow Bear in the Sagebrush
Up the hill we go. Butterflies in the mock orange. How nice! CRASH! CRACK! BANG! A scurry of activity. One second later: Then everyone is calm again. Now it’s time to hunker […]
Walking With Bears: a meditation on the place of ecocritical writing today
This is a folded land. Not all lands are made like that, but this one is. We can expect folds from it, and lines of energy, planes tilted up at odd angles, […]
Poets, It is Time for the Real Work Now
Here’s Okanagan Lake, an over-deepened fjord lake full of fossil water just down from my house. It’s the remnant of a much deeper lake, called Glacial Lake Penticton. The top of the green […]
Love a Bear Today: A Cariboo Saga
A year ago, I showed these berries. This year, I tasted them. They taste like this: You can be the wasp, if you like, but it’s really standing in for a bear. […]
You are the Wind
Wind is the air, moving, at a speed greater than a breeze. It is also energy. It is a habitat. Humans and cottonwood trees both live in it. It is not something to […]
Bear Going Nowhere
Two years ago, a mama bear taught her cub how to find grubs at Big Bar Lake, by knocking the cap off this old tree carcass. This year, as a two-year-old kicked […]
Little Bear in the Kinnikinnick
This spring cub is about to meet its first winter. First, berries. There are a couple of species of “bear berries” in our mountains in the Northwest, but these sparse ones are the […]
Bear Picking
Not many berries this year. Very small kinnikinnik berries, and that’s about it. And not a lot of them. Berry patch mostly rock, too. Still, the pickers come. … and go. […]
Okanagan Okanogan 