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.
For about 125 years, my valley has been the setting for the creation of a White homeland. It started in a British Empire that was largely Asian, looking for a racial state for a Britain driven to overpopulation by industrialization: the same force that drove Americans west across the continent to dislodge native peoples there. After the First World War, the whiting of the Okanagan continued by embracing other Europeans, after the British population was decimated by insane class-based military bungling in the trenches in France. During these two seminal generations,the indigenous population was confined ever more tightly to tiny “Indian Reserves” and the land that it had cared for for 6,000 years, was now approached out of european ignorance as “nature.” Its wealth was soon drawn down ecologically until now it is a ruin of weeds and burning forests and smoke. Well, it’s all over. It ended this summer. It is the end of White privilege in the Okanagan.
“The Rise” Development
Government ecological-protection legislation allowed for the legal ruin of essential grassland here in Vernon, through, in part, its replanting with native bunchgrass. This image shows how invasive cheatgrass is rapidly making inroads. It will soon replace the bunchgrass with a one-species wasteland of drought, because no one is minding the show. They’re not doing so because this is “nature”, and hence outside of human control. What nonsense.
Sure, land will continue to be abused, indigenous people will continue to be excluded from decision making processes or land use, but it’s all done on borrowed time now. Still, white culture continues to build for its views (all that foreigners can understand of a landscape) and continues to play, even when the valley is full of the smoke of burning forests caused by a hundred years of forest mismanagement, in general, and 25 years specifically. The smoke is “nature”, the pillar of whiteness, burning up.
Okanagan Lake, Below Bella Vista Road and Okanagan Hills Boulevard
White culture is so affluent that even in the smoke it can continue to offer elite views to the working class. Working class? Yes. The wealthy part of it. You can be sure that the elite white classes have already packed up for their second or third homes in Maui or Bermuda or Portugal or are the colonial elite teaching English in China.
As it was in the beginning, White settlement in the valley is fortress culture….
…and every view of smoke and shame is for sale, on the bluff that it is still a view of “nature.”
Even a view of smoke and shame. As I said, White culture has so much power it will continue for a long time here, but it will do it out in the open now. It does not own this land. That’s not to say that the syilx, our indigenous people, do. No-one does. But we all do together. Fire certainly does. At the moment, we all own the shame and the smoke. We could all own the pride. This couple just over the mountains at Willow Point already do:
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.
This is how to walk through the face of the sun.
Pretty great, eh! NASA, sorry guys, but we’re already there.
Those of us who talk about grasslands, talk about their rounded curves a lot.
Hey, Glaciers, thanks for that.
This is a land held in tension against wind and light, using opposition to it to create tension, which is then harvested in spring growth …
…or the dispersal of seeds.
But this is summer now. It’s the time for of the most beautiful angles. In this landscape of wind off the distant Pacific, mountain ranges away …
… ranges of glacially-cut, angular, uplifted-peaks of ancient, fractured continental collisions…
… arrow-leafed balsam root, swaying in the wind in spring…
…shifts in angles to the other plants nearby to catch the sun, and dries in place, like rain spread flat. This is rain lifted to a whole other plane of experience.
Move over, Picasso. You ain’t got nothing on this.
One after another,the grassland opens further. Something is ripening here.
It’s easy to share space if you are thin, and working on rhythms of opening and closing that intersect at the point at which one species needs water and another needs to release it.
It is the way a trout holds still in a flowing pool.
It helps to signal your presence.
Even petals can rise and fall in the rhythms of this pattern. Look how they are falling out in the bloom below in the opposite sequence from which they came in.
Going to seed in sequence helps. There are no clear seasons here.
It’s all one-after-the-other here. For humans, it’s all-at-once. That’s how a migratory, predatory species thinks through individuals that come together into groups by releasing its defenses and including the other within the self. That’s profound, but so is the grassland that thinks together. Every space that is closed opens.
This is water’s journey. It falls from the wind, opens into life, and then, when the wind is a closed space, opens again into the wind: opening after opening after opening opening openings.
Only a grassland thinks like this. Only water thinks this way here.
This is the spirit of a grassland. Here, and this is the big secret, humans can let down their boundaries and live in the sky as well, by extending the social group to these ends.
We are not just a predatory species. These grasslands are our ancient homes. Much has been forgotten, but much has been remembered, too. We are remembering it now as we put a close to the closings below.
What a nice bunch of mock orange.
Ah, but there’s more. See?
It has spirits!
It sure lifts mine.
No straight lines here.
Just everything lifting up at once.
Ahhhhhhh, sometimes a body gets to breathe, eh!
Oh, just roll in that pollen. Come on,you know you want to.
It’s climbing out again that’s hard.
Whew. But, hey, whoa.
Bye.
Like the colour from the setting sun on setting grass, the intervals of growth in the grass comes from a balance between earth and sun and time. It’s beautiful stuff.
The names are just images of humans: those observers who separate in order to come together again, who create such concepts as earth and sun, time, balance, colour and intervals out of the unity of which grass is an expression.
For grass, time is grass. And no less beautiful for it.
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 down and wait for Harold to go.
Lots of waiting.
Lots and lots of waiting. Sigh.
But the time to move on eventually comes. Yeah, OK, motorcycle on the road to the golf course up above. People, use a muffler, hey, if you don’t mind.
Harold moves on, too. Well, sorta. His spirit is still there.
What a beautiful morning.
Every day is a great day to meet a grassland bear. This is my fifth. Two were in the dark. I don’t do that anymore!
Such a handsome one, especially!
Thank you, Bear.
