lattice

Yesterday we went for a short hike — about 2 km. — up beyond the Malaspina substation. We like this walk because it’s high, with incredible views of the Coastal range of mountains, the tops of islands in Georgia Strait, and because it’s open, so that we often see Roosevelt elk grazing , black bears in the distance, occasionally a coyote, and wolf scat, though we’ve never seen the wolves. We’ve heard them though. This time of year everything is beginning to make the seasonal change. We saw the first salmonberry blossom yesterday, the huckleberry bushes are beginning to leaf, and under last year’s brown grass, the green shoots are pushing up. Most years, we’d be seeing bear scat, green with spring, in the next few weeks, but we’ll be away as of tomorrow until later in March, so I guess we’ll miss that. About a month ago, the willows were grey with young catkins, and I cut a few branches to bring home. Outside, during the cold winter storms, the male catkins were blooming away in the kitchen, the soft grey pussies covered with yellow. I think these are Pacific willow, Salix lucida, though I’m not quite sure. In the area where the young willows grow, none of them get very big because the elk graze on them. These might also be Hooker’s willow and I think they hybridize so…?

What I noticed yesterday was the latticework everywhere, in nature and in the human-built substation. As we came back to our car after the walk, the transmission towers were strangely beautiful against the stormy sky. It’s part of a big enterprise, one of the transfer stations taking power from Cheekye River, which empties into the Cheakamus River near Squamish, to Dunsmuir, near Qualicum Bay, on Vancouver Island. When we visited Ostrava in the Czech Republic, I remember learning the term “Industrial Sublime” in relation to the huge industrial heritage site at Dolni Vitkovice ironworks (on the list for Unesco World Heritage designation, I believe), and how visually stunning these places can be. I’m not sure the Malaspina substation is in the same league but yesterday it was beautiful and I don’t think I’ve ever thought that before. It’s interesting to me how birds in particular have made use of the huge pylons. Ravens perch on the top, watching the world below, and we’ve seen male sapsuckers drumming away on the metal during mating season, creating such noise that I don’t doubt they attracted females.

I remember when I was writing the title essay for my book Euclid’s Orchard, I tried to work out how to think about the relationship between the orchard we planted in the 1980s, cared for, and finally abandoned, and what in mathematics is known as an array of one-dimensional “trees” of unit height planted at the lattice points in one quadrant of a square lattice. More formally, Euclid’s orchard is the set of line segments from (x, y, 0) to (x, y, 1), where x and y are positive integers. I made a quilt exploring this idea and maybe I’m now sort of wired to see lattices everywhere–the branches of young willow, the enormous structures transmitting hydroelectric power from one place to another. Some days birdsong is a lattice of sound in the blue air, some days sunlight filtered through branches of Douglas fir makes a lattice of shadow on the ground below. Some days a lattice is a way to remember how a line intersects, how the world is lines woven together, across time and space, and how we are on the ground looking up, or on the highest tower, surveying the whole glittering planet below us.

I want to re-create those neglected trees rising from the surface of the ground, the clovers and wiry grasses around their trunks, the spring daffodils I planted in hope, and all the teeming biota under the earth: worms tunneling through the porous soil, the burrows of field mice, the root systems of the native wildflowers. I want the nematodes, the protozoa, fungi, the broken rocks, minerals, the decaying organic matter creating the humus needed to keep the soil healthy. I want to commemorate the dream of an ever-thriving orchard, alive in our stories when we gather now together (“Do you remember the time we slept on the moss?” “Remember walking up the driveway and surprising a herd of elk that winter, snapping off the lower boughs”).
                                        –from “Euclid’s Orchard”