Probabilistic Shifts

Alysia helped me realize that I need to describe “probabilistic shifts”, a term I use to describe a certain thought pattern that plays an important part in the way I think of the world. The term came from the way runoff flowing through grass reminds me of a Galton machine.

For an example, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_HVBhwhwV8.

The Galton machine is a model showing how thousands of instances, each unpredictable, can accumulate into a predictable pattern such as the “bell-shaped curve” of the normal distribution. Each bead cascading down can bounce either left or right at each level, theoretically ending up anywhere along the bottom. However, probability says it will usually end up somewhere near the middle (in the same way that if you flip ten coins, you will probably get between 4 to 6 heads even though 10 heads are possible).

In the same way, rain running off the land is like the marbles flowing down a slope and every grass stem is like a peg that keeps splitting the runoff to left or right. In this situation, however, I’m interested in how the Galton machine-like grass stems, through a series of probabilistic events, spread some of the runoff way over to the outer edges of this slope’s distribution curve, over far more surface area than if the grass stems were not there.

 I like to help spread it out even more so that it flows more slowly. By shifting a rock high in the channel, I change the probabilities of how many water molecules will continue along the main path and how many will shift over onto paths more to the side. Though I can’t predict what each water molecule will do as it flows past the shifted rock, I have shifted the probabilities at this point and I can predict with absolute certainty that more water will end up over to the side. I have absolute confidence because I have watched it happen many times. If I move this rock up here, more water flows this way and several seconds later, I can see the water begin to rise in this pool off to the side. If I move the rock back to its former position, the pool soon begins to recede; its inflow has been reduced.

I call these moves “probabilistic shifts” because they are small shifts that simply alter the probability, at this one point, of how much goes one way, how much the other. But I know with absolute certainty that this will shift consequences downstream. This experience creates unstoppable optimism. If I shop at Costco rather than Walmart, more of my money is flowing into the pockets of employees. I can’t track it but I know with absolute certainty it is because of the different employment practices of the two organizations. “More of it is flowing to the 99%.” One does not need certainty to have certainty (if that makes sense). One does not need certainty that every molecule in the flow will be changed by my play to have certainty that the outcome of the flow will change. One does not need every shopper to switch over to organic food to cause changes in how food and money flow within this world. We make little changes, continually, knowing that they will create shifts (albeit small) downstream.

The world is like this flow of water. Each of our lives is like a molecule of water flowing through this world. Millions of choices, conscious and unconscious, are like the splits in the cascading flow shaping our lives and world. These little splits can seem random and therefore insignificant but they can accumulate into significance in an absolutely deterministic way. This is what I am doing when I go around Chrysalis before school starts greeting as many of our students as I can. Creating little shifts in the energy flowing through the emotional atmosphere at the head of the day.

We give up some of our power if we limit ourselves to only a few major decisions or if we don’t act because we think it won’t make a difference. There is a profound difference between “not making a difference” and “making a difference.”

The Width of Water

Both my editors thought I should drop this section but this is me practicing how to communicate part of an idea that I am still wrestling with that I believe might become important. Feel free to skip over it at any time.

A stream’s width is always changing. In some places, the stream narrows and in other places, it broadens out. This change of width, easy to see, connects our mind to many other aspects of the flowing stream.

The easiest place to enter these connections is with the simplistic but still functional equation for stream discharge (how much water is flowing along a stream):

Discharge = width x depth x velocity

Width x depth is basically the familiar formula for finding the area of a rectangle (length x height). Width x depth give us the cross-sectional area of the flow. Velocity tells us how fast the water is flowing through this area. The distance the current can flow in a second gives us the length which when multiplied by the width and depth gives us the volume of a rectangular prism representing the volume of water flowing by in a second. In the United States, the units we measure by are feet x feet x feet/second = cubic feet per second or cfs.

This formula is simplistic because a stream’s depth is not uniform so the cross-sectional area is not rectangular. Furthermore, a stream’s velocity is not uniform. The outside of a river bend flows swiftly while the inside of the bend might actually be eddying upstream. However, this simple formula is good enough to give us a powerful introduction into changes happening within flow.

The key thought experiment is to imagine a stretch of stream where no additional water is joining the stream or leaving it. In that case, the discharge remains the same throughout that stretch. If the discharge remains the same, then that means that width x depth x velocity at one place must be equal to width x depth x velocity at another place along that stretch.        

If the stream narrows to half its width at one point, then the product, depth x velocity must double at that point for discharge to remain constant. Depth could double with the velocity remaining constant or the velocity could double with the depth remaining the same. More likely, both the depth and velocity will increase somewhat so that the product depth x velocity doubles.

Width, depth, and velocity are interconnected in a fundamental way. This malleable interplay between the three is what you see when you hang out around streams. A change in one absolutely requires the others to change. Drop a big rock in the middle of a current, thereby diminishing the cross-sectional area of the current and the water will deepen and speed up as it races around the rock. All three stream variables adjust to the change. More peacefully, if one floats down a river, one notices that when the river speeds up without narrowing, the river bottom is only a few feet away whereas when the river slows down with no change in width, the bottom is way below.

So depth and velocity are the first flow attributes connected with stream width. The connection between width and velocity, however, also connects width with the stream’s gradient. If the slope steepens, the water will speed up. This increase in velocity must create a decrease in the width x depth. The channel will become narrower. On the other hand, if the stream gradient flattens out, the current will slow down which will require that the width x depth to increase. So when we see a stream channel narrow or widen, it often signals that the stream’s gradient is steepening or flattening in those places.

But now, a stream’s velocity plays an exponential role in a stream’s kinetic energy. KE=1/2 mv². Kinetic energy is one half the mass times the square of its speed. If a flow doubles in speed, its kinetic energy quadruples. Kinetic energy can pick up material and carry it downstream. Kinetic energy gives the flowing water the wherewithal to shape the land which will give rise to several feedback spirals.

For example, if a streambed steepens, the current speeds up, increasing in kinetic energy, allowing the stream to start eroding that area, carrying fragments from the streambed downstream. When the gradient gentles out, the stream slows down, losing some of its kinetic energy. It no longer contains sufficient energy to carry all of its load so some of the fragments drop out, creating deposition. Therefore, steep areas become places of erosion that are worn down and flatter areas become places of deposition that are built up. The steep stream sections grow less steep while the flatter sections grow more steep. The stream develops toward a smooth continuous gradient called stream equilibrium.

This process can be watched in miniature. One place is where a sandy bottom stream opens into a deeper, quiet pool. Sand grains come rolling along the streambed. When they come to the pool, the increased depth slows the water and the sand grain stops moving, raising the streambed so that the sand grain coming down behind it can now roll past that dropped stream grain where it stops rolling. Over time, this process builds an underwater delta at the head of the pool.

I love watching tiny deltas an inch high that are actively growing one sand grain at a time. A sand grain comes rolling along to the abrupt downstream edge of the delta where it rolls over the edge and tumbles down the inch high steep slope and comes to rest at the bottom of the slope. The next sand grain tumbles afterwards and comes to rest next to that sand grain. Those two grains together now allow a following sand grain to come to rest on top of them. A steady stream of sand grains fall over the edge and come to rest on the steep slope below. Gradually, a layer of sand one grain thick builds across and rises up the slope until it reaches the top, to the level of the incoming stream bed. Now the incoming sand grains can roll one sand grain length further before dropping over the edge and starting to build up the next layer (called a foreset bed). Here’s a diagram on the web: http://www.denniskalma.com/river/deltaxsect.gif

This interplay between the current and individual sand grains is a very peaceful process to watch. The change in stream depth changes the sand grain from tumbling to coming to rest but the grain’s coming to rest then causes the stream depth to change which affects every sand grain coming thereafter. Each sand grain follows a different path because of the sand grain that came before it.

But this movement towards “stream equilibrium” affects the other variables. When the stream slows down and drops some of its load, for example, the dropped load raises the streambed, decreasing the depth. Therefore, with both the speed and the depth decreasing, the width must increase. On the other hand, when a stream steepens, speeds up and erodes, it lowers its streambed, increasing its depth. The stream width must decrease. So the oscillations in stream width that we see tell us where the channel is cutting down and where it is building up. It reveals all the small alternating sections of erosion and deposition by which sands and gravels are being moved from section to section over time. When we start seeing a stream in this way, then we start seeing a stream’s widest place being the dynamic beginning in the stream’s narrowing and a stream’s narrowest place as the beginning of the stream’s widening.

The ability of water to shape the land creates feedback spirals. The head of an eroding gully eroding its way upslope is like a black hole, bending runoff towards it, increasing rates of convergence so that even more runoff flows through that section, increasing its mass and kinetic energy. Is the shape of the deepening gully shaping the stream flow or is the shape of the narrowing stream flow shaping the gully?

On the other hand, a widening channel leads to deposition which then fills in channels, forcing the water to flow over an even broader area which slows the flow still more and an alluvial fan begins to build. Water flows broadly and slowly through an alluvial fan so more soaks in here. Plants grow thick, sponging up even more of the runoff, slowing the runoff even more, as even more of the sediment comes to rest among the plant stems. Roots spread upwards into the accumulating sediment; the alluvial fan grows lush green, spreading and slowing the water even more.

Life’s ability to do a Galton machine spreading and thereby slowing runoff alters the entire stream equilibrium of a drainage. By spreading and slowing the runoff, the plants allow the slopes to rise more steeply against the forces of downward erosion. The land rises steeper and higher – or rather the land is worn down more slowly.

The land, its soil, the stream, its width, its depth, its speed, its energy, its load, its steepness, and life –  all fit together to form a writhing brown and green serpent of flowing mass and energy slithering over the land, with cause and effect undulating back and forth.

Circular Drainages

Somebody drove onto a several-acre muddy field on the Chrysalis campus and spun around, creating loops of tire tracks that act as channels for unoff. That led me to go out during a rain storm to see if I could help heal some of the damage. It’s become a quite delightful challenge, trying to apply principles derived from nature’s converging drainage systems to a human-created looping system.

Cranes Calling Overhead

A couple of weeks ago, a flock of about one hundred sandhill cranes, heading north, circled low over the school for fifteen minutes. I announced it over the PA and most of the Chrysalis classes came outside to watch. To me, a flock of sandhill cranes make one of the most primeval sounds of them all and I was delighted that our youngest students were able to hear a sound that I never heard until my twenties. (If you have never heard sandhill cranes, please listen to this audio file because the sound is an important part of the story. http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/sandhill_crane/sounds – a great bird site if you haven’t discovered it already.)

About the same time the next morning, another flock circled low over the school for ten minutes on its way north. So the next week at our school-wide Tree Assembly, Sandhill Cranes were our Species of the Week. They inspired me to give a talk that went something like this:

I want to share a story with you. It’s a story about sandhill cranes but it’s also a story about why Chrysalis is a nature school. Some people ask why we take time to take kids out into nature when they should be learning reading and math. What’s so important about nature?

This story is from when I was a young man in Alaska. It was early September, which in Alaska is autumn. Days are dramatically growing shorter. The stars can be seen again. Frost at night. The tundra plants have all turned reds and yellows and orange. I was hiking to the Wickersham Wall, the greatest vertical rise in the world, three miles from base to height.

I hear, high above, the sound of sandhill cranes. I look up but I can’t see them. I keep walking; the sound of cranes grows. I look up with my binoculars and finally I see them, way up there, a flock of about a hundred cranes flying in loose V’s. I love their wild cries calling down to me in this beautiful, wild land. But their calls, they sound broader than that flock. So I keep searching with my binoculars and I see another flock, and then another, and another. There are about ten flocks forming a giant V of a thousand cranes calling high overhead. By now, I’ve taken off my pack and am sitting down looking up at this spectacle. The sound is so vast. So vast. I keep looking around and, my god, there is another giant V of a thousand. And another. And another. These giant V’s form a vast wing of ten thousand sandhill cranes stretched across the sky. I gaze upward as they pass over and gradually recede to the southeast.

I sling my pack back on and continue walking. About 15 minutes later, I hear the sound of cranes approaching. And the same experience unfolds. Ten thousand cranes majestically, exuberantly streaming overhead in a great wing made of giant V’s made of flocks and fading into silence.

I continue on. 15 minutes later, I hear again the vast sound of ten thousand cranes drawing near. This time, after sweeping over the vast flock with my binoculars, I direct my gaze beyond this flock in the direction that the cranes have been coming from and behind this flock, I see the next great wing of cranes following and beyond them, smaller in the great distance, the next great wing, and beyond them, another great wing, and beyond them, remote but coming this way, yet more great wings of V’s of flocks of cranes from the wild.

A great river was flowing overhead. A great river of cranes was converging from its headwaters which lay in millions upon millions of acres of tundra from which arose each year a new generation of cranes to join this river that had flowed for millions of years. This is what I was part of. I was part of a world where one hundred thousand cranes pass overhead fueled by the same oxygen that I was breathing. This amazing world, this is what we are part of. We are surrounded by other living things doing amazing things, showing us that we, too, are capable of amazing things. And that is why we take you out into nature, so that you can be reminded that you are part of something far greater and you have been given this wonderful opportunity to play a part in it.

Scientific Notation – size of the universe.

My eighth grade math class got to the mathematics of scientific notation, especially how huge multiplication problems can turn into simpler additions of exponents. When the curriculum shifted over to addition with scientific notation, a deviation from the students’ expectations led them, in response to a problem involving adding planetary distances, to an answer larger than the size of the universe without them even wondering if their answer made sense. This led me off into the relative scale of things. I used this link (http://htwins.net/scale2/?bordercolor=white) and started moving outward. We discovered that the entire observable universe was three orders of magnitude smaller than the answer they had put down

This led me into a series of thought problems each evening that I shared with them the following mornings. The final thought problem was this. So, a hundred years ago, the best astronomers in the world thought that our galaxy was the entire universe. Everything observable was within the “confines” of our galaxy. Our galaxy is 10 x 10²¹ lightyears in diameter so that is the dimension within which the best astronomers of that time thought. Now, we are thinking the observable universe is 10 x 10²⁷ light years across. How much bigger is this universe than the one a century ago?

This turns into: how many times bigger is 10²⁷ than 10²¹? We find this by dividing the first number by the second. Because of scientific notation, this turns into 10^(27-21) which is 10⁶. That is 1 with 6 zeroes after it. It’s 1,000,000 times further to the edge of the universe now than astronomers thought a hundred years ago. However, space is a volume and since we measure space in three dimensions, the width must be cubed to give us the volume. The kids had learned that when a power is raised to a power, you multiply the exponents so one million cubed is (10⁶)³ which is 1 x 10^(6×3) which is 1 x 10¹⁸. That is 1 with 18 zeroes after it. So we have found the answer to our question in a couple of minutes. The universe that the astronomers of our present time think about is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 – one quintillion – times larger than the universe that the best astronomers of a century ago thought about.

Eighth Grade Analogies

Years ago I read an article stating that all the pre-college tests like the SAT were not correlated with achievement in college and beyond. Only one test did predict it and that was the Miller Analogy test. Perhaps analogical thinking is important in some fundamental way so I started giving my eighth grade students analogies to complete on their Weekly Pages. This quickly gave way to having kids create their own analogies. A few years ago, I started sharing the better ones in Chrysalis’s weekly newsletter. Below are a selection of analogies I’ve recorded from the last two and a half years. I share them for three reasons. One is in hope you find them as delightful as I do. Second is because they serve as windows into the eighth grade mind. There is a lot going on in there; that’s why I love teaching eighth grade. (There’s a common image that junior high kids are unpleasant. That’s not my experience. I think that what people find unpleasant is seeing the unpleasant things within our culture beginning to be practiced by adolescents. They mirror their environment. In a caring environment like Chrysalis, they are very, very wonderful.) The third reason is to contemplate why an analogy test would be correlated with achievement better than other standardized tests. What was going on within the students as they created these? (If you don’t get one of them, think about it for a while.)

Minion is to villain as partner is to hero.  Josiah

Amelia Earhart is to planes as Michalengelo is to paintbrush.   Sean

Orca is to wild as goldfish is to domestic.    Jake

iPhone is to iPhone case as acorn is to shell as organs are to body.   Hannah

Flag is to country as mascot is to school.   Caitlin

Rock is to paper as scissors are to rock.      Josiah

Cast is to broken arm as ice cream is to broken heart.  Sean

Pandora’s box is to mystery for Pandora as Odysseus’s  bag is to mystery to his crew.  Will S.

Stain is to clothes as crack is to windshield. – William S.

Sword is to close range as crossbow is to long range. – Lukas

Pop is to quiz as unprovoked is to attack.   Cameron

Door is to out as ladder is to up.   Damian

Black hole is to matter as censorship is to free speech.   Will H.

Elevator is to stairs as first class is to coach.   Josiah

Kermit the Frog is to Miss Piggy as Ken is to Barbie.   Mackenzie

The Constitution is to “Whatever the King says” as democracy is to monarchy.       Caleb

Toothbrush is to teeth as Q-tips are to ears.    Austin

Black Death is to fleas as West Nile is to mosquitoes.      Sierra C.

Tired is to sleep as flat tire is to air.       Ellie

Hunch is to investigation as spark is to fire.   Andrew

Soy sauce is to Chinese food as ketchup is to American food.    Kaela B.

Hatred is to heart as gallons of oil are to the ocean.         Kendra

Tears are to the soul as a broken dam is to a river. Kendra

Beauty is to art as butterfly is to butterfly net.   Brianna-

“You can do it” is to encouragement as “Santa Claus doesn’t exist” is to disappointment

Gladius (a Roman sword) is to cavalry saber as stab is to slash.         Marshall

Ticket is to concert as passport is to country.                Ellie

Bad sound effects are to sci fi as sparkles are to fantasy.    Marshall

A rumor is to young friends as a crashing wave is to a beach.    Violette

ab is to ba as 6+4 is to 4+6.      Bella

Words are to language as snow is to silence.    Isabella

Shark is to deep waters as tiger is to tall grass.   Violette

The Magna Carta is to England as the Constitution is to America.   Jack

Hammer is to build as sledgehammer is to break.   Ian

U.S. is to U.S.S. as U.K. is to H.M.S.    Jack

Rain is to clouds as leaves are to trees.   Violette

Helping turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the vast headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come.

Cairns #74 – End of the Long Days, 2013

Paddling into the Wind

When I float down a river, a headwind will turn the kayak around like a weather vane. This is because I, sitting near the back, form the center of gravity with a light prow jutting out eleven feet into the wind, presenting a long, leveraged surface for the wind to push against. If I want to face downriver, I have to somehow counter the wind.

If the boat is pointed directly into the wind, there is theoretically no turning torque. The force of the wind pushes equally against both sides of the symmetrically pointed prow. However, the moment the kayak begins turning to either side, a reinforcing/snowballing feedback spiral develops. As the prow turns, it presents an ever wider surface to the wind so the wind can push against it more, turning it more strongly. Trying to turn the kayak back once it is in this position is very difficult so I want to correct the turning much earlier, back near the beginning. Maintaining my heading directly into the wind becomes my focus. The wind can’t be my only guide because the river current can eddy and swirl, adding its own twists and turns to the boat. So my paddling becomes a playful conversation with the wind and water.

If the kayak is twisting to the left, I counter with a sweeping arc of my paddle on the left side. As the arcing stroke continues, I see the prow’s leftward turning slow, stop, and then start turning to the right. What happens at the end of the stroke is the heart of the conversation. Does the turning slow down and then start turning back again to the left? If so, the kayak has not yet turned head-on into the wind. That direction still lies somewhere to the right and so I start another sweeping stroke on the left side. However, if at the end of the stroke, the kayak keeps turning to the right, then I’ve turned the kayak past that head-on line and the feedback cycle is beginning to twist the boat in the other direction. My next stroke will be on the right side, turning the prow back towards the left. The “line of balance” in between grows more palpable with every stroke.

As the prow draws closer to heading directly into the wind, my paddling grows less frequent and gentler. It’s like balancing a pole on one’s finger. The closer one is to balance, the less effort is needed to correct. I love when, with the gentlest of strokes, I bring the prow into balance and it hangs there for 10, 15 seconds before it barely starts to drift to the side and another gentle stroke nudges it back into balance, back into the gliding dream, so calm.

I remember once as a very young child getting really cold on a walk. When we got back to the car, I wanted (in panicky tantrum proportions) it to be warm. Right now. I remember Dad saying the engine was going and it would soon start getting warm but that did not stop my screaming. I was miserably cold now and things would not be better until I was comfortably warm.

I’m older now and if I know that a balance has shifted and that heat will begin to accumulate, I’m fine. Yeah, I’m cold right now but that will pass. Once one gets near the balance point, one is moving into control. One can soak it in, get a feel for the system, and start to play.

The following is another possible linking of stories as I work on Roaming, the on-line hyperlink book I am writing.

Scree

Because I am a classroom teacher, I often remember my own schooling, reflecting on what lessons left an impression on me. I try to learn from them. In all my schooling, the most important lesson I learned was in my 10^th grade Rhetoric class. Mr. Kalman came in and asked us whether we would rather be Red or Dead? This was the mid-60’s; the Cold War was in full swing. A well-known saying back then was “Better Dead than Red.”

Like fish to bait, many of us rose to the question and started arguing justifications for our position. I was in the midst of it, quite comfortable with my position. At some point, one of the less aggressive students said, “I’d rather be neither. I’d rather be free and alive.”

“So would I,” responded Mr. Kalman.

I protested, “You didn’t give us that choice.”

“But you had it,” he replied.

I was stunned. If I had been so passionately comfortable with accepting the limits of a choice that had been given me, how much else was I blind to? My map of the world no longer applied to this newly-revealed territory.  

“But you had it.” Those four words changed my life. The best example of this change was my path into college. In May of my senior year, I registered by mail for the classes I would take next fall at the college I would be going to. English Literature and European History were required but for my other two, I chose Calculus and German. A few weeks later, I realized I was just continuing along the same path I had taken to get into college. Every year I had taken English, Social Studies, math, science and a foreign language. But now I will be in college; I can make my own choice. Am I just choosing these classes because they were the ones chosen for me all through high school? I didn’t really like German. Why should I keep taking it? What are the choices I really have? What would I really want to learn about? The moment I asked that, I knew one answer right away. Astronomy! The college had astronomy classes with real telescopes. I switched from German and calculus to astronomy and philosophy.

My passion for astronomy was red hot. It had started that school year with a book my brother had lent me called Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. Most of the book was depressing urban drunkenness but in the midst of that, Japhy Ryder (pseudonym for the poet, Gary Snyder) takes Kerouac mountaineering in the Sierras. They camp the first night on a tucked-snug granite ledge overlooking the world.

Up out of the orange glow of our fire you could see immense systems of uncountable stars, either as individual blazers, or in low Venus droppers, or vast Milky Ways incommensurate with human understanding, all cold, blue, silver, but our food and our fire was pink and goodies.

Snyder brews tea and later pulls out a star map.

“As I came back our orange fire casting its glow on the big rock, and Japhy kneeling and peering up at the sky, and all of it ten thousand feet above the gnashing world, was a picture of peace and good sense.”

“Japhy, kneeling there studying his star map, leaning forward slightly to peek up through the overhanging gnarled old rock country trees, with his goatee and all, looked, with that mighty grawfaced rock behind him, like, exactly like the vision I had of the old Zen Masters of China out in the wilderness.”

Kerouac’s words created a picture of an experience I wanted. I wanted to camp up by timberline and feel at home within the stars. I wanted to have a star map and know the constellations. So I went down to the library and checked out a star book.  I took it outside at night and there indeed were the brighter stars outlining the major constellations other than the Big Dipper and Orion. I wanted to know more so I checked out more books on astronomy and as I plowed through them, I realized I was reading college textbooks and that I was teaching myself astronomy. Learning did not require a teacher! This is where my passion for astronomy came from that led me to change my freshman year’s courses, from a passage I read in Dharma Bums.

With this passion, I breezed through the introductory astronomy class freshman year and next year, I became the professor’s teaching assistant for that course. I gave planetarium shows and supervised the night-time observations with a couple of 8” telescopes. Four years later, when I applied to the National Park Service, I got hired partly because they were looking for someone who could give star talks. So Dharma Bums helped open my path into the park service.

I loved being a ranger/naturalist. The weekly highpoints of my two years rangering in Denali were my Discovery Hikes. I’d introduce people to the joy of cross-country hiking by taking them into areas I had never been where we would just roam in search of beauty and wonder. One day I led an enthusiastic group of ten to fifteen hikers up through a steep, mountain meadow on the flank of Cathedral Mountain. I had never been up there; I didn’t know what lay ahead. We got to the top to discover that “our top” was detached from the higher peaks of Cathedral. To get over to them, we would have to cross atop a hundred foot long, pointed ridge of crumbly rock flanked with steep slopes of scree sliding a thousand feet down on either side.

Scree covers the sides of mountains whose rock weathers into smaller pieces faster than they can be carried away. These rock fragments pile up and cover the mountain slope at their angle of repose, meaning as steeply as they can. Nothing grows on a scree slope because (a) water quickly sinks through the loose rocks to far beneath the surface and (b) the unstable slope slides slowly over time, shredding any roots. So those scree slopes appeared bare, slidey, and hostile. On the other side of that ridge were broad grassy slopes leading to the true summit of Cathedral Mountain. But first we would have to cross that ridge—so, without hesitation, I strode buoyantly along the ridgeline. About halfway across, I looked back to see how the group was enjoying this exciting part of our roaming. They were all huddled back at the beginning of the ridge. None had dared step onto that steep ridge. “Oh,” I said with cosmic delight as Dharma Bums came flooding back to mind, “you’re afraid you are going to fall off this mountain, aren’t you?”

The day after the star map, Kerouac and Snyder hiked upward and reached the final summit slope in the evening. They were slogging up the final scree slope when there came a point where fear of falling overcame Kerouac . He stops and huddles against the mountain, afraid. Snyder continues to the top. Kerouac hears Snyder’s wild yodeling from on top but continues hugging the mountain.

“Then suddenly everything was just like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bouncing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the sides of the world and in that flash I realized it’s impossible to fall off mountains you fool and with a yodel of my own I suddenly got up and began running down the mountain after him doing exactly the same huge leaps, the same fantastic runs and jumps, and in the space of about five minutes I’d guess Japhy Ryder and I (in my sneakers, driving the heels of my sneakers right into sand, rock, boulders, I didn’t care any more I was so anxious to get down out of there) came leaping and yelling like mountain goats or I’d say like Chinese lunatics of a thousand years ago, enough to raise the hair on the head of the meditating Morally by the lake, who said he looked up and saw us flying down and couldn’t believe it.”

That exultant image had resonated with me in high school. I look back at my frightened group and realize I have the opportunity to recreate this experience and pass on to these people what Snyder had passed on to Kerouac. I joyously exclaim, “This is a scree slope. You can’t fall off a scree slope. Watch.” and I leap off the mountain as far as I can and land upright 10 yards further down with the scree sliding a foot as it absorbs my impact. “It’s fun! It’s like a big sand dune!” I shout and they all begin jumping off, scrambling back up, leaping further and further, laughing and shouting in the ecstasy of the wilderness embraced. Then we casually ramble across that now-easy ridge, shake the pebbles out of our shoes, and continue to the summit above.

This passing on of experience from one time to the next forms the heart of Axe Handles, a wonderful poem by Gary Snyder. Check it out. (  http://poetrycontexts.blogspot.com/2007/10/axe-handles-by-gary-snyder-one.html  ) then buy the book. “How we go on.”

Cairns #72

End of the Long Nights – 2013

My mother died this month
She lived a life of smiles and grace up to the end at 95. If I had to tell only
one story about her, it would be this.

Both my mom and my dad were born and raised in the Midwest. She grew
up in the suburbs of Chicago; he grew up in an Iowa town. They met in
college in Iowa, got married, and had three children in Iowa; my brother, my
sister, and finally me. Back in 1951, when I was a year old, she divorced my
dad because he had a gambling addiction – expressed through the stock
market and futures markets. They had been living just a couple of hours
from Dad’s parents who were scandalized that she would divorce their son.
Divorce was just not done back then. What she did then amazes me to this
day.

She decided that she had to move far away in order to make a fresh start.
Where should she go? She decided that the town she moved to had to have
two things: a college (for cultural enrichment) and mountains. She had
grown up in the Midwest and she had always longed to see mountains. She
needed to have mountains in her life. So she did whatever research she could
do in that long-before-the-internet age and somehow chose Walla Walla,
Washington, 2000 miles away. She had three children ages 1, 4, and 7 and
no car. But she found someone who needed a car driven to Portland, Oregon.
A friend of hers offered to help her with the trip. They drove pre-interstate
roads with three young kids to Walla Walla and there Mom started her new
life. Later, she and Dad remarried but he had to leave Iowa and his parents
behind and come to her. There, in a story almost as amazing, he built his
own business in a completely new territory.

I can’t imagine who I would have been if I had grown up in Iowa. I grew up
a westerner – in love with its rolling wheat fields, sagebrush deserts with
brown basalt rimrock, and pointed volcanic peaks. Walla Walla was an
idyllic place for a child. Routinely I would, without forethought, bicycle 10,
20 miles through the wheat country. Whitman College enriched our lives
with theater and lectures and other programs. And Mom always loved the
Blue Mountains. For much of her life, she would take a walk each morning
north of town on a dirt road that went through the wheat fields with the
mountains right ahead. We will spread her ashes on their slopes where Dad’s
ashes await hers.

Alysia added: She loved books and nourished in all her children and
grandchildren a passion for a good story. It is so fitting that she drew her last
breath as her first child read to her a story she had long ago read to him, the
chapter “The Open Road” from Wind in the Willows. Such a fitting tribute.

Sara’s Music
Two other emails accompany this Cairns. The subject line of the first is
Cairns: Her Songs Have Heft. The second is Cairns: Dancing to the Songs
Inside. Each email contains an attached song by Sara Hoxie.

I don’t do advertisements in Cairns and what follows is not an
advertisement—in the sense that I am not deriving financial gain from
sending these emails. I am sending these songs to you for three reasons.
1. Alysia and I really, really like her music. We both often comment on how
often we find the lyrics (not just the tunes) running gently in our minds. We
often surface from sleep accompanied by her music. This power has
continued for months; her songs have staying power. So I can easily pass on
her music to you as a gift, not as a pitch.
2. Sara Hoxie, the composer/artist of the attached songs, is a Chrysalis
teacher and I want to support her and help her music reach a wider audience.
Feel free to forward my emails with the attached songs to others.
3. In addition, some of you might appreciate much of her music as being
place-based. The first sample I send you (Trinity River Love Song) is an
example of this. Not only is it rooted in the Trinity River (about 60 miles
from here), the central imagery would tend to arise only in a composer who
has spent time by rivers.
If you like her music, you can go to http://sarahoxie.com/waterfall-boycds/
to order her CD.

Difference between scouting and leading
Scouts and leaders; both are followed by other people. Many people assume
that I, as administrator of Chrysalis, am the leader of the school. I don’t see
myself that way for two reasons. One is because we have organized
Chrysalis as a teacher-led school. Therefore, part of my job is to often
consciously hold back from assuming leadership so that the teachers, as a
group, practice and strengthen their governing power. But the second reason
is that psychologically, I’m not a leader. I love scouting; I don’t like leading.
Scouting is exploring new territory. A scout realizes that s/he will sometimes
hit deadends and have to double back. One might not even ever get to a
specific place. One is scouting. One has to be comfortable with false starts
and retreats. But in the course of scouting, the terrain is learned in a way that
will allow others to follow. In that way, a scout is followed.

A good leader is trusted to lead to goals. The less false starts and retreats, the
better. This competency inspires others to follow. The leader has a
responsibility to those following in his/her company. A scout’s only
responsibility is reporting accurately on the terrain s/he encountered. I am
much more comfortable with that. I have no problem making decisions for
myself, for starting enthusiastically down a path that might go nowhere,
because I like the act of roaming unknown territory. But having to double
back when people are following me—that I don’t like.

Reading the Teacher
In my algebra class, Daniel, a smart, newer student, expressed his frustration
that whenever he gave a tentative answer to an algebra problem, he could
not tell from my expression and follow-up question whether his answer was
wrong or right. That led to my wondering how much of his school learning
thus far had been spent on learning to read his teachers instead of learning to
grapple with the material itself. Which got me to thinking about the
difference between the two. And that led me back to Fort Wolters.

I was brought up in a conservative farm town where everyone put their hand
over their heart when the American flag passed by in a parade. The United
States in my childhood was the bastion of freedom and democracy, holder of
the moral high ground. When the Vietnam War heated up during my high
school years, I struggled with knowing what was right. I wanted America to
triumph but voices of dissent raised questions that I didn’t have the
background to understand. I read articles in Time magazine that explained
the reasons why we would win the war if we just stayed the course. The
evening news reported the body counts; there were always more of the
enemy killed than Americans.

I went to a liberal arts college where most students were against the war—
perhaps partly because it was the sixties and that’s what college students
were supposed to believe. But I still had that conservative farm town
foundation in me and I couldn’t really be against the war, not if there was a
chance we could somehow win it.

At the end of my freshman year, I hitchhiked home across the country. As I
was going across Texas, I met a guy who asked me if I wanted to spend the
night on an army base. I couldn’t quite believe I could spend the night on an
army base but I said sure. And I did. I went through the chow line and got
fed and I stayed in the barracks which was a series of small rooms with
about four soldiers per room. And there we talked – or rather, I mostly
listened.

Fort Wolters trained helicopter crews. Almost everyone there was either
going to Vietnam or was returning from Vietnam. The soldiers I listened to
had just come back. Just come back in the sense that they had hardly talked
to anyone stateside so they were, I presume, still strongly in the state of
mind that had, for them, evolved over there. Vietnam was great, said a
helicopter machine gunner. You’re flying along and you see a guy walking
along a road, you just blow him away. It was great, he said, with no
awareness of how his stories were blowing me away.

This memory came to mind as I reflected on Daniel’s comment. When I was
struggling to figure out Vietnam by reading Time magazine and noting the
daily body counts and listening to speeches of the president and his generals,
I had been “reading the teacher.” Those soldiers started bringing me in
contact with the “lesson” itself. There was no way we were going to win the
hearts of the Vietnamese, no matter what the president said, if their fathers
and grandfathers were shot from the air while walking down the road. Body
counts based on incidents like that would only lead reasoning into a fantasy.
We must focus on understanding the lesson itself, not grow dependent on
following the leading questions of “teachers.”

My scariest animal encounter
Once in Denali I rounded a blind corner and less than ten yards away, a
mother grizzly with three cubs were chowing down blueberries. After a
couple of seconds of shock on my part – and continued oblivious gulping on
their part – I continued on past. That was a shock – but it wasn’t my scariest
animal encounter. That’s reserved for another experience I had as a ranger
up in Denali.

A bit of backstory. I hitchhiked up to Alaska when I was 23, fell in love with
Denali National Park and the National Park Service and formed a life goal of
being a seasonal naturalist in Denali. One of the rangers was my idol; he
gave an incredible campfire talk. So, when, four years later, I finally
achieved that life goal, one of the things I wanted to accomplish was
delivering a campfire talk as worthy as his. I wanted it so much that I tried
too hard and really struggled through a diversity of mediocre talks. So I
spent a lot of that first summer gnawing on my campfire talk.

While hiking one day, I had this great idea. I wouldn’t have a campfire! I
would explain to the audience how this would be a way to celebrate being in
Alaska. It doesn’t get dark until mid-August so there is no need for a fire.
And the growing season is so short up here in the interior that trees don’t
grow fast or large. So we’re not going to have a fire.

I cheerfully announced this at the beginning of my next campfire talk—and
walked straight into a silent but incredibly palpable wall of hostility. BAM.
Nobody said anything, because nobody had to. The soundless rejection made
it impossible to continue. And then a piece of wood was lobbed from the
back and thudded beside the campfire ring. The abrupt transformation of a
friendly group of vacationers into a hostile, telepathically-united near-mob
cowed me. It also made me aware that fire is far, far more primal than we
think. You do not deprive us of fire. It is light. It protects us. It brings us
together into a circle and joins us together as a pack. You Shall Build A
Fire! Without its binding energy, you have no authority and this gathering
does not exist.

I meekly built a hasty fire.

A wonderful bumper sticker I saw
Midwives help people out.