Poems by Kim Schnuelle
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Clearing the Sparrow's House
by Kim Schnuelle
From Canary Spring 2020
Kim splits her time between a small urban bungalow above a branch of the Salish Sea and a high desert converted storage container overlooking the Columbia River. She is unabashedly in love with the great Northwest rain forests and their inhabitants.
I am outside, fast-rubbing my gloved hands together, on a slate-sky early November morning. My husband and I are stomping boots and shivering as the northern wind rips down valley, whipping up tumbleweeds and pine needles past our legs. We are here in Eastern Washington this weekend for work - to shut down the dry cabin for the winter. Our only child, who loves this land like family, left for college two months ago and this is our first season winterizing without him. If he were here, he would be looking for coyote tracks in the frosted road and scanning the horizon for hawk sign. I can feel the ache of his absence as I rise and ready for the duties at hand.
There are so many tasks to do before dusk. This part of the state freezes over sudden and hard. Any stored water must be drained, or it will burst the containers and leak, soaking the floors at first thaw. My husband tips and gushes the liquid down the hill. What was so precious in the shade-less July heat is now just an excess burden to be fed up to sage and dead grasses. I lace up my boots more tightly and head across the field for a different but just as important task – clearing out bird box nests so new families can make a home next spring.
The cabin is both remote and connected to everything. On a hill above Brewster, Washington there’s a nice unobstructed view of the Columbia River over the low ridge and also four bands of internet service. But the road up is a twenty-minute, wash-boarded trek. Once the snows start in any serious way, our Honda Civic will never make it up the mountain.
Over the years we have set up fifteen bird houses here - sites for wren, bluebirds and even a barred owl den. The boxes are posted haphazardly over the forty-five acres. My boots crush the dead grasses, sienna brown and dry as a desiccated cricket husk, as start my task. The first house, a cheap mail order pine box, had no nest at all. The second one, tan and yellow with spiky nail perches, is full of dry twigs, old bits of down, and sleepy wasps. I flush it out and move on. The third box, rough blue-trimmed wood set high on the back-fence line, is harder to open so I pull out a wrench to twist the side screw. When it finally releases, I’m faced with a nest of dead chicks.
This land is intertwined with death. A lover it cannot seem to, or perhaps never wants to, leave. We came to this place through death as well. My mother, her body increasingly shorn away by Parkinson’s disease, finally passed on one hot July afternoon. Her ashes were scattered in a fast running Oregon river a few months later. As her only child, I inherited her estate and a piece of the same eventually changed hands in a Chelan County real estate office the following December.
Our new land held a small hunter’s cabin. Dry and without electricity, we hooked up a propane generator at night for reading. The walls were decades old pine, dry splintered from exposure to the calescent summers of Eastern Washington. Yellow jacket carcasses lay thorax up, suffocated in the gaps between window and wall. Cook stove burns branded the cheap linoleum flooring. We fell in love with the possibilities.
Eight months after the sale papers were signed and recorded, my husband and I were changing planes in Houston when, killing time, I scrolled through home state news on my phone. A large fire had broken out in the Methow Valley. This conflagration, the Carleton Complex Fire, was one of dozens that plagued Washington that summer. Eventually it would prove to be the largest in State history but at the time it was just one of so very many crossing the land. Gamboling mightily over the dry hills and valleys, it jumped roads and devoured orchards, homesteads, and unwary livestock. As I read nervously from the airport, the fire was perched to the south, near Pateros, and climbing fast up canyon. We boarded our plane. By the time we landed in Seattle, our cabin was already a ghost, vaporized and in ashes.
Once the road barricades were removed and it was safe to travel, my husband and I went out to survey the damage. Our down road neighbor’s home was smoke filled but it survived. Her corral, where legend has it a horse thief was strung up in the late 19th century, did not fare as well.
The land was a charnel ground. A blackened mouse skull lay near some ancient curled barbed wire. Our aluminum ladder was now a melted mercuric sculpture in the ashes. We grieved twice, once for the lost cabin and once again for my lost mother that made our connection to this land possible. Then we turned around, headed up the hill, and drove back to the city.
One can accept death yet still cling to life. One can refuse to succumb to finality before its time. Some months later, my husband stumbled across a tiny house inspired project, one that reconfigured old storage containers as minimalist dwellings, and our new cabin was born.
Now, a few years later, it is as if this were the only cabin that has ever stood on the rise. It’s funny how memory is that way. How we wipe our tears on our sleeves, adapt to what is in front of us, and move on.
I slid my hands under the nest and pulled it out, dead chicks and all, into the waning November light. Gingerly, I laid it down near a clump of dusky sage. In this windy hollow, I knew the nest would be blown to the horizon by morning. And so it was. We left early the next day, snow flurries braiding through the weak morning light.
Winter passed as it often does, full of fast-moving holiday celebrations and looming work deadlines. We went to and from our day jobs in total darkness. Memories of our cabin moved back into the crevices of my waking thoughts as I once again pondered buying full spectrum lights for our city home. Yet, one sun-hazy day the following March, we were back on the land again. The snows had melted, and arrow leaf balsam root were abloom over the hillsides. A large flock of California quail scurried across the ungraded road and then took flight, started by my sudden appearance on the scene. As I lugged fifty-gallon water containers into our shed, a whole season’s supply of hydration, I glanced up at the blue trim bird house. I was just in time to see a green tree swallow duck inside, a new family started on the land. I realized that I hadn’t been this happy in a very long time. I adjusted my boots and picked up another load for storage. There was still much work to be done before nightfall.
© Kim Schnuelle
On Knowing the Wolf when You Meet Her
by Kim Schnuelle
We were somewhat lost. Circling around the smaller roads of rural Okanogan County and estimating our way in educated guesses back to the main highway. It was one of those sun bright Eastern Washington days; a late-winter respite for us rain-weary Seattle travelers. The heater was on high in our old Honda Civic so I didn’t really mind wandering for a few hours. Cooling cup of coffee in hand, I gazed languidly out the passenger window as my husband turned right and then left, trying one route after another with determination. Just another winter’s day road trip in the Pacific Northwest.
The land in this part of north central Washington waves in an undulating blanket of pine forest. Often a monoculture from past logging, one can be lulled to sleep by the dull green monotony. I was almost dozing, eyes fluttering through the narrow crack of vision left, when I saw her. There in the slanted afternoon light of the glistening snow, she was standing alone in a small field. Snout slanted upward and one foot slightly raised. A gray wolf. The first I had ever seen in the wild.
Our car was a hundred yards down the road before I could even articulate what we had passed. My husband was skeptical, thinking that she was a stray dog or perhaps a large coyote. A logical explanation, given the rarity of wolves south of the British Columbia border. Yet I knew instinctively what I had seen. We argued about it and agreed to disagree. Eventually, my husband found the right road and we made it over the Cascades and back to the city. I went to work the next day, counting myself fortunate for the rare sighting.
As I told this story over the years, however, doubts began to creep in. How did I really know it was a wolf, and a she-wolf at that? My husband was right. There was scant evidence wolves ranged that far south at the time. Logically, I must have seen a particularly sturdy coyote, a common predator in the area. Yet I could not make myself believe such a sensible explanation. That day continued to gnaw at me. There was something I needed to understand about what I had seen but I wasn’t sure what.
A year or two after that February afternoon, we visited a wolf rescue facility south of Olympia, Washington. The injured wolves and wolf-hybrids nursed to health at Wolf Haven were not the same animal I saw in the Okanogan highlands. Or, more accurately, they looked the same but felt completely different as they paced around their forest enclosures. My doubts continued. But if it wasn’t a wolf that we came upon that day, what was it?
Wolves feature prominently in the legends and mythologies of most peoples. The nursemaid of Romulus and Remus. The swallower of the sun and moon at Ragnarok. A grandmother eater and tempter of red-caped children. Wolves often symbolize our deeper animal nature, caged deeply in the shadows of our psyche until triggered loose by some event beyond our ability to repress. In cinematic parlance, simply shining light on the darkness, or a full moon, can bring our wolfish nature to the forefront. Thus, as Lon Chaney Jr. was warned in Hollywood’s The Wolfman, “Even a man who says his prayers at night can become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” The wild and wolfish nature is always there. Even the wise and prayerful man is ultimately powerless to avoid its call.
In the scientific world, where I received so much training in my twenties, a wolf is a category. Mammalia – Eutheria – Carnivora – Canidae – Canis – Lupis. Substitute Latrans or Familaris for Lupis and you have coyote or dog respectively. In this Linnaean hierarchy, a wolf is a grouping, a mentally constructed box that contains a whole population of distinct beings. Once classified, we “know” what a wolf is and thus all wolves are the same once categorized. And once they are all the same, they are no longer truly animate in our collective minds. Wolves can then be subject to predator control policies in an abstract way, with scant consideration of what it really means to shoot hibernating pups in their dens. Or to ensnare their mother in a leghold trap, dying as she chews off her own paw but maintaining her pelt pristine.
Such classification provides an illusory form of intellectual control over what is, in truth, uncontrollable. It parses one type of being from another but it was useless in making sense of my experience. Understanding what I saw that late winter’s day meant at least temporarily discarding this training. It meant knowing what my actual senses told me and not defining truth by simply what was deemed scientifically rational.
Years after “the sighting” as I came to call it, my then teenage son enrolled in a wolf-tracking course held in the Idaho’s River of No Return Wilderness. He was gone for a week, hiking across burned tree fall and dodging for shelter from late summer hailstorms. He was somewhere very far from cellular reception.
When he returned to the city, he narrated the days and nights of wolf howls far down valley, scat near this tent in the slanted early light, and paw tracks as big as his hands. He never saw a wolf but he felt wolves and that was enough.
My son’s experience helped to translate mine. I had felt the essence of that she-wolf as we drove past her years earlier, and that was how I knew she was no dog or coyote. Western education categorizes but our sensing selves know, unless we talk ourselves into disbelief. But if we trust those senses, setting aside what our book learning might tell us otherwise, we may then know the wolf when we meet her.
© Kim Schnuelle
The Fallen
by Kim Schnuelle
I come from a land of giants. Washington State is home to the “world’s largest” Douglas fir and Sitka Spruce as well as “America’s biggest” Western Hemlock and Yellow Cedar. One can pick up a map at the Quinault rainforest store and plan a several hour sightseeing tour. Our verdant hills hold an estimated eight and a half billion trees, some young saplings and others ancient elders. But the forest is changing. And what does it mean when the old giants fall?
My family traveled through these wild lands often when I was a child. These trips usually involved my mother driving, straining to remain upbeat and talkative, while my father sat silent, taciturn and barely containing his cloaked rage. The coast highway undulated in curving arcs past sleepy Washington towns. The sun, frequently low on the horizon this far north, shimmered through lightly quaking spruce boughs. I was in the backseat, trying to mentally slip between the giant firs and hemlock that we never stopped to actually touch. Every few miles a new logging truck would pull out from a dusty side road and swerve into our path. My mother would slam the brakes as my father muttered curses over “lost time.” By age five, I was already gifted in focusing elsewhere. So began my routine of counting logs.
The felled trees were so big. Some trucks could only carry three or four segments, so great was their circumference. I lost track of the number of trucks crossing our path. I would daydream about a log so big that a truck could carry no more. A log so big that it filled the flatbed. I didn’t know what that meant at the time. Not yet.
Later, in my teens, I discovered Earth First and fancied myself a minor league activist. I pulled up surveyor stakes at midnight and carried shears to clip fences. I was firmly “camp spotted owl” and had no use for so-called forest management and its razed trees. Upon graduation, I left for university and studied Northwest anthropology. The forests really shifted for me then, from merely a beautiful place to visit into a separate community and culture of its own.
I learned of the braided interweaving of cedar and the wider mammalian community, especially humans. The native peoples of British Columbia called the Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata – technically a variety of cypress, not a cedar) the “Tree of Life.” Northwest coastal communities relied on cedar for clothes, medicine, totem poles, housing, and weapons. Cedar was a mythopoetic symbol of generosity and providence. Makah legend, from the northwest homeland of Washington State, tells of the two brothers of the sun and the moon, the “two-men-who-changed-things,” who transformed amorphous land beings into seals, herons, ravens, and mink. The brothers, knowing that the human inhabitants they created would need canoes to fish and hunt passing whales, changed one primordial creature to cedar for this purpose. In many ways, it was cedar that made human communities possible in our wet and cold forests.
Over time, Northwest logging practices changed and old growth forests were more often spared from the culling. The remaining giants then became relics, with trails cut so that supplicant tourists could hike a quarter mile and gaze at their majesty. Signs with arrows were installed along Highway 101 to lure visitors to the rainforest elders. Brochures were passed out by rangers.
The resulting pilgrimages took their toll, however. In 2016, its root ball weakened from the hordes of trampling visitors, the world’s largest red cedar, a popular stop on the north shore of Lake Quinault, crashed to the ground. So ended a thousand-year-old life.
The Forest Service quickly removed the directional signs and closed the trail, concerned that injuries would occur if hikers scaled the fallen log. But old maps still show the trailhead location. And so last December my family made our own pilgrimage to the grave of the giant.
Only four years had passed since the crashing down of the old cedar, but she lived in a rainforest. Water can be the great transformer. The trail was already moss-strewn and overgrown. Wooden stairs had rotted through and streams were running down the path. Ferns, salal, and Himalayan blackberries crept over the passage. We made some wrong turns and stumbled, following instinct only, into the woods. And then, there she was.
Others had made the pilgrimage before. We saw their footprints in the muddy ravines between the splintered remains. My son climbed up on her fallen trunk and walked the length of her body. We didn’t talk much. We gazed at the surrounding giant cedars, trying to understand how any tree could be even grander than the titans nearby. Then we gathered our things and trekked back to the car.
We humans often have a complicated relationship with the grand among us. Melville’s novel Moby Dick spotlights the majesty of the giant whale that Captain Ahab is trying to simultaneously control and kill. And first we chain-sawed down, but now adulate to their peril, the giant trees in our midst. Ultimately, however, the true role of these elder trees is inexorably tied to their surrounding physical and mythological community. And myths thrive in the shadowy and unseen places. Perhaps the best way to honor these giants then is to close the trails before they fall. To return them to a place of imagination and myth while they thrive in the deeper woods, unseen by human eyes, but felt deeply still in the human psyche. Perhaps this is how the giants will remain always standing in the human soul.
© Kim Schnuelle