A TEMPORARY REFUGE
Natural History of a
Wild Summer Steelhead Refuge Pool
in the Western Cascades of Oregon
by
Lee Spencer
© Lee Spencer
and
The North Umpqua Foundation
All rights reserved
OCTOBER
EARLY OCTOBER
The Western Cascades in Oregon is a green place, green never leaving the conifers, nor does green ever completely leave the madrone, chinkapin, and salal, the silk tassel trees, the manzanita, and the Oregon grape to name only a few of the more obvious broad-leaf evergreen trees here. And there is the alder, a broad-leaved deciduous tree with leaves that don’t change color while on the tree or even very soon once they have fallen to the ground or been caught up in the stream. While greenness is all around here, and always is in these Pacific slope forests below three thousand feet, October in the Pacific Northwest is a time of yellowness for those creatures whose orientation is the creeks and rivers and their riparian zones.
This yellow is to me a warm color that is like the steeping of all the sunlight of summer to a full rich brew. There are scarlets and oranges too, but the dominant deciduous color here is yellow, and it is for the most part a bright yellow at this time. As the winter comes with its rains and cold, this bright yellow will turn a straw color and finally to a pale brown as plant material looses its integrity and begins to join the ground. In October, those plants and leaves that are no longer green generally retain a vigor, or stiffness. If there have been rains sufficient to soak the ground at least once or twice, a new growing season has begun for the grasses and forbes, though at this time this new growth is usually infinitesimal.
Rains, sometimes heavy ones, and daytime temperatures in the forties interspersed with periods of Indian summer and nighttime frosts characterize this month climatically. For some reason, the blue blue sky and warm sunny days with cool shadows under the trees and nights in the 30°s come easiest to my mind when I think about the month as I am now. Rains have begun however and often the first truly consequential one falls during the month, the one that puts the creek into a significant spate that is several feet higher than the summertime average. This first big creek rise, whenever it occurs, initially pulls the steelhead from the pool, but, since the regular precipitations of winter have yet to settle in, the creek will fall again and steelhead will enter and re-enter. Sometimes they enter in larger numbers than before the exodus if it has been a hot dry summer with large numbers of steelhead locked into other and less satisfactory thermal and low-flow refuges lower on the main creek and in the North Umpqua River itself.
Light intensity reaches the winter level and this is one of the nice things about October. The retreat of the apparent path of the sun across the sky puts more of a slant to the rays that reach the earth and this I notice on a elemental level and love for some reason. For me there is a quality of clarity to this light that holds throughout the winter. I am unsure whether the range of different colors brought about by the death and casting off of vegetation is enhanced by the lowered angle and intensity of the sunlight or not. I imagine this would be true. In any case, to me the light is a singular thing.
The cooling of the creeks corresponds with a decrease in the minor turbidity of the water. This almost invisible summer cloudiness is probably brought about by biologic agencies, algae as much as anything else. In October, the water becomes truly limpid, preternaturally clear . . . when the creek is not responding to rainfall. Binoculars allow Sis and I to count the individual scales on the fish now if we so desire.
Winter is closer and the changes leading to it are strongly in train, which has led many of the authors I read to characterize autumn as a bittersweet time, a time when sunlight and warmth are necessarily savored because soon the dark season will be here once again. Perhaps so, but this ignores the new growth seen everywhere if a person looks for it here in the Pacific Northwest. It kind of puts winter in a bad light too, to use a word. Winter is wonderful and, as I’ve stated before, in many ways it is my favorite season here in the Pacific Northwest and October is October.
The early part of October is usually the time of year when the flows of the main creek are at their lowest. As has been mentioned however, by month’s end, often the first big flood of the year happens. This is one of the interesting things about the month, it will come in like a camel and go out like an otter. The wet, when it comes, brings relative warmth; the dryness, often brings polar cold at least at night . . . or at least the Pacific Northwest version of polar cold, nights in the twenties.
“ . . . if it ain’t frozen.” This was a phrase often used by my friend Carroll Kirk for some of the things he expected of autumn or winter. I am applying it here to October, though it may be used as well for September or November to account for a seasonal characteristic that is relatively common in the Pacific Northwest where the air and water temperatures are usually above freezing . . . below three thousand feet.
When it freezes, many changes go on hold or alter drastically. Often with a return of warmer weather, whatever changes were in progress continue. These initial freezes in October, if they occur at all and they usually do, are not a shutting of the door by winter. The primary reason for this is that the daytime temperatures during the coldest months of the year here at the level of the pool or lower average well above freezing and this in turn is probably due to the influence of the immense temperate mass of the Pacific ocean lolling and surging off shore and dominating the air masses moving onto and into the west coast of North America.
Leaf change is happening which means leaf fall is happening and leaves begin to build up in earnest on the substrate in the pool. Mostly these leaves are of the broad-leaved maples and the alders, dominant riparian deciduous trees. The leaves from the former tree are now often a bright yellow, while the leaves of the alder are still green, this green perhaps taking on more of a bluish hue.
In the main creek, adult spring chinook are done with their spawning, but not necessarily their waiting. During Sis and my time, we have yet to see a female spring chinook in the pool in October, though, once, we saw one on the final day of September. Male spring chinook are often present, particularly if they haven’t spawned and they appear to move around the different pools in the creek with regularity now; in all probability, they are looking for females.
The pool Sis and I sit at to deter poachers is a refuge for summer steelhead during the time of high water temperatures and low flows. This has probably been made clear by now. The area of spawning gravels just below the pool is not part of this refuge. Present in this redd area are some of the gravels that are the ultimate grail of one of the populations of summer steelhead that move up through the Umpqua River from the ocean and finding suitable spawning gravels and carrying out those behaviors that lead up to and include spawning is what happens after the need for a refuge passes from among these fish.
By this time of the early autumn, generally, creek temperatures are in the comfort zone for summer steelhead once more and it is now the low level of the creek that keeps these fish holding in the refuge pool, though low flows have a less tenacious hold on the steelhead than the warm flows did. With the increasingly frequent rains that have by now—statistically anyway—started for the season, summer steelhead more readily leave and return to this and other refuge pools as the creeks rise and fall. In the case of the redd area below the pool, this behavioral transition from refuge to creek and back to refuge is easy to observe.
During early October, if there is a creek rise of sufficient magnitude to stir the steelhead out of the pool, it is common to see a few of them over the redd area gravels, sometime as many as six or eight fish. Whether there are two or eight steelhead in this redd area, these fish hold with reference to where the main tongue of current is, the more dominant fish hugging the substrate at the center of this shallow tongue. Interestingly, the center of this tongue appears to be explicitly where the first redd is excavated by spring chinook if such digging takes place. Once the creek begins to fall again, and the number of fish once more begins to increase, steelhead will hold in both this redd area and the pool. At a certain point, however; I will only see redd-area fish in smaller numbers and in the early morning. Finally, all the steelhead hold in the pool and the spawning gravels are empty of holding fish until the next creek rise.
Waters are cooler and the steelhead are holding higher in them and they are by now commonly milling. As indicated earlier, both of these steelhead behaviors may represent an awareness by the fish that the refuge pool is losing its necessary hold on them. In the case that it is otter activity—the most usual cause of milling—that brings about the milling behavior, the pool may simply make the fish feel too vulnerable, whatever that means in steelhead minds.
The fact that the creek is cool now means that not only can steelhead move upcreek during pulses of higher water, but they can take up residence in pools that, during the summer, would have been too warm for them, pools that may be closer to gravels suitable to different populations of these fish. About two months from now, when the regular winter precipitations begin and the water in the pool stays at about six inches below the moss line on the midpool far-bank rocks—about two feet higher than the summer and fall low flow—the pool empties of fish. This has happened each of the last six years between late November and middle to late December.
Since the spawning time for summer steelhead in the main creek remains our to five months away, this tendency to go to their spawning gravels is intriguing. Do the sexual-selection behaviors of the local breeding populations take this amount of time to sort things out or is this another example of Nature not cutting things too close? All things being considered equal, it would seem that the steelhead would be particularly vulnerable in the shallow water that flows over these gravels. On the other hand, vulnerable to what? The average steelhead of the populations in the North Umpqua Basin is an eight pound fish, larger than an eagle or osprey can handle if the fish is alive and vigorous. These fish are too active yet for a terrestrial predator to catch. And otters? Otters are capable of taking them—if they exercise themselves to do so—in the shallows or in deep pools of the creek.
Short-jawed steelhead are now definitely associating with those long-jawed fish that have chosen to hold out in front of the pod. This may be occurring within the pod too, but would be invisible there in the dense mix of fish.
Occasionally—again, out in front—one or several short-jawed fish hold close to if not actually in contact with long-jawed steelhead and often the long jaw chosen is the lead male fish in the pod or in the vanguard of the pod. These associations are particularly apparent when the long jaws are holding out in front of the pod by several body lengths. Sometimes, the short-jawed steelhead appear to actually rub up against one of these long jaws. While these associations seem to be more common with the lead male, they also occur with the secondary and tertiary males and sometimes these few long jaws each appear to have a different group of short-jawed steelhead associating with each of them at the same time.
Since it is rare to see obvious or even subtly suggestive dominance encounters between short-jawed steelhead, it is unfortunately impossible to say at present whether the dominance status conferred by holding as the lead male steelhead is conferred, in turn, to the short-jawed steelhead associating with these fish. Additionally, there is often a vanguard made up of four or five short-jawed steelhead holding out in front of the pod by this time and often these short jaws are in front of and apparently unassociated with the lead male if there is a long jaw that is holding out in front of the pod. These vanguards are sometimes made up of as many as six to ten or more short-jawed steelhead. Interestingly, while a lead male may be often and variously engaging other males in its vicinity, the presence of a short-jawed fish upcreek from them, by now anyway, appears to be virtually always ignored.
Steelhead continue to enter and, if there are no creek raising rains that cause the steelhead to leave, often the pool is holding the highest number of steelhead counted for that season. During October, five to seven hundred wild summer steelhead have been counted over the last six seasons. If there have been two or three moderate spates since the time that the creek temperatures have dropped, however; the numbers will probably be lower.
At least one ocean-run steelhead under twenty inches in length has sometimes been present in the pool. During the third season, in late September or earliest October, though not entered in the notes, I saw an approximately fifteen-inch steelhead holding in a pool about two miles downcreek from the retreat pool. It had been sleeping and, telling Sis to sit well away on the bank, I got within six feet of this diminutive steelhead while trying to get a photograph. I failed in this attempt, but saw that it had ocean colors. This steelhead, or one just like it, appeared in the pool on October 7th, 2001. During the sixth season, a mature sixteen-inch steelhead appeared in the pool on the 10th of September and perhaps the same fish was seen again on the 16th of November. So far, these tiny steelhead have been wild fish and they were probably either jacks or jills.
Metamorphosis of pool steelhead is ongoing with some fish; however, by now, lots of the male steelhead in the pool appear to have fully taken on the wide richly red stripes and the gill plates and to have fully lengthened jaws with a kype visible at the tip of the mandible. This degree of metamorphosis is probably true for the female steelhead also, though, as previously stated, females change far less and, while there is some snout growth, it is minor compared to the almost duck-like bills now formed on some of the males. Minimally metamorphosed males remain difficult if not impossible to differentiate from the female steelhead.
During the third season, in the late morning, Sis and I saw one of the best instances of idiosyncratic steelhead daisy chaining as a response to particular visitors that has been documented in the notes. Two visitors, a couple, had been at the pool for about an hour or so with a minimal effect on the pod and the fish appeared to be at ease. Two new people came down the trail into the viewing area and, with their appearance, the steelhead began a daisy chain in the lower pool which they continued while these new people were present. The daisy chain stopped when they left. The splashy rise phase of the steelhead stress responses began then. This incident forms part of an accumulating body of data suggesting strongly that, at least occasionally, steelhead respond differently to different people. The couple that were visiting prior to the daisy chain event remained for quite a while longer.
The leaves of the deciduous trees along the creek have continued to change in earnest. There are several acres of ash trees that, with clumps of slender reeds, have taken over a bit of seasonally marshy ground located about a mile downcreek from the pool. These trees are usually furthest along in their change and by this time they are uniformly a yellow green. The broad-leaved maples and hazels are continuing to turn yellow too and, together with a variety of other plants, help to maintain this as the dominant autumn color change here in this part of the Pacific Northwest. The reds are supplied by poison oak, vine maple, and dogwoods for the most part.
Another sometimes dramatically red plant is the Oregon grape, but it can and does turn this color at any time during the year seemingly. The prickly compound leaves of this plant grow five to seven to a stem and are evergreen, so when they become shiny crayon red, it is only the leaflets on a single stem spanning a foot or more in length that do so. These leaves appear to last for several years before being brightly discarded by the plant.
Another interesting thing about the Oregon grape is that it is the only local broad-leaf evergreen I know of whose leaves only rarely turn yellow, that is, if they change color at all and don’t simply dry, darken, and curl up on their branch as those of the madrone sometimes appear to do. Whether chinkapin, silk tassel, or rhododendron, their aged leaves turn a rich banana yellow and this change begins in the spring and continues through the summer.
The sedges are beginning to yellow significantly too along the edges of the creek and the blades and leaves of many other shrubs and ground-hugging plants are changing to shades of red and yellow too. The viburnum takes on a rich maroon color. All of which brings up what seems to me to be a major question to which I have never been able to get a satisfactory answer: Why do deciduous leaves change to vibrant colors at all? In nature, the presence of bright colors seems to carry a message to the world, most often to attract or repel, but basically to get attention, and these messages often appear to be adaptive, to serve some purpose, albeit an evolutionarily accidental one. So, what’s the purpose of colorful leaf changes just prior to these leaves being dispensed with?
Showy flowers seem to attract pollinators. Showy fruit seem to attract creatures to feed on them and, often enough, to disperse their seeds. Among the land animals, the most obvious use of bright colors seems to be those by which some birds appear to attract mates. The natural history literature is replete with examples of brightly colored creatures that are poisonous or otherwise unpleasant, the reputed disagreeable taste of monarch butterflies is a well-known example.
Or is there something about the metabolism of leaves that compels a color change without a purpose? Well, the leaves of the alder trees fall to the ground or stream while still green . . . except for those few leaves shed in the early summer. Vine maple leaves that have grown in the diffuse light, or complex shade, of the forest also avoid a dramatic color change and simply become a very pale yellow.
Is colorful leaf change a way trees have of attracting creatures to their seeds? This may be part of it. Even if the seeds, nuts, or fruit fall to the ground a unique leaf color and shape will certainly be a sign to those creatures interested in them. And the colors or shapes of a tree and its leaves are unique. There is probably some more fundamental explanation at the root of this phenomenon of autumn leaf-color changes or of color changes at any time.
All this, of course, is speculation and there is nothing that is stopping you from coming up with your own speculation regardless of your background. Science, the method itself, is nothing but speculating within a formal set of rules that are designed to force one to try to disprove, not just to prove a speculation, to rigorously question ones assumptions, and to do so transparently. By transparent is meant that all the steps by which a person falsifies her or his reasoning are documented and made easily available to anyone who is interested. Without this transparency, what could be science becomes merely assertion.
Broad-leaved maples have begun to shed in earnest and at times they are the dominant leaf on the substrate. As these sometimes huge leaves drop away from their trees, seemingly always to falling stem first to the ground, their size seems to allow them to often form an unbroken, densely layered, and extensive carpet below the trees. I have often wondered whether this is a way of limiting the vegetation around their trunks. Broad-leaved maple leaves are quite leathery and resistant to rot, often making it to the following summer in good shape.
Many or most of the dogwood leaves are colored and quite variously colored too, all these colors often showing on the same leaf. Almost always the rich purple red that characterizes this tree seems to be present to some degree. Some of the dogwood leaves, however, simply become a pale yellow and others remain a rich melon green right to the end. Vine maples are involved in shifting their colors brilliantly into the various shades of orange and red, though some few of these maple leaves have been coloring up since the summer began.
Those blackberries and salal berries that remain on their thorny vines have lost their savor and become watery, even those that remain red. If the season in question has been relatively sunny and rainless, both of these berries dry on the plant and retain some flavor. Red huckleberries appear to be particularly adept at hiding their berries with their leaves. When one of these huckleberries retains berries, by this time of year they have a rich, almost a fermented flavor. Do these huckleberries ferment on the branch? Blue elderberries that have been missed by the creatures that search them out, are still tasty and also seem to be slightly fermented, they seem to bite you back a bit.
The moss of the far bank rocks that the otters have been pissing on has reddened strongly by this time too.
Bats are showing up in the evening by a hair, a spider web strand, past seven and have often disappeared from the air by the end of the month. They are hibernating. On a year the weather of which allows them to continue flying till the end of the month, that is, during a warm October, they appear then about an hour earlier in the evening than they did at the beginning of the month.
The young-of-the-year otters and beavers continue to accompany their mothers and, in the case of the beavers anyway, their fathers too.
Otters continue their regular visits to the pool and, as noted above, they are paying a different kind of attention to the steelhead now . . . perhaps. If there are crawdads to be had, they have them.
Migratory ducks occasionally show up on the pool now and these have included hooded mergansers, teal, wood ducks, buffleheads, and mallards. Migratory hawks appear too and this is often the time of the year when Sis and I see red-tailed hawks, though only one or two of these hawks make it into the notes each year in the neighborhood of the pool.
Robins are gone and have been from the riparian zone. Juncos too. However, if there is a dense hatch of aquatic insects or dogwood fruit are still available, robins may reappear actively along the creek for a few days. By now, on most seasons, all the fruit of the dogwood has been gathered or has fallen to the ground and, from there, been mostly gathered. But if there is any fruit remaining to the dogwood, it is attracting birds and squirrels and chipmunks, sometimes raucous bunches of them that appear to be disputing over who gets what.
The autumn change in the bird assemblage along the creek has occurred or is about to occur. It is probably brought about by a combination of shorter days, by lowering temperatures, and by rain. The fact that most of the fruits and nuts have been gleaned may also be a factor in the assemblage change. Now that early October has arrived, winter wrens, northern flickers, golden-crowned kinglets, and the hermit thrush are common around the pool once more. Varied thrushes become more common, but these birds usually first appear in their small flocks when snow drives them down out of the higher elevations. Once the varied thrush is present, the band of moss and organics along the edges of the roads begins to be torn up and turned over from the activities of these thrushes looking for food.
By now blue herons have become common visitors to the pool and when I see one I sit very very still. The blue heron has not accepted us. This is unlike the osprey which appears to have gotten somewhat used to Sis and my presence at the pool, along with the otters, beavers, and a long-tailed weasel. It is fine that the blue heron doesn’t trust us. There is no reason why it should. I do wonder about this and wonder if there are still a lot of people who think that they are helping juvenile Pacific salmon populations or improving their own fishing by killing these birds. If so, this may mean that these grand tall yellow-eyed birds are regularly being shot at.
As I’ve said elsewhere in this book, it may well be that the blue herons are using the pool and the local environs more than I have evidence of. I think this because I often spook them when I come to the pool very early or move about the local area in an unusual way. This suggests that the blue heron is very observant and aware of my patterns—possibly as aware of me as I am, or think that I am, of the steelhead in the pool. Despite its year-long use of the creek, for some reason we see the heron at the pool more commonly with the arrival of October.
Occasionally now, mergansers appear in their large juvenile groups of sometimes fifteen or twenty or more birds. Up here on the main creek, as small as it is, and it is small in early October, usually, the groups of mergansers are not as large as this, but we occasionally see more than ten together. I haven’t any idea why the merganser juveniles gather so and I can't say with any certainty how often adult birds are in these shifting, diving, and spinning mixes.
The heads of the juvenile dippers are well on their way to becoming the adult shade of brown for the most part.
While we never see them with regularity, ospreys are still around in early October. Over the seasons, unfortunately, ospreys are one of the local creatures that are getting used to Sis and my presence at the pool. From no dives in the vicinity to the pool during the first two seasons, now ospreys regularly dive into it while we are present. The most amazing dive I've seen so far was during 2003. I was seated, or kneeling, at the Perch, when motion in the periphery of my vision, upcreek—with a turn of my head—resolved into an osprey in a shallow fast dive which ended up with a great splash over the middle of the pod in the lower pool. The bird virtually buried itself in the flow and the fish scattered. The osprey came up with nothing and flew away down creek, shuddering water off occasionally as it did so. What this three-and-a-half-pound bird thought it was doing diving into a group of eight pound fish I have no idea.
Perhaps it was the osprey equivalent of Groucho Marx mistakenly asking both Thelma Todd and Margaret Dumont—in different movies—to “lodge with my fleas in the hills” rather than to “flee to my lodge in the hills.” Groucho quickly corrected himself in both films.
My friend Karl Konecny mentioned once seeing an osprey dive and latch onto an adult steelhead. This fish eagle was pulled up through a riffle and submerged in the pool at its head. Karl says it took the bird at least half a minute to come to the surface and that it then had to swim to shore where it stood around for more than half an hour periodically shaking its feathers before it took off again. This incident shows us that, ospreys are not smarter analytically than we are.
Many of the regular insects are still around if it is an Indian summer October. Gnats, mayflies, crickets, darners, and autumn caddis are present. Of the butterflies, the admiral, California sister, and tortoise shells are in the air and all still appear interested in fresh otter scat on the far bank rocks. Their ability to get nutrition from the otter scat and the scat of other creatures is what probably allows these creatures to be active at this time. Now native flowers from which nectar is available are very few or nonexistent. Exotic weeds do continue to bloom in numbers, however, especially the knapweeds along the roadside in the basin of the main creek.
Water striders are gone from the notes and from the creek, though the two are not the same thing. As with the pileated woodpecker and raven and other creatures seen or heard most days and neglected in the notes for the most part, water striders present a dilemma for me. Particularly when I get around to noting their absence, I cannot be sure that they haven’t been absent for a while and noted at a given time only because of a vague turbulent eddying of my awareness. By October, water striders are gone from the creek.
My field guide states that in the northern portions of its range, water striders overwinter beneath leaves that have fallen near water. If this is so, near water probably means well above the flood levels of winter. It is also mentioned that these insects are called “Jesus Bugs” in Texas for an obvious reason.
After a rain, as the ground is drying but still damp, but apparently only if it’s sunny, the small subterranean termites continue to fly. Again, if it is not too cold. As usual, half or more of the time, I only know they are doing or have done so by becoming aware of the hundreds of tiny glimmering wings that they have left behind stuck to everything that is smooth enough and is or was damp enough.
Autumn caddis continue their erratic, panicked-butterfly-erratic, flights generally in ones and twos over the pool. Big wooly bear caterpillars are out as are the large, amazingly swift sphinx moths in their various varieties. The distant, sleigh bell jingling of crickets is a common sound as it has been since August. Various of the orthoptera species are calling during the day too.
During the fourth season on the pool, I became aware of how resilient, a seemingly fragile butterfly can be. On a cool day of rain, Sis and I were walking downcreek and I noticed a California sister stuck to the edge of the road by the prevailing wetness. I thought to lift it, but realized that my relatively huge and blunt fingers, so useful with man-made tools, would likely tear this creature apart in the process of trying to separate it from the wet asphalt.
Three wet days later in the afternoon, while seated in the trailer, I remembered the California sister and went out to take a look. There was some sun at the time and I found the butterfly in the same place gradually freeing itself as the surface film evaporated from the pavement. There was an ant attached to its thorax. I carefully picked the creature up, pulled off the ant, and carried the butterfly to a small broad-leaved maple tree, putting it on a leaf in a patch of direct sunlight. When I came back, it was gone . . . and it was not on the ground under the waist-high tree.
I cannot be sure that a bird did not take it, but I saw California sisters through the rest of that October, tattered ones, that may have been different sightings of this same creature.
Crawdads are still out though in small numbers and as are garter snakes which we see now and then. We also occasionally see small rubber boas on the road in the late afternoon.
During the sixth season, on the 8th of October, when Sis and I were about half a mile below the pool on the road along the main creek, a vehicle pulled over the our side of the road and I was asked if I had a phone. There were two young guys in their twenties in the vehicle, the driver and a person moving about in the back seat.
It took a short while, two or three minutes, for me to figure out what had happened based on the garbled way the driver was talking. The person in the back seat had been shot in the back at very close range by another person who was no longer in the vehicle. They were all friends and the one had been handing a loaded twenty-gauge shotgun through the inside of the vehicle to the other who was stepping out the driver’s-side door to take a shot at a game bird of some kind.
The gun had gone off and the shot had entered the driver’s back in a tight group over the crest of his shoulder blade in the upper left quadrant of his back.
Sis and I got into the vehicle and we went back to the pool. I got the victim out of the car and laid him on the ground on a Thermarest pad that I got from the Perch. Then I checked the wound which was about an inch in diameter and only oozing blood. There was no froth around the wound or on the young man’s lips and, while without question he was in great pain, he was fully conscious and coherent. There is no cell phone coverage at the pool and I used a radio that the Forest Service supplies Sis and I with to call the Forest Service dispatch to request an ambulance.
By this time, the wounded person was covered with a blanket. We continued to put direct pressure on the wound until the ambulances got there which was about thirty minutes after the call.
Some hunters pulled up during that time with the friend who had accidentally done the shooting. This friend had left the car because of shock and nausea and the hunters had picked him up on the road. The woman of the party of hunters had a calm matronly presence and I got her to take over the application of pressure to the wound. She did a great job of talking to and reassuring the one who had been shot.
The young man was flown out to a hospital in Eugene. The injured person’s parents left me a note about a week later saying that their son was going to be ok.
On the 10th of October in 1999, while pouring boiling water into the washbasin Dad gave me that spring—a basin already containing creek-cold water, so to make warm water for shaving—as I often do, I thought of a story my friend Carroll Kirk told me. It was about an incident he saw when he was a boy visiting a logging camp during the teens of the twentieth century. The camp was in the Coast Range outside of Florence. Carroll’s story was about a person belonging to that camp who had filled a bath tub half full of creek water into which he poured an apparently reasonably carefully measured equivalent amount of boiling water.
Logically, and according to the principle of Hokum’s Razor , this procedure should have produced warm to hot water for bathing. As I was listening to the story at first I remember being vaguely aware that this made sense, this mixing of boiling hot water with cold creek water to get warm water.
Carroll said something like the man had been sure of himself, but that he had never seen anyone jump out of water so fast, shouting or not. Then Carroll was looking at me with his watery blue eyes twinkling. Expectant.
I put it together, though not very quickly. One part 210° water added to one part perhaps 40° water yielded . . . well, very very hot water . . . 125º water if my calculations are correct.
It was not just a matter of mixing hot and cold water and making warm water. Syntactically it works, but the real world is independent of syntax and probably independent of the rest of our minds too. The name that is the name is not the true name or it may have an unexpected permutation if you only think of the name and what it is supposed to imply and not the inherent nature of the thing.
A final early October thought. Compassion, as near as I can tell, does not exist as a mechanism in natural selection or adaptation . . . other than the perhaps related? parental love and nurturing which is everywhere evident in the natural world. This thought probably entered my notes because I am occasionally asked if I think that wild creatures are naturally enlightened in the Buddhist sense. For whatever it’s worth, no, I don’t think so. I would be surprised if they needed to be.
Violence does occur in Nature, though, apparently, not hatred. This makes us the only species that has a use for compassion and perhaps it is this and not the opposable thumb and intellect—which we certainly don’t obviously use in most of our actions . . . except to justify them—that distinguishes us from the beasts. Unambiguously, compassion is a good thing.
Take care, go well,
Lee and Maggie