Communion

The rain was hammering on the windshield, in those huge drops the wipers could barely stay up with. Since early the previous day, the storm clouds had been chasing me north as I headed deep into the Olympic Peninsula. ‘So this is why they call it a rainforest,’ I thought to myself, the endless conifers whipping by. It was a blanket of green, cut only by this two-lane strip of macadam and the occasional muddy side road. Essentially, it was just my van barreling down the lonely highway, on which nobody in their right mind would be out today. Even for storm-pounded western Washington, it was a major weather event.

Was it just me, or were storms getting more fierce over the last two decades? Certainly the previous winter in Santa Barbara had flooding from a massive “pineapple express’ that was off the charts, of all time. The entire lower Laguna Street for ten blocks in any direction had been knee deep in floodwaters overflowing from Sycamore Creek. And the highway out at the airport was shut for a couple days due to overflowing mud deposits. I had gone down to take pictures of the cars literally piled up by Mission Creek jumping its banks at the bridges; they were buried up to the headrests in mud.

I was slowly winding my way up the Pacific Coast, by the oceanside roads, with all their twists and turns, sleeping in my van, sometimes in below zero temps. And now I was rushing into one of the biggest storms of the year, on New Year’s Day, because I wanted to see the archaeological site of Ozette on a fierce winter day, the closest I could get to Early Holocene conditions at the end of the Wisconsin ice age eleven thousand years ago. Ozette was on the coast at the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula, sort of defiantly sticking its jaw out into the Pacific, inviting insult. Not an easy place to make a living, even ten millennia ago.

When I got “there,” I still had a two-hour hike through the actual rain forest, just to get to the beach where the site was. There would be no prehistoric artifacts or evidence still lying about because the Park Service had excavated the site several years before, but the site itself, the situation in ecological context would still be evident. I needed to stand where they had stood, looking out at what they saw every day for centuries – it would be the closest I could get to time travel, for a while anyway.

VOOOOOOSH ---- Suddenly my vision, already impaired by blinding rain, was clouded by blackness and motion. An eagle, with what had to be a six foot wingspan, had just buzzed my windshield, swooped down in front of me at forty miles an hour, pulled up to the left, gaining rapid ascent, and lofted to the left into an open clear-cut. He rose gently to the far side of the clearing hundreds of feet away, and settled onto a high branch, turning to look at my reaction. There had been a few clear-cuts along the way, but seldom close to the road. This one was extensive, and ugly. Probably an entire quarter- quarter had been sliced to shin height, and was ugly with its debris and absence. An American tragedy allowed by some chicanery between a government agency and the exploiters, spoilers of the Commonweal, for profit, and short-term thrills.

I brought the van to a halt; there had been no cars on this road for over a half hour, and I had the lights on. I sat there, watching the Bald Eagle watch me. And there was no doubt he was watching me, our eyes locked over the naked yards of missing forest. He was inviting me to witness the destruction of his home. The felled stumps still smelled of freshly cut timber, a smell I had grown to love as a kid when my grandfather took me at his knee into the giant kilns he supervised as a lumber engineer. The creosote was putrid, but fresh sawdust was intoxicating, opening the nasal passages. But now, fully grown, and having worked in timber country as an archaeologist for years, I could only feel sad at evidence of each new felling, each parcel of the wilderness falling away from the once proud oldgrowth blanket of green which had, before Yankee Imperialism, covered the West. Now it’s all about conservation, at best, a thumb in the dyke.

I whipped out my telephoto on my old manual Nikon (I like to do the thinking about settings for myself). The eagle continued to watch me, and I him. Now, I’m not prone to spooky things, but I swear we were connecting on an astral plane, and he was pumping me full of the built-up invective he had for whatever bandits had ripped down his neighborhood. Rip-and-run, they invaded, obliterated, and left the scene of the crime. He was not a happy camper, and he was letting me know it.

“Look at this mess; how would you like this to happen to your home?” I could hear him saying. “It’s going to take a century or more to fix this mess,” he continued, burning into my neurons from somewhere. It occurred to me that he was swearing, in this church, this cathedral of evergreen. I could only concur. Eventually he calmed down in my head, and we were agreeing, and becoming fast friends, sharing a religious experience together, across the void, across the missing forest, through the rain in the missing rainforest.

I took several pictures, telephoto and tragic wide angle. I even scratched my glasses because the rubber cup thingy was missing, but I didn’t care; it was the rarest of rare, sharing a trans-species moment of religion with a rare and beautiful raptor. But by now, I had gotten the message. A Hopi elder had once told me to listen to the Earth Mother and find my mission, it would find me. The eagle was the messenger. We shared a moment out of eternity, an eternal bond, brothers under the storm clouds, eyeing each other across the vastness of environmental insult, and knew what we must do, each of us. Voosh, he had gotten my attention; he had transmitted the message, and we resolved to be related, forever. “All my relations,” the ancient Native American phrase of prayer suddenly had immediate significance. All my relations meant protecting ALL my relations, not just humies. It meant, especially, protecting the relations out in nature who cannot speak for themselves, like Eagle, and the others living in his former neighborhood. I suppose he was chosen because he could have impact, make me listen. He sure got my attention. Like I said, I’m not prone to spooky stuff, but I listened that day.

- 1145 –