Prairie Reading List

February 22, 2014 

           Working on the Landmark wildlife crew, our days are rigorous. Documenting the animals of the Great Plains is not for the faint of heart. Hikes of up to 14 miles per day over the plains and then down and up flood-cut troughs are de rigeur. As conscientious scientists, we don't fail to record glimpses of fleeing animals, even when they come at the end of a long and trying transect. On the other hand, we always look forward to some cozy down time at the Lazy J Lodge after the workday is done. Relaxing in the glow of the heatstove, a variety of leisure pursuits pass the time. Crochet, jigsaw puzzles, and guitar strumming are among the ways we pass the time. The other day the local ranchers even gave three of us a calf-roping lesson. But the most frequent option for our down time is reading. Send a bunch of well educated millennials (and a few token misfits from generation Y) into a media starved cellular deadzone, and noses tend to get buried in books.

            I have read three very inspiring books since I have been here; namely, Buffalo for the Broken Heart by Dan O'Brien, American Bison by Dale F. Lott, and Built for Speed, on the subject of pronghorn antelope, by Dave Byers. Together these three form an edifying triplet for learning about conservation and wildlife on the Great Plains. I recommend all three to someone planning to visit the American prairie, and to those with a general interest in the native animals of our country.

            Each of these writers is either a biologist with a literary tendency or an English major that leans toward zoology. Lott writes imaginatively about the mass dying of the North American megafauna, saying that bison and grey wolves "walked together through a cloud of extinction," and emerged, respectively the smallest of the Great Plains herbivores and carnivores, the only survivors. Pronghorn were also there with them. Byers, a pronghorn specialist, shares the grind of collecting wildlife data year in and year out, and the satisfaction of riddling about the evolutionary strategies of grazing ungulates. And he shares a hilarious account of apartment hunting as a young researcher, with a sense of irony worthy of  David Sedaris. O'Brien is a novelist and professor of English whose love of the Great Plains landscape flourished immediately as he travelled through South Dakota in the backseat of a station wagon as an adolescent on vacation with his family. Since then his passion for land stewardship and conservation biology have led him to ranch for cattle, and then for bison once he realized that native North American grazers were the more ecologically harmonious livestock choice.

            All three of these books were published between 1999 and 2003, the dawn of the new millennium. Perhaps because of the time of writing and the thematic links among them, each author concludes in the same way: with a plea for the creation of a large Great Plains reserve to accommodate bison, pronghorn, and the many species that thrived on the American Serengeti. Ideologically all three are indebted to Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers University who suggested that much of the Great Plains be ceded back to native fauna. Some of the events of the intervening years might not satisfy the authors. For example, bison prices in Montana have crashed, and rancher O'Brien may well have fallen back on his literary trade to pay the mortgage on his spread. But one development in recent years would satisfy all three. The creation of a grasslands park on the Northern Plains is under way. The American Prairie Reserve is working to collect 3.5 million contiguous acres in Montana where the grazers and the carnivores can thrive. A creative merging of private capital, conservation science, and public policy, the project has the potential to fulfill the aspirations of these three insightful writers and many others who have dreamed of a revitalized buffalo commons.

prairie blog

check out this project I'm working on in Eastern Montana:

http://www.adventureandscience.org/2/post/2014/02/landmark-journal-tomas-ward.html

Public Transit Prophet

I'm a agent of the CIA 28 year

When I was younger I was a bad blackstone ranger

You see that guy walk up to me?

He see me a broke down homeless man

He don't know who I really am

I'm from Haiti. Where they make the dead bodies walk

You gone three days just and i wake you back up

Less than ten hours you will have to recover

Something is wrong in your mind mental stutter

But after a while you'll come back all the way

Dead less than 3 hours and you be the same person

You hear him cursin?

With the cross around his neck and the quran in the pocket of his coat

He messed up he got problems no joke

Its not a joke to say it takes 3 to make one

Holy trinity has 3 the father ghost and sun

I bang the drum for the holy ones

Long Day's Paddle - Coclusion

          

              I was in the middle of a mile wide wind tunnel on the frigid waters of Southeast Alaska, paddling into a steady 15 knots plus gusts. My teammates were out of earshot and had limited rescue skills even if we could reach each other in time if one of us capsized. My psyche was low. I still felt pretty strong bodily but I knew how much work lay ahead. My survival kit was less than sufficient. Could I make a one-night shelter out of the space blanket in the bottom of my pack if I had to pull out solo onto one of these rocky bear inhabited beaches?

            The afternoon wore on. I worked to stay relatively close to the shore. There wasn't much relief from the wind there, but I felt safer with and rocks and trees to cling to in case of a bailout. Arriving at coves and inlets, though, I had to steal myself the go across the mouths and into more open water.

            The ultimate goal of basecamp remained discouragingly far away, so I started breaking the task into miniscule chunks of progress that I could accomplish one at a time. I used features of the landscape whose shapes reminded me of something familiar to mark waypoints. "Here I come," I said to no one, "pulling up even with phone poll tree! Can't stop me now, no sir." A list of landscape shapes was enumerated - slimy rock, spider web rock, frog tree. Inevitably, bosom rocks. Between covering these tiny distances and wildly saying prayers - now a shout, now a murmur into the wind - I made slow progress in spite of fear and tiring muscles.

            After a long time I saw Jaime and Mike far ahead of me angle around some rocks and into what I thought was Waterfall Cove. It turned out to be an illusory misperception, like a false summit on an alpine hike. Nevertheless we were almost home. When I finally paddled in I found Gregg fishing for bass on his familiar promontory, and we grunted a greeting to one another. I dragged my kayak up into the grass and tied it off. Then I went to the tent to warm my bones and transition my mind from its grim survivalist outlook and into a state more conducive to cooking the evening meal and firepit socializing.

            Resting now, I looked at my watch and did some quick calculations. The return trip had covered six miles in three and a half hours time. That's about one third of the speed that I would walk down a hiking trail or a city boulevard at a casual pace.

            Over the course of ten days or so, we finished up and efficient and successful trip. Our digital data loggers were collected from every site except one (a cause for speculation - did a curious squirrel scramble off with it? Did the moist earth just swallow it up?). No one had a blaze orange flight suit to don for the occasion, but we were ready to say "mission accomplished."

            Days after that I was in the public library in Sitka, passing the time reading magazines. In the pages of Sea Kayaker there was a narrative account of an adventure racer who had paddled solo across Lake Michigan in a recreational boat using homemade outriggers and other random gear. The guy survived his trip, but the article was presented as a caution against launching a kayak without full understanding of conditions and a solid background of experience for the task at hand. The editors added in their commentary,

"If you've ever had to resort to your mental fitness to extend your physical limits on open water or a hostile coast, it's quite likely that you've made some serious errors in judgement."

            I thought about those words and about the experience of having conjured up a variety of mind tricks to endure a difficult physical challenge. How did our experience compare and relate to the one described, and had we in fact made serious errors in judgment? Was I just a pilgrim and a rube that had contributed to endangering my team by acting with incomplete information? Or had I simply explored my limits in a way familiar to adventurers throughout time? The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Long Day's Paddle - Part III

"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men."

                                                                                                            Joseph Conrad

            The counterintuitive reality in this country is that a fair morning bodes the most treacherous weather of all later in the day. Clear and sunny skies mean high pressure of shore, and while the sea is calm at 8 or 9 am, by afternoon that high pressure system is sure to be blowing from the West. The members of our crew, hailing from various parts continental - Great Lakes region, Montana, etc - neglected this basic fact. Later on Mike would say that he considered the clear skies to be less than auspicious, but no one had a strong inclination to discourage our decision to launch.

            We left as six, in two singles and two tandems. We split into two teams of three near Island Cove. One of the crew on the other squad had a stomach ache and was paddling with pain, so I thought it was best to lead my team to the further survey point. We would have an extra mile and a half or of paddling, but I didn't care. I felt strong and wanted to do what I could to help the day go well. I was out in front of Jaime and Mike paddling down to the very bottom of Slocum arm. We landed with tide on the high side and navigated on foot to our two data collection points without any problem.

            The wind started ripping sometime when we were out hiking. Return departure was delayed for about half an hour while we fussed with the elastic cord in Mike's sprayskirt. The gear adjusted, we put our noses toward base camp and launched. When we crept out of a pool at the north end of Island Cove, the wind hit us in the face. The straight wall of forested rock offered little protection as the wind cruised down the wide channel. All we could do was hunker down and grind out strokes from the core muscles. Progress was very slow and this along with bodily fatigue as the bright afternoon wore on created hazardous mental straits. Despair, sadness, fear, and anger were among the emotions swelling in the sea of my psyche. I regretted my misdeeds in this life and was repulsed by the shortcomings of my human relationships. And after excoriating myself for these failings I was ready to lash out at the my fellow paddlers.

            "Why are Mike and Jaime being so goddamn stubborn?" I asked. "Don't they know I can't keep up with them if they stay out there in the middle of the channel? They should be looking out for me better." And my trip leader, in a group further ahead with Jennifer and McCain, was another target. "What the fuck was Gregg thinking dragging me out here like this? This shit is dangerous!" The unnerving thing was how quickly my mind fumed with anger and aggression with my body under duress.

            Divine help was what I needed. I composed a mantra asking for help on the trip, and repeated it over and over into the wind. Could my prayer reach anyone's ears but my own in this roaring jetstream of air all around me?

            The situation reminded me of another time that I had sought spiritual guidance in a kayak. It was with Andis, on one of my first days in the Tongass Forest two years previous. We were in cross seas where the tidal swell and the wind opposed each other and created odd pyramid shaped wave maxima that were tricky to navigate. We were banged on the sides of the boat to make our presence known to the humpback whales that were breaching within a few hundred yards of us. I felt that I was at the sea's mercy. Seeking comfort, I tried to conjure in my mind's eye a boddhisattva that I had seen in a museum and had recently been meditating on at the cattle ranch down in Oregon. In the open sky above the Pacific, my visualization of the angel grew to a massive size, and seemed to offer its serenity to counterbalance my fear of the raucous elements around me.

            But now I needed more than just a calming factor amidst the random unsettling waves and a few pesky yet magnificent leviathans. I knew from the beginning that my strength and endurance of body and mind would be tested. Conditions were perilous, and whether I or any of us had what was needed to pull off a safe return was in question. 

The Long Day's Paddle - Part II

            Our mission was closer to geocaching than scientific data collection. Each of the research plots completed over the last two summers has a pair of digital loggers that record air and soil temperature. We simply have to paddle our kayaks to the closest access point, hike into the forest and follow our GPS units to the survey site, scrutinize the trees to see which one has the climate sensor tacked to it, and grab the sensor before paddling back. The sites are temporally stratified to represent various lengths of time that have passed since the cedars began to die off. A forest that died in 1895 is considered old, and the layers go up through healthy forests that exist in Glacier Bay National Park. A cluster of these sites lies six miles southeast of camp at the very bottom of Slocum Arm, a mile-wide glacially carved inlet separated from the Pacific Ocean by the jagged Khaz Penninsula.

            A fishing boat was wrecked right across from this campsite 11 months ago, a seiner, which stretches a long net across the width of the channel and then closes it like a purse around masses of fish. A young captain at the helm, the ballast tanks in the hull of the Evening Star were only partly full of water when she cinched up a full load of fish. The outlying weight caused the water in the tanks to slosh violently, and the failure to top off the tanks became a crucial mistake. "You would think that would be the first thing they would tell them, to keep those tanks full," says Charlie, our intrepid water taxi conductor, who at around age 70 has survived a variety of capsizings, accidental firearms discharges, and an epic trainwreck on the Skagway to Whitehorse line. "With how many boats have gone down that way." The Evening Star sunk down onto a shelf with the bow under ten feet of water and the stern below 90. Then she slid off the shelf while the sein net clung there, leaving the vessel tethered and swaying in the current. I never heard what happened to the wreck after that. The whole crew of six was taken off safely. Rumor said that the cash payroll for the crew went down with the ship.

            Our 2012 research crew missed witnessing the incident by mere hours. We had paddled down to the base of the arm to collect data at the six sites. Which is exactly what we had to do now, one year later. The original plan called for breaking up camp on the morning of the July 10th, loading tents and all into our boats, paddling down, collecting one or two sensors en route, setting up a new campsite for the night, collect sensors on the 11th, and then determine whether to head back to Waterfall or stay in Hidden Cove for one more night. We were scheduled to meet with Scott on the 13th to load our large and unwieldy bearproof food boxes onto the Alacrity and move the whole show north to Ford Arm.

            I was worried that so much shuffling would leave us mentally and physically ragged. Why not just make a long day of it instead, collect sensors from the Hidden Cove sites and then paddle back to basecamp? Since the sites themselves weren't taking very long, it seemed doable, and way more efficient. I said as much on the evening of the 9th as we picked bones from our fish. Opinion about the change in plans was mixed but supportive. Jen agreed that a day trip would greatly increase efficiency. Jaime, taciturn and measured as ever, pointed out that moving camp merely to fill time was a questionable strategy. No firm decision was made, though, and we tabled it until morning.

            2012 was one of the wettest summers on record in Southeast Alaska. New marks were set for precipitation in June in Glacier Bay, and July was more of the same. Our trips were cold, wet, and demoralizing at times. So the relatively warm and dry conditions we found in 2013 were a welcome change. The morning of the 10th saw the sun dawn on Waterfall Cove, and the water looked placid. Conditions seemed auspicious for a full day of paddling and a return to basecamp, and we decided to go with that plan. What could go wrong on such a beautiful day?

The Long Day's Paddle, Part I

copyright Corey Radis

            It was my own suggestion that we do a day paddle down to the bottom of the fjord, rather than pack up camp and move down there for the night. I just thought it would be a lot less hectic. Our camp was an assemblage of tents and tarps pitched on a promontory of trees rising up out of Waterfall Cove. The location was chosen for bear safety, which is always of utmost concern in this country. Maritime Southeast Alaska has about the highest density of brown bears in the world, rivaled only by Kodiak Island some hundred miles to the West. The brown bear is genetically identical to the grizzly of the Rocky Mountains, but larger due to her rich diet of salmon which arrive to spawn annually in the many waterways of this very wet country. By setting up camp on an outcrop projecting into the sea, we hoped to minimize ursine traffic through our dwelling. The whole thing was ringed by three strands of electric fence with a battery powered charger. I was personally responsible for erecting this barrier and testing its function by submitting to electric shocks. The current isn't very strong, but bears lead with their noses, and the hope is that a shock to the moist sniffer is just enough of a deterent.

         We were a crew of six on a wilderness research mission. The team leader was Gregg of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, a Montana nonprofit that facilitates citizen science. He and I had stood together piece of remote ground the year before along with Lauren, an ecologist who designed the project. The study is an investigation of the forest's response to mass the die-off of yellow cedar which affects the most of that species' range along the Northwest Coast. We did about seven weeks of fieldwork last summer, one of the wettest on record, no small claim for in this country of dripping temperate rainforest.  The rain was incessant, mold grew in all of our clothes, and Gregg ripped the crotches out of three pairs of waterproof pants while bushwhacking. We'd gone our separate ways for the offseason, me to bus tables and study chemistry in Chicago, Gregg to track wolverines on Nordic skis in Mongolia. Summer brought would see us meet again. I accepted his invitation to join the team at the last minute and flew up to Sitka on the 5th of July, with bits of corn on the cob still stuck in my teeth.

*******************

            "We're all gonna get mercury poisoning on this trip," Gregg says as we prepare dinner. It's true that we are eating an inordinate amount of salmon, which have sadly been documented to bioaccumulate the toxic metal from the ocean. But deliciousness overwhelms concern about toxic exposure. We thought we would be too early to catch many fish, since their stream runs haven't really started. To our pleasant surprise the salmon that are massing up outside the estuaries are biting assertively. Gregg has a $20 spinning rod picked up in Sitka, and two of his Montana crew brought fly gear. Together they are slaying them. By day three we are accustomed to fire roasted pink salmon to go along with our little baggies of dehydrated soup mix. Pinks are not considered the best eating of the five species of Pacific salmon, but given our rustic situation they delight the palate and fortify the bones. Dolly Varden char and rockfish are also on the menu.

            I am mulling over how to suggest a change in our trip plan while we rattle the tinfoil and pots. I'm just a worker bee here, not looking to upset carefully coordinated plans. On the other hand, I am the only one who is working on this project for the third year, and I consider myself an expert in data collection logistics. And I don't want to move the camp.