Stick Stack

Apr 21, 2023

This adventure is for anyone who sticks.

Funny thing: As I considered which adventure to take you on as the first for Substack, I decided to go with whichever one happened to come first among the photos on my phone. (I delete those photos as I share or file them in other places.) That adventure turned out to be one from last month, when the Co-adventurer, a friend who now lives out of state most of the year, was here for his spring visit. There were 41 photos. I transferred them to my laptop, moved them into the Temporary Photos for Substack folder on the desktop, and deleted them from the photo-import screen.

Whoops, too soon. They hadn’t finished transferring over to the folder yet. Only 19 of them made it over. The rest are gone forever.

But that’s okay, because guess what! My favorite number is 19. I call it a win, especially in conjunction with the stats on my introductory post so far:

I rarely use all the photos for any given adventure, anyway. Paring things down is part of the process.

To compound the blessings, a WND (weapon of nature destruction, in this case some resounding, beeping, grinding truck-based machine) in the draw below—which started up just as I was ready to begin here and sounded like it might be settling in to stay for a while—has fallen blessedly silent. Now the only WND is the occasional spit of a distant chainsaw.

A sweet spring breeze whispers wild promises I almost dare to believe.

Someone small darts among dead leaves.

A chipmunk and then a stellar jay come to collect peanuts.

A raven calls. The stage is set. Ready for adventure?

Let’s go!

~ ~ ~

The beginning of this beginning looks north, which is my direction of the future, maybe because we read and write from left to right, maybe for deeper reasons I don’t know yet. What’s your direction of the future? Do you have one? If not, don’t worry: you will.

Brown river water almost to a deep-blue horizon along a rugged coastline

The river mouth feeds the sea. Recent rains have washed a lot out.

Earlier snow, incredibly rare in these parts, dusted everyone but me, it seemed. The Ice Queen is now woods witch, rock witch, water witch. Snow drops.

Snowdrop flowers among bushes, with a bare, tawny hillside in the background

Rods divine the flow . . .

Part of a newspaper headline: "Despite struggles, some stick"

. . . which goes both ways . . .

A small, can-style campstove with flame flowing up from it

. . . sweeping up fire-tinder and converting it to oatmeal and tea.

We move along . . .

. . . and grow. Unfurl. Uncurl our fists.

Marshy-looking land with miner's lettuce in the foreground, cattails in the midground, and tall, skinny trees in the background

Discover gifts left behind by fire . . .

Marshy land with small, budding trees in the foreground and taller trees in the background, some blackened by fire

. . . like a hot dog on a stick.

Actually it’s more feline than canine—but soft and warm and good, thick with seeds of things to come . . .

The cattail head held up against a glorious blue sky, with budding branches and rays of sunlight reaching into it

. . . in all their unicorn glory.

An otherworldly green horsetail sprout, looking like a banded unicorn-horn

We meet ourselves going back the other way . . .

Muddy bare feet in front of a muddy footprint going the other way

. . . and delight to find that a blue thing glimpsed on the ground between branches isn’t plastic. It’s true and in essence enduring, of water and wide-open sky.

A small vernal pond with bits of the blue sky in it

We peek through a western portal but don’t explore it . . . yet.

Two redwoods close enough together to form a gate shape, one of them ringed with abalone shells, opening toward more redwoods

First we’ve got to see . . . what sticks!

A loglike stick in the foreground, a tall stick javelined into the ground in the midground, and a huge bay laurel in the background with a guy climbing on it

AllSuperb

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