Listening at Lookout Creek
“Baptized by Lookout Creek” is the first chapter in Van Wieren’s book Listening at Lookout Creek, published by Oregon State University Press.
There is spirit to these woods, if you take the time to listen. That is what I attempted to do in spring of 2015 as a writer-in-residence at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon’s western Cascade Range. Andrews is the most studied primal forest ecosystem on the North American continent and perhaps in the world. Here scientists conduct National Science Foundation-funded, long-term ecological research (LTER) experiments that span two hundred years, including studies on the spotted owl and the dynamics of old-growth forests. A unique aspect of the Andrew’s LTER work involves humanists, such as myself, who are invited to reflect on the forest and its experiments from the vantage point of poetry, art, philosophy, and, in my case, religion and spirituality. Previous Andrews’ writers have included Robert Michael Pyle, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Scott Russell Sanders, and Alison Hawthorne Deming.
Listening to the spirit of the woods is also what I have attempted to do in my home forest, the Manistee National Forest in the northwest corner of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Five hundred thousand acres of red, jack, and white pine, balsam fir, northern white-cedar, soft and hard maples, aspen, white birch, red oak, and black cherry; the Ojibwe called this place ministigweyaa or “spirit of the woods.” I grew up in these woods, different from the Andrews. Home to the Little Manistee River and my family’s cabin, the Cedar Shack, this is where I, with my three younger sisters, learned to fish and wade in rivers, build fires and send smoke signals, and distinguish false from true morels. This is where I came to love the water and the woods, and where I am now trying to teach my children to do the same.
Yet decades of moving from place to place—Minnesota, Eastern Africa, Washington, DC, upstate New York, Connecticut, Illinois—have made trips over the years to the Cedar Shack scarce and short-lived. Even though we have moved back to Michigan and are only a three-hour drive from the cabin, my husband Jeff’s and my day-in-and-day-out obligations as university professors and parents of three overscheduled teenagers have made forest time thing and rushed. Having an Ivy League PhD, it turns out, does not help: read, write, and publish (in an office) is this mantra. Not sit, watch, and listen (out of doors).
Continue reading Van Wieren’s “Listening at Lookout Creek.”
