Tommy:)

Any given day at work: dramatic precipitation fluctuations, brief views of the Olympic Mountains across the Henderson Inlet, irritable Great Blue Herons competing for a prime fishing spot along the shore, perhaps the sound of playful seals slapping their tales on the water. All the while diligently planting Oregon Grape, Salmon Berry, and Sword Fern along an eroding slope.

Evergreen and the greater Olympia community is known for its tightness, its closeness. Throughout my Evergreen career I have discovered the ubiquitous connections that exist around here in a variety of settings.

My current summer job is for a man anonymously named Jeffy. I originally met Jeffy while working at Sound Native Plants, a native plant nursery near Evergreen. Things have changed and I no longer work at Sound Native Plants, but work for Jeffy’s “Edible Plants in Natural Landscapes” business.

Olympia has a reputation for its wet and dark winters. The puget sound area and greater Pacific Northwest is home to some of the largest trees in the world and what is in global scarcity: rain forests. And while the wet can be a bit of a bummer, finding yourself outside admiring the green and appreciating the botanic prosperity offers a fantastic remedy. This is exactly what working with Jeffy has been for me.

We ride together in his old blue pickup talking Nietzsche, politics, Olympian culture, or pointless goofiness.  In the back are the huge Akita pups who come with Jeffy everywhere. He’s raised a family of Akitas for quite some time now along with a family of goats on the pasture out by Mud Bay.

The dogs pant and bark for attention while we drive the tired pickup out to a property on Johnson Point. We sip our coffee and anticipate sweat, mud, and plants.

The work is strenuous, healthy. We work hard and there is satisfying evidence of it at the end of the day. A lot of time has been devoted to ridding the area of noxious interlopers like Blackberry and English Ivy. But once these invasives have been dealt with we can begin planting native sustenance and cover the soil with protective red cedar mulch.

I’ve come to realize there is an art to many types of labor work. It’s good to have the type of work I do, as it is both beautiful and in harmony with the natural rhythms of our region. In addition it’s important to be outside and develop a better understanding, a better relationship with our world. It’s healthy for our hands and arms and legs to be used, to get muddy, to be tired by the end of a work day. It feels good.

The range, the variety of work students produce from their academic programs at Evergreen is vast. Evergreen offers passion a free reign. And that’s important. In Soren Kierkegaard’s, The Present Age, he remarks: “what our age lacks is not reflection but passion.” Passion is in desperation and important because, he says, “the conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.”

I can agree with this. My only worthwhile successes have only ever been yielded as a result of passion. As result of a fiery love for what I am doing. There is much to be said for ambition, discipline, cleverness, creativity, and responsibility. Even for honoring one’s obligations. But passion, may that be the place the heart and soul to forever remain.

The students at Evergreen, my peers, clearly are stoking the flames of their passion, I know this from our conversations. Because Evergreen demands so much self-motivation, students naturally turn to their passions. And passion yields voluminous results.

This last Spring I embarked on a bicycle trip from Olympia to San Francisco. It was for the class Writing American Cultures. I wrote a mammoth paper, 67 pages in length, titled Meaningful and Dignified Work. A hybrid of prose, research, philosophy and journal writing, I cannot be more proud. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

As a menial landscaper, a proud lackey, I would not immediately assert my will to power as the guiding incentive for my work. If asked in person, in real time, without proper time to contemplate, I’d probably regurgitate a trite excuse: “builds character.” I despise my own sloth, I believe in discipline, there is honor in difficult work, there is unique reward in productive exertion, gratification is rich when it is not instant. Work is a chance to cultivate strength, it is perspiration for creation if designed well. The idea that work is a task to be endured or softened, a means toward eventual leisure, is to make effort a waste of time. To make effort into waste is to surrender breathing, seeing, and thinking to corpse-hood.

I traveled by bicycle camping along the way. I camped with fear and loneliness; dampness (from the rain) as well. I met people along the way and spoke with them. I read more about America’s labor history, and current sociological dystopics. I scribbled in my journal. I got some much needed sun in California. A huge journey and a daunting inquiry followed by a sky-scraping meditation that I typed up. For school.

Here’s a picture (that’s my bike on the left):

Olympia is comfortably nestled at the southern tip of the Puget sound about halfway between the Cascade mountain range and Olympic mountain range. The interior Olympic National Park is a whopping 870,275 acres. Near the center towers the glaciated Mt. Olympus, the summit, cold and lonely, is set at 7,969 feet. This claustrophobic cluster of mountains offer a wide range of ecosystems. Abrupt transitions are marked by different elevations. As one trudges upward bask in the comfort and mystery among gargantuan trees: Sitka spruce, western red cedar, Douglas fir. The trunks of these ancient behemoths can swell to 15 feet in diameter and their tops scrape the sky, tease the gods, 300 feet tall. This is the Humid Transition Zone. Between 1,500 and 4,500 feet is the Canadian zone where the moss covered tree giants yield to the smaller, but more weather resilient species of Pacific silver fir, western hemlock, white pine, along with enduring, but markedly shrunken western reds and Doug firs. Timberline, where the air is too thin for trees to grow, is found within the Hudsonian Zone at about 6,000 feet. Above timberline the scene opens up. Range of sight is increased as one wades among the alpine flowers that will bloom briefly between mid and late summer. Witness shooting star, bluebell, larkspur, phlox, lupine, goldenrod, columbine, daisy, glacier lily and others.

Obviously there is plenty good reason to wander about the Olympic mountains. I like to honor those reasons often. However this past weekend my soaked body and I wandered around the lesser advertised Cascade range. While national parks offer huge acreage of protected land, they remain compliant with industry and so tend to be over-priced, over-paved, over-marked, over-serviced, and over-stomped. Gift shops, golf courses, and RVs lurk about the fringes of national parks.

Between I-90 and highway 2 stretches the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, about a third the size of the Olympic national park. It’s a bit of a drive, hour forty-five, from Olympia to the Bare Mountain trailhead #1037. This is mostly because one must drive down 23 miles of old unmaintained forest service road, FR5700, before reaching the trailhead.

The trail is remote, the buzz of the freeway absent, the loneliness complete. The Evergreen State College and its many surrounding undisturbed wilderness areas have made me a bit of a mountain hermit. This past Spring quarter was dominated by intense reading of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra along with a bicycle sojourn down the west coast; these two endeavors both recommend extreme solitude and an intimacy with the natural world.

It was a wet June day on Bare Mountain. A well worth it day. I waded through meadows of thimbleberry and salmonberry, felt humbled by the enormity of the surrounding cliffs. Each dark gray crag that bulged out from below a cul-de-sac of mountaintops was divisively segmented by silver angel-air, snow-melt waterfalls that tumbled down 100-foot drops. I gasped at the sight and laughed at the quickened pace of my heart.

Alone in the drizzle I walked and gawked. Dark-eyed juncos fluttered around me, I glimpsed a solitary Chickadee. At the top of the ridge I was blessed to briefly gaze at the paradise lakes, frozen white ovals with electric blue rings along the edges. The rain fell harder and my clothes got very wet. I felt alive again, my body seemed to enjoy the chill, glad to be put to a test.

The importance of wilderness has always been difficult for many writers and advocates to articulate. Some use science and the decline of biodiversity as their leverage. Others seem to consider nature a living museum, something justified in its beauty for human recreation alone. I don’t claim to know why, exactly, to the point of ending the debate once and for all–why wilderness must be let alone. But I know that it is good, healthy for people. Not just the forest or its inhabitants, but people too. Everyone in the world deserves to be on top of a mountain, alone and frightened by the looming thunderheads. Everyone should sweat, panic, and suspect a following cougar on their trail–only to discover a loafing rabbit emerge from the bushes. Legs should move, eyes should dart, hands should grasp boulders, and the stomach should crave only the most raw and basic nourishment.

Amen.