![]() We have virtually always seen "the West" through filters that have little or nothing to do with direct experience. We view the landscape through a number of intellectual and emotional filters, not least our false memories of landscapes that we "know" without ever really seeing them. They are the places I knew in my daydreams. I have found that there really are places where you can walk freely among the trunks of huge trees under closed canopies of branches like a child playing under a table: the Northwest's old-growth forests. Since then, I have recognized it many times. I had not recalled that feeling for many years. When we glided out of the rapids and into the space beneath the trees above the Stillaguamish, I recognized the sense of enclosure that I had fantasized about as a kid. I had imagined people living their lives under a high canopy of trees in perpetual shade, walking among huge tree trunks, rather like children playing under a table. ![]() When I was a kid in grade school, I had read novels – all the novels I could find – about Indians living in the forest. Our canoe shot into the arcade, and I recognized the place, the feel of the place, immediately. At one point, trees arched from both banks over the stream. Sunlight glittered and refracted off the spray in every rapid. Whitehorse Mountain, still covered with snow, loomed just to the south. One day, we drove to the north fork of the Stillaguamish River, which flows west from the North Cascades near Glacier Peak. When we reached our final take-out point, one of us would stay with the canoe while the other hitch-hiked back to the car. If the canoe hit a rock too hard, we'd haul it out of the water so he could patch the rivet holes with bathtub caulk. If I wasn't, he'd meet me at the ferry dock with the canoe mounted on his old Volvo, and we'd drive to a river, swollen with spring runoff, for a day of paddling. On a spring morning, when the rivers were running high with snowmelt, he'd call and ask if I was doing anything that day. Zev owned a battered aluminum canoe and a taste for white water. I remembered practicing that on rivers in northwestern Washington many years ago with my friend, Zev Siegl. I thought of the river canoeing technique called "ferrying," in which you align the boat largely with the current but paddle so that it moves sideways across the stream. It clearly knew exactly what it was doing the sideslip was a matter of technique. The crow was flapping its wings as if it were flying north, but drifting sideways toward the east. ![]() I was sitting at a white patio table in the garden behind the Monkey Tree café on Vashon Island, drinking a second cup of coffee while I enjoyed the morning shade and the wind rustling the flowers and young trees against the raw wood fence, when I saw a crow riding the wind just above roof level. ![]()
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