www.oregonnhc.org

“Ooh, check out the conifer, it’s still green in December, let’s cut it down and put some tinsel and crap on it!” It’s like killing somebody and then giving them a medal. For Year-Round Photosynthesis.

Image from a sweet Vancouver artist’s blog.

Just thought I’d point that out. Some people have been blogging for like ten years. I am not one of those people. I’m more of a ‘late adopter.’ But I see no reason why I don’t deserve a beer for my 13 months of undisciplined ranting. Cheers.

Image from here. I love Oregon breweries.

There’s a kind, sweet woman in Austin named Katsumi, and she knows her stuff. I missed the bulk of her explanation of EM, but the 10cm notebook managed to capture these two intriguing words, vaguely Engrishy and ripe for googling. (With quotes, please…)

So, I’m not usually one to review/promote products, and it really made me cringe to put that (TM) up there, but this one just hits so many of my cultural/biological/ecological g-spots that I simply couldn’t help it.

In brief, you’ve got a guy, Dr. Teruo Higa from Japan, who somehow magically realized that bacterias and fungi and other tiny things are really good for, well, everything. So he gathers a bunch of them together, sticks ‘em in a bottle, and sells the mix as EM-1. People use it on stuff and are amazed to find that cool things happen. Snake oil? Well, yeah, if snake oil had live cultures of lactobacteria in it and, you know, actually had some scientific basis for working.

Let’s break it down. Three major groups:
lactic acids bacteria: Converts sugars into lactic acid via fermentation. Used in food preservation. Inhibits growth of pathogens by lowering pH.

yeast: Converts sugars into alcohol (see also Rogue Ales) or carbon dioxide to make bread rise.

phototrophic bacteria: Use energy from the sun (photosynthesis) to break down a variety of substances, most notably converting carbon dioxide into oxygen. In Dr. Higa’s brew, these little guys keep the other kiddos (above) alive.

The idea seems to be that the application of a bunch of “good” living microorganisms to unhealthy soil will crowd out the “bad” microorganisms and kick start the activity of the “good” local flora. Sounds like colonialism to me, but I’m no microbiologist. I am a big fan of all things fermented, though, so stay tuned for my post on kimchi.

Photo of a plush Saccharomyces cerevisiae from here, used without permission but since I’m basically helping them with their viral (ahem) marketing campaign, I figure they’ll be cool with it.

You know, because everyone loves a navel-gazing blogger. I’m not sure how many of us this planet can safely support. I suppose the correct answer is that I’ve been out there in the world (the living, breathing one) trying to figure out a new place, a new people, and precisely what my umwelt is going to be here.

And yet, somehow, the writing remains important … so I’m back like a heroin addict. Thanks for reading.

Today on my walk home from a temp job at a trade show for Oregon nurseries and plant growers, I passed the following businesses: an unmarked bar that serves beer and cheese fondue, a hippo-themed hardware store full of old timey doorknobs, an art supply store, a museum of velvet paintings, the best music venue in town, a Greek deli, the offices of a guy with an aircrane business, a drum shoppe, and a local restaurant which purportedly has the best buffalo wings in town. While I was at the trade show, I spoke to a man who works for a company that manufactures waterproof notebooks which (if you use a pencil or a spacepen) you can write on (it?) underwater. I considered making notes in my sample waterproof notebook about the places I passed, but it actually wasn’t raining so I was afraid it would be a little pompous. There was a man riding a bicycle while wearing a sort of fedora who kept stopping at telephone poles to staple band adverts to them, and his ride-and-stop programme meant that he and I were going almost exactly the same speed down the sidewalk. It was like being followed by a feline and when you look back to see if she is still behind you, she looks away as though she doesn’t want to get caught in the act. My other souvenir from the trade show was a directory which lists the Latin names of plants and who in the area has them up for sale. It tells me, for example, that if I would like to procure a specimen of Aesculus hippocastanum var. “Baumannii,” then I will need to pay a visit to the J. Frank Schmidt & Son Company of Boring, Oregon. Yes, there is a town in Oregon called Boring. It may be the only place in it that is. I am pretty sure I made the registration badges for Mr. Schmidt and his son, and maybe his son’s sons. The nursery business is a family business, and that makes me happy. In general I think that capitalism sucks ass bigtime, but there is something very comforting about families called Miller or Cooper or Smith who make flour or barrels or horseshoes.

Yesterday (after trying to remind myself about the fundamentals of Ohm’s Law and the analogy between electricity and water pressure) I went to this guy Greg’s block party where there was a man dressed up in a tree costume ruling the top square in foursquare, and I played ping-pong in the middle of 48th Avenue with a 10-year-old while another guy with an amp on the back of his tricycle rode around playing guitar. At the end of the street is Belmont Station, a beer store and tasting room that could more appropriately be described as a huge beer museum where you can drink the artifacts, where Kelly (Jen’s friend, Damon’s ex, and the cornerstone of my fortunate social situation) and I went after having Thai food at the place nearby where the owner is known for giving jewelry and other swag away to his customers for no apparent reason. Greg is Portland’s bike safety guy and has a really classy backyard, complete with full-sized teepee (with interior fire pit), and two of the block-party’s beerkegs were donated by a wedding party who had leftovers and happened to see the street closed off. After riding around town in a 9-person bike gang, sampling some Chartreuse at a low-key birthday party in the northeast, having a quick game of cornhole, adorning ourselves with some Christmas garlands left on a curb for all takers, playing smack-the-stopsigns with a giant plastic candycane, and breaking at Voodoo for some bacon-maple doughnuts, we went back to (Damon’s girlfriend) Carolyn’s shared Victorian-style house for a makeshift dance party in a room lined with commuter bikes. In attendance were Artie, the special-ed teacher (who was making hats for people out of newspaper and packing tape), Kevin, the realtor/children’s music singer with the backyard hens, and James, who is working for a kiteboarding company after a stint teaching at the Outdoor School. I passed out around 2 am and rode back to the duplex at 4:30 to let Edie out, rolling out of bed at noon to get coffee and biscuits, and then I did sudoku while Damon showed a prospective camp member the 20-foot shelter he has set up in the backyard to get ready for Burning Man. Then I read a PD James book I got at the mysteries-only bookstore on Hawthorne (I finally finished Geek Love) while the lovebirds took Edie for a walk at Laurelhurst Park.

The guy in the picture: Georg Simon Ohm, German physicist, 1789-1854.

7,700 years ago: Mount Mazama, in what is now southern Oregon, erupts. It collapses in on itself, forming a deep crater which fills with melted snow over the next 600-800 years. Crater Lake, the seventh-deepest (592m) lake in the world, is born. It is a nutrient-poor lake with no inlets or outlets, preventing particulate matter from shading the depths below.

6,000 years ago (?): The lake becomes home to Drepanocladus aduncus, a species of freshwater moss which, thanks to the availability of sunlight in the lake, was able to establish itself nearly 600 feet below the lake’s surface.

4,000 years ago: Mazama erupts again, forming lava features such as Wizard Island. Wizard Island in turn has a crater upon it, giving us a “crater on an island in a lake in a crater.“

106+ years ago: A single hemlock tree falls into the lake, where it continues to float, upright and with its root system submerged, to this day. It is dubbed “The Old Man of the Lake.”

106 years ago: Crater Lake National Park is established, making it National Park #7.

70 years ago: A scientific survey is undertaken to plot the windblown movements of The Old Man. It is noted that, atop the four-foot bleached-white column of his stump that sits above water, there lives a small patch of moss.

20 years ago: A one-manned submersible brings up some Drepanocladus from the not-so-murky depths.

2 years ago: Robot subs conduct further research on the interesting bryophyte.

2 days from now: Me, walking around on Wizard island, giggling about how the world’s oldest group of terrestrial photosynthesizers has one of its members lounging around under 600 feet of melted snow in the bottom of a dormant volcano, which itself resides within 183,224 acres of federally protected parkland … parkland found in a state which has voted for every Democratic presidential candidate since 1988. I think I’ll enjoy living in Oregon.

References:
CNet
NPS

Old-timey geologic survey map from here.

“If when you think of hiking here in the Pacific Northwest, you think of cool, dark, mysterious forests of huge conifers, you’ve got the right picture. The area made rainy by the Cascades, Olympics, and other Pacific coastal ranges is the Conifer Capitol of the World. This is the only large temperate-zone area where conifers utterly overwhelm their broadleaf competitors. It grows conifers bigger than anywhere else, and the resulting tonnage of biomass and square-footage of leaf area, per acre, are the world’s highest, even greater than in tropical rainforests.”

Excerpted from Cascade-Olympic Natural History, Daniel Mathews 1999

photo from here.

There are certain climates which make bird migration seem completely reasonable. I have chosen to fly the 2,500 miles to Oregon so that I can reclaim via fern-gratifying mist some quantity of the gallons of sweat that I had been producing in Texas over the past twelve years. Some will say, “Too much rain!” or “Too cold!” or “Not enough sunlight!” … I will show these naysayers a dew-covered mushroom that has been nibbled upon by a newt, hand them the SPF 45 that I refuse to apply, and tromp off down some spongey trail in search of interesting bryophytes.