A Love Letter to My Old Home

What does it mean to fall in love with the land?

The cabin wasn’t modern, clean, waterproof, or climate controlled. It didn’t keep the animals and insects out. Spiders patrolled the corners. Lizards and frogs would occassionally wander in. Squirrels thumped onto the roof at dawn, peering in the skylight before disappearing in a flash of spectacular arboreal agility (in the summer, they — and the red-shouldered hawks — made reliable alarm clocks). Wrens plucked insects from the soffits. Towhees and juncos foraged under the porch. Wild turkeys strolled past the windows.

I remember my first days there vividly. Barefoot from dawn till dusk, working in the late summer heat, wandering the meadow beneath the oaks. After the sun set, I would fill a bowl with water, light a candle, and, as the crickets thrummed, sit on the porch and wash my feet, drinking in the sounds: rustling deer, hooting owls, the first breezes telling of autumn just around the corner. That cabin was my home for ten years. In the past few months, as I’ve been moving and settling into my new home, I have struggled to tell the story of my time then. How does one condense a decade into a few short pages?

Stories have a life and momentum of their own. Some are shy, while others practically demand to be told. This is one of those, and so here is my best try.

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, and organizer with the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund.

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In the winter, the woodstove crackles merrily as frost coats the meadow. Cold drafts seep in through corners, and by morning it’s frigid inside. It’s porous living, to quote

Julia Adzuki

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Outside the cabin are two stout white oaks, each about 90 years old, their bark like a deeply carved washboard. Gnarled limbs reach out upwards and sideways and curl back again in that pefect chaos that only oaks seem to have mastered.

Back in the 70’s, the founder of Eugene’s Rainbow Valley Construction, which still exists today, decided to construct the porch roof of the cabin around a spindly oak tree; fifty years later, it’s full grown. Now, when spring storms come, my sweetheart and I lay upstairs in the loft bed, watching that oak sway back and forth in the swirling darkness. When a gust roars, we feel a thump as it gently — as gently as an 30,000 pound oak tree can — bumps into the roof. It’s basically a giant tree hammer slowly dismantling the cabin, which, as I’m sure the tree has not failed to notice, is made out its own kind.

Buds appear far later than it seems like they should each spring. But you can’t rush an oak tree. Before the buds open, the birds arrive from the south. Dead oak branches make a great home for enterprising songbirds, who take advantage of the holes excavated by woodpeckers (pileated, downy, sapsuckers, and my personal favorite, the rowdy acorn).

Morning sun in the cabin loft.

By the time midsummer arrives and the loft becomes a furnace, the oaks are shading the southwest side of the cabin. I’m not sure this place will be livable without air conditioning for much longer. Maybe it’ll become like Dubai, where you either have electric cooling, or you die. The simple arithmetic of a warming world.

In this respect, oak trees are great role models. They never complain or play hooky or get tired, they just consistently work for decades to make the world a better place: storing carbon, creating oxygen, purifying water, providing habitat. Did you know that a single oak can provide habitat for more than 200 species? Death doesn’t even stop them, since arguably, dead trees are even better ecologically than living ones (although, I think this is like me arguing with myself over my favorite dessert, rhubarb pie or blackberry cobbler. The obvious answer is, both).

I look up to these trees. There a true ancient around the corner who must be two or three centuries old. I wander over to him+her (Garry oaks are monoecious, and hence biologically both male and female) for prayers and to ask advice a few times a week.

That tree has stories to tell. It’s next to the road now, but it was full grown when that road was dirt, and even before the road existed. I heard a story — in this case, it came from a human neighbor, not from the tree — about an old-timer out here who used to ride a mule into town, before the pavement came. Now, sports cars use the same road for illegal street races on summer nights. That’s the tale of the whole world in one road: from one horsepower to five hundred in a few generations.

I’ve daydreamed, living here, of the roar of engines falling silent; of leaves from that ancient oak falling, season after season, and carpeting the road; of soil forming over the pavement, first in patches, then unbroken; of acorns sprouting, shooting upwards, muscling the concrete aside, and in a decade or two, leaving nothing but a small footpath and a few outcrops of what looks like crumbling stone behind.

As it once was, and will be again.

These tiny caterpillars, translucent and eight millimeters long, rappel out of the canopy each spring by the thousands, presumably satiated from munching on tender young oak leaves and ready to pupate under leaves or in the soil.

We evolved from arboreal creatures, but it’s hard to tell now. When civilization began, there were about 6 trillion trees on the planet, most of them huge and old. Now, there are 3 trillion. On balance, ten billion more are lost every year. And that’s a net calculation, which includes trees we plant and that naturally sprout. And it doesn’t even to get into the declining average age and size).

There are more than 8,000 tree species which are threatened with extinction, and 1,400 tree species which are critically endangered.

In my time living in this cabin, I’ve seen a lot of trees cut down. The neighbors to the west cut down seven healthy, mature oaks a few years ago to build a barn to store their boat (this is their second home). Up the street, some folks cut down every tree on “their” 10 acres. It was dense, mostly Douglas Fir, some madrone and oak. I walked up to see the aftermath, and in the trunk of a felled madrone, saw a sizeable nesting hole. Owl is my guess.

The aftermath of logging nearby.

Then there’s the house across the way, where some people cut down a few dozen Oregon Ash trees to build their house. Turns out that site was a wetland and illegal to build on, so they had to move 50 yards southwest and cut the forest there — apparently one or two inches higher in elevation and so not classified as a “wetland”.

There’s more, of course. The industrial timberlands only start a dozen miles away. The old growth is mostly gone. And the meadows are going, too. Solastalgia is a term for the emotional pain of seeing the planet destroyed; it’s far too clinical a term for clenching in my heart and moisture in my eyes when I walk past the former meadow, now a sprawling house, where hundreds of violet-green swallows used to swoop back and forth, catching insects out of the air each spring. Not anymore. No place, no matter how remote or bucolic, is immune to the threats of industrial civilization.

I’m getting sidetracked again, wandering away from the land, but it’s hard not to. There are no fences and few clear boundaries in nature. It all spiderwebs out.

Which brings us, naturally, to the spiders.

Living in this cabin changed my relationship to spiders. In bed at night, I semi-regularly feel them crawling across my face. I know, I know. Not every night, but a couple times a month. But here’s the thing: I know these particular spiders. I've watched them in the corners of the cabin for generations, now. You start to get fond of them when you watch them take down mosquitos or finally grab that fly that’s been annoying the hell out of you. I trust them. Mostly.

This cabin is, at best, on temporary loan from nature. Remember that the oak is working on knocking it down, and then there’s the mold. Acorns start sprouting in the gutter every year. So that’s why I don’t freak out when spiders walk across my face. They were here first. And, I’ve come to figure over the years that spiders don’t want to bite me, and the more I swat at them, the more freaked out they will become. Besides, it’s just not polite to kill neighbors.

The indoor webs do gather dust, so we’ve made a deal. “Look,” I tell them. “I won’t kill you, because this is your home as much as mine. But, I do have to clean up. The corners are yours, but every so often you’ll have to rebuild.” I think they’ve accepted the deal, which I figure is a pretty good one, since humans tend to keep away spider predators. This is primo real-estate from an arachnid perspective.

The first frost each year reveals hundreds of spiderwebs stretched from grass stalks in the prairie. It’s like the Amazon rain-grassland out there for bugs: iridescent green beetles, darting dragonflies, ladybugs, ants, and definitely spiders — really fast black ones especially. They all love the meadow. Which means the birds love it, the lizards love it, and so on. It’s a buffet.

Natural grasslands are rare these days. They’ve mostly been turned into farms, housing, or some shopping mall that seems to be perpetually slowly collapsing. In the Willamette Valley, 98 percent of the oak savanna and oak prairie ecosystem has been destroyed. It was mostly agriculture that did it, and urbanization now steadily eats away at the ag land as well, covering what soil life was left under entombing concrete. It’s a bad idea, concrete. And agriculture — at least as practiced here — is a complete ecological catastrophe. People forget about that in the era of climate change, but ag is responsible for more of the ecological crisis than anything else, even fossil fuels. Although, that’s a narrowing gap. A race to bottom. The opposite, you could say, of the beautiful comparison of dead and living trees, or pie vs. cobbler.

So these precious grasslands are important, as the land demonstrates colorfully each year when the flowers begin to come in waves and the pollinators descend. Crocus, daffodils, fawn lilies, camas and death camas (don’t eat that one), asters, lupines, California poppies, nootka roses, apple and pear, cherker-mallow, cherry, biscuitroots, Oregon geranium, iris, red currant, miner’s lettuce, Oregon grape, daisies, peas, Hitchcock’s blue-eyed grass, bull thistles, deadnettle, dandelions, St. John’s Wort, plantain, Queen Anne’s lace, clover, yarrow, and I’m probably forgetting a dozen or two. Over the course of a year, the meadow puts any painter to shame.

Meanwhile, the neighbors have turned their meadow into a dirtbike track. Nothing blooms there. Down the street, other neighbors seem to prefer the immaculate manicuring of Edwardian England. “Anything other than grass shall be poisoned.” It seems these people don’t live on that land; they live inside their houses.

It’s uncommon, in our modern world, to have land — not a house or a cabin, but the land itself — as home. In her beautiful love letter to Desert Bighorn Sheep, Eating Stone, Ellen Meloy reminds us how to begin to rehome ourselves:

“Wherever you are, wherever you go, there are untamed creatures nearby that need your attention. Unplug your modem. Slam shut your self-help books. Quit standing around like a wall trout. Get to work. Invite warblers to your neighborhood with shaggy plots of greenery. Learn everything you can about the bandit-eyed raccoon that stares at you through your sliding glass door, demanding enchiladas. Mark the direction of jet-black darkling beetles marching up a red dune like a troop of miniature helmets. East? South? Let black widows live in your soffits.”

Here, I have done as she reminds us. I know where the daddy longlegs live, where to find a roly-poly. I’ve seen the nests of juncos nestled into the grass, tiny eggs barely larger than a jelly bean. The electric blue tail of a western skink disappearing into the dry oak leaves. A ring-necked snake crossing the driveway. Waking up to a lizard’s shed skin on the ground next to our bed. Showering with frogs during the long, dry summers. Opening to door to see a bear running past. Tracking a bobcat in the mud, sad to lose two ducks to her hunger but grateful to have such a neighbor, and glad that she can feed the next generation growing inside her womb.

A few of the denizens of this land.

These are the things I will miss: the dawn chorus. The incandescent green of new oak leaves in late spring. Frogs singing me to sleep. Great horned owls, calling back and forth to each other in darkness. The beauty of poison oak leaves in autumn. The moments when, after taking a shower, I pause in the sacred darkness on the path back to my cabin to crane my head towards the stars twinkling through leafless oak branches, the wind cold on my damp skin. The oaks feeding us in the fall with their acorns, collecting them, drying them, cracking them, shelling them, grinding them, and turning that flour into food.

I will miss the ways we have fed the land and the land has fed us: harvests from the garden, strawberries, mint leaves, camas bulbs. Dragging the carcass of a deer down into the meadow and seeing dozens of turkey vultures there the next day, stripping her body and leaving nothing but bones and feathers. Throwing out ashes, old shirts, burned food, bad meat, chicken bones, and all the rest, and watching the land absorb it, the soil growing infinitesimally thicker, sequestering carbon deep underground. Restoring a degraded wetland so the land — and us — can drink of water filtered and stored in the soil. Cleaning trash from the ditches and roadsides patiently, relentlessly, to keep this place as healthy as it can be.

Camas, serviceberry, wild and feral greens, chickens, and acorns from nut to pancake.

The creatures we have had here: Pomona and Aster, chicken the chicken, who laid her eggs above the side screen door without our knowledge for weeks until one finally cracked and the yolk ran down the screen door like an arrow pointing up to her hidden nest, chicken who one day in the summer when I came into the house was sitting on the island in the kitchen eating someone's beautiful scrambled egg and vegetable breakfast that they had stepped away from for a moment. Walking inside the house one day to find two deer in the kitchen — shocking for all three of us.

I will miss all the people who have lived here over the years, their stories, their idiosyncrasies, the beauty of the friendships that developed. A thousand beautiful sunsets and a thousand beautiful sunrises. Waking up in the morning and looking out of our skylight straight into the tree to see a hawk fly overhead or a spider scuttling back and forth or a western gray squirrel thumping loudly across the cabin roof, the insects of every kind and description: giant grubs in the rotting Douglas fir firewood (shai-halud!), moths nearly as big as my hand, a praying mantis landing on my shoulder to say hello, the first mole I've ever touched. Heartbreaks and joy, triumph and defeat, tears and laughter. The best and worst moments of my life. All here, on this land.

Laughter and games by candlelight during a 2016 power outage.

In the evening, the sun falls low on the west, and as it sinks behind oaks and pines, rays of light slide between leafless winter branches, painting golden streaks across the meadow. And there, highlighted in the sunbeams, for just a few minutes, insects dance up and down in small dusk swarms. The bugs fly up and down, repeating their movements, moving in layered rhythms with one-another. It’s a mystery, one of those details in life that’s so easy to miss unless you are still.

I don’t know the species of insect, and I don’t know why they dance. Mating? Finding food? For the simple joy of the last rays of the day’s sunlight on skin – or rather, chitin? But I do know that when I witness this — looking up from washing dishes on a spring evening just warm enough to throw the windows wide open, or enjoying the last rays of sun from the porch swing in the fall — I am witnessing magic.

What does it mean to fall in love with the land? To feel every pain it feels as if it were your own? To celebrate and feast with the land, to drink of the rain, to feel the sun on your skin just like the grass and the trees do? I’ve tried to learn that, here. This place is in my body: the acorns, the camas bulbs, the deer, the water filtered down through this soil.

Words can only begin to capture what it has meant to me to listen to the land here, to watch the flow of water, the growing of grass, to see the changes that take place over time. What flourishes, what fails, who lives and who dies, the animals who frequent this place, the paths that they take, the abundance of berries and acorns, the flowers and plants and the timing of their buds.

But here is the secret behind it all: while this place is unique, as every place is, at the same time it is quotidian. Our world is profoundly beautiful, diverse, resilient, lush — at least, it is in places where it is allowed to be.

Already, my new home has begun inscribing its own love letter on my soul. This land is starting to reveal itself: towhees foraging in the fallen leaves, seasonal creek gurgling down the hillside, a bobcat crossing the road down by the bridge in the frozen pre-dawn; it’s own unique magic.

If you take the time to listen and be still, you can find this magic anywhere: strong and fierce in a summer thunderstorm in the wilderness, faint and thready in a dandelion working to pry up concrete slabs and bring back diversity and abundance in the midst of the city. Breathe in this magic, this substance of life. Allow it to change you.

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