Turning 50 on Silver Star
Pyle, Robert Michael
The Tangled Bank Turning Fifty on Silver Star by Robert Michael Pyle WHEN THEA and I married, we built the living-room ceremony around friends, family, flowers; autumn leaves, the local judge,...
...I don't doubt that next summer will see our packs further exercised, our canoe wetted more than it has been lately...
...One week later, we again took up our beast-of-burden packs for a trek into the proposed wilderness of the Dark Divide, northeast of Silver Star...
...On the summits of Sunrise and Jumbo peaks, among native-plant-society friends and mountain heather, we found alpine butterflies never before recorded in Skamania County...
...For two days we explored the slopes, trails, hollows, and peaks of Silver Star, and I turned over my first half-ceritury embraced • by four white volcanoes...
...A regrettable but formidable tendency ensures that many would-be naturalists betake themselves out-of-doors all too rarely...
...I have never seen such a spectacle in butterfly-subtle western Washington...
...But they had grown far from the model I envisioned for myself: an engaged, yet oft-sauntering naturalist...
...And they all devote much more time, unless they are clever or vigilant, to a computer terminal than to the wild, be it yard, park, or mountain fastness...
...I suppose we did it partly to prove we still could, partly out of a sense of summers slipping by rapidly and irretrievably...
...But I have not escaped that insidious counter-pull altogether, especially when it comes to longer, more physically demanding excursions far from the desk, mail, telephone, terminal, and all other anchors on the ambler's drift...
...Thirty years later, the treks to high meadows and wilderness beaches have been far fewer than we'd anticipated...
...Since these insects favor flowers, the mountain held high promise for Thea's primary interest too...
...And gotten out we have...
...You wouldn't know it from the lushness of the turf...
...Last summer, we decided to mend our ways...
...After all, going afield, as the old naturalists called it, is its own reward...
...It doesn't do to become prisoners of our own commitment...
...We watched David Brower movies on the North Cascades and other imperiled wildlands, secure in the knowledge that we would see all those charmed scenes with the aid of boots and backpacks...
...He recounts his rambles from home, or wherever he finds himself, in each issue of Orion Afield...
...Our perch on the flower-strewn slope was solitary, since a lack of surface water deterred backpackers...
...Only 14 species, but thousands of golden western sulphurs, hundreds of wax-and-cherry Clodius parnassians, chalcedony and Edith's checkerspots by the score...
...Rangers administrate, managers delegate...
...autumn leaves, the local judge, Walt Whitman...
...So biologists spend their time in labs, committee rooms, and conference halls, while conservationists haunt offices, meetings, and legislative chambers...
...In our early 20s, Thea and I belonged to the University of Washington Conservation Education and Action Council...
...The snowy cone suffered in competition with the dawn-and-dew-struck flora...
...Helens, she saw three backlit butterflies bed down: a diaphanous parnassian on a pinkened umbel, a meadow fritillary on a rush, and a checkerspot on a blown dandelion...
...and then they forgot...
...No matter...
...This misdirection not-so-subtly subverts the very impulse that drives us to work for the outside world...
...For the good places' sake—for our sake—we are wise to get out...
...But as we age and our lives complexify more and more, we must ardently resist the busy demon that would keep us in...
...I took steps to avoid that fate, and over the years I have made certain to get out often, if only modestly...
...And the butterflies...
...and a best-forgotten sonnet with a well-remembered message: that getting OUT would define our lives together, so help us...
...There they stayed till morning rays warmed their wings and sent us down the mountain to water...
...And as sunset glazed Mount St...
...Plainly, they never got out...
...A canopy of creamy umbels and full-maned yellow composites wrapped outbursts of magenta paintbrush, furry mari-posa lilies, blue gentians, and scarlet columbines...
...We deserve to experience what we labor to preserve...
...Our first morning broke to Mount Adams emerging from the night into a slurry of rose mist and summer sun...
...Silver Star Mountain was reputed to be a fine place for butterflies...
...You don't have to backpack, of course, to taste the "tonic" that Thoreau distilled from his walking...
...Robert Michael Pyle lives and writes in southwest Washington, along the tangled banks of a Columbia River tributary...
...Years ago, when I worked for international conservation groups, most of my colleagues had been inspired by a love of nature...
...Tall orange Columbia lilies swayed on a light breeze all around the carefully placed gray dome of our tent...
...That is one reason I live where I do, where even fetching the mail is an adventure...
...Sharp-eyed Thea spotted the small brown chrysalis of a western meadow fritillary on a granite chip beneath its host-plant violets...
...but never enough...
...We are rebuilding the habit of getting out, often and well...
...Come September, we kept Thea's 50th among the red-and-blue blaze of ripe huckleberries that gave Indian Heaven Wilderness its name...
...If our loads were not yet second nature, neither was the experience secondhand...
...On July 18 we girded, loaded, and stretched our loins, and set out on a trail-head recently redeemed from an old forest lookout road in Washington's southwest-ernmost Cascades...
Vol. 2 • June 1998 • No. 3
