One Stormy Night

Trees, power and virtual reality

It is half past five in the afternoon and already dark here in Skagit County, as I draft this week’s publication. The temperature is dropping, though we are still, just about, in double figures. Outside the air is fresh and the sound of the wind is gathering, or is that my imagination? I’m listening. The cedars are shaking their needle tips like dancers warming up. A severe weather warning has been issued. High winds are expected overnight with possible downed power lines and fallen trees. The predicted wind speeds are 25-35 mph with gusts up to 60 mph.

Not such a big deal my UK readers may think and certainly nowhere near the force of recent hurricanes hitting Florida and the Carolinas on the east coast of the US. Across the pond, Autumn storms barrelling across the Atlantic regularly hit the west coast of Ireland with wind speeds over 100 mph, then onto the Welsh coast with only a little less velocity. Tree, property and infrastructure damage is common. So why the severe weather warning here?

It’s the tree giants.

In the Evergreen state, Western Hemlock, Douglas Fir, Western Redcedar, Sitka Spruce, Western Larch, Lodgepole Pine, Red Alder, Red Maple, Bigleaf Maple, Pacific Madrone - their very names read like figures in an epic fantasy - reach up up into the skies, some 40-70m high. I’ll confess those measurements mean nothing to me. Better for me if I say, a 14 - 21 storey building. Even the regular ones tower above you until your sense of scale gets hollowed out and cast aside. When one of these majestic beings drop a limb or topple to the ground the aftershocks reverberate deep underground. Flimsy power lines are no match for these.

The wind is gathering strength. The sound rattles through the night. The straight trunked cedars standing sentinel around our place are standing firm. The tops wave but not dangerously so. I am writing in the basement as advised by the severe weather warning, lest the winds pick up! I heard a woman say she’d recently moved and her one non negotiable criteria was, ‘no trees in the yard’ after a tree came down on the roof of her previous home. Eek!

In the UK, I loved storms. The energy of them, makes my senses come alive. Rarely did any of life threatening strength reach our little estuary in Ferryside though increasingly flooding is causing misery to homeowners in that beloved village and here in the US the hurricanes this year have devastated communities, land and infrastructure. A shout out to dear friend, Carla in Asheville, North Carolina,  who narrowly avoided losing her home but is witnessing the devastation and its aftermath through her poignant and beautiful writing and photography. I appreciate my friends and connections who gift me these stories behind the headlines. Thanks to Maggie too who shared her reflections with me on the Valencia floods after a recent visit to Spain.

So to be clear, I am speaking of the thrill of a moderate increase in windspeed when the air suddenly makes its presence known by a whip slap on your cheek and rattles the cages of your complacency. So many precious things. Maybe the capacity to be thrilled rather than terrified by storms is something to savour and appreciate. Something that is being eclipsed.

I am writing on my well charged laptop and have torches nearby in case the power goes out. So far the outages have been for a few hours, though neighbours tell of two or three day power cuts in the winter. I am lucky, the anticipation of an evening reading my charged kindle under blankets with candles lit, is not a hardship but a cosy invitation. Perhaps I feel a pre-emptive nostalgia for the intimacy of enforced candlelit nights. In the UK they used to say the birthrate rose during power cuts!

It got me thinking about power and how the presence of ‘flick of the switch instant power’ has a chequered history and may prove to be a short run episode in human history. My youngest daughter, when she was about eight years old was studying the ‘olden days’ at school. She came home one day and asked me if electricity had been invented when I was a child! The answer is yes and had been around for some time in the UK, in case you were wondering! Yet in 1974, when I was a child, Britain introduced a limit of 3 consecutive days per week of electricity for non critical commercial businesses to conserve power in what became known as the winter of discontent after industrial action by coal miners and railway workers coincided with soaring oil prices because of an oil embargo. Society adapted.

On this side of the pond, hard to believe but it wasn’t until 1950 that most farms in the US had electricity. That’s less than 75 years ago. How it has changed in that short time. Nowadays in large swathes of the global population, any prolonged power cut brings a host of difficulties for our modern lives. We use power to supply critical health inputs, maintain liveable temperatures in some places, direct a host of services from essential through to entertainment. Most businesses cannot function without electricity. Most financial transactions cannot happen except where cash is still accepted. Our lives are now reliant on external power sources.

We can adapt and adopt alternative forms of power from generators to renewable resource powered systems but at a more fundamental level, have we shifted our experience into a virtual reality? I’ve often thought of the World Wide Web as an external hard drive for our minds. Why store information in your memory when it can all be accessed by a voice command? Have we also created a life one step removed from living through focusing our attention on the outputs of our precious power supplies? Does my love of storms come from a deep primeval desire to connect with the living world, a mirror of our own living souls?

Walking near Little Cranberry Lake the other day, we stopped to sit on a bench and admire the tranquil scene before us full of Western Hemlocks, reeds and the still, soupy waters of Big Beaver Pond. It struck me, here was a scene where the cycles of life and death were active and animated. A level of depth, complexity and richness powered, as my husband commented, simply by photosynthesis and something else, something ineffable.

Our built environment, so wondrous and captivating, so complex and energy demanding, can only function while power is generated. In contrast, how effortlessly nature creates renewable power and from it more wondrous, fantastical and astonishing organisms and systems than we could ever fathom. How cumbersome our attempts to mimic these systems. I used to grow organic vegetables for commercial sale and it never ceased to amaze me how you could put seeds or small transplants in the ground and some weeks or months later, through sun, rain and soil, bountiful gifts of food were yielded. How on earth does a huge great pumpkin grow from a seed the size of my fingernail? It’s awe inspiring when you think of it.

This complex reality we have created, so power dependent can feel like a fragile construction which could end up being a blink of the eye in human history. Time will tell. For most of human history and in many parts of the world still today, power demand and supply is small. Wood fires for cooking and heat. Back to the trees!

Am I suggesting we turn away from our complex alternate reality, our power generated preoccupations that demand so much of human attention? No! I have no answers, just wonderings.

Human beings are this extraordinary paradox: we are puny yet potent. Misguided yet magnificent. When we get down to the essential mystery, we are powered just as Nature is, by something we can’t explain, measure or replicate.

These virtual realities we live in and take to be real, driven ultimately by our imaginations are no different from the realities we find in books, TV and film. Today in a Writer’s Critique Group I have happily found in Anacortes, we spent two hours in animated and lively discussion of six pieces of fiction (or memoir). I chuckled to myself as I left, thinking, how strange it must look to a passerby, all of us discussing imaginary people and places with such vigour and enthusiasm. When, in fact, isn’t this what we do in our lives? We get intensely animated by the details of our own personal movies, as if for all the world, we are the centre of our own universe!

I imagine trees would chuckle often if they could. Perhaps they do. Some live for up to 1000 years. What they must have seen. Though the wind noise is muffled by the double glazing it is gaining momentum. Tree duff hits the windows. The tap and whoosh is an accompaniment to the tap tap of my fingers on the keyboard. Upstairs it will be louder and tomorrow a carpet of pine needles and branches will cover concrete, soil and wooden decking.

So thank you for joining me on this November night and a little meander through the world of trees and power and virtual reality. It tickles me no end to know that family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, new friends in the US and total strangers are reading these despatches from my new life here in Skagit County, Washington State USA.

Many of you love the trees, so here’s a feast of images of trees of the Pacific Northwest I’ve met in the last few months.

Trees in Skagit County

Gratitude

I was thinking how none of us exist in isolation and how so many seen and unseen hands contribute to who we are and how we show up in life, what threads pull on us. For my love of reading, writing and trees I want to thank my Mum, who reads this Substack, I know! Hello and a great big thank you for reading to me as a child. Working and bringing up two children on your own, I am even more grateful that you took time to read to me - it has changed my life!

I particularly remember the Winnie the Pooh stories by AA Milne. You put on voices for the different characters who lived in the Hundred Acre Wood. Eyore and Piglet were my favourite characters. Eyore, a donkey was often depressed and quite cynical. His friends didn’t mind, they always included him. Piglet, a little pig was timid and fearful but often braver than he realised. Winnie the Pooh, a bear, was a great comfort to Piglet who loved acorns. Winnie the Pooh loved honey. I remember Mum, you made cassette recordings of yourself reading those stories so we could listen to them on the long drives down to see our grandparents in Cornwall, watering the seeds of my young imagination. So thank you for sharing your love of books. We continue to talk about books we’re reading.

Who influenced the direction of your life?

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Links & Resources

https://www.eia.gov/kids/history-of-energy/timelines/electricity.php

Book: Northwest Trees by Stephen F. Arno & Ramona P. Hammerly

‘in the Temperate Rainforest, wind, not fire is the forest’s primary shaper’ p.128 Cascadia Field Guide, edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield..

Threads that pull me

Memoir: Rowing to Latitude - Journeys along the Arctic’s Edge by Jill Freestone - a gorgeous memoir of avalanche specialist and explorer whose thousands of miles of rowing adventures in wild open spaces with her husband, is a beautiful tale of a woman’s evolution and self-discovery. Highly recommend.

Plum Village app - a free or by donation app of talks and meditations from Plum Village the community founded by the late Thich Nhat Han, an exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk who founded Plum Village in France

TV: Yellowstone on Peacock - we began watching this two years ago and have returned for the final series. A sweeping drama set in Montana with compelling characters and cinematic landscapes. The story centres on the Duttons, a ranching family whose vast acreage is under constant threat from various parties. Full of plots and intrigue it is Shakespearean in its scope.