Cape Disappointment WA Campground

 I really enjoyed the privacy of this yurt campground. Nobody was camping in the area. Very quiet.

Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas - Reading, Studies, Information

Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas

I will be Yurt Camping for four days at Belfair State Park, Kitsap Peninsula, Washington, in September of 2024. I have read and studied a number of fine books about this area. Here are a few of them:

Salmon, Cedar, Rock and Rain: Washington's Olympic Peninsula. By Tim Mcnulty and many others. Braider River, Mountaineer's Press, 2023, 206 pages. Outstanding  photography, informative essays. VSCL.

Cascadia Revealed: A Guide to the Plants, Animals, and Geology of the Pacific Northwest Mountains. By Daniel Mathews. Timber Press Field Guide. 2016, index, 582 pages. Outstanding guide, color photos, handy field guide. Superior on Geology. VSCL.

Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Edited by C. Marie Fhurman, Elizabeth Bradfield, and Derek Sheffield. Mountaineers Books, 2013, 400 pages. VSCL.

Heaven on the Half Shell: The History of the Oyster in the Pacific Northwest. By David George Gordon, Samantha Larson, and Maryann Barron Wagner. Second Edition. Foreword by Kenneth K. Chew. University of Washington Press, 2013, index, 228 pages. VSCL.

The Chinook Indians: Traders of the Lower Columbia River. Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown. University of Oklahoma Press, 1988, 372 pages. VSCL.

Razor Clams: Buried Treasure of the Pacific Northwest. By David Berger. University of Washington, 2017, 223 pages. VSCL. 

Day Hiking Olympic Peninsula. By Craig Romano. Mountaineers Books, 2nd Edition, 2016, 354 pages. VSCL.

Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest By Ella E. Clark. Illustrated by Robert Bruce Inverarity. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1953, 2003. Glossary, 225 pages.  VSCL.

Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We Are. Edited by Jacilee Wray. Second Edition. University of Oklahoma, 2015, 224 pages. VSCL.

Olympic Peninsula: The Grade and Gradeur. Text and photographs by Mike Sedam. Voyageur Press, 2002, 144 pages. A coffe-table photgraphic book. VSCL.

Olympic Peninsula with Olympic National Park. By Jeff Bulingame. Moon, 5th Edition, 2024, 260 pages. The definitive and current travel guide to this area. Essential! VSCL.

The Sacred Wisdom of the Native Americans. By Larry J. Zimmerman. Chartwell Books, 2016, 220 pages.

Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon: Exploring Beaches and Tidepools. By Ryan P. Kelly, Terrie Klinger and John J. Meyer. University of Washington Press, 2022, 253 pages, index. FVRL.

A Birder's Guide to Coastal Washington. By Bob Morse. Featuring Ocean Shores, Long Beach Peninsula, Forks, Westport, Tokeland, and 160 Birding Hot Spots.  R. W. Morse Co., 2001, Index, 249 pages, spiral bound text. VSCL. Detailed coverage of birding locations and how to get there. 

Beachcombing   SEE  Beachcombing

A Coast of Scenic Wonders: Coastal Geology and Ecology of the Outer Coast of Oregon and Washington and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  By Miles O. Hayes, Jacqueline Michel, and Joseph Holmes.  Pandion Books, 2020, 229  pages. 

The Flora and Fauna of the Pacific Northwest.  By Collin Varner.  University of Washington, 2018, 462 pages.  VSCL.  Outstanding photographs, larger size. 

Grayland Beach Nature Studies.  By Michael P. Garofalo.  2021-  

More Northwest Coastal Field Guides

National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Pacific Northwest. By Peter Alden and Dennis Paulson.  Knopf, 1998, 488 pages. This is a handy and sturdy field guide for enthusiasts of natural history studies. I carry in my car along with binoculars, magnifying glass, and supplies in my backpack. VSCL.

Natural History of the Pacific Northwest Mountains. By Daniel Mathews. Timber Press Field Guide, 2017, Index, 583 pages. VSCL.

A Naturalist's Guide to the Hidden World of Pacific Northwest Dunes. By George Poinar Jr. Oregon State University, 2016, 288 pages. VSCL.

The New Beachcomber's Guide to the Pacific Northwest.  By J. Duane Sept.  Harbor Publishing, 2019, 416 pages. VSCL.

The Northwest Coast: A Natural History. By Stewart T. Schultz. Timber Press, 1990, index, 389 pages. VSCL.

The Northwest Coastal Explorer. By Robert Steelquist. Timer Press, 2016, 282 pages. Overview of key features with pictures and text. VSCL.

Plants of the Pacific Northwest. By Jim Pojar and Andy MacKinnon. Partners, 2004, 528 pages.

Seashore Life of the Northern Pacific Coast: An Illustrated Guide to Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. By Eugene N. Kozloff.  University of Washington, 1983, 378 pages. A technical scientific presentation. VSCL.

Seashore of the Pacific Northwest. By Ian Sheldon. Lone Pine, 1998, 192 pages. VSCL.

The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans. By Cynthia Barnett. W.W. Norton, 2021, 432 pages. VSCL.

Wildlife of the Pacific Northwest. Tracking and Identifying Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Invertebrates. By David Moskowitz. Timber Press, 2010, 364 pages. VSCL.

Books in my personal home library (VSCL) about Washington State.
FVRL = Fort Vancouver Regional Library System, Clark County, Washington.

Appearing in the Forest

Memaloose Spirits, Ghosts, the Undead
Nehalem Bay, Tillamook, Cape Lookout
Oregon, U.S. Highway 101

Memaloose Ghosts

By Michael Peter Garofalo

Yes, I've heard the Memaloose Ghosts
    in the Sitka swamps all talking,
and I've also left quickly in fear fast walking.
I've dreamt of skulls and skeletons,
graveyards of broken canoes,
Islands of the Dead,
   creepy Clatsop Chinook stories in my head.

In the Nehalem rain,
    with a deep dark dripping forest all around,
A Memaloose Ghost whispered to me
    in these hallowed grounds:

"The tide comes in, the tide goes out;
that's essential, Yes,
to What It's All About.
Your tide flows out, old man;
So it's now best to smile and shout, Yes,
and stroll bravely out."

"Saghili pee keekwillie chuck;
elip lekleh yes ahha,
Iktah Mitlite Konaway
Wake Sia Kopa.
Mika chuck chako
pee klatawa, oleman;
Alta elip klose ahha
tenas hehe pee hyas wawa
pee klata kopa lapea
skookum tum tum
klaghanie ahha."

- Words of the Memaloose Ghost in Her Chinook Jargon; translated above.

At the Edges of the West: U.S. Highway 101 and 1.
Memories of Pacific Coast Places
By Michael P. Garofalo

The poem above "Memaloose Ghosts," is one of dozens of my poems found on my webpage:

At the Edges of the West

https://www.egreenway.com/mpgss/shortpoemsmpg9sea2.htm

Travels on US Highway 101 and 1

Memories of Pacific Coast Places
West Coast Snapshots & Snippets
Delightful Coastal Spur Roads

Docu-Poem, Haiku, Short Poems, Photos,
Quatrians, Graphics, Concrete Poems

By Michael P. Garofalo

Vancouver, Washington

Who Gathers and Chops Firewood for the Cook's Kitchen?

 The Fireplace Records, Chapter 8

Huineng Chopping Bamboo
Ink on paper by Liang Kai
Circa 1200 CE

Who Gathers and Chops Firewood for the Cook's Kitchen?
When he leaves, somebody new will take his place. 

Huineng (638-713 CE) was an hardworking monk who quietly followed all the Temple lifestyle rules.  His job was to gather firewood to use in the kitchen or elsewhere at the Temple.  He pulled a little cart and gathered sticks, driftwood, wood donations, and downed limbs.  He sawed, split up, and cut up dried wood to give to the cooks in the Temple kitchen or others tending fires.  He did this humble task well for many years.  

Huineng is remembered for emphasizing the power of simple useful work activities as a valid path to enlightenment (e.g., gardening, Temple maintenance, cooking, chores, firewood working, samu = work, transcribing, etc.)  Huineng became enlightened while chopping up bamboo.  He later became a leading Zen Master featured in many stories.  

Also, we all have roles, duties, work, and responsibilities to others and to ourselves. This is an underlying reality.  

"The kitchen was a hell of heat.  Woks large enough to bathe a child in sat on roaring, wood-burning brick stoves.  Young monks fed the insatiable fires, while others stirred the boiling rice.  Some chopped vegetables or prepared them for pickling. They were all under the direction of a senior priest, who was known only as "the Old Cook.""
- By Deng Ming Dao;, Chronicles of Tao, p. 166
The Kitchen of a Daoist Temple Monastery in the Huashan Mountains of China, circa 1930's.  

Somebody is still chopping wood for a fireplace stove, or providing you with the electricity or gas or coal for you kitchen ovens and stoves and cooking appliances.  

Without the fire in the kitchen for cooking we could not survive. 

So, who chops the firewood for your kitchen stove?

Comments, Sources

Refer to Cases ??? in Koan Classics.  OK. find any?  

Refer to my Cloud Hands Blog Posts on the topic of Koans/Mondos/Tests

The Daodejing by Laozi  

Pulling Onions  Over 1,043 One-line Sayings by Mike Garofalo

Chinese Chan Buddhist and Taoist Stories and Koans 

Fireplaces, Campfires, Stoves

The Fireplace Records By Michael P. Garofalo

Yurt Camping at Devil's Lake State Park

 

Yurt Camping in Lincoln City, Oregon, from 9/22-9/25.

Devil's Lake State Recreation Area

Lincoln City

Siletz Bay National Wildlife Refuge

Chinook Winds Casino and Hotel

Depoe Bay OR

Yurt Camping Information

Mo's Restaurant in Siletz Bay

Robert's Bookstores

Prehistoric: Rocks and Fossils Store

My Photographs

Yurt 35C

Mo's Restaurant

Clams and Oyster Shooter

Photographs from the Internet

The Man Who Planted Trees

 

The Man Who Planted Trees. By Jean Giono. Illustrated by Michael McCurdy. Chelsea Green, 2007, 72 pages. 

From a Facebook Post on March 18, 2025. One reviewer suggested that this is an artificially AI generated post to sell the book. You be the judge:

I found "The Man Who Planted Trees" three days after the diagnosis. Terminal, they said. Six months, maybe less. I hurled books across my hospital room, cursing the universe for its cruelty, until a thin volume slipped from the pile, landing open-faced on the sterile floor. A nurse picked it up, glanced at the first page, and against protocol, left it on my bedside table instead of reshelving it.

"You might need this one," she whispered.

She was right. But not for the reasons either of us could have imagined.

Let me tell you about resurrection.

Not the biblical kind—though what Jean Giono created in his slender 4,000-word masterpiece borders on the miraculous—but the kind that begins with dirt under fingernails and an obstinate refusal to accept desolation as the final word.

Most readers encounter "The Man Who Planted Trees" as ecological parable or gentle inspiration. They admire its message of environmental stewardship, nod appreciatively at its humanistic optimism, perhaps feel momentarily better about our species' potential. Then they return it to the shelf and continue their lives fundamentally unchanged.

I couldn't return it to the shelf. Because Elzéard Bouffier wouldn't let me go.

The story's premise is deceptively simple: In 1913, a young hiker traverses the barren, wind-scoured highlands of Provence, a landscape so bleak it drives inhabitants to madness or exodus. There he encounters a silent shepherd methodically planting oak trees—one hundred perfect acorns daily, year after year, asking nothing in return. The narrator returns after both world wars to discover this solitary man's quiet, relentless labor has miraculously transformed thousands of acres of wasteland into a vibrant, water-rich forest ecosystem where communities once again thrive.

A simple summary that betrays nothing of the story's devastating power.

I began reading in that antiseptic hospital room, my body already betraying me at thirty-six, the scan results still burning in my mind. By page three, something shifted. Giono's sparse prose—devoid of sentimentality yet pulsing with life—bypassed my intellectual defenses and struck directly at something primal within me.

His description of that initial landscape—"everything was barren and colorless, a desert without even the drama of traditional deserts"—mirrored my interior state with such precision that I gasped audibly. The nurse looked up, concerned, but I waved her away, already descending deeper into Giono's world.

When the narrator first meets Bouffier, the shepherd is described with haunting simplicity: "His beard was black, and his shoulders slightly hunched, but his figure was tall and straight, more suggestive of an athlete than an old man." Something in this portrait of contained power, of vitality harnessed for purpose rather than display, seized me. I read the entire story without moving, the hospital machinery beeping in counterpoint to my racing heart.

That night, I dreamed of acorns—hundreds of them, cool and smooth in my palms.

What makes "The Man Who Planted Trees" truly dangerous isn't its ecological message but its fundamental challenge to our understanding of time, purpose, and what constitutes a meaningful life.

Bouffier plants trees he will never sit beneath. He creates forests without recognition or reward. He persists through two world wars, through personal tragedy, through complete societal collapse and reconstruction, doing exactly one thing: planting perfectly selected seeds in precisely the right places, then letting nature and time do what they will.

This radical patience—this refusal of instant gratification, external validation, or even measurable short-term progress—represents a direct assault on everything our culture holds sacred. Bouffier's calm, methodical labor exposes the poverty of our addictions to immediacy, recognition, and tangible results.

And yet, the miracle happens. The wasteland transforms. Life returns. Not through dramatic intervention or technological salvation, but through one man's stubborn, daily choice to believe in a future he personally will barely glimpse.

By day three in the hospital, something unprecedented occurred. I found myself examining my own wasteland with different eyes. What if my diagnosis wasn't an ending but a clarification? What if the time I had—whether six months or six years—could be measured not in duration but in seeds planted?

I began making calls. Family members I'd avoided for decades. Former colleagues I'd betrayed climbing corporate ladders. My estranged son, now eighteen, who'd stopped taking my calls five years earlier.

Many rejected my overtures. Some responded with suspicious caution. A few engaged more openly. I didn't explain the diagnosis—this wasn't about extracting forgiveness or pity. It was about planting whatever seeds I could in the time remaining.

I started volunteering at a youth center near my apartment, teaching chess to kids with life circumstances far more challenging than my privileged trajectory. I allocated my savings to establish a small foundation focused on reforesting a degraded watershed in my grandfather's rural hometown.

The doctors were baffled by my sudden shift from rage to focused engagement. My oncologist suggested the medication might be affecting my cognition. I smiled and told her I'd simply found a better way to measure what remained of my life.

One acorn at a time.

The true power of Giono's story isn't its gentle hopefulness but its ruthless rejection of excuses. Bouffier begins his work as an old man, already sixty-five when the narrator first meets him. He has suffered devastating personal loss. The landscape itself actively resists regeneration. The broader society remains oblivious to his efforts for decades.

None of this matters to him. None of it interrupts the steady rhythm of his planting.

When I returned to the hospital for treatment six weeks after that first reading, I brought my own dog-eared copy of the book. As chemicals designed to kill rapidly dividing cells dripped into my veins, I read aloud to two other patients receiving treatment. One wept silently by the end. The other asked to borrow it when I finished.

We formed an unlikely book group in that chemo ward—discussing Bouffier's methods, his solitude, his monastic patience. The oncology nurses began calling us "the forest people," not understanding our private reference but sensing the strange energy our discussions generated amid the clinical despair.

Seven months later—already longer than my initial prognosis—a second scan showed something unexpected. Not remission, not yet, but a significant slowing of the disease's progression. My oncologist called it "unusual but not unprecedented." I had a different explanation.

I'd begun to dream regularly of Bouffier—not as Giono described him but as a presence beside me, teaching me to distinguish promising acorns from those that would never germinate. In these dreams, we worked together in comfortable silence, filling pockets with seeds, walking barren ridgelines, kneeling in dust and stone.

During my waking hours, I continued my own planting—reconciliations where possible, new connections where not, small contributions to strangers' lives, seeds of possibility in whatever soil would receive them.

Inexplicably, improbably, I was still alive.

What "The Man Who Planted Trees" offers isn't gentle inspiration but a radical alternative to despair. Giono doesn't just tell a pretty story about environmentalism—he demonstrates that meaning exists precisely in the face of apparent futility, that purpose transcends outcome, that transformative power often lies in the humblest, most repetitive actions.

The story's most devastating passage describes Bouffier's work during World War I: "The war of 1914 had taken away all his sons, all three of them... He resumed his planting." This breathtaking understatement contains volumes—both the immensity of Bouffier's personal tragedy and the immensity of his refusal to surrender to it.

Three years after my diagnosis, against all medical predictions, I remain. The disease and I have reached a standoff of sorts—it advances more slowly than expected; I live more fully than I ever did in health. I've since learned that Giono wrote this story for an American magazine that requested "the most extraordinary character I've encountered." He invented Bouffier entirely, later explaining: "My goal was to make trees likeable, or more specifically, to make planting trees likeable."

But here's what Giono himself may not have fully understood: he didn't create a character; he created a template for living meaningfully in the face of apparent hopelessness. He didn't make trees likeable; he made perseverance without guarantee of personal reward not just likeable but essential.

Last week, I visited the youth center where I still teach chess. One of my first students—now heading to college on scholarship—asked why I never seem afraid despite my illness. I showed him my worn copy of Giono's book.

"The man in this story," I explained, "plants trees knowing three things for certain: many will fail to grow, he won't live to see most that do succeed, and he has no guarantee the world won't destroy his work through war or greed or simple indifference."

"Then why bother?" the young man asked.

"Because the planting itself matters," I said. "Because transformation always begins in apparent futility. Because life, ultimately, is measured not in what we harvest but in what we plant."

I don't know if he understood. But later that day, I saw him reading the book in a corner, his expression intense with discovery.

Another acorn planted.

If you value comfort over transformation, avoid "The Man Who Planted Trees." This isn't inspirational literature; it's a literary detonation device disguised as a simple tale. Once you truly absorb Bouffier's example, you lose all excuses for inaction. You forfeit the luxury of despair. You find yourself, against all reason, planting seeds in whatever barren landscape you've been given—with no guarantee except that the planting itself may be the most profound expression of being fully alive.

And somewhere in your dreams, a forest is already rising.

Like

Comment

Send

Share

Write a comment…

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook