The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth's evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

After a slow start, the winter rains have picked up and the fields are soggy with rains that dominated the last two month. The big green has begun. Bushes and trees haven’t leafed out but the grasses, mosses, and herbs are pushing upward. On our Chrysalis field study, the miner’s lettuce grew thick beneath the oaks. We paused to nibble on a few leaves. And I had to give again a talk I need to give almost every time. On finding out that the plant is edible, one of the students (it’s almost always boys that do it) pulls up a double handful of miner’s lettuce – leaves and stems and all in all. My talk is: to pick one at a time the leaves you actually eat. This plant exists in its own right, not just for you. But contemplate from whence came the desire to pick more than you possibly need. At the kid level, I think the desire is a combination of exuberant excitement that the world is edible and also a desire to “fill one’s neighbor’s eye.”

Hitchhiking

From the dining room table, I noticed a bird on the ground a hundred feet away. It’s posture and size suggested a Northern Flicker and, sure enough, a minute later when it flew upwards, its white rump and orange underwings boldly pronounced its flickerness and I recalled my first encounter with a flicker. I had been hitchhiking north from San Francisco on Highway One and the driver casually identified as a flicker a bird flying away from the road. I was so amazed that he could identify it at a glance that I asked him how he could do that. He demonstrated a possibility that I did not know existed and which, later, I learned to do.

That memory led to a reflection on the people I met while hitchhiking and some of the consciousness-expanding gifts they gave me:

- A double amputee from Vietnam who drove very fast because he had learned that no policeman would give a ticket to a man who had given two limbs in service to his country.

- An Alaskan couple who were moving into their current farm house. They had set a full-length mirror against an outside wall as they were moving things around. Later, they heard a shattering crash. Their billy goat had rammed his reflection.

- On Highway 395 I was picked up by a man who had been away on a job and was now heading home to LA. He was looking forward to getting home and seeing his wife and kids. But as we drove south, he started debating to himself whether he should maybe nip over to Las Vegas for just a little gambling. He debated back and forth and finally decided he shouldn’t, that he would go home, but at the last turnoff to Las Vegas, he dropped me off and turned east to Las Vegas. My heart went out to his family. A great sadness.

- The bird-watching couple who told me that if I wanted to see birds, I had to go to Alaska. That changed my life.

- Learning about the necessity of crop insurance from a farmer in Kansas, land of hail storms and tornadoes.

- A mother who picked me up because her son was somewhere out there hitchhiking and she wanted to know what life might be like for him.

- The still-alive Marine who commented on the thrill of a knife fight because only one of you was going to come out alive.

- The army recruiter and the man with him who was re-enlisting because what he liked about the army was that someone was always telling him what to do. He didn’t have to decide himself.

- The man who gave to me his copy of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.

- Trying to understand an expert in spider taxonomy’s explanation of the evolutionary principles underlying taxonomy.

- The trucker who was well-pleased with himself because his job was delivering the ultimately easiest load (from a truck driver’s point of view): potato chips. They don’t weigh a thing and there is no weight shift going around corners. He said the weight shift made delivering live cattle the worst trucking load of them all.

- A newspaper reporter who taught me that the amount of news that appears in the paper is determined, not by the amount of news that happened that day, but by the amount of advertising space that was sold for that day.

- A trucker who warned me about wrapping my thumb around the steering wheel. He said that in an accident, the wheel can whip around very fast and slice off a thumb. He said I should rest my thumbs on the wheel, not around the wheel.

Global Flattening

The great systems thinker, Donella Meadows, pointed out thirty years ago that the ecological problem underlying “global warming” was the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That is the cause. Warming is an effect, a trailing indicator, something that lags decades behind. She lamented how so much political energy and precious time for action was being wasted in debate over temperature while the measurements of carbon dioxide were solid and irrefutable. To wait until temperatures are dangerously high is to waste the opportunity to take action.

A major part of what I call the Upward Spiral is life’s creation of surface area which dramatically changes the rates at which things flow. I recently realized that another perspective on what we refer to as “global warming” is global desurfacing. Cutting down of forests, paving of land, loss of topsoil are all part of a reduction of surface area on a global scale. Over millions of years, life spun a great web of surfaces based on carbon extracted from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Over millions of years, photosynthesis has fueled a complex “mat” covering bedrock, inches high in the alpine tundra, hundreds of feet high in the forests, containing so many surfaces that it has exponentially changed the rates at which many things are flowing upon this earth. (The flow of heat in and out of our atmosphere – the cause of global warming – is just one of these flows.) As we flatten the earth by knocking these surfaces down and either burning them or having them rot away, the carbon goes back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. So thinking of the problem as “flattening” focuses on the initial cause and it also does not sound positive. (Some think “global warming” sounds warm and inviting.) Global flattening does not.

The Play

In late November, my roaming along a rounded ridge led me into the head of a drainage that immediately proclaimed itself as the picture perfect place for a textbook play. It was so perfect. The setting was beautiful, looking out over miles of oak savanna. The basin, itself, was all grassland so nothing was obscured by bushes. The basin, an acre or so in size was large enough for many unexpected things to happen but small enough to be contained within a single photograph. The drainage was simple; just one channel spreading into an alluvial fan but which, at the lower end, was now being incised with a gully that was etching its way up through the fan. What promised a perfect play was the alluvial fan; it would make large, dramatic divergences easily possible so that much of the runoff could be led around the head of the gully.

It was so picture perfect that I decided to thoroughly document this one. I came back the next week with a camera and ten short metal posts. I walked about the basin, trying to predict where I would make plays and how I thought the basin might change in response. I then drove my posts in at places that would have good perspectives on those changes. Now each time I visit the place, I take a 360° series of pictures from each post.

Then I made a couple of plays. Tricky because this was before the rains and I did not have runoff to guide my trowel. But I made two plays, hoping I got them right but knowing I needed to come back during a storm to adjust them and add others. We had several weeks of not heavy but steady rain. I tried to get to the place (about 4 miles in from the trailhead) but a creek crossing was now a river 4-5 feet deep so I couldn’t make it that way. There was a possibility that I could kayak down the Sacramento past that creek and hike in from the river but according to the river gauge, the river was rising from 5,000 cfs to 30,000 cfs (in the summertime I kayak it at around 10,000) so I didn’t feel safe approaching that way. During the next series of storms, I tried coming in from the other direction (about 6 miles). Had to do a couple of creek crossings but I made it. Delighted to find that the divergences I had made had pretty good lines. I added more so that I currently have 3 pairs of divergences (I am thinking of them as chevrons) leading runoff away from the channel etching its way into the center of the fan out to the edges of the fan. Now I get to watch what happens.

An inflection point is where a line shifts from concave to convex or conversely.

Inflection point is a phrase I’m using to label certain places along a drainage where dynamics shift or reach a maximum. This basin has two such points, opposites from one another. Near the top of the basin is a place where a thick mat of vegetation acts to spread the runoff out into a structure similar to an alluvial fan. And near the bottom of this fan, a gully is cutting its way up; the head of that gully is the other inflection point. It subtly extends further up than one first realizes. The downcutting at the head of the gully acts like a black hole, bending runoff towards it. Runoff which once flowed broadly and slowly down through the fan is now converging towards the upward creeping head of the growing gully so that more and more of the runoff jets through its narrow, steep head, downcutting the gully still more.

The heart of my play is diversions leading as much of the runoff as possible around this gully head. The next image shows three of these divergences. Based on past experience, I predict that the head of the gully, cut off from its supply of converging runoff, will vegetate in thicker (because of more groundwater) and will become a zone of upward growth rather than downward erosion.

Why I Go on Rain Walks

“Rain walks” are when I go out in the rain with a trowel and look for “plays,” places I can carve divergences that spread out the runoff.

The main reason I love rain walks is I think thoughts then that I just can’t think at any other time. Thoughts I really like to think because they are so inviting of beauty and action and offer such hope. But here are some other reasons.

The colors of greens are brilliant in the rain, especially the mosses.

Rain walks are playing the way I did as a child but within a much better game. Imagine combining the adult hobbies of gardening and model railroading. You’ve probably seen pictures of model railroads that fill a vast room. Well, my model railroad fills a hundred acres or more. The trains are the runoff. I lay my tracks with my trowel, leading the trains out along the slopes. Each time I go out, I can push my tracks out a bit further. And the gardening part is watching how the plants respond to the changing of the water flows and trying to build my divergences mindfully so the land acquires contouring lines that accent the beauty of its shape. I love “laying my track” and thereafter watching the runoff running along it just as model railroaders enjoy running trains through a world they have created. Just like the real railroads pushing into the west, by bringing my “railroad” to new areas, the area changes, “grows” in ways that are fun to watch. It’s like having a model railroad that has tiny real plant-people who, while I’m gone, build little structures in response to what I built.

Also, I love to roam. Maps and roads make the world seem linear but running water has given the land a fractal shape. On rain walks, I follow the paths of runoff. The paths of water are one of the strongest shapers of the land but rarely do we follow those paths precisely. But during rain walks, I do – and they lead me into a deeper understanding of the land.

The rainy season in California is from November through February so usually the End of the Long Nights issue of Cairns is full of nitty-gritty rain walk, wonkish thoughts. So it is with this issue. The next few pages might be boring for those not interested in this portion of my work.

Terraces

This study has led me to a new hypothesis about “terraces.” Terraces are what I am calling the flat areas on either side of a channel. They have posed a koan for me for many years. What story are they telling? For example, when I look at the attached image, I interpret it as a drainage that used to have a flat bottom.

Any runoff would have flowed broadly, therefore thinner and slower, dropping suspended load which would help maintain the flatness of the drainage bottom as it builds it up. The watertable would be higher; more would grow.

I go on to interpret this image as: through overgrazing and such, we compacted the surface of the watershed so that more of the rain ran off, giving erosion more power and cutting the channel we see, feeding into a Downward Spiral. That is the story my mind sees when I walk the land.

There is another interpretation possible: that such channels are the natural shape that evolve between water and land. I think the answer lies somewhere in between. Channels do occur naturally. However, there is a gradient of increasing surface flow water from the headwater divide down to the sea. In the uppermost portion, surface flow stays spread out and flows over smooth ground covered with plants. Further downstream, the larger flows of water do gather together and flow in natural channels.

But I am working in the zone where the runoff is shifting from the one pattern to the other and I believe that the land is showing that the transition from overland flow to channeled flow depends on the health of the watershed. Surface flow gets channeled faster, higher up in the drainage, in an abused watershed than it does in a healthy one. So, yes, there will come a time when the water flowing down this drainage will concentrate into a channel but it doesn’t have to be yet. It could be further down, perhaps many miles further down. And the further down it occurs, the more water will be retained within the watershed. Runoff will be less “flashy.” It will be smoothed out over a longer time, creating a dramatic reduction in erosive power which is an exponential function of volume.

If my interpretation is accurate, then it suggests that the area should be able to develop a flat bottom again. How does that happen? That’s the koan for me. How does it happen? Smaller bare channels where I’ve worked revegetate - which I’ve taken as a sign they are starting to fill in again. I like to think that they will keep gradually filling up until they “push” the flow of water out onto the terraces. It’s easy for me to imagine that as the solution but I don’t believe it – because of levees. When the water crests its banks and flows out onto the terraces, that portion of the runoff flows shallow and therefore slowly. As a result, the water’s suspended load drops out in greater proportion on the terraces than within the channel. Gentle rises (levees) form to either side of the channel, holding the main channel in place except for times of highest water. So I’ve never had a solid sense of how the downstream channels might fill in as I believe terraces are telling me they do. But The Play I’ve introduced to you suggests another possibility.

That basin has an alluvial fan shape within it. Alluvial fans are not flat. They are convex – a slight upward bulge within them that spreads the water out. But I don’t think I’m looking at a deposition-formed alluvial fan. I think what is happening is that the seepage pattern concentrates long-term ground water along the bottom of the drainage and there plants grow thicker and taller. Their decomposing bodies form a mat of decomposing material the next year that is thicker than the shorter grasses to the side. This mat traps sediment and creates yet a thicker sponge along the central drainage of the basin. This spongy mat backs up and spreads the water farther to the side, allowing the mat to grow broader. This allows the tall thick plants to now colonize these new moister areas – and gradually an alluvial fan-like shape grows within the bottom of the drainage, spreading the runoff over a much broader area. The mat shape is similar to an alluvial fan and has a similar feedback effect of spreading runoff out which leads to more deposition which builds the fan yet more. But a classic alluvial fan forms where the slope diminishes, water slows down and sediment drops out. This fan is where the ground along the basin bottom stays moist long enough to nourish thicker vegetation which initiates the feedback loop of spreading runoff out which leads to more deposition (and vegetative growth) which builds the fan yet more.

I’m starting to think of this shape, this structure, as like a glacier. Under the right conditions, it can form, grow, expand. And as it expands, I’m starting to think that it can extend down the channel like an advancing glacier. So I’m thinking that rather than seeing the lower channels with terraces on either side “filling in”, what might occur is an advance of vegetative “fans” moving down all the side drainages until they converge and overwhelm the main drainage, forming an even greater “fan.” The terraces would then be explained as the remains of this valley fan which have since, like glaciers after the Ice Age, all eroded (receded) back up into their  headwaters.

This is a hypothesis. It’s changing the way I look at the land. One of the reasons I am drawn to the particulars of this work/play is because I find that the particulars can be mined as productive analogies for understanding the world. This hypothesis is way too hypothetical for me to even think of mining yet. But I am enjoying observing.

I write about how Downward Spirals can be reversed to become Upward Spirals. However, this reversal is not like reversing a movie. In the opening scene of my movie, The Upward Spiral, I contrast blocks being built up to form a tower with the reversed footage of that block tower being knocked down. Though on the surface, they appear the same (“blocks lying on the ground rise to form a tower”), the Upward Spiral operates differently from the dynamics of a downward spiral. It’s not the same process in reverse. It’s something different. That’s why I find it so fascinating.

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Email me at paul@chrysalischarterschool.com if you would like to be on my Cairns email list. Also, hearing the thoughts and responses of others helps deepen and extend my thoughts.

Back issues of Cairns and my movie, The Upward Spiral, along with other things can be found at my website: www.krafel.net     (Until late March, this URL won’t work. Instead, you will have to go to www.chrysalischarterschool.com and follow the links to the teachers and then to my webpage.)

© 2010, Paul Krafel, 18080 Brincat Manor, Cottonwood, CA 96022
Permission is granted to copy and distribute (for free) this material as long as you attach this copyright notice and my addresses so that a future reader can track down the source.

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