Milford Sound: Gertrude Valley

ultratransparent spring water rippling in superabundant sunshine, surrounded by flowery grass scattered with orchids, beech trees dripping with moss, ferns, and mushrooms. Vast walls of marble, quartz, and granite extend huge arms across the sky, making a bowl, and we sit like sapient specks of dust in the center. We walk on a vast field of rocks that have fallen from these raw heights and come to rest in this exact spot, where the foot falls. The nuclear furnace around which we orbit clocks its solstice path and catches the ragged edge of the ridges and marks out valley-marching shadows the path weave in and out of, the disc of the sun sparkling along the battlements. At the top, a waterfall over bare, shattered rock, dashing into a stream overpowering in its purity, mist washing over skin hot from the long, scratchy climb.


A Quick Note on Quicksand:

Clambering through paths of mud and roots, vegetation leaning in all around us, finding my first quicksand -- really, a sort of pudding with enough sand to hold up a seemingly stable surface, butt soft like a custard and quite deep (this one about a foot deep, enough to easily suck your shoe right off). Poking it with my walking stick, it wiggled like jello setting in the fridge. Almost an organism in its own right, a tricky fairy to keep the unwary from venturing too far into woods they're not prepared to deal with.

Global Warming Mis-Adventure: Fox Glacier

as ice transitions to water, as the seas warm

the unstable moraine, the gravel and rocks riven from the valley's walls that fall from the ice as it melts, that makes up the uppermost semi-solid surface, is constantly undermined both by the increasing glacier melt and denser rainfall, condensed from the vapors of warm carbonated oceans.

And so instead of how it was when Billy and I visited in 2003, as a quiet walk through rain forest
emerging into a mind-bending view of the face of the glacier, towering beautiful above its ground-out valley,

the rains
that have been pattering n the campervan roof, forcing the constant donning and un-donning of jackets, profoundly de-stabilized the sides of the valley into huge landslides in the days before we arrived, rendering the whole (apparently essential) task of getting the tourists within view of the glacier into a skull-crushing swarm of orange machinery, steel blades cutting into the vast curves of gravel the glacier left so subtly, back-hoes scooping, pirhouetting and releasing their jaws into dump-trucks like over grown child's toys, struggling to organize a glacier's death throes. In spite of all this Mad Max effort a huge swath of collapsed gravel still lies across the path. The great glacier looms far off, blocked by signs and the sheer impossibility of maintaining something so enduring as a road in such a deeply unstable situation, and I wonder if this isn't an echo of times to come. The real wonder is the sheer number of people who come here, to glimpse its demise - the swarm of sudden interest, vulture eyes. Will all of out natural wonders have such a last flash of interest, will they have to generate such fireworks?

I my orange jacket I felt like a clown at a funeral, feeling way too happy for the occasion. In the milky, ashy, roaring water draining away from the glacier we could actually see chunks of ice, floating away to the sea.

Once I learned to view it from inside the disaster, it was, really, quite funny, in a sad and spectacular kind of way.

New Zealand: Trees, vines, ferns, moss, fungi, lichen, water, and stone

Every time I enter a rain forest and see its extraordinary abundance of life forms I feel lifted by a sense of gratitude for being able to apprehend so much life, all at once. So many stories, so much delicate geometry, intricate, growing and evomving before my eyes. The tree pushes up, the vine climbing the trunk, stretching a coarse matrix of hairy roots across the bark, which is already densely decorated by competing webs of colored lichen. Moss grows in the root-hairs, storiing water in its spongy bulk that the vine (and all the plants who grow embedded in the moss) uses to grow when it isn't raining, and then the densifying moss becomes a sort of aerial soil for ferns, other species of moss, orchids, countless plants small to large, and even more trees, creating this three-dimensional filling of space with roiling, intermixing, growing life. I could spend a lifetime studying just one of these trees and understand less than 1% of what's going on. Over and over, we fall for the forms, the trolls, fairies, our attempt to understand the complex by anthropomorphization, hovering over an amazing, tiny fungus as the other hikers blow right through. Amanda has an amazing eye for even tiny mushrooms; we bought a guide, and now we have already eaten two species...

Aboriginal Australia, a few words.

Aboriginal Australia

Back when Neanderthals still ruled Europe, and our bead-making Cro-magnon ancestors were just arriving from Africa, the first aborigines were arriving in Australia in their dugout canoes. Their culture survived fifty thousand years, including the last ice age, making it by far the oldest continuous human culture on the planet, and consequently the most sustainable by any reasonable definition.

They lived on the hottest, dryest, and flattest landscape on earth, and they seem to have been the most peaceful civilization the planet has known, with little evidence of organized conflict of any kind. This didn't serve them well when the British arrived, who treated them literally like animals (under colonial law, the native aborigines were considered part of the "flora and fauna" of the land, the property of the landowner), and what happened next was atrocious even by American standards. 'Nuff said.

Their culture is based around the concept of Dreamtime, that the world is created by the dreams of all its creatures, with great respect accorded to every living thing, and a strong sense of the eternal present -- in contrast to our western notion of progress, which may or may not be compatible with actual long-term sustainability.

An extreme beach of grandeur

Whaririki Beach

There are lying-on-a-blanket beaches, beachcombing beaches, and swimming beaches, and then there are the rare beaches like Whaririki which enrapture with majestic vastness , the scuptural opera of sea, wind, stone, life, and sand dancing together for eons. The western edge of NZ has been experiencing massive uplift over the last few million years, and as the ocean cut into this rising stone it formed great cliffs that back every west coast beach, generating cubic miles of sand that is lashed by wind, cemented by spray, then carved by wind again into a tapestry of organic patterns that extend unbroken for square miles between dreadnoughts of rock made of flowforms of wind and sea, arches and swoops, towering like great castles, their feet blanketed by mussels, seaweed, and myriad tidal creatures (including anemones that, when closed, look like shiny cabernet grapes but feel pillowy and soft when touched), crowned by exotic hanging gardens of windswept tea trees, alpine flowers, and palms.

After experiencing the beach, we climbed up to explore the edges of the cliffs that line the coast, the brilliant expanse of empty space over the Antarctic ocean on one side, on the other a Suess-y picture of grassy pasture dense with sheep shit, festooned with comically exotic palms and gnarled tea trees. Ridiculous views in every direction. Constant gale-force winds threatensssss to push us off at any moment. We duck over a lip of a hill and find a calm, warm pocket of air where we can rest for a moment, eat a couple of oranges and take in the glory. Swallows hurtle overhead, twist and dive over the treed cliffs below. A day like no other, under the stark brilliance of ozone-free sunshine.