I became a forest steward less than a week after my dad died in his mountain home. Still in shock over his passing – though in his early 90s, he was so robust in mind and spirit it seemed he’d live forever – it would’ve been easy to skip a green cities orientation I’d signed up for in the community where I lived. I’ll show up for the first part, I promised myself, welcoming the distraction of PowerPoint slides and the enthusiasm of land conservancy leaders, who spoke about rejuvenating forests following the loss of trees and open spaces.
Clouds dipped on a late-March morning with no rain in sight. About 10 of us gathered in a general-purpose meeting room at the local YMCA community center. Leaders of the presentation, Charlie and Phil, showed us pictures of wilderness areas – western hemlock, Douglas firs, and western red cedar. It was terrain as familiar to me as the Cascade Mountain foothill where I’d grown up about a half hour away.
Charlie, who worked for the nonprofit that ran the green cities initiative, described the work of tending specific sites, whether forested boundaries or developed and neglected areas. Several cities in the Pacific Northwest participated in this partnership of agencies and private entities that collectively revitalized disparate forests to create a larger, more ecological whole.
In our community, Green Snoqualmie consisted of local government, the Snoqualmie Tribe, businesses, and a neighborhood association. The partnership advocated for acres of forested edges, parklands, and open spaces by giving them a chance to regenerate following development, urban growth, or other shifts and transformations.
My brother and I had grown up in a nearby forest returning to itself after logging and coal mining. Our driveway stretched into the forest and great-horned owls called to each other in spring and fall. Ken and I explored trails shaped by deer, loggers, and miners. When I rode horses on neighboring Cougar Mountain, my friends and I kept to the trails so we wouldn’t fall into the mine shafts. We rode in the mountains for hours without seeing anyone.
While I explored, Ken and Mom looked out for the forest, navigating every fern and trillium and Douglas fir on two acres that ended up adjacent to public lands. Mom wanted more sun for the garden through a trimmed branch here, a shifted sapling there. Ken wanted every plant to stay, even transplanting ubiquitous sword ferns. Dad and I weighed in on occasion. For the most part, we stayed neutral. With our love of books, Dad and I sometimes looked like the indoor people in the family. Quietly, and especially after he retired, Dad became more immersed in the landscape.
Charlie moved to a slide describing how his nonprofit set up restoration events in Washington state, primarily on the western side of the Cascades in cities like Seattle, Kent, and Issaquah. The Green Snoqualmie Partnership, formed in 2016, had a restoration and maintenance goal of rejuvenating 1,000 acres by the year 2037. One acre at a time, the nonprofit assessed landscape health in natural areas and parks, prioritized and planned events, and spread the word through websites, social media, local advocacy groups, and word-of-mouth to reach volunteers and recruit forest stewards to guide them.
Everyone in the room had been to at least one volunteer event in our community, which lie midway between Seattle to the west and the Cascade Mountains to the east. This gateway to the wilderness, which looked lush and healthy to the casual eye, revealed a lack of tree diversity and stressed plants, particularly in the vulnerable, often sunlit edges of parks and forested areas. As the ten of us were already familiar with the work, the hope was we would lead or co-lead events a few times a year as forest stewards.
In this buffer role between volunteers and the program administrators, we would help organize, teach, and motivate volunteers during work parties. Our tasks included what some called grubbing, or removing invasive species like invasive blackberry and ivy, along with establishing hardier plants and shrubs suited to more intense weather and in some cases, a lack of tree cover. In one of the more satisfying tasks, we’d surround the new plants with a moat of mulch.
We’d demonstrate weeding and planting and offer numerous tools along with multiple sizes of gloves, including tools and gloves sized for kids. From the start, we’d emphasize safety, always turning the shovels and pruners and rakes blade-side down near our worksite when not in use. We’d take at least one or two breaks during our 2 and 3-hour work sessions and encourage everyone to bring water, rain gear, and a hat. Depending on the event budget, we’d bring energy bars, oranges, and even pizza for larger occasions like Green Snoqualmie Day. We’d circulate the site to answer questions or demonstrate proper weed removal or planting and make sure everyone felt involved. We’d talk about the meaning of the work – an important step in the process, according to Phil, the city arborist. We’d remind volunteers that preserving a corner of the forest impacted both the immediate area and beyond.
After Charlie’s slideshow, participants stood up, stretched, poured more coffee, and grazed a selection of sugar and chocolate donuts. Lighted angled through the clouds and the conversation lulled. Between the presentation and the tour, I’d considered leaving and returning to my paperwork and logistics, the activities death requires. Maybe it wasn’t a good time to join the green cities group on a short hike. Maybe I should’ve stayed home and tended to the garden of my own mind.
I followed the group outdoors and into the light clouds anyway. An extra half-hour wouldn’t take long, I reasoned. Unsure whether I knew enough to be a forest steward and distracted by loss, I let the walk stretch my legs and postpone any decision-making. The group headed uphill toward the woods and a neighborhood bog I’d yet to explore. The air held the pungent-earth smell I remembered from springtime at home.
A residential street, quiet on this Saturday morning, was lined with homes on one side, second-growth forest on another. In this transition following winter storms – we’d had a lot of snow that winter – the breeze stilled. Having fallen a few steps behind, I listened for Phil’s footsteps and watched for the cap he wore. He nearly eluded all of us by slipping into a trail between the trees. Someone spotted his dark green wool vest before he blended into the woods altogether. We followed Phil through the Douglas firs and hemlock to a clearing and a wetland, which had a small platform at one end. I’d heard high school kids used it to smoke – we all had our reasons for being there. Phil showed us natural, healthy-looking cattails, ferns, and other vegetation at the core of the bog. Using the site as an example, he described the stages green cities provide, not unlike the stages following grief, for forest rejuvenation, recovery, and maintenance.
We found the pathway from the bog and made our way back through the conifers. Along the way, Phil pointed out different kinds of blackberries on the forested perimeter, from the tri-leaved native trailing variety to the spikier five-leaved, invasive Himalayan. “This is something we’ll look for in our work parties,” he said. Salal lined the openings in the trees along with holly-like Oregon grape and a smattering of innocent-looking purple flowers on light-green stems that Phil called Stinky Bob.
“We’ll teach you all of this,” Phil said. “You don’t have to know all the plants.”
It was a relief to hear I didn’t have to be as knowledgeable as an arborist, although some of the plants remained in memory from years before, like the Oregon grape and its dark blue berries and the fierce tartness of wild huckleberries. The bleeding hearts curving in dark purple for summer. The three-starred trillium emerging each April that Ken used to count in the hundreds behind our house. I searched under the ferns for a few of these striking, three-petaled white flowers, a sure marker of spring and happier times. At the tail end of March, it was still too early.
Our group circled the wetland, one of many tucked-away enclaves the partnership cared for. While I assumed most of the forest stewards and volunteers would be local, Green Snoqualmie volunteers came not only from the immediate community, but also from bigger cities like Seattle. Phil would later tell me that the Green Seattle initiative was so popular, they had to turn people away. Other volunteers came from far-flung states to serve in national nonprofits like AmeriCorps. Reasons for volunteering were as varied as the areas they came from. Some came in service of other environmental nonprofits. Others served as part of company initiatives in work-party events that would grow in popularity. Still others chose work parties near their favorite trailheads or in the neighborhoods where they lived. Some regional volunteers were inspired both to serve and experience the area’s natural beauty, some of them staying after the work party for a hike or a walk downtown along the boardwalk.
“I’ve volunteered at a few events,” said one of the forest steward orientation participants, a man in his thirties.
“Same here,” I said. My first restoration event had been in the woods at the base of Snoqualmie Point Park, which was both close to home and a popular trailhead. Hiking with friends or my dog Theo, I’d passed through this boundary between park and forest land countless times. Who knew the western hemlocks lining the base of Rattlesnake Mountain could use additional mulch and shrubs to keep invasive plants at bay, and moisture and shade in place?
We’d come full circle around the bog by now. My mind drifted toward the growing patches of blue sky and the question of whether I’d be willing to lead a few of these events each year, to take my turn minding the landscape I so readily explored.
At the end of the circle, Phil spotted the white flowers of some budding chokeberry.
“You can eat these,” he said and plucked some of the white flowers from the shrub. Our group of six admired them and Phil picked some more. He popped a few into his mouth and set the rest of them into our cupped hands. Enough blossoms remained on the vines to become berries later. The tiny, early blooms made a tart reward, enticing us to stay.
Weeks later, at my first restoration event, I snapped a Himalayan blackberry vine thick as my thumb. Coaxed with a shovel, its root ball broke free in a shower of dirt. I tossed the vine on a bed of branches raised a few feet above the ground to prevent the vine from taking root again. Our small work party included a plant expert who worked for the City of Snoqualmie, a teen running for student government at the local high school, and a professional in his thirties who loved the area and its intersection of farms, forest, and high-density neighborhoods.
Our job for the next two hours was pulling and piling blackberry. The Himalayan, an invasive plant reaching the Pacific Northwest in 1945 and now barely held at bay, can grow 20-40 feet long and up to 15-feet high, forming thickets that overrun wildlife habitat and impede hiking. Culling it was a first step before planting species like wild currant and shore pine – drought-hardy natives well suited to a forest bordering a grassy park and neighboring houses.
By the time my brother and I were in college, the lands adjacent to our childhood home had been purchased and preserved as wilderness areas by county and state agencies. After Mom died in the mid-1990s, Dad navigated his two acres and next-door forest, the two so intertwined you couldn’t tell the difference, by leaving it alone most of the time. On occasion, he pitched in to help it. Like his annual job of culling the plant Phil called Stinky Bob.
Along a steep-sided ravine, my husband, John, had helped Dad perform this chore several years ago.
“Is this the right plant?” John asked, holding a pink flowered-stem in one hand, a purple flower – maybe a bleeding heart – in the other. It was a warm spring day, yet recent rains made the soil pliable for weeding and removing invasive plants.
“The pink one,” Dad told him, indicating the clover-like blossom before turning back to his own steep section of the ravine that towered over the creek of my childhood.
Halfway through my own work party, I uprooted a strand of a trailing blackberry, the native plant with a frosted purple stem and gentler thorns, by mistake. No harm done with this hardy plant. I poked its root back into the soil in hopes it would regenerate and remembered the tart berries I picked with my brother, mom, and grandma in southwestern Washington on lands disturbed from logging – an area, like so many others, now in recovery after years of misuse.
Dad, in his own way, had been tending the mountain all along, especially later in life. After every windstorm, he’d clear the steep-sided culverts lining the driveway of branches and debris, ensuring stormwater water flowed unimpeded through the vegetation and rocks along the way. Aiding the mountain in its role as a natural sponge.
One afternoon, a county worker stopped her truck when she saw my dad, who was already tall, half hidden in a deep ditch. “What’d she say?” I asked Dad when he told me this story, uncertain how receptive he might’ve been to a stranger’s advice. I was just as doubtful a county worker would consider a 90-year-old working in a deep, roadside culvert a great idea. I pictured the worker asking him what he was doing in the best scenario and telling him to stop in the worst.
“She started helping,” Dad smiled. It was an excellent outcome for all, including the water source. Caring for this section of forest helped water percolate down the mountain to area rivers, lakes, and Puget Sound, its purity impacting salmon, orcas, and numerous species in between. I pictured Dad and the county worker, each wearing gloves and combing through the debris, making their own small ditch-side platform of branches to return back to grass and leaves and soil.
Partway through our morning work party, a squirrel scolded a hiker on the trail. Chickadee song joined with muffled voices from the playground. From past hikes and friends’ accounts, there were frequent deer and occasional bears on this mountain, all of whom benefitted from the undeveloped woods and farmlands. By now, the sweet spot for trillium had passed and soon the purple bleeding heart would make its appearance from feathery pale-green leaves.
With every glimpse of sun breaking through the clouds, the park grew busier with parents taking kids to play on the swings or individuals walking their dogs on the trail. Many times, I’d brought our dog Theo and wandered through the woods on this unused gem of a trail with a flourish of pink wild currant in spring and flashes of blue-feathered, black-crested Steller’s jays year-round.
“I’m running for class president,” said the teen in our group. From previous events, I knew he was putting in volunteer hours to help with high school initiatives in addition to this campaign for office. He pulled up a blackberry stem and added it to our growing pile.
“I need a slogan,” the teen added.
The tower of blackberry branches grew to about half the teen’s height. While our stem and root pile represented a singular blackberry platform, some of the larger restoration events, like Green Snoqualmie Day, would include several of these towering formations. Now that I knew what Himalayan Blackberry looked like, it was hard to stop seeing it alongside freeways or on more rural roadways. Every effort, large or small, helped, I reminded myself.
Our restoration group agreed to brainstorm slogan ideas. All of us – the arborist, the professional, and I shared our two cents, from straightforward to cringe-worthy. I don’t remember exactly what we came up with; something like “Alex for All,” or “Serving Mt. Si Wildcats and Wild Places.”
The teen, whose maturity belied his age, gave all our suggestions thoughtful consideration. He took this branding exercise as seriously as he did the task at our feet, and I wondered if our work here would follow him into the future like the mountain I grew up on kept catching up with me.
“I’m ready for a change at my job,” the urban professional told us.
I listened along with the rest of the volunteers. In the short time we’d spent together, our work had shaped us into a small community, one built on varied experiences. Digging deeper into the soil, into ourselves, a relationship with place born from hikes or simply passing through became more deeply rooted.
Several residents smiled or chatted with us on their way to other outdoor activities. “Thank you,” said a hiker with his dog. “Thank you for doing this,” said a woman prepared to run the trail. Thank you, they said of our restoration event’s goal to temper the reach of the blackberry and rejuvenate this place. Dad’s mountain, hidden by the ridge we worked on, was out of sight but no less cared for.
By the end of two hours, we wore scratches on our arms from thorns biting through our long sleeves and pants. We decided a vine maple or two could be planted in the new ground we’d uncovered, or maybe some green-leaved, white-berried snowberry. The potted plants provided by the land conservancy group waited for their new home. We shared our two cents on the teen’s campaign slogans, chatted with the professional about his work, told the horticulturist which native varieties we’d like to plant here in fall. Piles of blackberry vine rested on two platforms like burial mounds, left to return to the soil through weather and time.
