A Story in Two Parts: One. The Arboretum
This two part series contrasts two landscapes, the an Arboretum at a community college, and the wild expanse of Glacier National Park. I explore concepts of nature, wilderness, and human interaction with the environment. Through a personal narrative woven with ecological and historical insights, I reflect upon the cultivated serenity of the Arboretum and the sublime wilderness of Glacier National Park touching on the complexity of these landscapes as sites of beauty, history, and conflict. Through visits with family and solo explorations, I contemplate the ways in which these spaces are experienced, perceived, and valued differently by visitors, highlighting the interplay between personal experience and broader environmental and cultural narratives. This series is as a meditation on the role of human activity in shaping natural landscapes, and the power within landscapes to shape and define the human. It is my belief that we must continually find new ways to understand, define, and experience the world around us.
The Arboretum at Flathead Valley Community College
The Arboretum
It is early morning on a particularly cold and lifeless day in November when I visit the Flathead Valley Community College’s Arboretum. As I drive the familiar road at a familiar hour, I am brought back to my years at FVCC and the bright beacons of welcome that the artificial light pouring from the buildings created during the cold winter months of early classes. I pull onto Grandview Drive at the light off Highway 93 N and then left into parking lot F, situated between the new Nursing and Health Sciences building to the West, The Childcare Center to the South, and the new College Center to the NE bordering the Arboretum. I graduated from FVCC in 2013, and despite the growth and change on the campus, it still creates a sense of safety and home for me, an oasis of academic thought.
A raven welcomes us to FVCC Arboretum
There are three of us, my daughter and the daughters of my daughter, three generations of wildness, and it is the first time any of us have been to the Arboretum grounds. With a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old in accompaniment, I’m reminded of the difficulties and lack of freedom that motherhood brings in the early years. But as we are walking down the trail toward the trees, Roma (3) is speaking about the adventure as if she is an explorer ready to take on new trails and experiences, walking head held high and answering back to the raven flying overhead and to the trees whose voice only she can hear. I’m reminded of the other ways of seeing the world that a child gifts to anyone who notices. We have brought lunch and snacks, a thick blanket for ground sitting, and are armed with mittens, hats, and warm winter boots, and when we enter the grounds of the Arboretum, I am taken aback by how vast 7 acres can feel.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.”
― Mary Oliver
There are wide open spaces of frozen grass between tall Ponderosa Pines, and as we move further in, the raven’s call becomes more insistent as it flies overhead to the East. I leave the three for a bit as I follow the call and find that the arboretum is bordered to the East by the Stillwater River. I slide down slippery dew and frost-covered grass to stand at the river’s edge and watch my breath hang in the air above the moving body of the river. The raven sits atop a Ponderosa on the other side, calling continuously as if describing the life of this place to me. There are a few people: a couple walking hand in hand, a woman carrying pieces of apple into the trails, I watch them pass, spend some more time amongst the trail that follows the river, and then turn to meet back up with the girls, the two smallest of which have been running with ecstatic joy and laughter in the wide open spaces beneath long cinnamon brown trunks with the canopy far out of reach.
We start our exploration in earnest; when I’m with my girls, I use the words “noticing” and “listening” as ways to stop and engage our senses with our surroundings. Roma is so familiar with these that she will stop and say, “Let’s do a listen! What do you hear?” “Let’s notice! What do you see?” We find Cleaver, Windswept Broom Moss, Smooth Brome, Marasmiaceae mushrooms, spotted knapweed, Nodding thistle, Kinnikinic, Sweet Wormwood, and Yarrow on the forest floor. We listen to the sound of the cars on the highway, and to the occasional interruption by the raven. We notice the ways that the moss covers the many jagged tree stumps left from fallen trees and the ways that mushrooms dance in fairy-like formations near visible roots. The Arboretum was designed and created in 1997 by the Montana Native Plants Society to recreate the Palouse Prairies Habitat of NW Montana. Palouse prairie habitat is traditionally thought of as being found in Washington, some parts of Idaho, and Oregon, but lesser known is that the montane regions in NW Montana are also Palouse terrain.
I notice that while beautiful (and I imagine even more so in the spring and summer), it is evident that it is a cultivated space, perfect for short breaks between long classes. The spacing of the trees looks wide and deliberate. I think about the ways in which forests can sometimes feel confining, almost claustrophobic. I have hiked in locations that have left me longing for a glimpse of sky due to the close spacing of the trees and the interconnection of the canopy. The spacing of these trees allows for breath and sky both. I see only Ponderosa Pine and many of those with blue-painted bands around their bodies. The bands are likely markings for trees that are, like Ponderosa all over the Flathead Valley, succumbing to a widespread infestation by the Western Pine Beetle. FVCC has created a citizen science project to track the infestation throughout the valley. In the Summer of 2022, the Flathead experienced a storm of record-setting severity; all the windows in my home were broken on the South facing side by hail the size of the palm of my hand, and valley-wide trees were damaged, as were roofs, windows, and cars. The aftermath has been a boon for roofers and auto body repair, but for the Ponderosa Pine, the damage was enough to cause the tree’s “immune systems” to fail, allowing for a takeover of the beetle. There are no signs to mark the arboretum trails, to name plant species, or boundaries, and the webpage is ridiculously unhelpful, but it does state that there is an interpretive guide on Wednesday evenings in June.
Roma “helps” me over logs, shoulders held high. Dahlia nurses as her mom carries her, one blonde head turned toward sustenance and safety, the other tipped toward the treetops. I photograph the three along with plants and trails and ravens and sky. Ariel sighs and repeats how grateful she is, expressing her love of the trees, the sky, the air, and the trails in a way that only a mother confined by her most beloved beings can express. We see apple pieces set atop rotting logs and get “lost” a few times in the trees. The wind is cold, and our cheeks are red; lunch is a hurried and chaotic event. I think about the cultivated nature of this space, about the lives of the plants and animals that inhabit it alongside a campus full of humans partaking in cultivated knowledge just a few feet away. I think about the ease of accessibility, the ways that those who cannot escape to places farther away can come and breathe, the ways that the Palouse is disappearing, and the way that there is so little knowledge or notice of the arboretum, even though I attended the campus for 4 years, I didn’t know it existed. I am simultaneously in love with the space and at the same time left with a feeling of an emptiness I can’t quite name. Something is missing, and maybe that “thing” is Spring. But maybe it is the sense of the artificial, of confining wild things to tame places, of attempts at recreating a landscape the way a painter brushes her canvas, and I wonder why I might feel differently about this than I do about my garden or the maples that line the boulevard and I realize that I have assigned designations to certain species–this one wild, this one tame–and that I’ve assigned those same designations to different geographic locations. It feels lonely and confined, as if my body wants miles instead of acres. I reflect on the way that my daughter is experiencing it in a wildly different way than I am, and I recognize the importance of green spaces, free of charge, easily accessible, and with some semblance of “natural.” It is through visiting this space that I begin to think about William Cronon, Donna Haraway, Anna L. Tsing, Chaia Heller, and others who have contributed to the body of literature that holds other ways of seeing and defining nature. It is this visit in November that informs much of my journaled experience that I had in September in a much “wilder” space (Part Two Here)
