Finding My Place

September 30, 2021

It has been a long time since I have dissolved into uncontrollable tears of grief. But last night, when I was watching a town hall about the sewer project – yes, a sewer project — that is going to go past us in the next few years, there I was. I couldn’t talk as I started dinner and my husband had to ask me what was wrong. It took me a few tries to push past the tears and give him some words of explanation.

“They’re going to take down the red cedars near the Connector,” I managed to utter eventually.

Okay, back up, way back. We moved to Redmond, Washington, in 2018. Since COVID arrived and the gym became a dangerous place, I have been walking for exercise and treasuring the places where I can do that in Redmond, especially along the Sammamish River, which is about 1000 steps from our apartment. If any of you trawled back through my Facebook posts over this time, you would find me discovering the birds, greeting the beaver (or perhaps river otter) from the bridge that crosses the Sammamish on the walk/bike path, along with the eagles, the heron(s?), the ducks and geese.

And, more recently, you would find my acquaintance with the trees.

Cut to Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist. I am surrounded, among Pacific Northwest Quakers, with mystical environmentalists. I was thus directed to Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, which I found extraordinarily beautiful and moving. I strongly encourage everyone who reads this blog to engage with her concept of gratitude as a relationship to all of the Living World. But here, I am going to draw on just one chapter of the book, the chapter on Mother Cedar (“Old-Growth Children”).

The Western Red Cedar was a central plant in the lives of native people in this area (Redmond land and streams have been used by humans for at least 14,000 years). According to Kimmerer, Mother Cedar provided bark for baskets, clothes, blankets, beds, and dishes. She provided water-resistant wood for canoes (along with the paddles, fishing floats, nets, ropes, arrows, and harpoons and the hat and capes worn by those in them). “Newborn babies were born into a nest of cedar fleece. Every part of the tree was used,” for tools, tinder, and medicine. Native Americans did not cut down Mother Cedar for these gifts. She provided many of them while she lived, including planks that could be removed from her outer covering while she survived. Natives waited for ecological forces to cause her natural death before using her wood for purposes such as the canoes.

So, I worked on recognizing Mother Cedar as I walked the woods of Redmond. And I found my Sister Cedars very close by – at the base of the entrance to the Sammamish River Trail that I walk just about daily. They are a cluster of four cedars, not ancient but probably 90 years old; they will not be “replaced,” as the sewer planners phrase it, quickly. There is a younger cousin nearby. They must have survived the earlier installation of the sewer under the trail, as well as the explosive recent growth of the City of Redmond itself.

Along with celebrating the birds and beavers, I have been treasuring the old trees that I meet along this path. Behind the Sisters are a line of towering black poplars and further north, Brother Sequoia, with an enormous redwood trunk and strong, sheltering limbs. I believe the sequoia and the poplars are not slated to be in the way of the sewer.

But my Sisters, according to the town hall last night, are on the execution block.

Did anyone invite them to the Town Hall?