INFINITE PENINSULA
The official launch of a full-fledged newsletter!
The time has come. Welcome to a deeper exploration. This is the official launch of Infinite Peninsula!
In my Substack dispatches you will learn the tools of attention carried by a naturalist-spy. You will follow the adventures of an explorer—tracking bobcats, scaling bluffs, seeking big trees—who believes that the deeper your knowledge of your home landscape, the more powerful your stories.
Join me. I am a nature guide, land steward and award-winning essayist writing about a semirural peninsula in the South Salish Sea. For four generations my family’s been here surrounded by forests, beaches, farms, wetlands, homesteads, clearcuts, rotting fifth wheels. A land of edges and fragmentation, loaded with rich interlocking life forms.
Sound familiar? There is no need to drive to wilderness areas to sink into all that is wild. What I write could be many places: what is real, now, surrounding us in Cascadia. How do forests speak their histories? How do animals create their worlds? And who am I? What is shifting, and what can I do?
My Substack comes roughly twice a month. Read on for more of what to expect. The About page is here. At this page you can choose to receive my monthly pieces for the Key Peninsula News (for those not local enough to get a paper copy).
Your subscription helps me keep going. Thank you.
To give you an idea, how about a few scenes from my neck of the woods:
Along this endless bushwhack I’ll carry several ongoing storylines. There is the dam removal on a neighbor’s land to restore salmon to a pristine forested canyon. In the neighboring uplands there is The Bald, a clearcut I managed to purchase and am working like a dog to reforest. Equally tangled is the fantasy-not-fantasy novel I’m writing. Across the peninsula, through my work for the local newspaper and as a naturalist-at-large, I have built a network of informants and landowners through whom I can enter many corners of the larger landscape.
I am drawn to those who are laboring against all odds to rewild the peninsula. The forests have been torn to shreds again and again, and long hot summers are making it harder for things to grow back. Yet joyful interpenetrating life yearns to fill every corner. It waits to be explored. In my writing, larger environmental storylines come home to roost.
All these explorations carry the hope, call it wild, that people can be “architects of abundance” (thanks Lyla June), that when we write-with our nonhuman neighbors we’ll not only enrich our surroundings but glean a sense of self something like the agates we hunt on the beaches around here: golden, a little milky, full of light.
My hope is that you will not just learn from this newsletter but feel what it is like to be out in the tangled world, shoulder-to-shoulder with our wild neighbors, working to care for our spaces and ourselves and abandon the machine.
That’s my daily life. It’s a practice. It’s pretty great.
You can expect my writing to be filled with:
Science: I draw on a deep base of knowledge and research from the scientific community. Every dispatch will be loaded with facts about the creatures around us—and all of it localized through the eyes of a hometown naturalist. I’ll demonstrate that discoveries can be made by regular folks paying attention and getting in the habit of wondering about things.
Adventure: In a land of 150-foot trees and unstable geology, where hidden worlds wait beneath hypothermic waves, it takes some doing to make those discoveries. There will be thrills and chills aplenty.
History: The past is here, an old bearded guy wreathed in coffee vapors. Part of my own past had me writing landscape histories, which taught me to embrace the half-stories told around town. This serves me well when I’m trying to piece together clues from elusive animals and rotting fencelines and old-timers (and their self-published books) and scars in the soil.
Poetry: I can’t stop trying to connect the dots. Knowing about critters is one thing, but to really be their neighbors we must feel them, intuit them. Finding our place means feeling out words and voices that call us forth from our manufactured lives. Infinite Peninsula is a spiritual pursuit.
Policy: I’ll get into specifics about policy in two senses. First is governmental policy and the rules it creates for land use. Second is in the sense of “good policy,” as in the tact we ought to carry as explorers, particularly as storytellers. Both are critical to navigating the political aspects of conservation.
Rambles: To call these explorations hikes or expeditions would be to confine them to pathways with starts and ends. It would put the focus on me. Catching a scent, I duck through a fence and head for the woods. A ramble isn’t exactly aimless but it’s freeform and reactionary and never complete, like a good novel. In my book, if you’re rambling you’re living it up.
So what about the name?
Let me tell you about the Key Peninsula. It’s sixteen miles long, rarely more than a few miles wide, home to 20,000 people and, like I said, patchy as all hell from one 10-acre property to the next. It’s impossible to generalize; I get whiplash moving between the beach shacks, tract homes, double-wides and artistic permitless burrows. Yet the general sensation is of tall Doug fir and redcedar forest, sword fern, huckleberry, marshes thick with salmonberry. Madronas lean from bluffs that crumble into cobble beaches. The word “picturesque” comes up a lot in old land promotion schemes; think of small communities on sheltered coves where sunlight bounces off the heads of seals.
“Do you see the key?” That’s an old question locals ask each other. They mean on the map, do you see the shape of a dangling key for which the peninsula was named (in a 1930s business-sponsored contest). I have yet to meet the person who will say sure, of course, it looks just like a key.
This newsletter is about a different kind of map and a different way of seeing. Scrap the satellite’s-eye view. This is a map built footstep by footstep at eye level; a map scratched, fluid, and unending. It’s a rooted map, situated in a particular stretch of the peninsula, in the generations to which I’m fated to be tied. It’s a map that embraces the imperfections of our perception and the scale of the human body and stretches the land to staggering, often disorienting, magnitudes. (Trees are a lot more impressive this way.)
So while Infinite Peninsula may seem an odd choice of name for someone who actively resists the terms of infinite expansiveness, it is the satellite’s-eye view that, in the end, puts our culture on the road to a finite view, where the world is a math problem and its parts interchangeable.
Sure, I can be good for some fiery lashing out at power-tech-development. I find myself tormented by the way the machine lurks behind the choices made by my neighbors. But I try to stay focused on the way animals live: context is everything, clues must be spied, you live where you live.
The name is an ode to Rebecca Solnit and her 2012 atlas of San Francisco, Infinite City, in which she writes of the millions of mental maps, each different, carried by the city’s residents. “San Francisco is small,” she writes. “[It is] vast not in territory but in imaginative possibility.”
There. That’s what this naturalist-spy is after: imaginative possibility.
Also, if we’re serious about a culture and relationship with nature that can renew itself generation after generation without exhaustion—true sustainability—then infinity is kind of what we’re talking.
It’s honest hard work, this planting, protecting, harvesting, preserving.
You’ll have to indulge me when I get that particular loopiness—body-tired and lost in an endless patch of invasive Scotch broom, launching rocks at stumps, knowing I’ve altered but a tiny swath of history and unable to do it all. Then turn with me to the towhee that pops in and out of this tangled mess, taking what it will, hiding its nest.
If it’s a way of being a conservationist, or heck, a revolutionary, it’s more akin to farmer knowledge than climate activism. Who doesn’t love talking to a farmer? Ramble with me and watch your speech become peppered with obscure critters and references to certain stages of the moon. Home cannot be bought. It must be earned. It’s as small as a pocket and infinite and all around us are wild guides who will offer clues about how to live, how our sweat and blood can be transfigured.
What will you get from my newsletter? Probably rewilding is a good enough word to be talisman. My newsletter will center on practical know-how about land conservation and reforestation and attention and adventure. As I draw the feeling of wilderness like a blanket across my impure and infected home peninsula, I hope to be freed to work and write with purpose and joy and even a kind of self-reliance. Rewilding. It’s a highly active, fraught way of living, with such wild joy it’s painful and such pain at the sight of a road-killed river otter (just last week) that you can only laugh, crazy as a loon.
In true Cascadian style we might just glimpse a “land without America” (Pablo Neruda); “seeming to approach from all directions” (Marianne Moore). There will be wolf trees and folks to gawk at them. Kelp crabs stalking eelgrass meadows. Nighthawks at nightfall. The naturalist-spy slipping from encounter to encounter, filled with madness, filled with wonder, deep in a human-scaled world, constantly aware of the lifespan of the trees.
Awesome! Excited to keep up on this newsletter.
Exited to have found your newsletter Chris! Really looking forward to hearing more about your landscape and everything it has to teach. Thank you for sharing it with us.