Wild Things: Adventures of a Grassroots Environmentalist

By Donna Matrazzo

"Wild Things is the amazing tale of Donna Matrazzo's coming of age as a grassroots activist and a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of Portland, Oregon's renowned greenspaces movement by somebody who was there from the start. It is a wonderful story that will inspire a new generation of activists, wherever they may live, to get involved and protect the wild things and wild places that surround them."
-Bob Sallinger, Conservation Director, Audubon Society of Portland

The planet needs more friends like Donna Matrazzo and it needs more books like this one, which remind us that were all quite capable of making big and useful change.
Bill McKibben, author, The End of Nature

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595629299

Donna Matrazzo

Donna Matrazzo is a science, environmental and history writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications, on PBS and the Discovery Channel, and in national park visitor centers and museums around the country. She has lived on Sauvie Island for 20 years. View her website at www.donnamatrazzo.com

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CONTENTS

Prologue

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

Epilogue

Appendix

Prologue

There were no woods on Wood Street, where I grew up. Nor any birds. Just one block of sooty homes, choked between the railroad tracks and the steel mill. Houses were so close together that if Mom shook the dust mop too far out the hallway window, it was in Mary Mihalko’s living room.

From my home now on Sauvie Island, I look out the kitchen window to my own woods, three quarters of an acre. I felt compelled to honor them with a name: Trillium Woods, for the three-petaled wildflowers that bloom by the hundreds each spring. Baking Christmas cookies, I fling open the window to catch the whistling of tundra swans as they fly overhead toward the lake.

Jutting beyond the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, Sauvie is an alluvial isle about the same size and shape as Manhattan. Sparsely-settled farmland graces the southern half. The 12,000 acres of the northern half are protected as a wildlife area by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Population count: approximately 445 families and 312 species of wildlife.

I had no idea that when I began to see wild things, really see, that they would take over my life. Not just that I would spend every spare moment hiking, kayaking or bicycling to their wild places. Or knock out my office walls and fill them with windows.

But when the wild things became threatened, I was drawn, or thrust (I’m still not sure which) into the vortex of raging conservation battles. In the challenge of keeping Sauvie Island unchanged, I’ve changed: I’ve grown wings of my own.

Over these years I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know hundreds of grassroots environmentalists. Our story, I realized, is all the same: First comes a deep passion of place. Then the courage to speak up when that place becomes threatened. Then change, and all that change enables.

A friend told me this is a book about empowerment.

I think it’s simply about learning how to see.

PART 1

A PASSION OF PLACE

Chapter 1

Four-Mountain Mornings

Out of my driveway I turn northwest, the silhouette of my bicycle pedaling beside me down the narrow country road. To the right, the horizon wears a ruffle of snow-capped Cascade mountains; nearer, along the left, the island and river channel are framed by the velvety folds of the thousand-foot Tualatins. Most mornings I ride the same six miles then back, been doing it for years, every day a different journey. Past migrant workers weeding strawberry fields, past the sign pointing to long-since-gone Fort Williams, past a woman jogging in mango tights, past the cedar barn tipping on its last beams, past plume-bobbing quail scurrying into bushes, past a yellow school bus of surprised faces pressed against dusty windows. I grin and wave.

It’s with childlike glee that I allow myself these morning rides, because my childhood was not one of play. For the eldest of four, daughter of a diabetic mother and strict Italian father, Saturdays were not times of leisurely amusement, searching for polliwogs in a pond or admiring the intricate pattern of a butterfly’s wings. Instead, they were spent in the gloomy basement with Mom, feeding laundry through the wringer washer, never far from terror that my fingers would be caught and crushed. Our neighborhood had no parks or playgrounds or streams or flowers. I don’t recall ever noticing a bird.

Four miles of pedaling pass, then five. Then I hear them. That marvelous joyful trilling, like a class of exuberant French birds learning how to roll their r’s. Rar-r-r-o-o-o. Rar-r-r-o-o-o. Sandhill cranes, on their spring migration to the Arctic. They’re my favorite of all the birds that come to the island, and I squint against the horizon to spot them.

No matter, I know they’re there. I pull over to the side and take out my binoculars. Cranes are hard to distinguish in the tall, matted dry grasses, but as they come into view I gasp aloud. In my walks and on my rides around the island, I’ve seen as many as 55 sandhills at one time. Here, slowly scanning left to right, I count a total of 198.

The sun outlines the long, elegant curve of their backs, these stately silver-grey birds with the brilliant red crown. I watch as some of them walk, necks extended, feet plodding slowly forward like water-filled boots, so unlike their grace in the air. Most of them peck at the earth, digging for earthworms or beetles, tossing dirt aside with their beaks, shoveling holes that nearly bury their heads. When a V of Canada geese fly overhead, they look up. Two standing side by side in a seasonal pond preen themselves, fluffing backfeathers with their bills. Four stand at the far end, sentinels, watching.

They’re facing northwest, the direction of their summer home in the Arctic, breeding ground for millions of birds. I imagine their flight that brought them to our island today, probably from northern California, following the sparse string of lakes that are all that remain of the disappearing Pacific Flyway.

Three cranes soar in for a landing, their seven-foot wings outstretched. When they near the earth, they pull back, feet out and forward, and gracefully touch down. I watch awhile, but work beckons, so I pedal on. Less than a mile down the road I hear more trilling and see another large flock. This count: 139. I straddle the bicycle, not wanting to stay too long, and catch something out of the corner of my binoculars. Focusing, I realize it’s a coyote—the first I’ve seen on the island—walking around the perimeter of the cranes, staking out a meal.

The earth of Sauvie is nothing like the dirt of Braddock, Pennsylvania. That was mill dust. Grit, really. By this hour on a spring morning, windows opened, I could wipe my palm across the stove and it would be covered with the soot that clung to every surface in town. The mill released clouds that darkened the sky, and Braddock’s air would land on me, shiny black particles caught in the soft hairs of my arm, making my skin prickle. Dirt means work, people would say, as though it were the town’s motto. I associated the monstrous blast furnace with death, the early deaths of both my immigrant grandfathers whom I never knew, the horrid leukemias of my uncle and cousin, the man my millworker father saw sliced in half. I always knew I would leave. Where, I had no idea.

As spring edges into summer the landscape is increasingly dotted with seasonal lakes and ponds. Before the first dike was built in the 1920s, the island—bordered on the east by the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, and on the west by the Multnomah Channel of the Willamette—flooded every year in early summer, and sometimes again later. These lowlands then were wild meadows, full of wapato beds and wildflowers like the lovely, star-shaped violet camas. Native Americans ate the bulbs of both, the women harvesting the wapato with their toes probing down in the mud. Now I watch as these small bodies of water spread across domesticated fields.

Near the end of the road, where pavement turns to dirt, mud nests of cliff swallows encircle the four paned windows of a grey pumphouse. I count 11 nests, and more must be under the cement walkway for I watch scores of the graceful buffy-rumped birds zip in and out from beneath it. Fearlessly they swoop low over me, with their mesmerizing zigzag flight. Zip, to the left. Zip-zip, to the right, mouths gaping, scooping insects, up to 6,000 a day. Rather than flapping their wings up and down, they glide in breaststroke fashion; I think of them as swallowing the air.

Blue skies like this morning’s always startle me, because I lived the first decades of my life without ever seeing one. In Braddock the skies were shaded a poisonous brownish stew; snow was never white; nights were without stars. Here the dazzling sapphire of the earth’s ceiling still seems to me almost unbelievable, like an amateur painter’s improbable view of how beautiful the world could be.

Passing thickets on a dead end road, I stop to marvel at the panorama of the Cascades—the nearly perfect cone of 11,200 foot Mount Hood, next to it Mount Adams, more than a thousand feet higher, and then Mount St. Helens, its snowy crater since the 1980 eruption like a giant’s helping of vanilla ice cream with a scoop removed. On such brilliantly clear days Mount Rainier outside Seattle is visible, nearly 200 miles distant. A white-haired woman bicycles past me, wearing a pink sweatshirt decorated with her grandchildren’s names. Beautiful morning, isn’t it? I call out.

Yep, she smiles in response, It’s a four-mountain morning!

Foggy days roll in with autumn. Riding along, it’s impossible to tell where the pilings enter the water. They seem suspended above the shore’s green grass, like O’Keeffe’s skulls above the desert. Fog shrouds buildings and drifts off the water. I hear geese overhead, coming closer. Finally two Vs appear, then vanish in the soft grey air. Sometimes the fog lifts and settles in different places, like an angora blanket moved from bed to bed. Mountains appear and disappear. There is a feeling of romance, of timelessness, traveling over an ocean of clouds. In low fog, trees seem to grow out of the mist.

Bird shows abound; I can’t distinguish them except to say they’re LBBs—little brown birds. I look up to see a chocolate fireworks of 500 or more birds, flapping their wings in a round shooting cloud. It’s over in a few seconds, and they scatter and disappear. Then two groups of about 200 birds each waltz with each other, gracefully swooping and blending, then separating. They land, then all take off again in a repeat performance. In the distance, thousands of birds fly off in perfect unison, swooping together as if to land, then suddenly soaring upward.

Who in Braddock would ever have thought of watching birds, even if there had been any to see? Hiking? Canoeing? Wonderful things a chubby, bespectacled girl could read about in library books were unimaginable in real life, too far beyond the realm of muscled steelworkers, struggling to feed families impoverished from the paycheckless months of union strikes, when even savings bonds from the children’s baptisms had to be turned in for cash. As I ventured off on my own—to my family’s bewilderment—I sought out people who showed me woods and whitewater, and glimpses of the wild things. More and more fascinated, or merely emerging from a cocoon of experiential deprivation, by small increments over the years I was drawn to wildness, inexorably pulled westward in a search I hardly realized I was making for a place where I might belong.

Through autumn’s gentle rains, not unpleasant, I pedaled contentedly in the soft flapping of my bright yellow poncho. Winter rains are different, hard and pelting, driven by fierce headwinds. Tree branches swing wildly, grasses bend sideways from the wind’s force. It’s hunting season, and men in camouflage clothes pass me in pickups and Broncos. I hear the dull thwap of gunshots, then the sound of air moving in great masses, hundreds of waterfowl lifting off, rising from the wild lands, winging their way toward me.

Along the shore I spot a flash of blue-gray, which I recognize as a belted kingfisher, chattering its rattley rickety, crick, crick, crick as it flies down the channel, hunting for small fish.

The belted kingfisher is almost comical-looking with a punk-rock-look double-peaked crest of blue feathers on its large head. From it protrudes a long, dagger-type bill, over a stocky body with short legs and small feet.

Curious, I looked up their story in one of my now-favorite books, Audubon’s 1,100-page Encyclopedia of North American Birds, and immediately developed a fetish about the kingfisher’s feet. A distinguishing feature of kingfishers is syndactylous toes—the outer toes are fused for part of their length to the middle toe. This oddity makes them a relative of some of the world’s most charmingly named birds: the Tody family of the Greater Antilles, the Rollers of the East Indies, the Bee-eaters of Africa, the Hoopoe family of Eurasia, and the Motmots of South America.

As winter deepens, temperatures drop, and steel gray ponds speckle the landscape. One morning, 22 degrees, a biting chill snaps at my face and a film of ice crystals covers my gloves. Ice on the road crackles beneath my tires and I pedal carefully, listening as redwing blackbirds whistle their cheery song.

When the daffodils open their blooms, the sandhill cranes return to the same field, the cliff swallows to the same windows of the pumphouse. The sun, the stars, the earth’s magnetic field, the smells, the lay of the land instinctively guide them to this place. What, I wonder, is the path of my own flyway? What instinct drew me here? Years ago I stood sobbing on the Mediterranean shore of Santa Eufemia in southern Italy, overwhelmed that my grandmother left the beauty of le montagne and le mare for the filth and frigid dreariness of Braddock, never once to return. Yet I felt an inkling of understanding, that perhaps somehow I’d inherited an innate desire for water and mountains, for a place with wild things. The first time Mom came to visit Sauvie Island she looked at my life and said, I don’t know how a daughter of mine could have turned out so different. But I can see you belong here.

Chapter 2

The Bald Eagle Watch

At 34 degrees Fahrenheit the February chill feels arctic as we shiver in the parking lot beneath the bridge. Illuminated by the island’s only street lamp, Portland Audubon trip leader Mike Houck, his thick black hair unruly at this predawn hour, is already center stage.

Okay, this bus will leave at 6:30 sharp, so let’s start loading up, he intones over the chattering conversations and door slams, heading the bundled crowd toward an off-duty school bus. Forty-two people pile in, toddlers to retirees, dressed unstylishly like me in anything to keep warm: two pair of socks, bunting sweater, hooded rainproof jacket, ear-warmers and two pair of gloves. All except my friend Carolyn Lee. Ever the artist, she’s decked out in gold tights, fur-trimmed white boots and a gold-buckled forest green jacket.

At precisely 6:32 the bus drives off. When everyone’s settled, Houck balances himself next to the driver and revs his performance into gear. Okay, how many of you have never seen a bald eagle? he yells over the rattling motor. Nearly half raise their hands.

My intimacy with the outdoors began with groups like this. At age 22, I’d eked out a journalism degree from Duquesne University through three scholarships, a loan and two jobs, and settled into a city apartment in the Shadyside section of Pittsburgh with my best friend from high school. Downstairs lived a woman who was a member of the Appalachian Trail Club, and she invited a circle of friends to spend a weekend in a cabin along the trail. It sounded like a party. Instead, I took my first hike, and fell asleep in front of the fireplace.

I hiked all weekend, and felt the kind of fascinating disorientation of a northerner first looking at the southern hemisphere’s night sky. There are stars above, but you immediately recognize they’re not the ones you’ve been seeing all your life. I had never walked a distance on anything soft. Hiking down a dip to a stream, I was startled by the drop in temperature, and the way the entire atmosphere seemed to transform. The perfume of a pink flower stopped me in my tracks. Just being in the woods seemed glorious, although I had no idea what anything was called besides Tree, Flower, Rock, Bird.

It’s still dark as we unload, snug yet from the bus’ warmth, standing in overgrown grass three yards from the road. Houck begins his spiel: