Nature, Culture and Conflict in the Changing West
CHAPTER ONE ~ The Range ofLight The superficial inducernent, the exotic, the picturesque has an effect only on the foreigner. To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives motives of one who travels into the past instead of into the distance. A native's book about his city will always be related to memoirs; the writer has not spent his childhood there in vain. Walter Benjarnin, 1990 Little Deer Creek slips off the northwest slope of 3,8gg-foot Banner Mountain, gathering a trickle of light snow and rain on its journey to the sea. Dipping down through a transition zone forest, its waters are cooled in the shade of ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, incense cedar, black oak, madrone, manzanita, and ceanothus. Spring brings the glorious bloorn of the do~vood, only to see the white petals beaten to the ground with a late April rain. Deep in the shadows where the sun rarely shines, the snow lingers longer to water an occasional big-leafed maple. A brilliant explosion of color COllIes with the fall. Black oaks turn orange and yellow against the mixed greens of the conifers, while the bark of the madrone and man zanita glow a deep reddish bro,vn against the red clay of the earth. The lllaple leaves stand out with the burnt red ofa New England autumn, conjuring up visions of I-Ienry David l'horeau and Walden Pond deep in the Sierra woods. The white leaf rnanzanita leaves hold their gray-green reflectance through the winter as the leaves of Quercus kellogii (black oak) turn brown and drop to the ground.
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