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O'Neill Preserve:
1 Acre in
north Thurston County on Burns Point overlooking Totten
Inlet.
Donated in 1998. This
property contains large
second-growth maples and conifers, which provide habitat to
birds and other wildlife.
Notes from the Field:
O'Neill Easement
by Shelley Kirk Rudeen
(Issue 28 Winter 1999)
Wind roars through the trees and casts the last alder leaves loose
from their moorings. Sparrows escape pelting rain in the hedge leading
to Norma O'Neill's doorstep. She waits there with a smile and invites
us into the warmth of her home.
For the next half-hour our conversation ranges over many topics --
renewable energy, heirloom seeds, and her love of trees. It was this
love that brought Norma and her husband William to the Northwest more
than 25 years ago, after a military career spent mostly in the Orient.
They settled here on Burns Point, overlooking Totten Inlet.
The O'Neill's recently donated the small forested parcel next door,
to be protected by the Trust as a nature preserve. "Giving of
yourself and caring for each other -- that's what it's all
about," she muses. "And I want to look up there and see
those trees." Norma tells of a doe that wanders the woods with
twin fawns, one healthy, one frail. "When it rains, the mommy
deer stashes the stunted one beneath my eaves while she goes off to
eat." Norma keeps an eye on the little fawn while the doe is
away. It's another sign of her stewardship for the land, and desire to
leave something tangible for future generations.
I leave the warmth of indoors to explore the little nature
preserve. Less than one acre, at first glance it looks as though it
could be anywhere in the Northwest, easily overlooked for its small
size and familiar vegetation. It rambles over a hillside, clothed in
Douglas fir, salal, and Oregon grape. The trunks and branches of
Pacific madrone reach skyward, their sculpted, muscular forms
glistening in the rain. Bitter cherry, alder, and cedar add their
crowns to the canopy, and the twisted vines of honeysuckle clamber up
their trunks and over fallen logs.
I think ahead to summer, when hummingbirds will visit the orange,
trumpet-shaped blossoms. On this December day, as wind bullies the
treetops and rain washes the glossy leaves of twinflower, not even the
daredevil gulls are about. The only signs of animal life are small
holes and runways threading the duff beneath robust thickets of
evergreen huckleberry. Urged on by the storm, the forest sheds
needles, twigs and leaves, abandoning them to slow, life-nourishing
decay on the forest floor. I pick up a fir twig, fuzzy with the soft
green and gray forms of lichen growth. There are at least six
different kinds: ruffled and leafy; crustlike and clinging; whiskery
and branched. On this small twig in a tiny sanctuary, the lichens
exemplify the yin yang of the plant world -- a miraculous duality of
fungus and alga. The fungus provides form and attachment; the algae
creates food from sunlight. Lichens, common and diminutive just like
the nature preserve, are easily overlooked.
The wind rests briefly, revealing the voices of kinglets in the
high reaches of the firs -- little feathered monks chanting in
bell-like tones, offering a meditation on wind and cloud and rain. I
add my own meditation, a gratitude for the philosophy of land
stewardship embraced by the O'Neill's, and for their appreciation of
the small and familiar.
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