In case you missed it, May 8 Au Sable Institute celebrated Prairie Heritage Day. As in the five previous years, a beautiful light from our own special star warmed the many attendees as the great tome of the biosphere opened before us. The vignettes presented this year began off campus, in the morning, at three sites.
Martha and Steve Ellis made the 10,000-year-old-story of the Keystone Spit and Crockett Lake live, while shorebirds wheeled and sparrows sang, amid the rosy Sea Blush somehow thriving in the salt sprayed cobble. Meanwhile, Peter Dunwiddie read the book of Ebey’s Bluff as the bladder campion’s bulbous blooms nodded in the pungent, sweet sea breeze and a ghost gray northern harrier flowed towards the dry stream bed fracturing the verdant fields to deposit nesting material to a waiting mate. At the Ferry house, above the landing, Ranger Leigh Smith biographied the lives of the prairie people: the pioneers and their native antecedents.
At noon back at the campus, Vern and Karl Olsen’s joyous tunes tempted long haired maidens to waltz amid wildflowers in the meadow. A complimentary picnic consisted of dogs served hot by Coupe’s Last Stand, bags of the Bronson’s popcorn, liters of lemonade and the ice cream, well, was a perfect finish. The event was especially graced by the nevergenarian, “90 something” Mrs. Maureen Ryan who braved the uncertain terrain and brought her family too! “I wouldn’t have missed it!” She and her husband started Whidbey Island Audubon and have been stalwart proponents of environmental stewardship.
Following president/director Cal DeWitt’s never humorless homily, eager interest pursued the guides who led and read from the 180 acres which lay before us. They read chapter and verse of: the fir and elderberry; the not-so-common camuses, desert parsleys and bright blue Brodieae; the reproductive rows of Roemer’s fescue; the 300-strong future oak forest; the solar and Hertlein powered greenhouse; the grand Granary meetinghouse; the bibliophile’s snug Roost; the brooding Brooder Barn eager to germinate ideas and action.
It was all told that day, a story of creation, courage and creativity. A tale of how hope was planted five years and more ago, a thing with feathers which perches in the heart and whose deep roots tenaciously hold to the fertile soil of the soul. Thanks to all who came and served and testified to the beyond Pulitzer power of what was shared today.
Gary Piazzon
Coupeville
