An environmentalist at heart

Yesterday's op-ed piece in the Statesman Appeal is a fine tribute to Timm, a bit odd to me, seems that Timm's part in the unfolding story of product safety legisilation was quite marginal - he had read about a chemical banned by the State of California and suggested to Hooley that she might consider it in the product safety legislation she was working on. His was the spark and whisper of an idea which took root further down the road, after he was gone. Yet I wonder the presence of any of us has more influence that that. History takes what little phosphor we lent to the world, holds it in its hands a brief while, then lets it go. It falls to us to sing - magnify, praise -- what light was there, especially in Timm's heart ...

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What strikes me again today (I write on Timm's laptop at 5 a.m., windows open to a breezy, mid-to-post-Tropical Fay night, the kittens Hugo and Belle just sprung from the guest bedroom where they spend the night - providing our Siamese Violet a little emotional elbow-room) is that Timm's heartland, his great wandering home, was nature. Timm was an environmentalist at heart. Nature was his element, his womb, his freedom and his nurture.

Anyone who spends a moment with Timm’s photos can see that he believed in the healing power of natural beauty. So it isn't surprising that Timm was deeply an environmentalist. Who doesn't live in Oregon who didn't deeply love and care for the world? Here in Florida, it's a much more difficult proposition for the environmentalist, for we have much pristine splendor yet it has been rapidly subsumed to development. Raped, perhaps. Fading, if not altogether gone.

When Timm lived here - back in the 1970's - Central Florida still had plenty of wilderness nooks not far from the boundaries of development. When we lived in Winter Haven, Timm (at aged 6 to 7) explored the edges of the orange groves which had been cut down for our housing development (about a mile from Cypress Gardens). His curiosity would get the better of him as he came home one afternoon limping and crying, both soles of his feet burned from jumping into the cinders of a trash fire located near the latest construction.

When he returned to Florida with Mom and Molly in the mid-70's, Timm explored further out. Mom and Molly say that Timm was gone most afternoons after school, fishing pole in hand. Central Florida is littered with lakes, several quite near their Glenridge Avenue home in Winter Park. One of Timm's favorite fishing spots he called "Bad Luck Shore", or something like that, named so for the day he cast a line out and managed to get a fishing lure hooked into his head. He also spent a lot of time canoeing on the lakes.

Perhaps foreshadowing his future as an environmentalist, Tim got involved with his school's Ecology Club. Here's a photo clipping that shows Timm with the club helping to collect and save aluminum cans for recycling:



When I was visiting Florida in December 1974, on break from my first year of college in Spokane, Washington, Timm was struggling over a grant proposal from Walt Disney World for his ecology club. I offered to help, and between us we knocked out a proposal that was good enough to get the award for the club. Here's a picture of Timm receiving the grant at a Disney function.


Note the pants leg creeping up and those big, big shoes. Timm was not an indoors kinda guy.

I think on those big feet and recall Timm in high school, 1980 or so: I had freshly relocated to Florida from Washington State (my westward heave having been completed), living with Mom and Timm at the Glenridge Ave. house. Timm was working at a local fish store and, unfortunately, wore the same big sneakers to work as to school. A classmate once startled up, saying “What’s that smell?” Timm slunk lower into his seat, his redolent big sneakers tucked under him.

Timm at aged 11 or so with his wilderness booty.

Timm apparently was as interested in native peoples as he was with nature. On April 18 I was down at Mom's with Molly as we were collecting ourselves after finding out about Timm's death; I was to fly out to Portland that night. Mom had produced a box of Timm keepsakes - all the stuff moms keep, report cards and school pictures and the like. In there was a collection of poems called "Tales of Old" which he had apparently written in junior high school. The cover had a crayon drawing of the title and some rustic scene of hills and forest and stick people. The poems (what I can recall of them) were tales of a native race that had long disappeared. The teacher had given Timm very high marks. Strangely, Timm writes on a page behind the title that he prefers not to be identified to his classmates as the author. Why the anonymity? Perhaps the fantasias he’d written were too intimate to be shared.

On Timm's laptop there is a folder of writings from 2007 titled "Aire Born," chapters of a book he apparently was trying to write. It's about a lost race of people called the Aire Born whom a lead character - Timm's fictional self, let's say -- comes into contact with as he canoes one day in the wild. Here's a passage from the opening chapter:

It was a beautiful summer morning when I put my canoe into Spirit Lake, high in the Oregon Cascades. The mist that had covered the surface at first light had now receded to the shadows that only inhabited the edges.

I had waited a long time for this moment, building elaborate visions that I would visit most nights while I lay in bed waiting for sleep to come. So quiet - so serene. Rising around the lake were four peaks - mostly at its northern end that reached up and touched the deep alpine blue sky. The ever-present clouds that punctuated the morning air just seemed to add to the mystique of the area.

I had first read about this lake in one of the many travel magazines that litter the breakroom at my office. The author spoke of an almost otherworldly, spiritual quality to the area that had drawn him year after year for the past two decades. Gazing at the photographs that graced the pages I felt strangely drawn to the area and knew I needed to go.

The canoe cut a soundless wake through the placid waters with the only noise coming from my paddle as I dipped it in and propelled my way across the lake. It didn't take long to make it to the end of the little inlet that I had launched into, turning into the main body of the lake that continued on for another two miles. Rising out of the water a little ways to my right was a surreal rock formation that was oddly distinct from those that surrounded it.

According to a guidebook I had found in a nearby bookstore, the lake was the product of the alternating volcanic and glacial forces of the past 20 million years. Volcanic eruptions that spewed both lava and rock were common in this region only to have their offerings redistributed by the migration of the many glaciers that marched down from the surrounding peaks. Rock would fill in the area - glaciers would push it down the valley. Sometime after the last glacier receded, water began to collect in the concave valley that was left. Around its edges the porous gray rock were piled in jumbled heaps waiting to be redistributed by the next eruption. All that i((was left was this)) this single outcropping.

As I drew closer I was amazed at the thirty-odd foot high length of rock that rose almost perpendicular to the water with just a slight curve towards the shore. As I ran my hand along its side the rock was cold but smooth unlike many of the other jagged rocks in the region. I pulled my boat back to take in its 200-foot length that seemed to snake through the water barely fifty feet from the shore.

Reaching into my rucksack that lay at my feet I pulled out the guidebook again, flipping it open to the section specific to the lake.

"On the eastern side of the lake rises perhaps the greatest enigma of the area - a 200-foot long rock out-cropping that early Native Americans referred to as the Dragon's Backbone due to the slight curve that left it looking like one half of a leviathan's ribcage."

Looking up I could see why they thought this. Slowly I began to turn my canoe away and continued the journey further down the lake. Off to my right _____ peak rose ____ feet to the sky and laid perfectly reflected in the lake. At one time I could see how it probably had come to a point but it now looked like a giant had taken a knife and cut off the top third, leaving what appeared to be a flat plateau on top. It wasn't more than a couple minutes later that the first breeze of the day ruffled the surface of the water shattering the mirror like quality and scattering ______'s reflection. ((Note: this writing was probably an early draft, maybe the only one; lots of misspellings and blanks in the copy.))

Suddenly my canoe seemed to strike something, almost throwing me from my seat, but when I looked over both sides I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. Puzzled I began to paddle again when once again I hit something, but this time it sounded more like someone had slapped the hull. I looked again on the right and saw nothing, but when I looked on the left I was startled by the face of a woman looking up at me. I sat up, shook my head as if trying to clear my vision and looked again. She was still there - right below the surface and looking up at me. Her hair was a light flaxen color with eyes that were deeper blue than the morning sky above. She was young - not more than twenty years old -- and ((appeared)) deeply sad.

As I stared at her I realized that I could also see the bottom of the lake through her, as if she were translucent. She began to try to speak but no sound broke the surface of the water. I reached out as if to touch her and when my hand seemed to pass right through her I felt a wave of dizziness well over me. I sat up again, shaking my head to clear it but the world around me just continued to spin. The last thing I remembered I was falling.

Thus begins the narrator's adventures among the Aire Borne, a legendary and somewhat magical primordial people who had almost disappeared from human time. It was an encounter that Timm obviously hoped for and believed in, somewhere out there deep in the wild, deepest down in his heart. All the years of wandering, all of his exploring, hiking, cycling, canoing: was Timm searching for a wilderness door to the Aire Borne, into his oldest and deepest nature? No wonder he was a fierce environmentalist; he didn't want to lose the door he might one day find.

All of us are aware how much fades into modernity; how much is lost. Like Timm, I share the belief that there are ways to creatively connect with that greater magnitude, to exhume its wonders as if from deep soil, to sing it loud and wild. For me, the deep wild is a shore where eternities meet, I and Thou, lover and beloved, mother and child, father and son, the isolate soul and the great uternine deep and ever-blue sky. Timm and I crossed paths along the way, rarely having a moment to speak, hurrying about similar tasks that kept us apart. Deep in our hearts I think we were twins, each looking over the other's shoulder for a lost other, a greater, more intimate communion. Mother Nature's children, as we all are, walking and wondering at the beauty of life, perhaps especially because we are bereaved of it all too soon.

But if we remember well, the green of those woods remains deep, virginal, clean, inviting – present.