Focus: Love of nature, music inspire river guide

Skamokawa resident Andrew Emlen is a man of many passions. A natural curiosity and a need for variety takes him in several different directions. Sometimes so much so, that he finds he needs to edit activities in his life, like a writer trims her stories.

First and foremost, he is a naturalist.

“Natural history is my thing,” Emlen said. “I’m interested in all wildlife but I’ve probably been the most focused on birds. My dad taught me the basics when they came to the yard when I was a kid.”

“I joined an Explorer Post through the Boy Scouts,” he added. “I got to play in the woods as a kid and I think part of what set me on my path is that none of those places still exist. It was semi-rural, and now it is all filled in with suburbia. What I think of as the home where I grew up is not there any more, and it’s not what people picture when I say the name of the town.”

Emlen believes that it is not where a person comes from but where they choose to go and stay that defines them.

He has chosen to be in many places, but the farm he shares with his wife, Audrey Petterson, and their two sons in Skamokawa is where he chooses to stay.

There is an orchard there and a small garden. Skamokawa Creek flows through, and Emlen has created paths everywhere. It’s beautiful and lush and peaceful.

The fruit trees lead to a story and Emlen loves stories.

“I like fruit trees,” he said. “I graft them, I prune them. Once word got out then I ended up pruning for other people too. I’m trying to keep that from becoming a side career. I was excited to have all this space to plant things and graft things but I found as a kayak guide, I couldn’t keep up with the mowing.”

This is when the character of the Townsend vole makes his entrance.

“Townsend’s voles are like voles on steroids,” Emlen said. “They live in the tall grass. They took advantage of the cover to go up to the base of all my fruit trees and kill them.”

He put guards around the trees but it was all for naught. The voles crawled underneath, destroying even a favorite tree that stood nearly 10 feet tall.

Ever the problem solver, Emlen considered his options. Getting rid of the tall grass would deter the voles.

“I thought about goats,” he said, “but you really can’t have an orchard and goats. They like the trees better than the grass.”

That’s when he found Black Welsh Mountain sheep and made a friend who would eventually become his business partner.

“I haven’t lost a single tree since I got the sheep,” Emlen said.

The Black Welsh Mountain sheep are a primitive breed, according to Emlen, who has become well versed in the subject. They are used to a similar climate and they don’t get hoof rot.

“They were bred as the King’s mutton,” he said. “Even an older sheep tastes like lamb. I think there were about 600 of them in North America when I got them. It’s triple that now.”

He became a breeder for the association, and the benefits are many. The sheep keep his grass trimmed, which keeps the voles away from his trees, and he gets to sell the lambs every year for a small profit.

“They are the perfect kayak guide breed,” he laughed. “They don’t need help lambing. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and find two more were born during the night. They are good livestock for someone who has other things to do.”

It was while researching the breed that he found a Skamokawa resident’s name on the list of breeders. With only 600 of the animals in the country, that was remarkable.

He made contact with the man, Mark Whitaker, and they became friends and eventually partners in a kayaking business, Columbia River Kayaking.

Along with the orchard and his sheep, there are gourds for the purple martins, boxes for swallows and a bat house. Emlen and Petterson have 11 acres in the Conservation Reserve Program. They are paid and a habitat is created for wildlife from the land most recently used for agriculture. Work has been done to shade the stream for salmon and eventually it will provide some woody debris for their habitat.

“We qualified for the program all around,” Emlen said. “This is a good place to come when the salmon are running. I’ve measured some spawners after they died. I found one that was 47 inches.”

“Carcasses are important for the next generation of salmon,” he continued. “They lay their eggs here and the young feed on the insects that feed on the nutrients from the carcasses.”

The habitat has already improved. The silt bottom of the stream has been flushed out and now the cobbles are visible in the clear water.

It was his interest in the natural world and cultural history that got him his first job as a kayak guide in Skamokawa. A few years ago, another partner, Ginni Callahan, invited him to help guide a natural history tour on the Sea of Cortez for Sea Kayak Baja Mexico each March. This year marks his third trip to the area.

The Road Scholar Program also keeps him busy at Columbia River Kayaking. Kayaking the Lower Columbia River is one of the highest ranked adventures in the program, for which Emlen and his partners take a lot of pride.

“The nice thing is you are on the river,” Emlen said. “It’s changing throughout the seasons and you’re with different people each time. It’s new to most of them. If it’s not new, they chose to come back. The participants are excited about it, they come to have a good time, and they generally do. It’s nice to work with people who are excited to be out there with you.

“I don’t know how the traffic cops do it,” he paused. “Everyone you meet is not happy to see you. Luckily I have a job which is what other people do on their vacation.”

Emlen graduated from Whitman with a major in art and a minor in Spanish before eventually going on to get a masters in environmental studies at the New Jersey School of Conservation at Montclair State University.

“The cello paid a lot of my way,” he said of Whitman.

Natural world, check. Music next.

“The scholarship required that I play in the orchestra and any other group as well as take lessons,” Emlen said. “I was in the Whitman Quartet, and I played for all the operas that Whitman produced. La Boheme, Carmen, Die Fledermaus. I played in three operas before I ever saw one. You can’t see them from the pit, you know.”

Classical music is great, but Emlen admits he is a folk musician at heart.

He started playing the cello when he was nine. He took a break after college, but he’s back at it now. He is also proficient with the guitar, the mandocello, the banjo, the fiddle and the piano. When he lived in Astoria, a neighbor gave him a mountain dulcimer.

“I worked on a salmon tender in Alaska right out of high school,” Emlen remembered. It’s not really a place you want to take a cello along. But the skipper had a guitar and he taught me how to play. When I was studying in Mexico one semester, I scoured the markets of Guadalajara for a guitar and bargained for half an hour because I didn’t have much money.”

“Some years I played it more than the cello,” he said. “It’s relaxing. You can sit back with a guitar. You can sing.”

Try singing while playing the cello. Emlen will tell you it’s hard. Really hard. Fortunately there is little call for it.

He got his mandocello on ebay after “trolling” for one for months.

“Some craftsman started it,” Emlen laughed. “And then I think he must have died or something. Someone else decided to finish it. The connection for the strap is an eyebolt straight from the hardware store. The bridge is funky and made from aluminum. It doesn’t even have a big enough hole to have two C strings like it should.”

Emlen gave a brief history of the instrument.

“The mandocello was invented in the 1890s,” he said. “There was a mandolin craze in the US spurred by Italian Americans, so they developed all these mandolin orchestras that played light dance music. The mandola was invented to play the viola parts and the mandocello was invented to play the cello parts.”

He figured that he would have no trouble playing the instrument. He had developed his right hand playing the guitar and done as much or more for his left hand playing the cello.

He was right.

Learning to play the piano was a completely different challenge. His left hand had always played the melodies. On the piano he would have to use his right hand. He also learned to read a treble clef.

Emlen loves music and will listen to most anything, though if pressed, he draws the line at death metal.

His biggest musical influence is Yo-Yo Ma.

“Maybe that sounds trite,” he said, “because everybody that likes cello likes Yo-Yo Ma. It’s because the guy is good. He’s not just good, he has played multiple genres and worked with everyone from Chinese instrumentalists, to the top bluegrass players in the country to Bobby McFerrin. If I were in the same place I’d be doing the same thing, just not as well.”

The move to Skamokawa allowed Emlen to pick and choose the kind of music he wanted to be involved in making. Prior to that he only hoped he might be invited.

These days, he’s much sought after and has played the cello for albums produced by several local musicians.

He has been in several bands including Willapa Hills, which had a 12 year run. More recently, he’s a member of the Skamokawa Swamp Opera along with Erik Friend, Jillian Raye and Kyleen Austin.

Emlen also enjoys arranging music. Austin is a trained opera singer, and Emlen arranged a set of pieces for a concert which she performed with him and pianist Kathleen Peterson.

Last year, Emlen and a friend, Rex Ziak, traveled to Florida to perform a show about Mozart. Ziak spoke while Emlen performed several pieces on his cello. They were never called back for a repeat performance, but Emlen took advantage of the trip to spend some time in nature looking at local flora and fauna. Mostly birds.

“I saw a Wood stork,” he said happily, “and a lot of other things I hadn’t seen before. I saw Limpkins. They kind of walk funny and have a long curved bill and eat snails. They live in swamps. Cool things that we don’t have here. There aren’t enough giant snails for them to eat here.”

“That’s what I like to do when I go to new places,” Emlen said. “I look for birds and frogs or whatever the place has to offer, starting with the wildlife. If I’m there long enough I’ll get to plants and mushrooms or whatever else. If I had to pick a favorite passion it would be that, natural history in general. Wildlife.”

He spoke of hard wiring, how the fear of spiders or snakes in some parts of the world can keep people safe.

“That wasn’t part of my wiring,” Emlen said. “My first love as a child was animals. I was off playing in the woods and bringing home salamanders and things like that and keeping them for a couple days and letting them go again. That was my thing. That and I would draw pictures of animals.”

His thoughts returned to the Road Scholar Program.

“If people see that you are passionate about something they will show some interest too,” Emlen said. “It’s nice to have music as part of the program because you can lecture about a place all you want and people will learn about it intellectually, but if you sing a song about the place, that affects them on another level and they really get a feeling for the place.”

Fortunately for Wahkiakum County, Emlen is passionate about many things. Much of the stories, the science and the songs are place-based. It is a place he chose to stay. A place that defines him as he defines it for others.

"That's a chestnut sided warbler,' a friend once told me while we were walking," Emlen remembered. "It says ‘Pleased, pleased, pleased to meet you.'"

Like I'm going to learn every twitter out here, he thought.

"And then she pointed out another one.

“The same chestnut sided warbler was in that same bush every morning as I walked to teach my classes,” he said. “As other things migrated in, I noticed the new sounds. I think being a musician helps with that, especially one where you have to develop an ear, like the cello. There's no fret. You have to get your finger in the right place by ear. If you are attuned to that, its easier to hear the difference between the different bird songs. You can spend a lot less time looking around if you are just listening."

“It's just a way of being aware, wherever I am. I learned them all by their calls.”