First Place | Nonfiction Writing Contest

The Entanglement of Spring (Ex Tempore)

Vernal Equinox: Last night the moon flooded the backyard with a physical light. It hung a lunar laundry of strange shapes on the evergreens, covered the grass with a cold blue rug, then licked the windows clean with brightness.  Look at me, look at me, it said. At 4 am I give up and get out of bed. The neighbor’s cat appears at the backdoor, eager to get in. We change shifts. After rubbing on my legs, he leaps onto the bed, takes a spit bath, and curls up to sleep. The radio springs on, but I turn off the news, which is the same each hour, each decade. There’s nothing to do but put the coffee on the stove and listen. The juncos start first, with their bell-like churring, and at 5 am I hear the quiet husk of a robin’s phrasing.

There’s an old saying among cowboys, that the sun draws the cold out of the ground. As soon as the sun crests the ridge, the crepuscular rays, the ones that flick on like stage lights, light up the forest. The warm air rises, and my bare feet, as I walk the moss-filled front path, turn frigid. But it’s been steady rain all spring, and this clarity buoys the spirit, no matter how cold the ground. The sun hoists itself over the valley’s rim, due east at the equinox, it cups its face against the kitchen window. Pine and bamboo shadows fluoresce on the yellow walls. Today, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere, everyone on earth will have roughly same amount of daylight, the same amount of night. This year I will take spring’s measure the way chemists do, holding it up to the light in a beaker, stirring it with a glass rod. 

I walk my daily river loop—here in the Snoqualmie Valley, twenty miles east of Seattle—in reverse. On the paved trail through the marsh, with water on both sides of me, columns of mist twist and burn like cold flames. Thick fog drapes wraith-like around trees. My hands turn numb. The sun, like a silver eye, casts a dim glare through the haze. Freezing ground-clouds finger the throats of saplings, tongue the grasses and shrubs, and tiptoe across the water like mischievous children.  

Long before today, the “official” start of spring, the egg of winter broke open, cracked by song. Birds morph as the light lengthens. With twelve hours of daylight, they are frenzied, each a carnival barker on his own little soapbox. Sparrows, thrushes, and blackbirds broadcast through the mist, and riptides and currents concuss the trees like currents. I feel pulled inside out, my skin peeled, my ears blistered by song. Snow geese stab holes in the pale scrim above, their white bodies like jagged shreds of sky torn off and heading north. 

The Pacific coast lies beneath one of four flyways that slice up the continent. Waves of waterfowl, warblers, and other winged things steam overhead, from as far off as Patagonia, to their northern summering grounds. Thousands of sandhill cranes, Grus canadensis, take off from Mexico and Texas, touch down in eastern Washington, and continue north. As I write, birds flow over the Pantanal in South America through the jungles of Panama and Costa Rica, and then fan out like multi-hued blood cells along these four arterial routes. It’s not just birds on the move. Four to six billion dragonflies zigzag across Argentina, and twenty million Mexican free-tailed bats jitterbug from Mexico to Texas. Elsewhere, three and half trillion insects needle their way over southern England, and ten billion locusts helicopter across Africa and Israel. Spring is a continuous stampede; one doesn’t walk through it so much as one is trampled by it.  

Last month, as spring slid up the continent by degrees of latitude, the valley ruptured like a glass vessel. Warm rain blew in exhausted breaths on the mountains. When the snowmelt poured down the rivers, and the forests could hold no more, the marsh tried to absorb the remaining waters like a heart sucking blood. Water ran in jagged streaks across the adjacent campground like lightning. Campground became island, then charnel ground as insects and small mammals drowned. In low places, the water came over the tops of my knee-high rubber boots. I carried a frigid lump of rock in my pocket until it thawed into a frog, which tried to burrow a hole in my palm. When I got home and set it free, it rocketed off into the garden. 

But today I’m hidden inside a dry-ice morning, the moment spring officially arrives, I’m staring at the only color in the slough: a strip of fluorescent lime colored moss, like a signal path marking the end of winter’s dark runway. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about bird migration, and that’s how I stumbled upon what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Also known as quantum biology’s entanglement problem, “spooky action at a distance” is the ability of two separate particles to seemingly interact–to remain linked, despite being light years apart. A journalist explains: “If you observe a particle in one place, another particle, even light years away, will instantly change its properties, as if the two are connected by a mysterious communications channel.” This quantum entanglement is believed to be at play not just in bird migration, but in photosynthesis. 

Birds prove ultra-sensitive to earth’s magnetic field (so too for butterflies). Avian eyes have a chemical called cryptochrome, and when a photon of light enters a bird’s eye, it nudges a pair of molecules so one loses an electron to another, like jugglers sharing balls, and creates an “entangled” pair of electrons. The molecules oscillate between two chemical states, and the earth’s magnetic field triggers a bias of one chemical state over another, which orients the bird’s internal compass, much like we might turn unconsciously toward an attractive stranger in a crowd. 

By now flocks of migrating robins have already advanced through Kentucky, North Carolina, and as far north as Michigan, en-route to their summering grounds. Here robins, sharp-eyed and suspicious, cavort everywhere: they pull and stretch worms out of the ground, fight with their reflections in windows, scatter through shrubbery like buckshot when I walk by. 

The newborn leaves along the trail harvest light photons with nearly 100% efficiency, losing nothing to heat. The instantaneous transfer of light energy into sugars is made possible by this same spooky action: entangled electrons working in femtoseconds, or millions of a billionth of a second, to find the quickest path from the plant’s light gathering cells to where photons turn into energy. I’m reminded of Whitman, who said the poet places himself where the future becomes present. Entangled particles can exist in two places at once and as two states: as a particle and as a wave, much like we can be of two minds. 

Spooky action, a manifestation of the invisible threads of the universe’s tapestry, whose sub-molecular presences push and pull on the warp and weft of our lives, exemplifies how the known leads to more unknown, for quantum physics doesn’t fit neatly inside current theory built on Einstein’s work: they are two sides of one card, the Joker. We live tangled and knotted up with fickle-hearted flocks of electrons that come saltating, to twirl us around earth’s dance floor. No wonder my heart feels like a spinning plate.

Early evening, late March, Carnation Farm: The planet’s tilt tips open the season like a cup of wine spilling, the blood of spring draining into summer, even as Earth moves farther away from the sun. The sun’s god-rays spill and pool on residual floodwaters, and the western sky becomes a scarlet smudge. In the eastern sky, clouds pile up along the mountains like a restless herd of elephants. The cols on the distant mountains light up; the peaks’ denticulated folds resemble a granite curtain drawn shut to obscure the vanishing point.  I pull over at the empty flower stand where 100th Street crosses the valley, and look down its length. The road slivers down a rise, dips underwater, and comes up the other side a quarter mile away at a horse farm. An eagle appears as a dark slash in the kaleidoscope sky, and the distance between her wingtips diminishes then lengthens as she circles. The sun sets into the world, and the world, reflected and wavering upside down in the water, undulates like seaweed: kine-dotted fields, the sparkling brown river, dark spears of trees like silent armies on the hillsides. 

A parked car faces where the road disappears underwater. A canoe, paddled by a young boy, rides over the submerged road towards the car. A woman gets out of the driver’s seat and beams a welcome like a lighthouse to the boy. The boy takes infinite delight in this perverse upside-down world under his feet as he paddles towards his mother to take her home. 

As I marvel at the road underwater, at the landscape reflected upside down, I think about our planet’s velocity: why can’t we feel the earth hurtling through space, on a dizzy path clocking 67,000 miles per hour? Why can’t I feel the wind blowing my hair back, my ears flattening against my head, my scarf choking me, and why is the boy on the boat not blown off course, his boat reduced to splinters? 

But these are macro, or winter things, to think about; spring is about the micro: quantum physics feels around parts of the elephant universe, finding this part or that to be like a trunk, or a leg, or a tusk, but doesn’t quite know how everything acts as a whole. We put out blind feelers, then run experiments, come to new conclusions, add to our wrinkled and massive body of knowledge about what the universe is like. The universe, for its part, winks its eye, bats its eyelashes at us, tosses its head. We’re like a tick in an elephant’s hide. Embedded, we can’t quite see above or around the edges, and what we do see looks implausible, or spooky. 

Early April. At 5:00 am the Towhee starts up, wheee? wheee? from the willow thicket. At first light the knocking of woodpeckers sounds like a competition of hope or regret. The drilling has a rhythm that trails off at the end like someone unsure of themselves, but is really a territorial display, different from the rhythm used for searching out grubs in tree boles. Some folks dangle long mylar streamers to discourage them from wood siding, but the birds ascend to the metal chimneys to peck out a Frostian Morse code: whose chimney this is, I think I know. The clever birds, like magnets, take to any available metal. Yesterday I walked past a sapsucker who sat on the wooden post of a 25-mph sign. Every few seconds he drilled on the sign, then stopped, peered around the metal edge looking for rivals, then drilled again. When I walked the river loop this morning, a Pileated woodpecker—all red triangle head and foot-long body—ratcheted up the trunk of a cottonwood using his tail as a brace, and concussed the tree with blows, as if willing the sap to rise. 

A haze of green crowns the maples and alders along the river. The hillsides explode in fireworks of pink then white: cherries, wild apples, plums, and magnolias burst forth, then dogwoods. On the four-block stretch at the back of town the cherry trees have combusted and look wreathed in pink smoke. On the river loop, escaped daffodils leave sparks  along the path, their color plastic, unnatural. On the river bars, when I press my face against the fresh heart-shaped cottonwood leaves, and they smell of honey. 

During the day light stretches and lengthens like a bronze thread. Hummingbirds—those little organic helicopters—whir and flit through the wine-colored flowering currant, and punctuate the air with a syntax that stutters and starts. At home, a blowsy rain spatters the windows, and when next I walk the trail is littered with giant catkins of the big leafed maples, their caterpillar-green leaves emerging like folded up origami bats.  

Above the campground on the forested bench of moraine, the sharp smell of blood hangs in the air, as if the river has been at some rough labor. By the Tolt, I strip off my shirt and contemplate the rush of snowmelt, and instead put my feet in. The sharp scent of blood mixes with pollen and the smell of thousands of cottonwoods and shrubs releasing, releasing…

It’s April 11 and the Osprey is back. When I first see the fish hawk, he’s sitting upright on the nest closest to the trail. He has a rich chocolate back, a snowy chest and head, with a dark eye stripe. His upper mandible curves down into a sharp hook, as if he could tear open the sky’s envelope. Tense and coiled, he looks carved out of a twisted piece of driftwood. 

I’ve seen him catch fish: he plunges towards the water, then folds head and feet together at the last moment, a feathered dart from the Oligocene, and pierces the river’s skin. He emerges all silver and blood, aligns a fish in his talons so the head faces forward, then sails back to the nest. To see the osprey do this is to realize that they’ve known about aerodynamics for millions of years. Like all Accipiters—eagles, broad winged hawks, kites—he punctures prey with sharp talons, keeping the biting parts away from his head and face, until the prey hangs limp. 

Seven springs have come and gone since I first started watching this pair: the male arrives first, the female second. We have two weeks of rain, with intermittent sun breaks; the woods and nest waterlogged. I wonder if he regrets leaving Central America so soon. I wonder what he thinks, sitting in the cold rain night after night. Like eagles, the osprey mates for life when it can, and a pair will often have several nests in their territory, and will use one or the other, depending on how deteriorated each has become. This pair had two nests, each on a light pole at the middle school track, spaced several hundred feet apart, but a windstorm recently blew one apart. The current nest, reinforced each year, has become large and deep enough for a human to sit in. It has so much accumulated debris that a large thatch of grass is growing out of it.  

The fossil record shows that ospreys date from the Tertiary period of the Cenozoic era, 33.9 to 23 million years ago, long before the first Homo habilus wandered in Olduvai Gorge. This makes the osprey older by millions of years than our own species. 

A week later and his mate still hasn’t shown up. Today I hear him first, his sharp high cheerp, cheerp, cheerp, before I spot him. Then his calls issue from the trees over by the river, as if the cottonwoods suddenly had voice. I read that the osprey is a medicine bird, and to see one in a dream is a sign you have spiritual powers. The night visions I have are spectral, but don’t contain ospreys: last night I dreamed of refrigerator-sized penguins and owls, spaced throughout an arctic shoreline, all facing north. 

We have a day, and a night of rain. The showers hiss on newborn leaves and the coppered spears of ferns. Sunlight shatters the clouds, then they roll in again like boulders. At night the rain makes tapping sounds down the drainpipes, like a blind man with a cane. 

Finally, on my daily ramble, she’s arrived. At first, I don’t see her, just him on the nest. He watches the middle school kids below him run around the track as they howl resistance; they resemble an agitated mass of hormonal bees. The osprey takes off, and on stiff pointed wings, sails in wide arcs between two poles. I lose his arc through the trees, but when he alights on the nest again, suddenly she’s there. They cheerp together, then both take off for the river. Later in the day, I take a walk to the river, and on my return, the male hovers over the female’s back, touches down to mate, then sits beside her again, keening. I was hoping to see him do the fish dance, or the stick dance. That’s when the male, holding a stick or a fish in his talons, will rise up and dive, rise up and dive, then gently hover himself into position back on the nest. This kind of wild love, which isn’t love at all but a fierce morphic resonance, ripples all the way to the basalt cliffs behind us. By Mother’s Day, she will be brooding eggs. 

April 20th: This morning, I step outside the backdoor while still coming out of the fog of sleep. As I lean down to scratch the cat, I see a large, dark blob hanging from the side of a pot used for growing lettuce. The dark brown mass slowly expands like bread dough; I run inside and snatch my glasses. It’s two slugs intertwined, hanging off the planter by a thick band of mucous; the slime grows and stretches like a slow-motion waterfall. I held a piece of bark underneath them until they came to rest, then put them on the ground. I put on the coffee, and when I checked on the slugs, they had untwined. One of them was on its way to wherever it is leopard slugs go, while the other remained on the bark, so I brought it inside to the kitchen table, and set it down to draw it. 

Slugs are hermaphroditic, meaning they don’t need another slug to reproduce, however, even slugs desire to exchange genes now and then. Before mating, they eat each other’s slime, and after mating, gnaw off their own penises. They can store sperm for weeks, and when they are ready, will produce twenty translucent eggs, tiny as a peppercorn. I touch a finger to the slug’s head, and its antennas retract just like someone pulling their arm back through a jacket sleeve while holding the end of the sleeve in their hand. After shrinking down to a nub, each antenna leaves a small indent at the end, like a miniature cup with which to hold a quarter-breath of spring.

May 3rd: For the past week, Venus appears as an amber jewel on dusk’s cerulean breast, just like in winter, but now the sky’s limelight at dusk reveals a vernal tint. The weather folks tell me spring occurs from March 1 to June 1. They chop the year into neat quarters, like an apple, but it really begins earlier, despite how meteorologists define it.  In the Pacific Northwest, plants bloom all temperate winter: a vanilla plant in November, a tea plant by the back fence in December, and hellebores push up mauve and cream flowers by the front walk on New Year’s Eve. Spring never truly ends; embedded as it is in fall and winter; now it flows like a faucet turned on high. Birdsong rises, sap whooshes up trees, and catkins rain down as plants turn inside out and burst open, leaf-fists turn into palms, then hands. As much as I crave warmer days, I’m not ready for this riot of star-fire and green-leafed flood, not ready to leave winter’s dispause, the cave of northern dark, that incubator of thought. Is this what a denning bear feels like when hunger pushes her outside? 

My consolation prize for being bulldozed by spring is that the Swainsons thrushes will soon arrive. Thrushes, like all songbirds, have a double syrinx, not a larynx, so they can actually sing two notes at the same time. They literally sing in harmony with themselves. Furtive, secretive, they hide their spotted bird bodies inside the trees. At dusk, their haunting, fluted song pours out of the trees in upward spirals, as if the trees were singing themselves to sleep.

Today, between the porch eves and a post hangs a spiderweb the size of a small plate, with water droplets strung along each silken strand. The drops hang like notes on a staff, each droplet a small mirror of the world around it. As the hours advance, the droplets dry and evaporate during the long slow morning. It feels as if the web is like a liminal porthole—now closing–to a parallel universe, or an eye winking shut. 

Over in the Hawaiian islands, spring arrives with a vengeance: a long seam tears open the Pu’uo’o crater on Kilauea, on the big island of Hawaii, and hot magma pours out. Volcanoes National Park closes. Plumes of ash rise tens of thousands of feet into the sky like oiled clouds. The crater I hiked across several springs ago, where sulfuric vapor slithered out of cracks and hovered like cobras, shuts to hikers. Along the shores of Pahoa, hot caustic bubbles of lava issue out of the ground like steaming mushrooms in the middle of neighborhoods. Evacuations are ordered. The stoic won’t leave, and hold their ground against this spring. 

Late in the morning, propelled outside, I walk. The ospreys bask in the sunshine on their nest, one faces north, one south. I see through my binoculars there has been some rearranging. The thatch of grass growing out of one section has been plucked and moved around, fresh sticks poke up on one side, and general housekeeping has commenced. When I reach the pedestrian bridge, and turn along the river, the male starts up his cheerp call, then spreads his wide pointed wings several times. His feathered white legs dangle down and look as though he wears pantaloons. His call turns into an alarm. Overhead a third osprey soars. This white and brown missile slowly wheels around their nest, staying high enough to keep out of fighting distance, but close enough to get a good view. Its reminiscent of another man checking out someone else’s girlfriend, but staying far enough away to plausibly deny causing trouble. The male on the nest continues his alarm calls. Suddenly a fourth osprey comes sailing over the big leafed maples, joining the third bird. Another mated pair, she falls in line behind him, cruising in slow circles, then they sail off over the cottonwoods, heading upriver. 

May 11th: I’m idling in the meadow, counting molehills, when suddenly, a ghostly moaning erupts behind me, a howl that unrolls up my spine and echoes off the trees, a threnody that scorches the air all around me. Instead of running away, I run towards the sound, then catch myself. When I stop and face the woods there is nothing there, just the yip-howl rising up from inside a copse of trees, twenty feet away. It keeps on going, stops for breath, then rises again. 

The howl splits the air like the keel of a canoe. It lowers, as if going underwater, then resurfaces for air, then continues on through waters it alone knows of. The howl bore holes up through the insides of trees. It scours the beds of the rivers, flattens the grasses, pales the air, and dims the sun. It feels anguished and joyful. The wail bears news of winter trials, of announcements of whiskered pups licked clean, of fresh killed rabbits and bones and blood, of newborn leaves, of cottonwoods tickling the sky, of sun-warmed sand and fur. It is praise, and holy blasphemy and curse. It is the voice of Jupiter, the voice of the dusted rings of Saturn. It was the voice of beauty itself.  

Through it all I stood, a match struck into a flame of howl. I backed up, moved toward it, then backed up again. It was all I could do, but wait, to ride the sound as it rose and fell like a swell on an ancient sea. When it was all over, when the last note had faded, when the woods and meadow and fens had all but stopped, only then the blackbirds, frozen on their stems, those newsboys of the marsh, were the first to chatter and buzz, flashing their red epaulets in the cattails, did you hear, did you hear?  

 According to coyotes, the world has been rent asunder. Or not. As I tiptoed across the meadow, I wondered: if language is how we know the world, what does the coyote know, and how can I learn it?

For the first time ever, I feel as if I’m in the thick of it, in the thicket of spring. But if I try to grasp the season’s edges like a map, they dissipate like smoke. Spring implies that reality is elastic, non-temporal. Maybe spring is not a turn of an internal compass, not the turn of a linear calendar; time, if it exists at all, is a loop like a snake with its tail in its teeth, or an instantaneous game with the cosmos: my “ping” to the universe’s “pong.” Spring turns one inside out, it is compulsion, or mandate. I should face north and shed my skin. 

May 25, sun:  William Burroughs said if you cut the present the future spills out. The day dawns hot and clear. I want more spring. Not ready to be catapulted forward into summer, I decide to cheat time, and sew the present closed. My camping gear stays in the back of my car for times like this.  A quick check of work deadlines, and in less than an hour I’m driving through the broad flat pastures of Enumclaw. Horses, drunk from the sun, sprawl flat on their sides, their rounded brown abdomens like brown boulders against the green grass. Civilization falls away, and the trees grow taller. I coast down state route 410, through the town of Green Water (“report your Bigfoot sightings here”) then along the milky blue-green White River, full of rock flour from Emmons Glacier. I drive through woods, rock, water, and sky. I barely notice the slow rise in elevation as the road climbs the flanks of what the Coast Salish call the “mother of waters”  or “Taqʷəblu” (Takhoma). The miles of dark green forest, the endless ribbon of river soothe my brain and feed my cool, blue hunger. Soon, I pass under the iconic Works Progress Administration sign and enter Mount Rainier National Park.  

Along the broad, long apron of the slumbering volcano, I drive across the breadth and depth of time. The road climbs, pockets of snow appear. The thin highway borders a crumbling cliff, and the mountain peaks through gaps in the trees. As I near the top of the pass, the mountaintop suddenly appears, swathed in ice and snow. Though miles away, it takes up half the sky, as if to blot out the sun, and appears so suddenly, as close as my hand—that I try to reach out and touch it. 

Tahkoma used to sit much farther north, next to Mount Baker (Koma Kulshan) another volcano who sits brooding near the Canadian border. The two mountains were betrothed, but Takhoma was jealous of Koma Kulshan’s philandering–perhaps with one of his lesser foothills–so she gradually moved south to where she sits now. On clear days she clothes herself in bridal dress and stares with longing across several hundred miles of lowlands, at Koma Kulshan’s volcanic cone. It’s hard to believe, looking at Rainer, an elegant, radiant 14,000 foot tall dish of sherbet, all lavender, white, and apricot in the sun-shadows that crease her massive crown, that she’d fall for someone like him, who from this far distance, resembles a cartoon volcano from a comic book: all sloped sides and a pouting mouth. Charming, but not marriage material. 

I drive up and over the twisted narrow potholed road to Cayouse Pass, where winter still blankets the land. The pass just opened for the season, was cleared and plowed only a few days ago. My fingers grip the steering wheel, my tires roll a mere foot from the cliff edge, and snow piles on the side of the road lie heaped, blinding white in the sun. Drunk on the pointed dark firs and cerulean sky, the glare of curved road, I plunge down the other side: down, down the road dives, into canyons of fir and cedar. Sunglasses come off. The highway curves and twists, and shoots through a tunnel (where I roll down the windows to hear my voice echo off Cenozoic stone). As I emerge, a breeze blows the sudden hot-blasted scent of green wildness, of fresh fir needles thrust open into hot sun. The road careens to the valley floor, where I coast past the feet of giants, trees that grow to a thousand-years old or more, trees that blanket the volcano’s slopes up to where the air thins out at the krumholz. 

At Ohanapecosh Campground, on the lower east side of the mountain, plashes of noonday sun spangle the open areas and the beaches along the Ohanapecosh River.  I drive past the visitors’ center, pull into an empty site on the lip of the river—there are a dozen other souls who had the same impulse—get out of the car, walk to the edge of the small rise overlooking the river. The water knits and purls over rocks and logs, the color of sea glass, a delicate green, and chalky white with rock flour.  After unpacking the car, I stretch my legs on a small hike. 

On the path to Silver Falls, the forest floor resembles a thick moss rug, which creeps along and envelopes everything in its path. If I were to lay still long enough, the feather mosses would knit a loose mask over my body, until all that remained of me was a fuzzy outline. All along the path, the ghost of last year’s vine maple leaves–preserved where they had dropped in October before being covered with the first dusting of snow– appear as gray palimpsests of a year gone by. As green as the woods feel, and as hot as the sun is in the open, time has reversed here, and the calendar rolled back two full months. In these higher elevations—the campground sits at 1,900 feet–it is only early spring. The vine maples are only now budding into leaflets, which look like tiny bat ears. 

Hovering above the moss, short stems of vanilla leaf have only just emerged, dangling their three triangular leaves with lobed edges. Trilliums, which in my area have peaked, here push out creamy white blossoms and heart shaped leaves; they lie hidden amongst a lacy collage of huckleberry, salal, and the arched canes of pink-flowering salmonberry. 

The tail of a flying squirrel, like a gray brush, lies in the path, its stem severed cleanly from the body. Farther on, the remains of a small corpse, decayed under winter snow, reveals itself—I cannot tell what it was. Only the fur is left for the beetles and other forest recyclers. The forest quickly absorbs what dies, and in this short season of higher elevation, the plants, now that spring has sprung, race to put out cones and fruit, which will be dispersed by bears and birds, carried by winds, in order to propagate another generation.   

That evening, I wait for the familiar, soothing rattle of the firewood truck as it makes its rounds—the same truck, the same driver, year after year–then build a fire and watch the dusk come on. The river canyon is  steeped in shadows; the sun departed the ridge long ago. I watch the sky and listen to the melted rush of the river below. Bats, awakened out of torpor for the season, weave across the tufted starlight in between tree crowns. I turn in early, imagining bears and elk roaming the campground in the night. One hundred miles beneath me, a large pool of magma simmers. Miles above me, glaciers creak and groan. The next morning, I sit with my coffee in a patch of sunlit beach. The water teems with fish; insects hatch along the surface. High up in the fir tops, dozens of long banners of spider silk waft on the wind, invisible until the sun’s photons hit them just right. The streamers, twenty or even forty feet in length, appear and disappear on the breeze like particles winking on and off.   

Far up the East Side trail, a flat, shaded, narrow path that follows the river, swollen freshets and streams pour snowmelt down from the mountainside. I amble through water that trickles over the path, and over bridges that traverse cascading waterfalls (so that bears hear my approach I clap my hands and sing). The long boles of trees, felled by disease or wind, lay across ravines, bark shredded off by porcupines, trunks fretted with woodpecker holes. Bosses of moss, the common language of the Pacific Northwest, adhere to standing trees, but also lay slathered over every downed nurse log: haircap or bird-wheat moss (Polytrichum juniperinum), mats of dusty fork moss, and curly heron’s bill (Dicranum fuscescens). Beard lichen and witches hair, along with licorice ferns on the few hardwoods, adorn every tree limb, as if tossed by an overzealous decorator. Needles and duff lay a foot thick and in between waterfalls the air holds an expectant hush. I walk through cathedral like silence and the twilight of dense woods. Enmeshed with birdsong, and the skittering and the scolding of chicarees. 

Back home, near dusk: I haul my clothing and food bags out of the car and dump them inside the front door. Suddenly my ear catches a note. I hold my breath, and tiptoe outside. The ‘thrip’ of a contact call emanates from the woods. Another ‘thrip.’ And finally, the haunting spiral of song unfurls, two full-throated upward phrases, a harmonic resonance that swirls and dissipates in the evening air like sugar on the tongue. It’s the fluted strains of the Swainsons’ thrush, singing in harmony with itself. The song twines together with the warm sweet breath of the cottonwoods, in this, the precious unfolding of another ancient spring. 

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