A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #10

 

We've come to a new place: Hood River, Oregon, where the waters off of Mt. Hood, the tallest mountain in the state and a somewhat active volcano, drain into the Columbia. Every direction I turn, there is something photogenic. A cloud. A mountain. An ice-capped volcano. A line of evergreens. The Pacific Northwest is truly a magical place. 

But I don't know it. 

We've been here almost a month now, however it will take me years to learn this place. I can't even describe it now because I don't have the names, the types, the words of what this brush, or this bird, or this bark is. I keep tracing back to what I know of pine or poplar or pear in the east, in the Appalachians, but they're just not quite the same here. 

Still, it's exciting to learn new things. I've already learned to identify horsetail, hexagonal basalt, wild asparagus, quail—a family lives in the bushes just down the road!—rabbit brush, big leaf maple, false hellebore, california poppy, jewelweed and horehound. All thanks to my wife, the botanist, of course. 

There's actually a surprising array of flora in this climate zone. Hood River is on the western edge of the Cascades, so it gets plenty of rain and cloud but not near as much as the coast, I'm told. In fact, just a half hour drive to the east and you get something like 10 inches less rainfall. 

I'm discovering that the entire West is like that. Seems on our way here we drove through one climate pocket after the next. 

For instance, jumping up to 8,000 ft in Wyoming had us driving through an ice storm that disappeared soon as we dropped down out of the mountains; ice still falling off our windshield as we paused and thawed at a gas station. Salt Lake City had its Echo Canyon and mile-high mountains, but just above the lake, into northern Utah and the remains of Lake Bonneville, it was its own sweeping horsehair hills, making the godlike bare mountain crags of SLC into a memory. The Snake River flowed through a sudden and unforeseen purple gorge. The whole are of southern Idaho is cold night and hot days, ideal for potatoes though northern Idaho does not serve nearly as well in that respect; neither does northern Utah, which seems much more predisposed towards wheat (or maybe that's just the Mormons). Then about Baker City, Oregon, the Rockies thrust out of the earth again, and I'm told all of the Rockies are like that: ranges scattered here, scattered there, forming their own mini-climates on one side, in a cleft, on the sunny side of the hill as opposed to the northern side. The West strikes me as a place of sudden extremes and no one region is consistent with the next. Even the Cascades are green and lush on one side and dry as a bone on the other. 

And we've made it without developing a single symptom of COVID in any of us, and that's probably the greatest and luckiest accomplishment. 

Already my imagination is taking off in new directions. Particularly for The Lost Millstone, a fantasy epic I'm still materializing, and researching. I'm already imagining a white-capped mountain at the head of the valley, seeable from every direction in Homea. It is a solemn sight, when the clouds and humidity allow you to see it. I don't know what I'll call it yet; perhaps Mount Dooh. 

There have been many other things I've been having to get used to. We are above the 45th parallel, here, in northern Oregon, and it's past daylight savings time, so the light fades around 4:00pm. My wife says it starts to get to you—she lived in Seattle for several years. The dark winters. Sometimes I comfort myself with the fantasy of being in New Orleans, or perhaps setting up shop in Houston, or Arizona, or Los Angeles. It's a small silly pipe-dream. One I shouldn't indulge in. 

However, there is a sense of nostalgia growing in me, for the East. For the woods I know. For the heat and humidity of summer; the sharp brightness of winter. For the subtle smooth shift of the climate, and the trees and wildlife, from north or south. The East is a much calmer place, I think, even with its occasional hurricanes and summer thunderstorms or tornado in the likes of Missouri. Still, it is a green place of glens and woods and fields and suburbs and houses tucked in every little notch. 

Out here, there are wide unpopulated places. 

Here, there is mostly cloud, and more cloud, and the volcanoes. The geography is breathtaking, the forest-cloaked basalt columns, the Columbia that I wish I could've seen a hundred years ago before it was dammed and chastened and brought to heel by the will of man. This Oregon is a tectonic land. The moving of the Earth evident right before your eyes. Geology is not a calm thing, millions of years in the past. No. It is a now thing, a violent thing. 

I think my boy will do well growing up here. I think I will write well here. I look forward to traveling all these western lands and western places, smelling all these western plants, searching out all these western animals—the flicker of a wing, the dart of a tail, the snap of a twig under a hoof—and learning all of their names and what their names mean in that breadth of an eyeblink. 

To new beginnings. 

And that's all from the end of the river this perhaps weekly. 

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