Francesca G. Varela's Blog, page 2

The Madrone

We walk into the fields, these open spaces that were once the farms of pioneers, once great swaths of white oak savannah, once tall grasslands where elk and deer stepped lightly through volcanic dust.

The sky is big, here. You can see it all—the entire sweep of it, blue mixing into the pale, creaking grass, the clouds washing over the sun and then receding, the light coming down in short flashes.

There are no paths, here, none that are marked, but there are indents in the grass, places where footsteps have matted it down, and so we follow that, going up the hill, the world feeling as open and aimless as it must have a thousand years before.

We pass gnarled hawthorns, their rosebud fruits dried like winter gourds, and a row of sickly sequoias and shore pines, out of place and stunted by closeness, most likely planted as a wood lot.

On the fringe of things we can hear the birds, even though we can’t see them. It’s the red-winged blackbird who calls the loudest, its round-toned whistle pressed sweetly into the wind.

We walk for a long while, moving slowly, and in the dip of the hill we find a madrone, a native tree whose bark is smooth and orange underneath, like the peeling bark of a eucalyptus. This one is a relic, left here, a vestige of what was, holding up the edge of a world that once spread wider than the continent could hold.

The Cold Light of Mars

I look out the window just past dusk, and I see a point of light close to the horizon, just above the hill, poised to sink down into it the way the sun falls into the ocean.

I head outside and don’t even bother to put on my shoes, stepping gingerly over the maple helicopters so they don’t stick to my socks.

I want to see the stars, to see their splendor, and so I stand out there in the cold, and I look up. To the west, the sky is completely clear. To the east, the sky is brown, hazed over, and all I can see is one glittering star caught in the cedar branches, like sunlight on water.

The light near the hill has already sunk, already moved just slightly toward the blue. It’s Venus; that’s what it is. I’ve seen it before, low in the sky, brighter than anything else.

I let my eyes adjust until I can pick out Taurus, where Jupiter hangs like a broad-faced god. Even though it’s farther away, Jupiter feels warmer and somehow closer than Venus. It sits between the U-shaped horns of Taurus, above Aldebaran, a small red star that I always mistake for Mars.

But Mars is out, too, the real one. It’s wandering through Gemini, just east of the twin stars, Castor and Pollux. There’s something strange about Mars. Even though it’s red, its light feels cold, like a single ember from some old fire, a spark scattered far-off on the soil, burning the last of its thin, ghostly light until it fades into nothing.

I look up even higher, just then, and at that moment a shooting star streaks by, fleeting, like the arc of a skipping stone. I never see shooting stars in the city—none that bright, at least. It’s the only one, but I stay out anyway, watching the sky as it tilts, the great lobe of the stars, until Venus disappears into the earth.

Two Moments

You’re at the park near your house, walking your dog, and you stop for a moment to look up, to feel the pulse of the firs as they flicker orange in the light. Playing behind them, in tandem, almost as if a filter screen has been transposed over it, you see just as clearly a single night almost fifteen years ago, in college, when you spent the night alone in the Cascades as part of a backcountry survival class, and you are right back there, in that pale stillness, feeling the cold air rising from the ground as you strike flint with callused hands, over and over, unable to get a flame to catch in the bundle of lichen, and you remember, just as well, how you gave up when the sun set, how you huddled under your tarp shelter, the smell of plastic and fir needles mixing with the smoke of your classmate’s successful fires, and you remember how you pulled the fleece blanket over your head, the balled-up texture of it scratching against your face, and how you came out of that cocoon only once in the night, to see if the stars were there, and you had to walk a little until you found a pocket of them, a crack between the firs, and you stood there, hunched, shivering, the cold deep in your muscles, the clouds dark and coursing, an old and placid fear tied up in all of it, the scattering of stars pressed into your mind for the rest of your life, like ink long-bled onto paper.

The Fallen Fir

It’s the kind of fog that you can feel as you walk through it, all the droplets hanging static, not enough of them to wet your hair, but enough of them that they pelt your face like grains of sand, each waterdrop present and tangible, as though the air itself is made from mist, and yet when you run your hand over your forehead, your skin is still dry, and there are only a few beads of water on the shoulders of your rain jacket.

Once you get beneath the trees, the fog dissipates, and you no longer need to squint. Your boots sink into the soft earth, especially the corners where the water pools between tree roots and the dirt turns to mud, but you avoid these spots, step over them, and you stay on the far side of the trail where the fir needles have fallen.

Something about the forest is different today; the sky is more open, like a tree has fallen, and there is one down, but you can’t quite recall whether it was like that the last time you walked through here. It’s a tall, old Douglas fir, whose trunk is severed a little too cleanly, with just one side of the bark frayed, like something had started gnawing through the crust and gave up trying. Perhaps the tree fell in a storm, and a crew came through and cut it into smaller pieces to keep the trail clear. Perhaps the tree was dying, a hazard, and so they cut it down before its time. But you cannot remember, even, how long it has been there, how long ago it fell, and for that you feel guilty.

And you pass another fallen tree, an old one where the lattice of roots are exposed, stretching vertically like a trellis, spider webs and moss draped along it, and you think to yourself that that is what a fallen tree would look like if it fell during a storm. It would have fallen from the roots–it would have toppled.

First View of the River

If you walk up the hill, ducking beneath the hazelnut tree, its branches looped and willow-like, and you continue past the elderberry bush, the one with the bead-like berries that only the birds eat, you’ll find the part of the forest where the dirt is bare, where the ivy doesn’t grow, and you’ll continue on, amongst the cedars, their bark reddish-purple, the soil carpeted with their cones, and you’ll brush your hand over the felty leaves of the thimbleberry, and across the sword ferns, with their strange, rough seams, and you’ll follow the blackberry thicket to the two vine maples that frame the open air, and that is where you’ll find it—the first view of the river, one small section of it visible at the bottom of the hill, the current moving fast and textured between the grey-sanded banks, the reflection of the cottonwoods casting a yellow shadow against the water, the color of darkened sunlight catching lazily on the ripples.

Queen’s Cup

See the mats of clematis running across the trees like mangled telephone wires; notice the dry dirt beneath the ivy, how gray it looks, how it is sickly compared to the rich, dark mountain soil that is gossamered with those little flecks from the edges of fir cones, and peppered with roots of things, pipsissewa and wintergreen and strange little queen’s cup, which grows low and limp like thick pieces of grass.

I still remember the first time I saw it, queen’s cup, on a backpacking trip just before my first year of college, along the edge of Clear Lake in the Cascades near Eugene, the air filled strongly with wildfire smoke, but not enough to block out the sky, just enough to make it paler than usual; how we walked along the water, passing by deep trenches where submerged tree stumps sat black and ghostly, carpeted with some kind of aquatic slime.

And I remember crouching down to hold the queen’s cup between my thumb and forefinger, my bare knee right in the dirt, and everyone else walked past me, kept right on going, and I stayed with the queen’s cup for a moment, memorized it, vowed to look it up in my plant book later, and then I caught up to the group, running, panting, the smoke making the sun feel both heavy and thinned out, magnified and also swept away from us, and there was that buzzing silence you get in the mountains, especially near water, in those low places where the Douglas firs ripple in the distance, and the water throws up its coldness at you, rattling through the dry leaves of the manzanita, and I think of it still, how I have seen it since, all of it, at other times and places, but never quite so vividly.

The God of the River

The river is opaque
and fogged-over like sea glass
unpierced
by even the sharpest sunlight,
its layers
amorphous clouds
of sediment and algae,
almost brown,
almost green,
almost orange at the edges,
slipping past you
in the way of wind,
catching on logs
long buried,
their arms reaching
and rough
and barnacled,
their arthritic branches
prone to birds,
to dark-eyed juncos
and crows
and kinglets,
and the long-legged heron
who waits to catch fish,
knife-like,
in its beak,
and around the bend
the tunnel
whose concrete walls
smell strangely
like damp wood,
where the drum of the freeway
pummels down
on your head,
after which
your eyes soften
to the sunlight
to the wapato plants
to the wheat-like grasses
that form a curtain
around a lawn chair
hidden on the banks,
and above it all
the god of the river,
the Douglas fir
that leans diagonal
over the water,
its roots clay-braided,
strained,
its branches scooped forward
like locks of hair,
its shadow
a thin bridge
across the water,
waiting.

Winter Gray

Yesterday was the winter solstice. Today, it feels like the sun didn’t even rise. There’s the residue of it, the low-seeped daylight behind the clouds, but there’s no warmth; no casting of light upon the pavement. Just a gray sky the color of wet stones.

We live in the Pacific Northwest, but I find it easy to imagine the endless nights they have in the arctic; the sun weak and flickering, barely making its short arc above the horizon. If you go far enough north, all the way up to the pole, the sun truly does disappear, blocked entirely by the curve of the Earth, and there is only darkness for months at a time.

Here, it’s the clouds that keep the sun from us. And there’s no consolation to that, no aurora borealis or aurora australis flickering across the constellations like some ancient green fire; no sparkling plains of snow.

In our dreary winters the best we have are the saturated greens of the fir and cedar, and the mist rising from them like curtains of smoke; entire hillsides so darkened by rain that they turn to black velvet. And those trees are blanketed with moss, the kind that holds on to water long after it has rained, droplets left hanging in threads, and there are the tree ferns, too; licorice ferns. They sprout up on the maple branches or sometimes the cedars, hanging over and air-bound like some tropical bromeliad.

And, at times, even the gray sky has a beauty to it, but only in those moments before the rain is heavy, when the sky condenses and bruises itself to what is almost purple; those moments when you can feel the wind change directions, the quickened pace of it, and the big gusts pushing so heavily against the trees that they sound like they might fall.

On those kinds of days the river matches the sky, the water swift and wrinkled with movement, and you can smell in the wind the scent of woodfire smoke, somewhere off in someone’s fireplace, and the smell of winter, and the indescribable smell of the rain as it hits the water, somehow so similar to the smell of the soil, of dried mud, of fallen leaves, of pollen. And, though you still long for the sun, you can, on those days, see the sky not as gray, but as silver.

The Forest At Night

In the night there is a certain silence; a vacant hum under which everything is neatly muffled, all the sounds buried low amongst the mushrooms and the pill bugs and the white rot that leaks from decaying branches.

And then, rising from the stillness comes the owl’s great stutter. The sound hangs there, an entity in itself, and then it dissipates in the way that stars fade out at dawn, little by little, blink by blink, starting first at the edges until all at once they are gone.

Another owl answers, its voice farther away, tucked somewhere around the creek-bend. It’s almost as if they are laughing, their calls formed deep in their throats, great coo-coo-coo-ahh‘s and single screeches that crisscross the forest like arrows.

And, underneath this, another kind of silence forms, the kind that is stirred-up and trembling. There, beneath the gray-filtered ferns, the mice and moles pause carefully in their burrows, their small hearts moving fast in their chests, their bellies warm against the dirt.

The owls increase their bellows, somewhere between a yelp and a song, the forest a dark swath beneath them, their wings gliding and silent in the way of snowfall. And then they move on, two shadows against the cedars, flying farther up the creek; farther and farther and farther, until they reach the place where the sound no longer travels.

Fall Light

The wind parts the leaves
like a hand brushing back a curtain,
yellow and diaphanous in
the low tide of the sun.
There they are,
the Ash and cottonwood,
the young maple,
long bands of light
tethered in the furrows of
their bark.
Their leaves are coaxed loose,
and they fall
as slow as particles of dust.
The light thickens,
turning in on itself,
and the leaves wait
in soft silence
for the blossom of rust.