Francesca G. Varela's Blog, page 8

Siouxon Creek

[image error]

Last night we camped by a waterfall. Even at midnight you could see it, a pale blue ribbon laced between moon-painted firs. All night we heard its gentle pouring, which by morning had become as smooth to our ears as the lap of the sea.

Around the fire, we told stories about the beginning. How the moon ran into the Earth and brought water to our planet, all those billions of years ago. It seemed fitting for the blue night, and the points of starlight sewn through fir needles, and the moon, a liquid shadow behind their black silhouettes.

Today we walked on paths lined with red huckleberry and salal. The creek guided us, its murmuring as soft as the songs of crickets. In some places the water deepened into turquoise pools, and in others it rushed over stones, quick and clear and clean.

We waded below Chinook Falls, where the water was cold as glacial melt, and then ventured uphill, where the hemlocks billowed, dancing the dance of woodfire smoke.

And now we’re camped by the creek. At the bend, the sunlight fades down in long streaks–the way light gets caught up in spiderwebs–and the trees hold long onto it, as the gnats make great star-streaks upon the water, their whole lives golden lines, and small pools, and smooth rocks, and alder leaves floating down the current.

Chickadee Funeral

[image error]

The cottonwoods told me that summer would end soon. I was already nostalgic for it, and for other summers that had passed. Dark clouds gathered over the treeline, warmed by the wind, touched by the grassy smell of late-August, as I made my way up the path, and greeted the false-solomon’s-seal, the ocean spray, the wood sorrel. I followed the stream, up the hill, deeper into the forest, and then I turned around at the usual spot to head home.

But, on the way back, I stopped suddenly, stunned. There was a dead bird on the trail. Had I missed it on the way up? Had it just died, perhaps moments ago? I crouched down and nudged the bird with a stick. It slumped over, both limp and stiff, heavy and empty. I wanted to cry. There were no marks. No blood. Just a black-and-white songbird, emptied of the-thing-that-makes-us-alive.

I decided to have a funeral. I made a circle around it, arranging fir-cones to the north and south,  nipplewort leaves to the east and west, and plantain leaves at each corner. Around this, I placed a circle of dried maple leaves, rimmed by ferns. And then, in the bird’s stiff talons, I placed a tiny, pink geranium. This was the part that scared me–the way the bird’s feet were curled like branches. At first I pulled my hand back, too scared to come that close to touching the bird. But I tried again, and the flower stayed there, as though in a vase.

Miraculously, no one walked by during this time, despite the trail being busy. And, just as the funeral was complete, the sun surfaced for one brief moment. It shined right on the bird, and then the wind blew in, and the clouds stole it away.

The Marshmallow Plant

[image error]

Althaea grows best in the warm nights of late-July, when the air is still scented with heat, and the sky lingers blue around the edges; when the night creaks with frogsong, and the wind calls softly, coaxing the flower up, like a star from the darkness, its petals veined like birchbark, shaped just like the wings of a moth–Althaea rising taller, and taller, a plant known since ancient times to be a relative of the moon.

Sauvie’s Island

[image error]

A piece of a sand dollar in the dark gray riverbed, embedded in pebbles hewn as fine as black pepper. Here on the banks of the Columbia, an hour’s drive from the ocean, the water feels like its own gentle coastline, quiet ripples and a steep drop-off, and seagulls that fluff their feathers in the sand. Up, high above, higher than seems possible, a single turkey vulture glides westward. Against the clouds it is a dark, silent arrow, another world from these screaming children, who splash into the river despite the cool wind, and run with sand kicking up behind them in black torments. I search for the stillness behind it all. The row of green cottonwoods that mark the beginning of Washington. The osprey on its power line nest. The bend in the river, the blue hills, where clouds pull into distant rain.

In the Dream

[image error]

Sometimes I think I would rather live in the dream.

As they sit by the fire,

holding beer cups in their gloved hands, their mouths rippling with laughter,

I press my back to the dying warmth,

the last glow of sun, bled into rock,

and, through the cold air above my sleeping bag,

I watch the shock of pointed light,

the needle-threads woven into shapes that don’t matter,

that only I can see,

where the mystery lives,

deep wind through a canyon,

a bear’s paw-prints in the snow,

the eyes of an owl on my back,

as I walk into a sea of ferns,

a moss forest that smells of rain,

and I hold out my hand to the huckleberry

and wade into the cold, dark river,

and lay down and float, alone, alone,

to the sea.

Wolf

[image error]

Photo credit: Nick Jans

The salt-worn trees

and their terraced arms

white as bone, as cartilage,

twined into rope and

laced like string between

cloud and earth.

Wind blows through,

caught in the late-light shadows,

the teeth of baleen whales,

gusts of seawater and krill,

sea-wind and spring mosquitos,

the ocean giving each footstep

to the ferns,

a slipped, soft whisper,

a creek bubbling over stone.

Down the path,

yellow eyes

from the black shadow,

the ancient thump

of distant waves;

droplets falling like snow on fur,

and you find you are still tied to the smell of smoke,

the same old fire,

still burning yellow in the dark.

Birdless

[image error]

The mornings I best remember are those of my elementary school summers. I’d wake up at 7 or 8 am, for no reason but the habit of school lingering into my sleep schedule. I’d have some cereal, and put on jean shorts, and a baggy cotton t-shirt, and black rubber rain boots, and the old green army backpack my mom got from Goodwill. It was filled with my explorer supplies–a plastic magnifying glass that didn’t actually work; a pamphlet about insects of the Pacific Northwest; a notebook and pen; and an old bandana that was starting to get holes in it.

I’d walk out the back door, where our border collie Misty would be chasing bees, or sleeping in her dog house, and I’d rub her velvet ears for a moment before passing through the gate. Misty would stick her muzzle under and watch me walk away. “I’ll be back soon,” I’d tell her. “I’m just going to the backyard.”

And, above me, the trees would rise, the great maple canopy painted soft-green in the sun. And the birds’ music would wash over me. Robins. Chickadees. Steller’s jays. Spotted towhees. Dark-eyed juncos. I didn’t know their names, back then, nor did I know the names of the cedars, or the lanky western hemlock near the creek, or the vine maples scattered amongst the ferns, the salmonberries, the invasive ivy, the native waterleaf, but, still, their songs were familiar to me. I knew them.

I sat on the mossy earth and leaned against the cedar, and wrote in my journal, and listened to the birds. Their voices wove together, a tapestry of trills and warbles that seemed themselves to be made of light. The creek rushed by. There were no mosquitos at 9am. And the world smelled like ferns, and the neighbor’s cut grass, and the distant scent of hose water on pavement, because my mom was watering the plants in the front yard. We didn’t have a lawn like my friends did. We had a long driveway, a garden of flowers shaded by birch trees, a side yard where Misty lived, cushioned by bark chips, and then, of course, we had the forest in the back. It was small, just a fragment surronded by suburban streets, but to me it was a great wilderness.

And those mornings will always stay with me. Because now the brids have nearly vanished. One or two robins sing each summer, rather than the old tapestry. Perhaps because the meadow on the neighbor’s property has been turned into houses. Perhaps because the forest floor has been blanketed over with invasive wild clematis. Perhaps because of climate change, and fewer birds in the world in general.

Whatever the reason, the forest feels silent now. So I keep those memories, the songs of birds whose names I learned only years later, the sound of my childhood summers, and I think back to the warm morning wind turning the trees in circles, how they danced and made lacy shadows agaisnt the creek water; how I sat on a fallen log and dangled my feet in the water, and felt the world breathe, a world which, to me, felt secret, a world I thought was infinite, one I never thought would end in silence.

Morning Grey

[image error]

I hear a train horn in the morning grey.

I can so clearly imagine it down by the river.

With each reverberation it pushes against the quiet,

the rippled river,

all the way out to the mouth of the ocean,

and the coarse interior mountains at the end of the Columbia, the Snake, the Fraser,

off somewhere where there are elk and moose,

and the air smells like stone rather than sea.

I imagine myself on an arid hilltop, bowing to the sunrise.

The colors blot out the valley air, and

all the while the sun pulls on me,

and so does the hill;

old, quiet beings, the both of them,

spinning the world with their weight.

Sea and Sky

[image error]

Blue mountains fade like mist out of the water, reflections of each other, dawn to dawn, the haze of all horizons stretched over them. It seems these mountains are all water,  that they are the sea and the sky at once; empty and cloudless yet full of something that is old and living. I stretch out my arms and try to become the same blue, water to water, sky to sky, to fade up like the mountains, the point that is both, sea and sky the same.

Real Birds

[image error]

Photo by Kenneth Cole Schneider

Once, in the middle of the night, I heard a squeak from the building across the street,

some rumbling of the air conditioning or something,

and I thought it was a bird,

some exotic nighthawk on the roof,

something beautiful,

with eyes like smooth black stones,

and a scarf of white around his neck.

He would be perched on the edge of his talons,

there, above the old folks’ home,

and the gray building with sunflowers by the parking lot,

his wings tensed,

ready to expand, long and bat-like,

ready to flap wildly in circles,

to chase the moon

over the cold pavement,

and the rhododendrons by the hospital,

and the three homeless men who sleep outside by the church,

all the while squeaking, squeaking, squeaking–

a beautiful dark fleck

above the I-405 bridge,

and the dim rusty glow of the river.