GOOD MORNING, Everybody! Afternoon, whatever. We must have had some Hawaiian air roll in overnight. I love that. I assure you, you can tell. You open thee door, and it's virtually hot and himid, almost stifling outside. On some of these days, I swear, you can smell Hawaiian plants. Blooms, I mean. Primarily plumeria, that bush tree you see there pink and white. (Nihil?) I think it's called other things, like frangipani and something else. (Damn, it sure makes for "interesting" reading and embarrassing writing when you can't remember what you talking about. I think one has to then ask, why are you talking about it? Eek.)
Anyway, there's some "foreign." non-Canadian, air out there, and it's warmer than in the house, practically steaming, and it's really neat.
This makes it a perfect day to drive through the Fall woods up to higher altitudes, as the warm air will be riding along all the way. (I don't know how I know that, but it must be experience.)
If you picture yellow and orange and cherry in the darkest background of "forest green" (the doug fir and hemlock), and then add the deep moist brown and chartreuse and mint soil and the profuse lichens on the branches and trunks, and then the emerald and white and grey stream of jade at the bottom of the world's mossiest canyon, you'll be thinking of some other place. No, here. I had just started that sentence out a certain way and discovered I still had to End It All.
Inside this warmth, it rained an inch and say a half yesterday, and you'll see the effect, when you go out. This quickly; yes. The mosses will be cranked up, the scents different, the mushroom understory in chaotic bloom. Fecund, ya know. Just freaking crawling with vibrancy. Sound id very muted. Humidity near a hundred. The sky will be overcast, but the light bright, creating a level of these grean and warm colors you may never, ever, see anywhere in your life. Hawaii does come to mind, but of course the plants are different, and it is nowhere similar except in intensity.
The air will be a veru odd combin of still, thick, and fragrant. Thick like the base medium of an omnipresent perfume. A medium, in which to suspend aromas, spores, thoughts. And still to pass light, wedging to you.
I'm trying to think of the painter early Impressionist who used reds and browns and yellow and chartreuse and greens, and contrasted them in puddles and pools like Gauguin, where there seem to be "more" colors. More than really exist.
"At the Milleners" is a similar Degas, chartreuse and auburn and brown, in his feather edge strokes. You think, "Can they put those colors together?" Both the painters and the Oregon woods? Well, damn, I guess they can. It's like cheating. But who's going to call the Police? I hate when artists and scenes get away with things I wouldn't think to try.
The first winter I moved to the Willamette valley area here, I remember walking into the greenest roadside field/wood I had ever seen in my life.
I got stuck. For quite a long time. There were things growing in there, I had never seen before, like an alien invasion. Profuse. The Oregon whit oak trees are leafless then, but they are in a second bloom. A second leafing. Becasue the trunks and every branch are swollen several inches dep with a community of mosses and lichens and orange things that look like gelatin frogs. They look like they're alive in there, like don't touch them, because what they're really waiting for is Human Brain.
All different colors in velvet tiers. Civilizations. Really! Verdant civilizations. Acting most civilly ~ pasing down, arm over hand over roof, droplets of water, vertical pin balls, of sustenace and constrution material, to the thousands below. Water. Drops.
But perhaps they're so generous because there's a lot more coming.
Maybe it becomes like waste-handling. Drowning prevention. That year kind of overdid it, because part of the reason I was out there was that the Tualatin River was flooding it's whole basin. We were rich, man. So rich, the guys on the bottom drowned.
Those oak tree branches, and trunks, their spectacular shape and shag carpet coatings, made me want to photograph them.
So many greens!
You could stand next to the trunk and fill the lens of a 3 by 5 camera with nothing but living things, green and orange and white and grey, and call it, "Nothing But Life in This OPicture."
No spot, no minute spot, where there was anything but living things. Or water, or air.
A thousand things, Ten thousand? Disappearing, like a fractal.
The Spanish or Irish moss, grows invisibly until it drapes, from the branches, making waht were dark trunks and brances look a new, mid winter, as Russian Olives. A green-icicled NEW specie! I, have discovered a new specie! "Do people know anout these trees?"
Gum drop land.
Everything has a coat.
But it's not a warm coat, it's a warm coat of life.
"I am a noble oak, a carriage, a structure. I can support more life, more abundance, more community, than any other living thing in history. I am The Noblest."
Nobility brings the long, daiquiri beard. The gown, the gown fringe of age and wisdom and abundance. They hold very still, and drip, and the plants grown down those drip cascading lines, along gravity's organization, anmd it looks as they might move, but they don't. They might dance, sway, but they don't. They hold still.
They are the wettest objects I have ever seen.
Wet thru and thru.
Soaked, but soaked for six months.
Six months ago we were soaked, now we're wet.
Just freaking wet.
We had a winter that warm and wet three years ago.
The first year here, 72 maybe, was another. Things were just two things,
warm and wet, for six months, maybe 18.
Things took on an appearance you have never seen. I had never seen.
Cannot be created artificially, can only be created this way.
This, way.
You HAVE to do this, to get it.
That's the amazing part. You don't realize that, until it's here.
There. Where-ever, it "is."
Now, if it stayed like this, warm, (say above forty degrees nocturnally),
throiuyght the whole fukking winmter (oh dear), we would get "that."
Just picture adding all those wet soaking days, and what all that time and water brings to life on the trees.
The change of scenery, to a new plateau. You have never seen before.
Like a state of consciousness.
I must go look.
At the beginning.
Dal be back. |
