Confessions of a wild love affair

We are pleased as peach to share with you a wonderful piece written by our neighbor.  We hope you enjoy this as much as we do.  Thanks Paul for letting us post this.

Confessions of a wild love affair

Doting on Venus slippers

and rough-skinned newts


By Paul Keller

           Photo By Paul Keller

I treasure every season here.

From the welcome return of those long summer bare-toe days; to that tart-in-your-mouth, leaf-turning cool night first breath of fall; to winter’s revisit of wet and gray, good-for-hibernating short days—when the planet’s polar air mass shoves pell-mell down atop us once again with her ornery promises of ice and snow.

While I can find kinship with all these diverse phases of our calendar year here, my first and foremost true love will never change: the vernal equinox.

Spring.

For the past 20 years, I have lived literally tucked away in the woods at the foot of the same towering, tree-thick east-west bearing mountain ridge. With no roads, no trails, no houses—and absolutely no people—this wild ridgeline tumbles down through every season in so many different generations of green.

Like I do at this time every year, each morning the past few days, I walk out my door into this ancient silence of cedar, hemlock and fir. I follow the twist of centuries-old deer trails back up into the places I know—from past explorations—where, just below my boots, trillium seeds now push new life up through the weight of the earth.

Even as I write this—after yet another long winter—they are remembering their way, once again, up toward the pull of February sun. With enviable grit and faith, they are renewing the beginning of this miracle we call spring.

Last year, on March 11, the first trillium blossom appeared.

To gently press my fingertip to the skin of this flower’s first glacial-white petals, restores my faith in the world.

Four days after I find that first trillium, I follow another route farther up the hill through the stubborn arms of shoulder-high mountain mahogany (used for arrow shafts by our area’s original residents) to greet—there beside the same congregations of licorice and lady fern—the season’s first faces of tiny yellow wood violets.

Now, in the next few weeks, I will once again salute and embrace the return of so many signs of spring—from vanilla leaf to the rare surprise of Venus slipper. And I will welcome back more than this wonderful celebration of wildflowers.

On March 10 last year, I watch a rough-skinned newt emerge for his mating season, slowly pulling his bright orange belly across the shadows of oxalis and salal. (Exactly where, five winters ago, I snowshoed onto the surprise of black-red snow to find a freshly killed adult deer at my feet. The hunter was four-legged. Still warm, the big doe was surrounded by explosions of huge cougar tracks.)

On March 16 last year, I watch a flame-crested pileated woodpecker, a juvenile, careen through dappled sunlight near that first Cascades frog-loving pond at the ridge’s top. Where I have also met the shy and mysterious rubber boa snake. (And where the male elk sometimes secretly return in the fall.)

On March 28, a golden eagle circles the sky over the rock field that sweeps down the hill just above my house. I will see and hear him throughout the summer, weaving the blue air or landing in the old wildfire-scarred snags high above this broad expanse of moss-covered rock. (Down below, I know a flat piece of basalt that you can lift to sometimes see a black scorpion scuttle back down its secret hole.)

Of course, that next day last spring, I also come home with the year’s first blood-sucking deer tick happily lodged in my body. Another apropos reminder that Ma Nature—she who creates not only wildflowers but devil’s club and stinging nettle—is no one-dimensional Pollyanna.

Every day I marvel at what might be moving down just beyond my porch light again tonight. Wolverine? Black bear? Bobcat? Cougar? I have had the honor to hold all four in my eyes here before.

So, how do I explain all this wonderment to the befuddled people who continue to ask: “You still live up on Mount Hood?”

It seems “success” in our jet-propelled, upwardly mobile peripatetic world is measured by how many times we relocate to ostensibly snare that bigger title.

In the Navajo language there is no word for “moving houses.”

I share this indigenous nation’s historical perspective. Of the two views of earth: as commodity/real estate or ancestor, I am unquestionably endeared to the latter.

For I have surely found my place right here where—after six long months—my own ancestors arrived in their ox-pulled wagons inside that beginning of fall 150 years ago.

I have no doubt that another six months later, they too marveled at their year’s first trillium. They knew, as I do, that they had finally found home.

Writer Paul Keller lives in the Upper Sandy River Watershed on the western slopes of Mount Hood.