RAIN-FOREST YEARRAIN-FOREST YEAR

Nothing touches our inner circuits quite like the seasons. The rolling months and the changes they bring in our surroundings signify time passing, connote the flow of things. Whether melancholy or good cheer, fear of time flying or joy in renewal, the feelings brought on by the seasons must infect almost everyone.

Some say there are places without seasons. This is not true. In the depths of the cement cities, sycamore leaves crinkle brown, fall away, then push out again as soft green rockets that explode with summer into big fans. Crocuses thrust cheeky color-spurts from littered bits of soil. Too-cold-for-comfort trades places with too-hot-to-handle. The cities have their seasons.

So do the tropics. Quite right: the day-length varies little from January to June at the Equator. The sun shines every day; every day is hot. Few trees lose their leaves all at once, and the birds stay home in winter. But the northern warblers join them at migration’s midpoint, making the passage of birds an additive seasonal feature instead of an obvious loss. Too, the monsoons come and go in the tropic zones. Travelers in equatorial regions prepare for “rainy seasons” and “dry seasons” rather than heat waves or blizzards, and dress accordingly. Seasons come to the tropics for sure, but subtly so: they creep through the tropical rain forest like a quiet night animal, instead of crashing through the countryside like the mad moose of Minnesota seasons.

With precipitation exceeding 100 inches per year, the woods of Willapa may rightly be called rain forest also. The term “temperate rain forest” more commonly refers to the coastal valleys of the Olympic Peninsula to the north, but the Coast Range qualifies by any measure of moss or rule of rain. And, as in the tropical rain forest, the seasons walk softly in Willapa.

Here the movie of the months rolls past in shifting shades of green, in a rotation of other-colored accents. The monsoon only slackens, but seldom goes for long, and some years never ends at all. Yet, occasional Mediterranean intervals punctuate the Nordic calendar of mists. They always seem to take us by surprise, because these sun-days may come in any month of the year, as likely in January as June.

January 1985, for example, stayed sunny throughout. The river dropped to summer level, and the licorice fern curled with drought and frost brought on by completely clear nights. How difficult it was to stay inside and work! The temptation to go out was stiffened by the knowledge that another January might dump thirty inches of rain (as January 1986 in fact did) and that the coming month of February might be soggy, and March as well. As we watched butterflies and robins in January and listened to radio tales of record snowfalls in the Midwest, we of course felt quite smug.

This does not sound like rain forest, nor does it seem very seasonal. But I have been here long enough to see the true faces of the months behind the changing masks and moods. I know that regardless of our fickle calendar, weather remains the hottest topic in town. Why do people discuss the weather so much? I never have thought of weather talk as small talk. After all, it’s what’s going on around us all the time. And it is the changing weather that orchestrates the seasons, as each day deposits its unique hours of weather into the common pot we call the climate.

Weather and climate may define the seasons, but only in one sense. There are several other measures. Seasons come in colors. They find form in the progressions of plants, from bud to leaf and flower to fall. The coming and going of the birds marks the seasons as surely as the length of day and the sun’s journey across the firmament, which is of course the source of the seasons. The night sky changes, and the tides, and the level of rivers; the quality of light and kind of cloud; the pelage of ponies; and the sounds from the river at night. A great many details in the texture of the countryside change with the sheets of the calendar months.

I find myself watching these changes, just as I talk about the weather at the post office and the store, trying to anticipate the seasons, to feel and enjoy them fully, and perhaps hoping to hurry them along a little bit. As I watch, I write: journal entries, field notes, letters to snowbound friends, essays. Sometimes in my mind, driving on the freeway to Seattle or Portland and listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I write fresh scenarios for the music such as the Venetian never imagined.

Always writing the seasons. Why? To live them more—to ratify the days—and (I suppose) in a desperate effort not to let them get away. All seasons pass, by definition. But a season written of, though only a part of its shortest day in one spot of its limitless realm, is a season that cannot escape clean. And to share. In this chapter, I plan to share some of the page-pictures I have drawn from fragments of the months of Willapa’s year.

Some pagans think that the months are mere mechanical devices, contrivances to place births, deaths, marriages, the signing of contracts and levying of taxes, and that the year should be subdivided by other, more earthly measures. I disagree. I believe the ancients demarcated the months with close attention to their personalities. When they named May and November, they had something in mind beyond tithes and festivals. Perhaps women, linked to the months and the moon as men may never be, have always known this. The months mean, and each has its own qualities.

Why not begin, then, with January? Close enough to the winter solstice to make sense as a new beginning, January 1 means mostly food, drink, and football to a majority of our people. To me it signals time to start a sharp lookout for the first violets beneath the camellia and to walk the bounds of the land to see what’s going on. In this spirit, let us walk through the months of the rainforest year.

January, most years, sees the falling of the heaviest rains. Then the world seems truly awash in Willapa. But it can also bring high pressure off the ocean, and with it, flirting interstices of sunshine. No matter how often they occur, the wet, gray lambasts always bring a sense of persecution, and the sun-running balmy days lend a feeling of unreasonable privilege. But whether January speaks in sunbeams or rainbows, or merely mumbles though the mossehurr, the month has a lingua franca in mist. Bright days and cloudy too usually dawn with fog. A nuisance to many, fog to me is more palliative than pall.

Many are the mornings when the whiteness of the fog floats on the whiteness of the frost, obscuring the river that mostly makes it. Ribbons of mist originate beyond Elk Mountain Ranch and spread over it in palpable threads. Wood smoke from the ranch house billows into the softer meadowmist and is lost. Not a moment passes but the mist metamorphoses, now merging into a mistbow above the barn like the lenticular cloud capping a volcano, now parting into a flying horse’s tail. Yellow sun arrives on the flank of Elk Mountain as steelheaders arrive on the river. As if at the touch of the sun, the fog blanket unravels. In an instant, the frosty salad of grass becomes visible beside the bridge and the black trees that served until now to anchor the fly sheet of the fog over the fields. The bridge timbers go from cold gray to green to white-gold, and the wood smoke floats unchallenged by earthly vapors. The mist has gone.

The birds that stay behind or come from elsewhere help make January what it is. Eerily attenuated lines of tundra swans wheel into water meadows already owned by scaups. Upland, downy woodpeckers draw the ear as they pick at thimbleberry galls for grubs. Red-breasted sapsuckers swallow hollyberries, giving truth to W. H. Hudson’s belief that reds show best as small bright bits in an otherwise green landscape. The normally unseen green on the backs of golden-crowned kinglets shows up against the mosses they probe for winter insects. Chickadees animate leafless scenes, decorating alders otherwise all unadorned. Great horned owls call and mate in dark night trysts, and winter wrens copulate in bloomless honeysuckle bowers by day.

Even a late, cold January cannot keep the snowdrops down. Waves of the simple white flowers appear around the old homesteads and had best be braced against. A warm January sends the outrageous yellow flags of skunk cabbage to waving over the wetlands. But their appearance, the most overt sign of short-lived winter’s early demise, usually belongs to February. They are likely to flash dimly in the rain like amber warning lights in a twister, no one outdoors to see, or be forced to grow aquatic, as the waters rise. For if the sun shines in January, February may be called on to make up the difference in the budget of rain.

February brings expletives such as “rain, rain, rotterdam rain,” and it often brings the flood. One February the rain knew no surcease. The roof began to leak beneath a paste of Mount St. Helens ash and oak leaves crammed in a valley. A rivulet ran beside the back door and found its way into the cellar, whose stone walls peed in a dozen spouts. One stream bubbled up out of a molehill. The ground must have been wetter than a waterlogged slug. Wet, wet, wintergreen wet. It rained 6.2 inches in Skamokawa that day, a few miles away. And the water ran deep all night long, as the sump pump and the river worked overtime.

In the morning, the valley lay underwater as Gray’s River vaulted over its banks and up to the rim of the hills. The torrent covered the road and swept trees before it, yet reached no houses, all built just high enough (or long since abandoned if not). The muskrats owned most of the valley and must have wondered where to go next. And what of the moles? But a calf survived her borning in the storm, and the sun came out. A goat and a pony lay supine in the sun after rotting in the rain for weeks. In a few days the flood dropped again into discrete ponds where pintails and goldeneyes, buffleheads and hooded mergansers spattered the surface with unreasonable colors.

Some years experience no winter, mild January dripping through sodden February into spring. Other Februarys mimic May, like the one following a house fire when I really needed the sun. But what there is of cold and snow is as likely to come in February as at any time. After the California-like January of 1985, February made an abortive attempt to regain the blue skies of a high-pressure system. Then a low front came in off the sea, and the month settled into a chain of snowy, frosty, sleety, haily, and cold-rainy days. Feeding flocks of robins, varied thrushes, flickers, and fox sparrows kicked the duff of a hardwood bank to uncover insects, as tits and kinglets mined the mosses overhead. Brown came out of hiding and a semblance of winter struck.

When the full moon came around, I walked down to the river. A very cold and silent night—not even a mouse or a coyote. But what struck me was the singular appearance of the molehills. Multitudinous in the pastures, the molehills by day became white-capped volcano fields in the snow and frost. But due to the north winds and the southern sun, they remained white longest on their north sides.

This became wonderfully apparent in the moonlight, with the molehills so black against the pallid pastures, and their north faces so silver, almost nacreous, in the moonshine. I don’t suppose the moles were aware.

Most Februarys rain and shine instead of snowing. When the winter clouds have been lightly shedding their wet, and then the northing sun finds a crack in the marble countertop of the sky, the valley is quick to seize the unexpected radiation. Against the kelly-green tunic of the land, the sequined cummerbund of the river glitters and wet roads loop like silver braids.

Omnipresent in the winter months, mew gulls seem to scissor the fabric with flashing blades of wings, and wheeling, shining flocks of starlings stitch it back together. Beyond, a thick green fringe surrounds every backlit fir and hemlock on Elk Mountain. The marble clouds part, and the scene’s luminosity intensifies like a crumpled piece of cellophane in lamplight. It is one of those shockingly clear sunbursts that announces the return of the sun to the northern sectors.

Then, just to remind you that this is still February in Washington, the clouds close rank, all goes gray and olive drab, and the rain resumes. Banana slugs emerge from winter quarters to resume their lifelong slither and graze across the greenwood. Then one evening, the tree frogs begin in earnest their magnificat for male voices—a bunch of bassos, each with a throat in its frog.

That nightly devotion, were we allowed no other sensation, would leave us in no doubt that March was upon us. March signs its presence in other ways as well. Here, it is like March anywhere in the North: sun chases clouds and it is windy. Also a yellow time, skunk cabbage swaddling low meadows and blanketing boggy bottoms with its canary colors. My own little stream makes room for it on the narrow floor of the ravine. Here and elsewhere, on grassy banks, yellow violets offer a similar brand of tint in smaller packages. And echoes of old bounce off yellow daffodils, which may bloom anywhere—as often as not on the sites of homesteads long lonely.

Of course, the yellows come hoisted on stems of green. Freshest of all greens, the new growth of March! Soft, yellow-green leaflets of Indian plum fleck the forest with touches of new viridescence. Greens to beat the stuff of any market produce stall for sheer, succulent freshness cover the floor of the forest in the form of heart-shaped mianthemum leaves, turning the herb layer into the biggest salad bar in town. Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, the perfect shamrocks of oxalis paint the shady places with three-spot patterns of lush leaf-green.

Eruptions occur daily. Out of the twigs of trees, catkins pounce on unsuspecting scenes. Hazel’s long canary danglers, alder’s rufous tassels, and pussy willow’s pearly tail-tips, all break the silence of the branches. Below, unexpected pushers break out of the banks of shale and orange siltstone slides. Among the limp, rotted rags of last year’s horsetails, the new crop appears. The green, vegetative plants at first resemble the myriad evergreen seedlings that sprinkle the roadside before drying out and dying. The flowering stalks come out tough and dull, like some sort of tropical cycad sprouts. Out of the very same places burst the herds of coltsfoot heads. Before flowering, the coltsfoot and the horsetail rather resemble one another—vaguely malignant-looking fungoid growths entering the fresh air uninvited from the fetid blank embankments. Then the dense-packed heads of coltsfoot bloom, expanding beyond all hopes, in the surprise Roman-candle manner of all composites.

Meanwhile, up above the forest fringe, a revolution takes place in the salmonberry brakes. Unrest at swollen nodes hints of leaves to come, while riots break out at the flower buds as cerise packets of petals unfold. Casualties are high as kite-flying winds scatter a quarter or more of them all. This gives rosy overtones to the angle of repose, where blood currant reddens the rocks on its own. Together, Rubus and Ribes make a pair of shocking pinks for the spring show. Nothing blasts the news of the Northwest spring like the magenta megaphone of the currants, unless it be the carborundum gorget of the first rufous hummingbird to steal their nectar.

Nectar of many sorts, absent these three months, now becomes available in gradually growing rations. The early emergent butterflies, veined whites and spring azures, find the creamy heads of coltsfoot a godsend as they flock to it: seldom settling but somehow getting a drink. Wild cherry, yellow violets, anything going serves to tank the whites and blues and the early creamy carpetbag moths that speckle the woods all spring. But the hummingbirds have the greater thirst, and they must suffer attrition as they frantically examine every possible pot of bright color. Jean Calhoun at the post office fills her feeders daily, and still the many takers fight, sometimes to the death. By following the feeders and precocious patches of bloom they seem to get enough, but it is hard to imagine that the frantic search provides more calories than it consumes.

And when the rains run sideways through the sky, and the river rises to meet the slug-belly fog at its banks and threatens to return the rain forthwith; when the great March storms come, what then of the hummingbirds? How do the azures fare? And what do the swallows do in the rain? That’s a good question. For if the winning scent of cottonwood balsam serves as the signature of spring around the ring of rivers, so the coming of the swallows stamps its official seal. One cannot help but wonder, on the harsh days, how can migration-weary, bug-hungry swallows make it?

Yet when the sun comes out, there they are—the otters of the air—violet-green streaks, gunbarrel-blue darts, investigating every hole for a home and nabbing every available insect. The hummingbirds, survivors too, rev up and prepare for courtship. A mourning cloak butterfly comes out, glides and alights, its mahogany and sapphire shine intact after winter’s draining. Hibernation however has skimmed the buttermilk margins of its wings, leaving them pale and tattered. The blues too have lived out the storm, or else new ones have emerged. Along Gray’s Bay, a single spring azure flits and basks on the damp clay bank, a powder-blue speck of sky fallen onto the floor of mud. Nearby, a carpet of cardamine spreads, ready to soften the tread of life and feed the larvae of the whites, and it is April.

April, rainstained but lush. Alders coming on like puffs of green smoke. You thought it was already green, and then April! The month explodes in a shower of green sparks that look like leaves. The valley pastures grow so green that they look blue, and indeed the heads of timothy and meadow foxtail do form blue crescents and swathes across the meads. If you pick through the patterns of new growth in the green ravines you find thick stands of frondose bleeding heart and its cousin, corydalis, whose pink-popsicle flowers will spatter the verdure before the month is out. The red currant hangs on and the Indian plum comes into its own after weeks of tentative unfurling: at Altoona, the image of their red versus white panicles dangling together from the river cliff is doubly striking. And stinking, for they both smell unflower-like, but that fails to deter the hungry hummingbirds.

Each year wears a different face, complected by the weather and made up with the paints of plants. In 1985 spring came a little late and cool. But when it came, it brought extra allocations of the early flowers. At their peak, Thea and I toured the back country of the Gray’s River Divide. I have never seen such trilliums: each a generous double triptych of deep green and bright white, stapled together with six yellow stamens. All along the road banks, evergreen yellow violets gathered themselves into orefields, crossed and bound by the green-gold veins of running club moss.

Now the horsetails stood a foot tall. If the green plants mocked small pines, the flower stalks seemed pale poles sharply banded with chocolate and crowned with cones. Overhead, bigleaf maples branded the forest edge with their long bags of chartreuse flowers. All together they painted the maples even brighter than their winter dress of moss and ferns.

Those maple danglers attract the returning warblers, orange-crowned, yellow-rumped, and black-capped Wilson’s. As much as bursting plant parts, back-homing birds spell April-ness with their calls, colors, and motion. Purple finches and pine siskins sit on dandelions, weighing them down and pinning their heads to the ground, so as to eat their seeds, perhaps the first seeds of the season. Band-tailed pigeons peck at cones and maple flowers and coo, their sickle-marked throats swelling iridescent. Cinnamon-flanked, apple-backed rufous hummingbirds buzz-bomb the watcher by the berry bushes; one large female, like an obese bumblebee, barely hovers over columbines and bluebells in the garden, perches to rest or nectar, then flops off to a vantage. Great with egg, she is almost too fat to fly.

This is pleasant to watch, but the high-fliers are the great glory of April with its perpetually unsettled weather: vees of Canada geese of course, but raptors and corvids as well, and cranes. One blustery morning at the mailbox I looked up to see a bald eagle, a turkey vulture, a Cooper’s hawk, a red-tail, a pair of ravens, and a judgment of crows, all soaring and circling overhead at once, as swallows harassed the lot and hummers zinged up in vertical display trajectories. The corvids clearly played with the wind in the manner of English rooks and jackdaws.

Loath to abandon the spectacle, nevertheless I left it at that, thinking I’d had my share. But no sooner was I back at work than I heard a peculiar snorkeling sound approaching from the southeast. Vague recognition grew sharp as I bounded outside in time to see thirty-five sandhill cranes arrive overhead, circle Swede Park at treetop height, then gabble off into the northwest in their graceful, lanky way. Such are the winds of spring.

Those winds that carry the broad-winged birds can be mean to the broad-leaved trees. The rotten, cold edge of April (following fast after a perfect, hot Easter) has more than once sacked the plums and dashed the apples, grounding petals and pollinators alike. Even if they survive this most fickle of months, white flowers change the guard as May arrives. Just as the wild cherry goes over, elder flower is coming on. Soon it dots the bush-fields of the secondary woods with creampuff sprays that appear to be mirrored along the roadsides by false Solomon’s seal. Serviceberry, so much more sonorously known by its botanical name Amelanchier, makes the occasional white splash at the edge of the forest. Pacific dogwood and madrona, still scarcer in the Willapas, brighten the banks of the Columbia only here and there. Back in the rain forest, May lights its way with pale fairy bells, queen’s cup beadlilies, and the simple white blossoms of oxalis.

Just as we thought the palette must be exhausted, two new greens appear on the scene. The new growth of the conifers comes out in tufts so soft and light that it seems they could never harden into the stiff needles of spruce or the dark boughs of hemlock. At the same time, like so many yellow-green parasols opening in the spring rains, the palmate leaves of vine maple unfold from their red bracts. Pendent from a basketwork of green limbs, they overhang woodland ponds, where newts float near the surface like fat, somnolent otters. Their egg masses resemble transparent pomegranates, the dark seeds being the efts growing within.

Overhead, winter wrens give full throat to brilliant, complex songs that pierce the greenwood. White-crowned sparrows, commanding clearings, may sing their simpler song at any time of night or day. This habit makes more sense in the arctic with the midnight sun, yet some birds do it here as well. Out in the open, calving under way in earnest now, eagles scope the fields for afterbirths and scout the river for spawned-out salmon.

May, if sunny, seems the more glorious; if cold, the more regretted because May shouldn’t be that way. Green deepens, and all the varied saxifrages of the woodland floor and river gorges go to flower, fringed and pale. The meadows run to gold as the first haying proceeds, and gardens grow voluptuous. At Swede Park, hummingbirds crowd the masses of rose-colored columbines that spring up in the watering-can days of May. Shrubs and perennials bloom in a paintbox of color. Pink and blue comfrey, salmon azalea, red and mauve rhododendrons, golden broom, purple lilacs and irises, the whole bound up in a dozen fresh greens and arced round with a broad ribbon of gold—the young, soft, pale leaves of the oaks that set the homestead so far apart from the evergreen forest all around.

Into June, the vegetation continues its excesses until the oak curtains go green and comfrey collapses under its own weight. Bracken uncurls its fiddleheads, reaches for new ground, and screens the edge of the wild bounds from sight. Mellow, pregnant June, with pink roses tumbling over the porch and incubating eggs about to burst open on all sides. But with the sun and summertime comes grass pollen, my particular bane, ensuring mixed reviews for the month.

June, early morning: Orioles haunt a foxglove patch, willow and western flycatchers prove true to their names in all respects. Swainson’s thrush begins its fluting, and goldfinches copulate on a hickory limb. A great blue heron flicks its primaries just enough to keep from falling on me from on high, as spotted sandpipers call from the river shore, and crows cronk over the cobbles. Slugs haunt the damps, European black in the garden, native banana on the alders.

June, midday: Papilionids flock through the grounds—pale tiger and western tiger swallowtails drink deep drafts at the purple Scotch rhododendrons, Clodius parnassians clamber over hawkbit and early bramble blossom for undistilled honey. Barn swallows—swoop is a word they invented, and they do it in, out, under, and all around the covered bridge. I watch them chase one another’s windowpane tails through the paneless windows of the barn, out over the rushy meadow, and up to their nest on the porch. Aloft, swifts.

June, dusk: A nighthawk over Elk Mountain. The golden fields of fresh-cut hay go a sickly yellow as horsemen forlornly clop over the bridge and a sullen gray sky conspires with Sibelius to invoke total melancholy. June can be as lonely and bleak as January. E. B. White agrees: “I don’t know anything sadder than a summer’s day.”

June, in the evening: Skunks roam, and opossums, and raccoons. Great blue-eyed, tan-vaned Polyphemus moths petition for entry at the bedroom windows. Finding one open, they enter and flap like soft brown bats around the room. Later, the lights off, actual bats come in and out as well. In, too, come sweet scents off the rain forest; building since April, the odors of immoderate growth now coalesce with the scents of hay and honeysuckle to produce June’s own heady perfume.

July is the time of spreading, shining bracken, of greens growing heavy and tired, of swimming-pool skies. Time for the cat to take shelter in the shade after a roll on the sunny stoop, as Scots broom cracks its pods in the heat of the day. Vultures and carrion beetles investigate whatever’s dead and rotting in the sun. We investigate the state of berries: blackcaps and raspberries, red currants and strawberries, thimble-berries and salmonberries, blackberries and dewberries, all coming on strong. Kingfishers and otters work the river while swallows intercept insects aspiring to rise toward weasel-tail clouds.

A soft glow blanches the valley as the first porch spider of the season snags rising Jupiter in her starnet. Bats flip through the garden as moths emanate from wood and grass. Killdeer and coyotes call, and frogs, much subdued since March’s crescendo, initiate their cluster croak. Clouds like a dinner platter of elvers in a spotlight rotate across the black table of the sky. The full moon and deep valley mist draw me out to be like Morris Graves’s birds, wrapped round in moonbeams. But I am coated inside and out with pollen. The moon can make lunatics and save minds but has little power to stifle sneezes or sooth sinuses.

With August, the pollen passes. Hay meadows, cut a second time, lie in winnows and eddies of yellow and green. Goldfinches too take their second harvest, working the awaited thistle heads. Tiger swallowtails move over to phlox, hummingbirds to montbretia. The new nectarer on the scene, the little tawny woodland skipper, isn’t picky: any nectary its proboscis can reach yields up fuel to the darting yellow jet. Days redolent of Buddleia recall butterfly-bush days of youth, when its bright purple spikes and cloying fragrance and those who came for its nectar were all the excitement a young boy could handle in one August afternoon. Saddle-backed cattle bring me back as they splash beneath the covered bridge, their reflections floating down the river.

Now you would not call it rain forest when you venture into the woods. In the garden, green snails feed on plums you dropped, but the forest mollusks estivate or at least hide out through the driest time. Mosses shrink, ferns curl, the sponge dries out. Bird song closes down and the greens, hacked about and blemished with insect damage, grow heavy and old. Away up in the Willapas, the fritillaries of high summer fly, seeking the violets, whose flowers have long since passed, on which to lay their eggs. The elk have gone as high as they can go, and at night the coyotes sing as low and close to the river as they can come.

The relative shutdown of August turns around in September as if everyone realizes that the season’s running short and the rains will soon be here. Garter snakes and red admirals come out to bask. Apples fall, bringing deer and opossums by night, yellow jackets by day. Steller’s jays and ruffed grouse catch unfallen acorns outside my study window, my cat watches voles and shrews and chipmunks and beautiful jumping mice, and a huge orb weaver over the borage tub catches honeybees that came to catch pollen and nectar while it lasts. Our one katydid species calls and Carolina grasshoppers launch their mourning-cloak wings into clattering flights. Tussock moths come out and I mistake them for russet butterflies; termites come out and I ignore them, as Bewick’s wrens and Douglas squirrels lecture on whatever topic I care to imagine, probably termite control, or the curbing of cats.

In the evening, owls call—great horned, barn, screech, saw-whet. Sunny mornings, purplish coppers quarter the riverbanks. Snails abound in the early rains, and banana slugs mate on alder trunks glyphed with their castings. Second- or third-generation white butterflies follow the same foraging routes their parents did. Their pallor echoes in the silver-coin full moon rising, leaving a distillate of itself on the valley floor. With it, a heavy mist rises off the scales of the summer salmon in Gray’s River. A total eclipse of the moon takes place. Crescentic bits are chewed away by earth, as if in retribution for Luna’s devouring of Sol in the previous winter’s solar eclipse. When the moon disappears, or at least becomes russet-pink, all the valley dogs’ lunatic barking ceases—until the coyotes give tongue in a brilliant, mad paean to the celestial rarity above.

The woodlands in September offer courses in the study of maximum growth attained. Walking webby sunways, I see tresses of club moss dropping down from maples and stretching up from stumps as if they might meet, like soft green stalagmites and stalactites reaching to form a column in some inside-out cavern. Long tendrils of marah, the wild cucumber, make a green-and-white cascade off a tall hemlock. Where its vast tuber lies (another name is manroot) I can only guess, but such growing power, to scale the forest and climb back down again in a season! New Guinean is its tropic feel, abetted by the whopping great skunk cabbage leaves looking sordid in the streambeds, grown into tired, tatty elephant ears. But temperate, cool, not at all tropic in the feel of the balmy airs.

The first big storms are as likely as not to come in September. Then the wind rends the nylon clouds and hurls trees across wires, as electricity flees and autumn arrives. The coyotes sing to the absence of mercury vapor lights as happily as to the missing moon. I like the dark too.

October, and spiderwebs appear between every two possible anchors in western Washington. To be specific, the elegant orbs of the introduced European Araneus diadematus. A misty rain points out every one of thousands of fenceline nets with silverdrops. Many hang empty, but others have rain-deckled spiders in residence. A beauty of a web links two misty foxglove stalks, as if a mirror divided it down the middle. The bulbous body of Arachne grows fat with flies in a race to make eggs before the frost. October without webwork? Unthinkable.

Animals great and small populate October in Willapa. A puma appears above Deep River, as scores of elk arrive in the valleys below. Back home, a birch underwing moth comes to lights, and a great gray slug walks in the back door. Catocala relicta and Limax maximus, big invertebrates in black-and-white tones, may not seem impressive alongside pumas and elk; but I am impressed.

Also to lights, every October without fail, come the big yellow, heliotrope-speckled geometrid moths known variously as the autumn thorn, the notchwing, or the maple spanworm. By whatever name, their annual arrival coincides with a chill in the air, and they cannot last long—they lay their eggs, then die. Isabella moths employ a different strategy, spending the winter as larvae: woolly bear caterpillars. October days may profitably be spent watching woolly bears as they cross the roads, then vainly climb clay banks, only to tumble down every time they reach the crumbly overhang; or approaching, meeting, following, and finally turning back from the river. There will be other caterpillar winterers. On a reddening roadside cascara tree in the Bear River range, I find three species of geometrid larvae preparing for the cold—eating, stoking up, perhaps beginning to think about spinning up—two cryptic red inchworm sticks, and a green. Rich caterpillar hunting in the fall, and no license needed; but I wear red, and hope that I will not prove cryptic against the autumn colors.

Those colors furnish another reason for going outdoors in October, despite the deer hunters. I needn’t go far. Swede Park, my home, is a crazy quilt of alien hardwoods, a patch of the northeast in somber-autumned western Washington. Here the sugar maples glow like torches against the still-green oaks that give away their own autumn plans with one or two branches each of precocious ruby leaves. Bright birches, a tulip tree, a catalpa, black walnuts, and sycamore maples, all arrayed around the white calendar house. They threaten to spill their several yellows into the atmosphere, turning it green. Later, a bright and poignant autumn tableau centers on a Japanese maple. Its flaming coral leaves, ranging from pale salmon to scarlet, fly off and sail, plucked by the frigid fingers of the rain. Still they densely clothe the smooth gray tree, at least until the next low blows in off the ocean; the last one stripped the sugar maples almost bare. The russet crinoline of the maple scintillates against the dusky blue of Elk Mountain beyond, mirrored by the azalea at its feet. Yellow lancets of black-walnut leaves score the crisp air as they glide on down. Molten oaken ingots fall as lightly as leaves.

Swede Park is exceptional, atypical of Willapa except inasmuch as the settlers of the region all brought much the same plants from home. But not all that glitters is exotic. Washington colors make soft autumns, but splendid. The glum hills opposite look less so for the yellow clumps of bigleaf maples that seem to have tumbled down into the cleft of the creek.

All across the hills, native maples like butter pats spatter the hemlocks with brighter color. The cottonwoods have gone gilt, and vine maples in sunny positions, together with osier dogwoods, bloody the nose of approaching November like any eastern shockers. Up the Columbia, the overall effect of oak, ash, cottonwood, and maple is that of old gold. The day ages, and the colors run to those of ale and malt whiskey, as the amber draft of autumn mingles with the liquor of the late sun.

Last year, October came in pallid tones for both native and alien trees. The sugar maples went yellow instead of orange. It was as if they knew they didn’t belong in western Washington anyway, so why be garish about it? The vine maples also showed a pallor, like last year’s colors faded by the sun, or daubed with the drippings of a watercolor fire engine left out to run in the rain. Why? Was the wet, cold spring followed by a long, hot summer a recipe for penumbral October? I can see why the fruits and nuts never set under such a regime. But I would think the early watering and later sunshine would favor the anthocyanins and carotenes and xanthophylls that make red, orange, and yellow when the chlorophyll flees. Chemical reasons exist for the leaves’ response, no doubt. Ignorant of them, it seems to me as if they knew they’d be washed out when the rains began anyway, so why make the effort?

Of course, most of the bright things here come in shades of green. When it rains, as it will and will again, they only grow greener. But it is hard to imagine a licorice fern going garish. Green, and greener, is as it should be. No washing out of the mosses. Through the warm, bright days of most Octobers, the ferns and mosses merely wait their turn to shine.

Goldener Oktober, Grauer November. Headline in 1984: “November rain wouldn’t let up”—over half an inch fell per day, average. A fine gray fist gripped the valley and the great god-sponge got the big squeeze. After weeks of throwing sunbolts, Thor switched to water lobs. The lily pads vanished from the pond like slowly sinking grebes and, with them, the muskrats. The rains had settled in for good. Or for a while, you never know. Still there could be scarlet days to come, when the big red oaks toss sparks and cinders from their flaming crowns, and red admirals show their vermilion bands as they drink fermenting apple juice from fallen fruit. More likely, what falls from the oaks is what falls from the sky, and it’s cold and wet, not red-hot.

With November rain comes the time of the fungi. We fill our pouches with chanterelles, orange fruits of the forest floor, and watch the mushroom show. Purple russulas glisten, livid and viscid. Countless agarics spread their spores from receptacles the shape of witches’ hats, capitol domes, black nipples, or distorted phalluses. Clear, white caps surround an alder trunk, growing right out of a collar of moss. Bracket fungi threaten to off-balance the trunks of trees whose heartwood they’ve already wrecked. And a jellied eel-like slime mold perambulates the path of a nurse log, making what progress? Perhaps more than the salamanders we find, moist animals uninclined to ramble beyond their rotted logs. Across these logs spreads a fungus called blue stain, and the turquoise fruiting bodies whose spores pass along its talent for painting wood an aquamarine tint.

In the chanterelle forest, a mile from home, on Thanksgiving, I reclined in one of the soft crotches of a mossy, massive stump, and watched unseasonal sunbeams blow sword fern fronds about. Then lay down on a moss mattress, and watched the motion of tall, slender hemlocks swaying in and out among one another in a mesmeric dance of fluid forms belying any notion of the rigidity of wood. The sky faded from periwinkle to soft slate. We returned to the valley, but I stayed out of doors, and my ears and nose took over for eyes deprived of short-day’s light.

A snipe snarked on the marsh, a barn owl rasped after rodents, and coyotes spoke on all sides as I walked the valley loop. Cattle chewed and snuffled, and tardy frogs croaked quietly and slow. My nose told me that three or four kinds of wood burned in stoves, as well as oil and coal. Rain, mist, and moist earth, muck and cows, and rotting leaves all cast their scents abroad. And near a large apiary, twice I smelled honey on the cool night air.

The fragrance of the air in Gray’s River, always fresh, takes on in December the acrid edge of silage and the sharp edge of chill. In its other traits, December’s days and nights may come sodden or dry, blue or gray, still or stormy. But always there is a quality to the low light that is December’s alone. This light may appear as a sun-smeared frosting on the grass and the valley, lying in a mercury pool beside the river. Or an oyster-shell glow emanated from the plumbeous clouds and the breasts of the mew gulls, picked up by the still roots of plants and thrown back in rain that threatens to rise to the skies. The light is short-lived and never twice the same, yet it always says “December.”

The year runs down. The solstice stands by to start things up again. On the logged hills, burnt stumps roam the land on flexed leggy roots, standing still. Seedlings on their tops catch the rain in hemlock nets of needles and make plans to take over, come spring. Below in the valleys, where spruce giants once walked, snapping sheets of dunlins, gulls, plovers, and peeps swirl and wheel in separate planes and settle on the silver meadows. Everything awaits the longer days, except the rain.

In December, rampaging rot overruns the rainforest floor, making fodder for the summer’s slugs to come. Buildings long abandoned give in to the double seduction of rain and rot, as decay advances elegantly. The double agents of clambering brambles and mats of moss make sure that nothing capable of falling will stand. Some find this a depressing and terrifying time, when the thinness of walls and the narrowness of time and the slender space between safety and surrender had best not even be imagined. But to me it means the opposite. For not a drop of rain falls, nor a bit of rot goes on, that doesn’t add up to growth and green: to life. In the dripping, deeping green of December, with life at rest but all around, I take true delight.

Even so: come the solstice, the barely longer days, and the new year, I am ready for it, ready for the brand-new calendar without a mark upon it; like a fresh white page, ready to be written, the year itself stretches out before me. It will be like no other year, yet like every one that’s gone before. The familiar face of the days strikes a new fashion for itself each spring—never the same, unchanging, classic, yet capricious.

You cannot take the months for granted here. In the first place, they slip and slide into one another so sloppily that they sometimes seem just one long, unruly season. And then, having settled more or less into a sort of recognizable pattern, they are liable to slip back out again: December into June, August in February. Yet they manage to make their seasons, these months; seasons full of change and surprise and gentle procession.

Seasons always green; yet seasons just the same, as one can tell by watching the reliable march of minutia through the days and weeks and months that make up the face of the rainforest year.