Scenes from the Northwest

 

We booked our flight to Portland a few eons ago, hoping that the pandemic would be well contained by then and that we'd feel confident about flying. Eons passed(I don't remember much of it, just lots of hiking to the music of cicadas, and teaching people about sourdough bread, and hours spent staring into the void [aka the internet]), and we made the decision to go anyway. We wanted to visit family. We wanted to hike beside the waterfalls and breathe the smell of pine needles warmed by the alpine sun.

Our flight landed last Monday, and Zach's dad Gary picked us up from the airport. As I took off my mask— the three of us are now a "pod," like dolphins— and looked out the window at the browned summer grass and muted-green Douglas firs, a feeling washed over me: 

What a long, strange, weird, hot, anxious trip that was. It's so good to be home.

My mind felt thrown off, but my body relaxed with that feeling you get when everything is familiar again— those horse statues made of driftwood along the airport exit, that blackberry thicket at the overpass. Home! And the past year, full of a pandemic and unrest and anxiety, was a trip that was finally over.

Of course, this feeling didn't last long: Covid is here, too, although people in general are a lot more cautious about it. And Portland still doesn't feel like home the way the Midwest does. But still, the lines between what is a trip and what is not has gotten pretty darn blurred in my head.

Our days have been action-packed, with me squeezing in editing papers in between jaunts to various hikes: Ramona Falls at Mount Hood, Ape Canyon Trail at Mount St. Helens. Socially-distanced lunch with our sisters-in-law on the patio, raspberry-picking on Sauvie Island, walks along the trails in Vancouver, WA, where we lived for seven months last year. Next week we're camping on the coast near Olympic National Park. Tonight I'm baking a homemade raspberry cheesecake.

The forests here are less alien than I used to find them, but no less fascinating. On the 2,000-foot elevation gain near St. Helens, we noted the way the berry bushes changed the higher up we went: salal and black raspberry and Oregon grape at the trailhead, thimbleberries and salmonberries tangled up in the alder thickets as we climbed higher, then huckleberries and alpine strawberries as we cleared the tree line, interspersed with the high-Cascade flower trio of purple lupine, scarlet paintbrush, and white pearly everlasting. Berries thrive in coniferous forests because they know their time is limited: they entice birds and bears to spread their seeds to the edges, as the forest grows darker and denser each year until there isn't enough light for them to survive. Moss and ferns swallow everything in the end, but the berries leap lightly over huge distances and create new roots in the cool sunshine. 

The rock is all volcanic here. It creates dazzling cliffs and geometric forms and so many waterfalls. The highest peaks of the Cascades run like a string of snowy pearls down the Pacific Crest, and at elevation you can see them in rows or triangles. We look at the peaks and discuss: is that Adams or Rainier? Hood or Jefferson? Which direction are we facing, anyway? Mt. St. Helens is the easiest to identify, because you can see the abrupt edge where the top thirdof it melted, and then exploded.

I'm not used to "short" trips (two weeks seems like nothing when our average trip is multiple months), so I'm trying to soak it all in. Family time, ravens croaking from the fir-tops, fresh-picked blackberries, swaddles of moss, communal YouTube-watching, Steller's jays, nights where you can leave the windows open: I breathe them in, grateful for the chance to be here in the Pacific Northwest.

 

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