Got home Tuesday night from what will have to pass for a vacation this year. When I say I went up to the Pacific Northwest for a funeral, everyone is quick to offer condolences. But this was a memorial for my Uncle Ole and Aunt Bertha, both of whom were in their 90s when they died late last year. So the tenor of the event was much more a celebration of lives well--and very fully--lived than it was an occasion for grief.
I gave myself two days on each side of the weekend so I could visit with family members and recharge my soul with big hits of the greenness of Washington State. Shot lots of photos, many of which will show up here in time, I suppose. Hung out with my favorite aunt and uncle. Had dinner with two of my adult children and my barnebarn (grandchild), who is now nearly nine years old.
But I also spent a lot of time alone, visiting favorite places whose beauty tethers my soul to the Northwest, no matter how full my California life may be. It's just the way it is: I was as imprinted by the sight of fir tree tops against a sunset sky as a baby duckling is upon the first sight of his mother. I see the familiar sights and I start to hear the melody of home home home home singing in my ear.
Shot a few photos of some of my favorite green things, trees and plants and landscapes that simply do not exist in California. Here's a plant the dangers of which I probably warned 2,000 little girls during my stint as the nature counselor at CYO summer camps. It's Oplopanax horridus, more commonly known as devil's club. We pagans don't believe in the devil, but if we did, he'd inflict these leaves on the denizens of hell as toilet paper, I bet. It's so green and beautiful, with its massive hand-shaped leaves. But the leaves are covered on both sides with fierce hooked thorns, as is the stem, and, when it fruits, the berries. I was very surprised to learn that it's apparently a medicinal plant much revered by the Tlingit people in southwest Alaska. I noticed they use skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) leaves to protect their hands when they are harvesting leaves from devil's club. I love the way the leaves reflect and filter the light.
I also was pleased to see my old friend vine maple (Acer circinatum), and be able to shoot it from underneath, with the light coming through the leaves. It's shrubby, growing in a thicket rather than having a tree-like shape, and is often found in the otherwise evergreen forests. I shot this one on the trail up to Salmon la Sac in Kittitas County. My family has gone camping there since my great-grandfather used to hitch a wagon to a team of horses and bring everybody up from the ranch they homesteaded in Ellensburg.
My grandmother loved vine maple, too. She used to tell me that whenever she was crossing Snoqualmie Pass in the autumn during the first snow, the red of the vine maple leaves looked to her like strawberry jam running down a dish of ice cream. They do turn brilliant red in the autumn, but I think I like them the best when the leaves are new, intensely green, and almost translucent. It's too hot and dry for them here in the Bay Area, alas. Here are some very green vine maple leaves.
I also miss the subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa) one begins to find in the northwest at an altitude of about 2,500 feet. I've been in love with this tree ever since my first backpacking trip back in my Girl Scout days for the minute it shows up in the landscape, it's a sign that alpine meadows are to be found nearby. For me, this tree has always looked like it belongs on a Christmas card. The trees are relatively narrow for their height, and some of them are grotesquely shaped as a result of the weight of snow they bear in the winter.
I shot these trees along the Denny Creek Trail that was once the wagon road over Snoqualmie Pass. My grandmother and great-grandparents would take this route by wagon to get over to Seattle long ago, and when my kids were little, I'd take them hiking along this trail as many times each summer as possible. It always felt like our own personal hiking trail.
Finally, here's Cooper Lake framed by subalpine fir. I shot this from the bridge over the Cooper River, which flows from the lake. It's just northwest of Salmon la Sac, and the mountains you see in the background are Chikamin Peak and Lemah Mountain. The last time I was here in June, it was way too snowy for me to get up to this elevation of 2800 feet, so I guess we really are seeing the effects of global warming, even in the arctic-alpine zone of the Washington section of the Cascades. It was a beautiful day, and had I been a little more nible, I would have been out lying on my stomach, photographing some of the wildflowers with my macro lens. This time I brought home only my memories of how beautiful they were. Here's the lake.
It looks like a dry dry summer here in the Bay Area. When I got home I saw that some of my annuals had already burned to straw, despite my friend Thalia's best efforts to keep them watered. So it's a good thing I have these photos and memories to draw upon when the Berkeley Hills turn brown this summer and the Diablo winds start blowing and drying all the vegetation to tinder. I can remember with Hopkins that ``nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.''
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