Desert Blues

When I was a teen, my family came to Oregon for summer vacation. We stayed a week in Seaside or wandering along the coast. My sister and I were fascinated by the slugs: we didn’t have slugs in Nevada, let alone those huge yellow banana slugs or the blacks ones or – well, shoot: we didn’t have six-inch long fat slugs. We walked along the beach with my mom and collected sand dollars.

Then one day, my dad would say. “It’s time to go home: it’s too green.”

He didn’t mean it was full of environmentalists (that terminology came much later), he meant: it is too green. Ferns, firs, evergreen huckleberries, elderberries, and the various deciduous trees and bushes that grow under the fir canopy, the sitka spruce, the grasses, the hedges, the vista of the Coast Range: shades of green.  The Cascades from the Willamette Valley: shades of green.

He meant that he longed for the pottery colors of the high desert: the browns, pale blues, purples, and sage green. The browns that fade into the distance, become blue and purple hills, and the sagebrush & rabbit brush that dot the landscape. He missed the granite and basalt ridges and the white alkali valley floor, cracked and dry and dusty – or muddy brown.

Every winter I endure in the Willamette Valley is another winter I dream of pottery colors. Staring out the dark window into the subdued light of day, the green of the fir trees turning dark and mysterious while lawns sprout up and out in grass green and the rhododendrons create a framework of evergreen that is still another shade of green between the fir and grass – I miss pottery colors.

On a rainy day, it is just brown upon brown upon brown in the high desert. But rainy days are not infinite and the sun comes out and the temperature drops. Hoar frost paints the landscape. The browns are complemented with the sage green, the yellow of dry grasses, and the fading purple and blue mountains; the darker brown basalt rocks and the soft grey granites accent the hills. Earth tones. Pottery colors.

The greens have their own beauty. When the sun comes out and you can distinguish the shades, there are mosses, bracken fern, ferns, deciduous greens, firs, pines, spruce, hemlock, yew. The green rises into great pinnacles of mountains and deep, sudden vales. It turns blue-green in the distance and shimmers in the blue haze of the Cascade peaks reaching above the timberline. Those peaks are white with glaciers.

In a recent conversation with my son who is in Maryland, he mentioned his own form of homesickness: “There are no mountains on the  East Coast.” he said. “If they don’t rise above timberline, they aren’t mountains: they’re just foothills.”

I really do not mind the Willamette Valley that much, it is just that winter gets to me: endless days of no sunshine. Rain that comes in all forms: mizzle, mist, rain, downpour, drizzle, sleet. The grey clouds that hang low over the earth and obscure that skyline of Cascade peaks reaching high above the timberline, glacial white and deadly. The grey clouds that block the sunlight and make noon, dusk.

It isn’t too green: it is too grey.