In the 31 years I have lived in Western Washington, my eyes have become accustomed to the color green, though I can tell you that this way of seeing was not always the case.
In 1977 we left Ohio and moved to the Pacific Northwest, settling and working first in Central Washington, in Yakima, just East of the Cascades. We lived in the rain shadow of the mountains then, a landscape of sagebrush and dry, generally brownish hills that had an Old West kind of feel. As a photographer, I would have told you back then that I knew colors, but the truth is that I really didn’t know green, at least not the way I know it now. It wasn’t until we’d lived for several months in Yakima and made our first drive west, over the Cascades, to spend a day in rainy Seattle, that I had my first Green Epiphany. I remember being slack-jawed, taken-aback, thrown off-balance by the ridiculous intensity of Western Washington's green.
We moved to the Seattle area in 1980, and today, as I sit in the second floor office I have in our home and type these words, I can look out the window to my left and the only thing my eyes take in is a rectangle of green, a huge cedar tree filling the frame...and the same is true of the view from the window to my right. I can hear that rain is falling outside -- which has been the case most days here since mid-September. I’m no botanist, but I’m pretty sure that, when it comes to trees and grass and the other plants that live outside my window:
4 months of rain
+ 3 more months of rain
= green
Anyway, we went hiking in the green yesterday, walking a path in the Olympic National Forest, about 30 minutes from our home. Our trail took us through a valley in the temperate lowlands and the day felt like spring, but all around and above us were mountains, high places still covered in winter’s snow, though now beginning its melt, so that the slopes dripped and seeped with runoff.
Drip, drip, drip. Every plant was soaking up the moisture, the creeks swelling. We came to a spot where a tree had fallen across a stream and the tree has become a "nurse log," a fertile host now for moss and ferns and baby trees. We could practically watch things grow.
1 drip
+ 2 drips
= life
