Robert Michael Pyle - Gray's River Lecturer
Welcome to Gray's River Almanac. In this series for the Gray's River
Grange website, I intend to contribute brief observations on some of the
natural goings-on in our charmed and challenged valley and its embracing hills. Many of these will have to do with the
passage of the seasons, and the annual events that follow the orbit of the
globe. What better time to begin
than soon after the winter solstice?
Spring starts early here, and soon the daily changes will come hot and
heavy, so I'd better begin.
First,
you'll note that I use an apostrophe in Gray's River, unlike the road map, the
State Grange, and most other sources.
This eccentricity is for reasons explained in my books Wintergreen and Sky Time in Gray's River, to which I refer you for more details on
that particular quirk, or on the general natural history of the area. Both titles are readily available from
Timberland Library in Naselle or at the Redmen Hall shop in Skamokawa, through Powells.com in Portland, or on
Amazon, in diminishing degrees of localness.
Second,
I stated above that our valley is both charmed and challenged. Much of the charm and most of the
challenge owes to our abundant endowment of water. If we did not receive the unusual gift
of four meters of more of rain per year, most of it falling between October and
March, and much of it in this very month of January, we would not be so green,
so lush, so diverse, so mild, or so threatened by floods. But we do get that much--and for many
of us, that's why we're here, if for no other reason than it keeps the
population down to a delightful dribble.
Not
that we are antisocial, but we like our space, our traffic-free roads, the
absence of lines at the bank, the shops, and the post office, and knowing most
of the folks we see. One of the
distinct pleasures of living in such a place is knowing our neighbors--not only
the human kind, but the other animals and the plants with which we share the
valley and hills as well. Getting
to know those more-than-human neighbors a little better will be one of the
purposes of these occasional notes.
But
back to water. From my study, the
second-story nursery of this old farmhouse, I've just noticed raindrops in a
form I'm not sure I've ever seen before.
Rather than simply dropping, as usual, they are running down the slanted
branches and twigs of a birch before launching off the tip, like so many kids
on a waterslide. The little
waterfalls on our brook are tumbling over themselves in a genuine cascade, way
up from summer's trickle. Of
course, the river is rising also, and if the precip keeps up, we may well be in
for yet another flood, when the whole valley might well be renamed The Big
Muddy. But we know all this, and
we live here anyway. Gray's River
without the water might as well be some desiccated stick of a village on the
dusty side of the mountains; or if it were still this beautiful yet not so wet,
it would surely be overrun in no time.
As for the season, here's what to watch for as winter wanes and spring gets underway: dangling catkins of hazels as they yellow up with pollen, our first native plant to bloom. Next is usually the Indian plum, whose leaf buds are already breaking. In our garden, Swede-planted snowdrops are already in flower, and crocuses and dwarf irises are not far behind. The occasional clickers of precocious Pacific tree frogs will erupt into full chorus any day now, hitting their crescendo between St. Valentine's & St. Pat's. Resident black-capped and chestnut-backed chickadees and dark-headed juncos dominate our feeders, along with spotted towhees and Steller's jays. Varied thrushes, like robins with black necklaces, come down from the hills to warmer valley gardens. Winter wrens "chuck" from the sword ferns and song sparrows issue wispy calls from bare canes of salmonberry--which will put forth shocking pink blossoms before we know it, in time for hungry rufous hummingbirds, always one of our first spring arrivals. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Each season brings surprises, but of one thing we can be sure: before we see those hummingbirds, there will be a lot more water under the bridge.
Comments