Dyslexic Geese

Like dyslexic geese, we head south with the spring as our cousins fly north over our heads, nosily mocking. With the closing of the ski area, the streets of any ski town start to empty. Two weeks later in the early evening, a bowling ball rolled down the main drag, cleanly down the middle or a gutter ball down either side, rolls unobstructed and largely un-observed.

I lived in Breckenridge Colorado for most of a couple of decades. As the town grew, you would meet fewer people you knew shopping at the market. In the later years, I would meet more people I knew in the Moab Safeway two weeks after the ski area closed than on a normal trip to the City Market during the season. At that time, I realized it was time to move.

Recently I made my proscribed southern migration, though not to Moab this year. In Fernie, the leaves were just breaking with the first of the spring warmth when I headed south to pass through the gauntlet know as the US Border. With a careful eye, the uniform checked my back seat, my trunk, unzipped my duffel and rummaged through. Then seeming still reluctant, allowed me to pass.

I’ve learned the true advantage to dual citizenship is you always have a place you can call home. A place that welcomes you. And it ain’t to the south.

The first sign of real spring appeared in Bonners Ferry with the shock of a single early blooming pink ornamental cherry tree. Only one, barely visible in a yard half a block off the highway.

The first evening, I spent with friends in Spokane. Just out of the city, they live on almost 300 acres with their own year-round trout creek at the bottom of a canon. Basalt rim rock, sage, and ponderosa pine. Dry land. Upper Great Basin lands. We sat on the deck in the morning, enjoying the sun, watching the birds, listening to the cows in behind the house in the barn. John talked of how none of the cows dropped and it was a late spring. He could only pick up a couple of weeks each year and this late calving would throw him off for several springs.  In the canyon bottom, where heat reflected off the rocks, the willows spun green, but most of the flowering trees were only starting to show buds, their color remaining hidden under the brown wrappers. The grass greened, but still seemed a week from needing cutting.

Sitting on the deck, I thought I saw Fernie a week or two further on. And I marveled at our talk. Of harrowing fields, plantings, chickens and late dropping cows. Of great books we’ve read. Of readings we’ve recently attended, or long ago. Of our own work and where it sits. I’ve known John and Clair for well over thirty years. As academics. A writer and a concert musician. Now we mix the sustainable nature of organic farming with the academic. Seamlessly. Perfectly. The lifestyles dovetail and seat themselves naturally on the deck in the sun between sips of dark aromatic coffee from a French press sitting on the deck at our feet.

Late in the morning, continuing south, I approached the Columbia River. Trees filled and gardens seemed on the verge of climbing out of the barely defined beds. Once in the Gorge, the broken basalt layers contrasted to the new spring green of the blooming sage and grasses. In the eastern part of the Gorge, Pasco to The Dalles, the landscape is barren with few trees. As you pass The Dalles, heading west, the oaks start to fill. In the sheltered alcoves among the cliffs, oaks mix with willows seeking the water seeps in the draws. Then trees fill complete valleys once you get to Mosier, with the ridges barren from the arid nature and the relentless winds. By Hood River, trees no longer seem a rarity and the valley floor becomes filled with blossoming fruit trees.

Hood River is the boundary between the Great Basin and the Cascades. Moving west from Hood River, you leave the dry scrub oak and enter into familiar terrain with hemlocks, cedars in the draws and firs standing up the slopes. In the sixty miles from The Dalles to Stevenson, twenty miles to the west of Hood River, annual rainfall totals increase an inch a mile. The Dalles receives six to eight inches a year. Stevenson receives seventy or more.

In Stevenson, spring has arrived and stamped every corner and every plant. The ornamental cherry in the yard holds blossom clusters the size of junior soccer balls. The camilla is dropping the last of the blooms. Forsythia pokes yellow and the herb garden has been thinned and given up one set of cuttings. The spring merges into approaching summer.

A couple of days playing with the dogs and I head off again. Further south. Into the desert near Bend. I skirt Mt. Hood with snow still along the roadside and drop into the ponderosa pine forests of the Warm Springs Reservation and on into the rim rock land of eastern Oregon desert. Here the trees become shorter and slowly change from pine to juniper. Stunted , no bigger than the fruit trees of the Hood River Valley, they hold in the lee of hills and down arroyos. As I approach Bend, even junipers become scarce with the tallest plant being a spring green sage. The grasses still create a green filagre carpet between the sage, but there is a foretelling of the brown and dun colors to come in the full dry heat of summer only one page further on the calendar.

Bend is a mix of re-visiting the old and seeing new business. On the Metorilus River not fra from here I first learned to fly fish. Early one winter, I worked in the Hoodoo Ski Bowl rental shop mounting skis and converting their shop to a new binding system. Years before Breckenridge, Now I was back to discuss sailboat masts.

After a long lunch, a discussion of the properties of carbon fiber in different applications, sezo axis with hoops and so on, a look at super light glider and a peek at the prototype fuselage of a custom glider being built to break the world’s gliding altitude record (just over 50,000 feet), I heed my cousins and turn north.

The seasons reverse. The warmth of spring rewind over the next few days as I move north back into early spring in the mountains. The last bit I make in one push and stepping out of my car in front of my house, still dressed in the sandals and shorts of late spring (a full spring, I only left hours earlier in the day), I shiver.

It remains very early spring in Fernie. I dig around in the duffel to find a pair of jeans fast.

But it’s good to be back. To smell the cedars. To walk on the riverbank. And to see the shadows cross the Lizard Range as the sun drops each evening.

The sandals and shorts will be back out soon enough.