The Colors of Home - Part 2

One spring morning I was riding a bus downtown, over the Ross Island Bridge, when I saw a pair of western grebes dancing their courtship dance. They were running along the top of the calm, blue Willamette River below me, in perfect unison, their necks bent and wings outstretched, singing for the joy of being alive and being together. Later that spring, a canoe trip to Sauvie Island, on the Columbia River, brought us so close to a pair of great blue herons that we could see the plume feathers on their heads, and the multi-textured layers of gray and blue on their breasts. We could hear the wind blowing through the feathers on their wings as they flew over us in that lazy, head-tucked way that herons fly, scolding us for disturbing them as they were fishing in the shallows. Sage grouse gather on dancing grounds thousands of years old, the cocks strutting and dancing with their tails fanned and their chests puffed out in the pale dawn, competing with each other for the right to woo the hens. As the sun begins to rise they all fly away, seeming to disappear into the desert, awaiting another dawn and another dance.

In April, when everything else is still dark and dull and wet, the trillium bloom; the lovely three-petaled, waxy, translucent-white blossoms of the misty Columbia River Gorge, amazing in their purity, glowing against soft and shiny leaves of pale green. When the blossoms age, they begin to blush pink, turning darker and darker with each passing day. As the trillium bloom, the bullfrogs start singing at dusk and at dawn, and old-time Oregonians affirm that spring has arrived in earnest. The waxy-yellow flowers of skunk cabbage begins to blossom in the damp places along creek beds and marshes, adding a musky pungency to the scent of the forest. Mosses coat the sides of trees and poke through last year's brown leaf-litter, moist and furry and soft in a hundred different shades of green. Dogwood trees reaching fifty feet or more are covered with thousands of thick-petaled pale green-white flowers.

As spring progresses into summer, the hillsides of the Gorge and the Cascade Mountains explode with palettes of color. Blue and purple lupine blossoms tipped with white and pink, flame-colored columbine with throats of deeper orange, brilliant yellow gorse growing on stalks of dark green, fuchsia-pink fireweed and the softer pink of wild rhododendrons, and high in the alpine hills, the elusive white mountain lily, all blooming against a backdrop of deep green hemlock and spruce trees. At those times, when the flowers are just starting to bloom, the green of the leaves and spring branches on the trees is so new, so verdant, so green that the color itself has a scent. It's the scent that only the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest can have - part ocean, part river, part moss, part flowers, mysterious and intoxicating.

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