I had big plans for the winter break, but my dreams ended as most do, thudding back to earth. I woke up as the airplane landed, my forehead pressed to the cold window pane. My native Willamette Valley sprawled before me. It wasn’t bathed in the vivid summer light of my memory but in a fine mist shrouding fields of subdued green. Moist air quenched any sense of ambition.
It was a wet winter, “La niña,” my dad said when he picked me up at the airport. It was raining as we walked through the parking lot. Not a cleansing summer storm, but a persistent rain saturating anything that ventured outside in the winter months. This was the work of a bone-tired god who’d lost a great many creatures with the fall frost and sought to flood the land for a fresh start in spring. We drove through the rolling foothills of the coast range to my house on parkland abutting dense doug fir timberland.
Things are falling apart so slowly that it’s nearly imperceptible. In the months that I’ve been gone, entropy has prevailed; an antler I found a few years back has split under its own weight on my bookshelf. My dad’s old truck sits in a fallow field, her blue paint chipping with the cycles of freeze and thaw, rain and dry.
Exchanging my baggage for a few wet dogs, we drove west to Wolf Creek where the accreted coast range eroded before my eyes. The steep walls of the roadcuts were carved by mud-brown streams as culverts strained to keep the water off the road.
The forest slowly turns over, as always, digesting itself. We hunted winter chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms for dinner. My old dog whimpered, trailing at a distance as we approached the remains of a stone foundation with a rock chimney. What once was a sturdy house of stone crumbled under the prying embrace of a sea of moss.
Back at home, I shimmied out of an old raincoat that clung to my sopping hoodie underneath. The rain won’t let up before March, leaving everything in the temperate land to decay. Somewhere in the recesses of my weathered brain, I’d already resolved to ride out the storm by the fireplace with my family.
My grandpa regaled me with faraway fishing stories. My grandma saved newspaper clippings for me and smiled sweetly as I read about some backup quarterback who grew up herding cattle. Eventually, my grandparents grew tired and napped, my parents and sister worked, and all the while, the rain fell.
The land shouldered what it could as water rose through subterranean caverns and porous rock. Topsoils swelled, lichens held bulging beads in their hydrophobic hairs, and monocultures of young Doug firs binge drank, but soon their thirst was sated. The land drained creek basins, shuttling water to the sea in rivers, moving high, fast, and formless.
I grew restless, watching as the world was swept away around me. In a downpour, I drove back to Wolf Creek. There, amongst the chanterelles and Doug fir, I saw the old chimney. I saw my family aging into an ever-changing topography, my home reclaimed by the land. Come spring, the rain will be calm and the land verdant. Tall grasses will sprout atop the sessile corpses of last year’s medusahead, healing old scars. But by then, I’ll be gone.
