Cusp
Autumn in Three Parts
Part I:
We woke a couple hours before sunrise in our camper where we’d slept to get an early start, tucked into the elbow of the forest road accessing our trailhead. We made coffee and dressed in layers and struck out at first light for a pass that lay a little over nine gentle miles up a dense drainage: our favorite trail in the Olympics.
We passed through a burn scar where leggy rhododendrons held onto copper-colored spent blooms. We traversed a couple rock slides, the trail through which had been improved considerably since last year’s walk here. We entered an older section of forest where the floor was as green as the canopy and speckled with mushrooms. We slowed down.
Our first venture up this trail was a day I’ll never forget. We found a bear’s head mushroom – a toothed fungus related to lion’s mane, named for its size potential and among if not my very favorite forest food – that filled our daypack; we accessed a favorite high point in the northeast corner of the range from an entirely new direction; we saw a cougar – my first and only wild mountain lion spotting – on our drive out.
Since then we’ve gone each year. We check the bear’s head spot, which produces annually though we’ve never again timed it right. And then we climb. Long switchbacks gain the western slope of the draw and the view alternates between a forested valley gently falling away toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north and the crags, peaks, and saddles of the Olympics towering to the south.
This time around the air was thick with suspended moisture, just shy of having the density necessary to fall as rain. Everything, including us from the knees down, was soaked. The violet bells of gentian, the last of these mountains’ wildflowers, hung heavy in the thick dew.
There was an upward momentum to the heavy air. A bright sun shone on the other side of the thick, wet layer hugging the mountains and gently began lifting it. The trees, having taken their fill, released moisture from their stomata as transpiration. We watched it curl up the opposite side of the canyon and disperse on the winds that struck it as it crested the ridgeline.
We climbed and climbed. The clouds parted and closed again. The sun shone on their far side, adamant that there were still some days left in summer. But we could feel that autumn had arrived already, three weeks early despite the calendar’s claims, despite the sun’s position in the sky.
Part II:
The harvest moon is up and the animals know what to do.
Two weeks ago, from the saddle of Mt. Pilchuck in Washington’s North Cascades, Alex and I spotted a black bear gorging on blueberries three hundred feet below us. We watched her dark mass for a long moment before she moved, confirming our suspicions. (Our hopes, really – because seeing a bear on a hike is about the best thing you can hope for. When she’s at a very comfortable distance and happily eating her fill, it’s an especially nice experience.)
The bushes were laden and the bear moved slowly through them. I imagined what this all might look like up close: her pushing her snoot through the foliage, past poking twigs, reaching for dark clusters with lips curled back, jaw opened just enough, using her teeth to strip the berries from the bush. Was she drooling? Was she in a mountain blueberry induced euphoria? Yes, by the looks of it. Following her lead, we ate our fill all the way down the mountain.
At home later that week, I sat outside on a cedar round and picked a pint of huckleberries. Maple, my dog, sat next to me watching as I dropped each tiny orb into the repurposed gelato container held between my knees.
“I’m not giving you any of my huckleberries,” I said to her, matter of factly. Her eyebrows rose and fell in expectation and disappointment. But these berries are tiny and picked one at a time from between the others that are still green or already past their prime.
“It’ll take me an hour to fill this,” I told her, rattling my plastic pint container, the bottom barely covered in a single layer of berries. She looked hopeful at the gesture but then confused when I relodged the container between my knees.
I held a branch tip covered in shiny, nearly-black berries out to her. “Here,” I said, inclining my head toward her invitationally. She reached for the dark cluster with lips curled back, jaw opened just enough, and, using her teeth, she stripped the berries from the bush.
She’s only three, but so far I’ve had to remind her she can pick her own berries annually. “Snack bushes,” I said to her, again and again, hoping the concept sticks this year.
For the next hour while I filled my pint, Maple filled her belly. When she tipped her head sideways to find an optimal angle of entry between poking twigs, drool spilled out.
But it’s not only the large predators out eating autumn’s bounty. The fir cones have opened and the birds have descended. We listened to them from my sister’s front yard on the first day of autumn, happily chattering while eating their fill of the protein and fat rich seeds encased in each armored scale. Flecks of dismembered cones floated toward the ground on humid air.
The squirrels, too, are at it. Each morning for the past week or so, the remains of a freshly deseeded cone, or two, or three, have been left on a stump Alex uses to split firewood. Similar piles are littered around on every available surface.
It’s nearly Fat Bear Week, which means it’s nearly Fat Squirrel Week – our spin-off event hosted here at home. Hazel wins every year, both because she’s stripped her namesake of every last nut, and because we now refer to every squirrel as Hazel. I’d be willing to bet, between the nuts and the fir cone seeds, that our resident squirrels are capable of doubling their weight in the glut of each autumn.
Part III:
A moment of gratitude for the verdure of this seasonal cusp, so often brown and brittle. The odds were stacked against western Washington at the beginning of the summer, the chances of a devastating fire season higher than normal due to low winter and spring precipitation. But then it rained in August. Hard. And then it rained some more. And in September it rained again, several times.
Now here we are at autumn’s start, and the grasses are green and the trees are standing tall. We’ve made it to the far side of fire season, relatively unscathed. None of which are small things. None of which will go unnamed, or unappreciated, no matter who may complain that summer wasn’t what it ought to be.
