Fragile Creatures

Late spring and the preciousness of this season strikes me this year in a way it maybe never has before. The tenderness, the vulnerability, of everything – the brave green shoots of a thousand different forbs and fescues, half of which get mowed down within hours of emerging by hungry slugs, rabbits, and deer. But still the meadow is full – overfull if I’m being honest, that’s my fault – and there’s plenty for all.

It’s especially hard to begrudge the deer their forage. They have fawns to feed this time of year. We’ve seen three different mothers moving through the property in the past month. One fawn, maybe two weeks old, collapsed in a terrified heap in our drive after the neighbors’ Corgi chased her off their lawn a while back. 

Body rigid and eyes wide, I thought she was dead until, after about half an hour of laying there, she began panting in the spring sun. I left her watch to gather supplies to shade her – a pair of folding chairs and a beach towel – until she found the courage to get up and rejoin her mother. In my absence she disappeared. 

I didn’t see her, her sibling, or mother for a month. Just as well, I thought, I too have a dog rippling with instincts. We keep her leashed for fawn season, but still. Unlike the Corgi, she would not be deterred in the least if the doe turned on her and charged. 

But I worry about the fawns when I haven’t seen them for a few days. I try not to pay too close attention, not to keep a census, but I can’t help myself. Our dog found a dead fawn in the woods last spring. She pulled Alex straight to where it lay curled in a lifeless ball in the dark. In the morning when he went to bury it, it was gone save a single hoof.

I imagine a doe with fawns is the most vulnerable family group in the forest. No partner, no shelter, packs of hungry coyotes on the prowl, and an under-stimulated dog in every yard. 

I spotted the fawns again a few days ago. An immense relief, apart from the fact that they were standing in the middle of the road with (thankfully very patient) traffic accumulating in both directions. The doe stood ground for them all, nosing them toward the shoulder from her position in the center of the lane. 

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The Swainson’s thrush has returned to the forest for the spring. The upward spiral of his song fills the day from dawn to dusk, lures me out into the garden first thing each morning. Throughout these late spring days I weed in ten, twenty, thirty minute increments to his tune.

I stop to watch the bumble bees tunneling into and out of foxglove blooms. They have to let go at the lip of each bloom they back out of, which causes them to drop a bit, wings buzzing furiously to lift them again. I take a video in slow motion so I can better see their pollen-loaded haunches and daring drops. I send it to my nephew who shares my delight.

Robins’ eggshells litter the paths, their blue so striking they read as litter for a split second each time we find them. Chartreuse tips cover every fir and hemlock, their flavor as bright as their hue. The madrona’s new growth is the same color in high gloss. Rhododendrons are blooming in jewel tones across the spectrum, the native shrubs on the forest trails bright pink. The lupine add their indigo spires to the colorful line up. Late spring’s palette is a riotous celebration.

The grasses in the meadow – prairie June grass, Roemer’s fescue, meadow barley, blue wild rye, tufted hairgrass – are all seeded. Their textures are as varied as the flowers’ colors and beg to be combed by hand with each pass up and down the stone path. The yarrow, more plentiful on our little patch than any other plant by far, are feathery soft and ready to burst into bloom any day now.

Everyday there is something new to discover. A flower that bloomed in the meadow in the morning’s sun for the first time this year – self heal this morning; a spiraled depression in the long grass where a fawn passed in circles, like a dog, before it bedded down; the dashed iridescence of a slug’s trail looping across the pavers and logs, the silver lining in its destructive wake. The chores are endless but the work is fun. The air is warm, the birds are singing, the hammock is at the ready for cloud spotting.

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If the trill of the Swainson’s thrush is the foreground sound as spring concludes, the approach of wildfire season is the background noise. An annual anxiety since the Beachie Creek Fire burned my beloved Opal Creek Wilderness in 2020, my mind wanders to snow pack and precipitation levels, fuel loads, and summer weather predictions as habitually as my body wanders into the garden this time of year. 

I try not to pay too close attention, not to keep a tally, but I can’t help myself. Here on Bainbridge Island we’ve only received 70% of our average rainfall so far this year, and we haven’t entered the dry season yet. The rain events we’ve had have been intense – creating the illusion it’s been a wet year – but intermittent. 

The snowpack is even further behind. As Caroline Mellor, Washington State Department of Ecology’s drought lead, commented after a late winter snow storm bumped the state’s snowpack by ten percent, “The Olympics did go from 34 percent last week to 51 percent today, which is a huge jump for a week. That doesn't make 51 percent any less concerning.”

Our neighborhood has just participated in a Firewise program sponsored by the local fire department. A ten yard dumpster was delivered to the terminus of our dead end lane and we had a weekend to fill it before it was hauled off for free. In preparation, Alex spent two weekends limbing the trees in the ravine of their dead branches. The pile he created in the course of doing this work would have filled the ten yard dumpster without the contributions of our neighbors. In the end only about thirty percent of it fit. 

The remainder of the deadfall sits where it was hauled, stacked in a pyre next to where the wooden boat is parked on its trailer, under the drying cedar trees. That pile represents maybe a quarter of the work we should do to make our home as fire resilient as possible. Being aware but unprepared feels especially precarious. 

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We plan to visit Opal Creek soon, before access is blocked again while a bridge is repaired. We’ve been enlisted to assist in some road repairs. We’re on standby, waiting for a piece of equipment to arrive onsite, ready to head down this week or next. 

I remember reading the words of a fire chief describing the destruction up the Opal Creek drainage after the Beachie Creek Fire. “Pretty much worst-case scenario,” he said, “a stand-replacing fire.” 

It’s interesting to be on the far side of a worst-case scenario. It feels like an opportunity to practice the kind of curiosity that doesn’t hold on too tightly. I’m dreaming about my any-day-now encounter with this place I love, exploring in the subconscious what it will feel like. It feels appropriate that my first time back to this precious place, which in a grand sense is in a new and precious phase of life, happen in this precious spring season. 

And while we wait, I garden. The words of Wendell Berry pace through my mind – a middle note between the thrush and my fire anxiety:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.