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Salmon River
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We sit on the rocks by the river, the alder trees whippling, each leaf pulling in different directions. The water casts its own shadow, billowing like window blinds, and as the wind reaches us we can see its path, lit and flickering atop the water, constellations of cold, white sunlight darting across the green…
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Desert Darkness
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There’s a certain kind of darkness the desert has, the kind that seems to rise from the ground itself, latticing its way, muted, through the air, and yet you can still see the knotted limbs of the junipers, and the pock-marked openness, the rock fields and buttes, all of it encased in a muffled…
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Spring River
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The Willamette River has started to thin at the edges, its murky spring sediment swept downstream, emptied into the great confluence of the Columbia, meandering miles and miles before sinking later into the wide, slow Astoria estuary. And so now, if you look into the shallow waters of the Willamette, right along shoreline, you…
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Cottonwood Canyon
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The river—pale-brown with sediment, the color of fossilized soil—moves in one great heap, a sweeping rush like wind through a tunnel, and I swear I can feel it, the low-down coolness it forms from itself. The river is high, and in places it has risen halfway up the willows and alders, painting dark rings…
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The Forest Swan
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I woke up just before dawn. For a moment I laid there, watching the wind smooth the fabric of my tent, its touch gentle, like a hand pressing lines from a t-shirt. I could hear the rest of the group outside, whispering to each other, rattling metal coffee mugs and plastic cereal bowls, their…
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The Madrone
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We walk into the fields, these open spaces that were once the farms of pioneers, once great swaths of white oak savannah, once tall grasslands where elk and deer stepped lightly through volcanic dust. The sky is big, here. You can see it all—the entire sweep of it, blue mixing into the pale, creaking…
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The Cold Light of Mars
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I look out the window just past dusk, and I see a point of light close to the horizon, just above the hill, poised to sink down into it the way the sun falls into the ocean. I head outside and don’t even bother to put on my shoes, stepping gingerly over the maple…
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Two Moments
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You’re at the park near your house, walking your dog, and you stop for a moment to look up, to feel the pulse of the firs as they flicker orange in the light. Playing behind them, in tandem, almost as if a filter screen has been transposed over it, you see just as clearly…
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The Fallen Fir
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It’s the kind of fog that you can feel as you walk through it, all the droplets hanging static, not enough of them to wet your hair, but enough of them that they pelt your face like grains of sand, each waterdrop present and tangible, as though the air itself is made from mist,…
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First View of the River
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If you walk up the hill, ducking beneath the hazelnut tree, its branches looped and willow-like, and you continue past the elderberry bush, the one with the bead-like berries that only the birds eat, you’ll find the part of the forest where the dirt is bare, where the ivy doesn’t grow, and you’ll continue…