The mountain is here. It hides in the silhouette of the morning sun, its gray rock softened to the color of the moon, and it watches me as I walk the streamside plains. This is a place of blue rapids tossing beneath fir branches, and dense, dark clouds gathered like flocks of starlings.
Today the water is low enough that I can cross over it on a fallen log, and I do so slowly, delicately, hunched over and walking with my hands. When I make it to the other side, I dip my hand in the stream. This is water from glaciers, from snowmelt, from the mountain itself, and it will run down the hillside to the east fork of the Hood River, which will take it north, through forests, through apple orchards, through city streets, and up to the Columbia River. This water will meet the ocean in Astoria, spilling out from the estuary and into the open water. There, it will be mixed with water from every creek, every river, every rainstorm, and the world will churn together.
But for now the water slips past my fingers, and it is just me, and the mountain, and the ravens creaking like tree trunks, all of us streamside, and watching.
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I’m the author of four environmental and science fiction novels: Call of the Sun Child, Listen, The Seas of Distant Stars, and Blue Mar.
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