Into Spring
March arrives with May on its breath, and we ride the respirations. Hard and soft, wonky and in flow, we go, and it’s breezy, of course, and another cold front’s in the forecast, but note the moss little by little greening out. Note ingots of snow on a few north-facing drainages, remains of a late January storm. How on the lower slopes, the fetterbush, evergreen shrub easily mistaken for laurel, starts to bloom, pale danglers like hanging lanterns in miniature. The birds are bugging a bit, the bugs going botanical, and quietly, stealthily, other flowers are taking wing: hepatica, trout lily, cut leafed toothwort. We ride this strange warmth (that’s not hot so much as startling) overdressed and underdressed, because that’s what it means to get it right at shoulder season when the body, like the land, the weather, deals some funny hands. If we go further on our rides, and faster, it’s to stop more often, to stare, to see. And not to know.
Not yet the phoebe song, not yet the waterthrush, not yet the geese on their nests – but soon, so soon. Easy go the does heavy with young along the ridgeline. Easy if leery the eagle on her nest off Enchanted Forest trail. Easy to welcome the pics a friend sends of blue heron on her nest near the Roanoke River. Easy to welcome every chance to roll, roll, roll. To scan, on the climbs and flats, the woods and outcrops still unshrouded by foliage, for bobcat, bear, turkey scratch, stumps, redbud, deadfall, rootball, spicebush, stones. See puddles of shadow and shine, limbs bending in the breeze, if not gusts. March marches on, schizo as ever, and we ride with it, fueled by the land’s skins erupting, this old land, these old hills.
Maybe you tapped a few sugar maples around Valentine’s Day and have boiled that water down and are sipping that sweetness from the water bottle as you climb, caboose of the group, the gated old logging road in national forest to access the chunk, and you’re a little nervous about it, your first time down the upcoming descent, and one of the crew starts telling a story about their seatpost snapping on a cyclocross bike, how the post’s carbon shards tore their scrotum like a grocery bag on barbed wire, and how they fetched their lost nut, stood there with stray testicle in hand and got a lift to the ER to have it sewn back in there, the plumbing all good not long after that, and you’re trying not to hear this by being grateful for this salad road not being full on salad-style yet, no grass to the knees, the grass hardly green at all due to the elevation, and then you’re at the top, nothing but chonk all the way down, and you hear someone ahead say, Ain’t no line. And then someone else: Just hang on. The rocks’ll show your bike the line.
Yes to the first trout lily’s opulence, bashful and dangling, so different from the bloodroot’s many-petalled solar panels. The leaves on the duff so brown up close, so quartzite from afar (the canopy still lets you see far). Sometimes starflower, sometimes lesser periwinkle. And soon enough, violets in yellows, purples, blues, pinks and whites, so many violets, more than thirty species in Virginia alone. And trillium. And saxifrage. And robin birds. And bluebells. And merrybells: Uvularia grandiflora. Maybe you geek on the names as you pedal and maybe you don’t; either way you see them being sounded by the turn of the crank and the fluttering of the swallowtails and the first thunderstorm’s rainbow exhaust over Butt Mountain across the New River after an easy long doggie up Wolf Creek to Burkes Garden where spring’s a week behind the usual elevations, and the dominant punctuation has gone from dogwood back to redbud again, scrambling the syntax for good.
Maybe cadence is how the mysteries surge through us in spring. Maybe cadence conjures the rain sprites. Maybe Cadence is Prudence’s sister or lover or hater or who knows. Who knows anything in a Virginia spring? April, now, and in the bottomland’s groundbreeze (or is that the plungepool’s wind?), trembling penitents: Dutchman’s breeches, stonecrop, shooting star. And there’s the water thrush’s squishy fricatives, phoebe, too. Yes, bring it, April, bring the fire pink as more and more we bring the skin to the wind. Spring’s hectic around here, wack as a mug (of pollen-streaked puddlewater?). The skin of this land breaks out crazy even if there never seems to be enough rain anymore. And the emerging poplar leaves shine like all limbo’s besorcery. It can, seriously, feel like living in a flash flood, these riotous barbarisms of beauty and growth. Every new leaf a wraith. The hoary puccoon blasting its deep yellow from the shale barrens, red dye of its roots harboring the origins of its name, bastardization of Powhatan poughkone. Hear it in your throat, how the foretaste of summer mingles with winter’s aftertaste. Hi, black snake in your Easter best. Hi, cold weather gear not yet boxed away even as the soil warms and the mycelial webwork begins to thrust its reptilian issue of sac fungi: morel, merkel, molly moosher, Morchella esculenta/angusticeps/septimelata, etc. A kind of drainage, all this blossoming, all this hatchery of buzz, ticks giving suck at beltline and crotch. Stop it, spring, you budjob, you. No, no, don’t stop, just ride us on your flood in peace and safety or towards it at least.
