Spring on the Downslope
Mid-April, now, and we ride under the canopy’s green skirt, a few ephemerals — dwarf iris and lady’s slipper — lying wonderfully low, if scattered and rare. Was that a flycatcher? Maybe. And that, a wood thrush? Many listeners out and about. Warbler, tanager, oriole. We ride the petal-fall, the enseeding, capsuling. Deeper into the leafswell, limbs bending under that weight, sometimes swaying, we enter the song.
We go, we ride, and the sun’s power feels less new and more silky for it. Mountain laurel in various licks of bud, blossom, blossom-fall, seed, depending on their aspect, how much daylight’s stretching skin touches it. Rare to race the dark these days. Dark to rare the race, too. Miraculous, wheezy, rapt, our rolls now, even the piddly ones, even the breaths between them — real life? — like we’re plugged into spring’s voltages, some heavy gauge transporting those waves right into our substations. Maybe we haul ass, maybe we don’t and slow, go pokey a while.
How we go is where we are. Something. Yes, the world is burning, as ever, greed’s many shitshows on hyperdrive, so we saddle up — it’s later spring — and get out there when we can, who cares where (it’s all primo now), just out there, and crank, carve, flow. That egg shell, bird or snake? Turtle? But everything’s nearly egg now, summer’s. Baby chipmunk. Whiffs of honeysuckle. Light’s more shadow here, on trail. A shell, all of this, and broken or about to be.
Fewer wildflowers by the week in the Central Appalachians of Virginia, though black bear encounters, holy, feel likelier now. A cold front after record heat, some wind and rain as preamble. Are there fawns yet? Is spring over the hump, past peak?—a big Allegheny maybe to that, a Blue Ridge yes. We ride, and the bugs are everywhere, in the helmet, too, and summer — not yet, please — feels closer. Have you been stung? How many tick bites so far?
More green than blue upwardways, a sort of cloud cover, chlorophylled, or fog. Limbs feel abstract again, as the trunks do. Winter, what was that, when? Much shrubdensity. Lances and lobes. Galls. As many wonders as horrors. Who’s counting? Blackberry blossoms. Azalea, rhodie, wineberry blossoms. Paw paw in the bottoms puckering their burgandy, a strange, meaty stench. Where’s the bat candy? What the hell is bat candy? Ask the rocks, hunkered as ever; no, ask their lichens.
That was definitely a wood thrush. And that, a waterthrush. Anyway, who cares if we ride the names as much as the contact, for unnaming is contact, too. Attend, connect. To soar, roll. To soar and be grounded, we roll some more, and noodling along, feeling hemmed, shrouded, held, for certain, we unknow it all. So the green deepens, a little translucence left in the leaves, at this elevation anyway.
We’re past mid-May, and doemama’s barking, and with each sunrise the canopy feels more dense, more heavy to twirl. So many seeds, so much gone-to. Like some jamboree slowly packing to head north to its next gig, these woods. No fawns yet — are they later this year? — but there a green tree snake. There some cable fray at dropper-lever pivot. And there two cubs clawing uptrunk, mama all hackles at roots. How does the fire pink hold its red petals so long? By trickery, by treat? We go, we ride, green cloud travelers, who cares how or where, just that we do. As galax sends its curious candles up and alight for a while before time, too, blows them to seed.
