Tag Archives: smells

Washington – The Rain Forest

nature, travel, trees, water, writing, , ,
 

The rain forest surprised me. It wasn’t chilly, even though it was cool; perhaps the humidity served as a blanket. The towering complexity wasn’t too overwhelming, because my camera helped me to isolate and literally focus on various particulars.

My favorite plants were the exotic fungi, because they stood out from the multitude of mostly green colors.

They say there are several thousand plant species in there, and I imagined it would be a trial to take a day hike through all that jumble and jungle of green sameness. Instead, it was strangely invigorating. Is there more oxygen than average in a rain forest, what with all those plants exhaling? It was as exciting as the beach.

We had the slightest drizzle as we entered, but not enough to warrant covering my head. Even that amount of moisture waned and my hair didn’t get wet — only pleasantly fluffy, a welcome relief from the usual flat.

Autumn was beginning to give some color accents, especially in the form of the big leaf maples that arch throughout the canopy and drop their leaves over everything.

Hoh….the very name of this forest is like a mother’s calming hush, or a version of the meditative Ohm. I got to thinking of the shape of the letters themselves as the circumference of a Sitka Spruce trunk with branches on the sides.

It seems that the word Hoh by itself has endless possibilities, but in any case it seems to be the only name possible for this place, so quiet and deep. The Hoh River runs through it.

Wherever a stump stands, several plants will use it for a seedbed, so that a conifer, a fern and a deciduous tree will often make a bouquet on the stump. But a log lying horizontal becomes a pasture of low and thick lichens and moss.

Below: Gray leaf lichens were in abundance, lying around everywhere, and also growing on trees. If there were a contest for the brightest fungi, the yellow one would get my vote.

This area of the world boasts the tallest (Sitka) spruce tree and the tallest (Red) cedar tree in the world. I couldn’t guess what most of the evergreens were, their lowest branches were so high up, and everything blanketed with spongy green lace. But I think this one is a Douglas-fir (it’s written like that because it’s not a true fir.)

 Leafy lichens abound. I guess this is one?

I was surprised when Mr. Glad said we should turn around and go back out. We’d been hiking two hours and it didn’t seem to have been more than about 40 minutes. By that time I wasn’t living in the moment, though. Time was flying because I had caught a whiff of the moist rain forest scents. Funny I didn’t notice right away. But when I did, I couldn’t just enjoy the mystery and deliciousness of these smells, but I had to start thinking about how I would describe them, if only to myself, so I could remember them.

I will probably never come back here! was my thought, and I will never smell this again. So why did I waste time thinking about it, I now wonder. Why not just drink of the thrilling sensory Now? And why were the disciples not content to just be in Christ’s presence at His transfiguration?

They were trying to make provision for the future, and prolong the experience, as I was hoping to provide myself with some words to take with me. I couldn’t hope to make the moment last, as we were walking fairly briskly by then, getting closer and closer to the outside where the opportunity would be gone.  I was lagging behind and noticing that the mix of wild aromas changed with the changing terrain, but they were always bewitching. Do people get addicted to smells? It could happen here.

Time was running out, and it did run out, ten days ago now. I kept thinking about the words for several days, but as expected, there was no way to improve on whatever poor metaphors I came up with while my senses were being bombarded.

The smell of the rain forest was something like eating a cookie fresh from the oven, a cookie made of fermented wild mushrooms and hazelnuts, with one’s head in a bucket of vanilla ice cream.

This was a new smell for me, with no links to my grandmother or anything in my past. There was no way to focus on it the way a camera helps one to focus visually — and no way to deliberately preserve it, though my mind has no doubt filed this input in a purer form than the silly image I worked so hard to invent. Perhaps elements of that exotic forest atmosphere exist elsewhere, and if so, they might someday come to me on a moist breeze and I’ll be taken back to the Hoh.

 

Snow and Smells

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I agree with Alana about bad smells (and thanks to Marigold for the link), but because my blog’s subtitle doesn’t include “things I dislike,” I don’t want to spend too much time on this topic. Those offenses I like to nip in the bud, but it’s not always possible. When we moved into this house 20 years ago I began to strip it of the smell of cigarettes, and it took a few years before people started to say that the house smelled as mine ought–whatever that meant.

But that odor was released again and assaulted my sensibilities this week when B. and I went at our ceilings with a will and removed the decades-old acoustic junk, a.k.a. popcorn or cottage cheese, stuff I hate because it can’t be cleaned. Perhaps because I clean so infrequently, I’d like to do a thorough job of it. At least that dirty thing on the bottom of the room, the wall-to-wall carpet, can be replaced when one wants to remove everything that offends.

On the other hand, I grew up in a house filled with the smell of cigarettes, so I don’t think of it as vile, exactly. All the time I thought it was gone, it was probably melding with the me-smells (what are those? cookies and eggs, lemon oil polish and grapefruit dish soap?) the way my mother’s heritage melds with other parts of me. Now that it is more gone than before, the house will smell different again, like the new me.

Spring winds are blowing away everything stale in the olfactory department, I think–at least in my marine-temperate zone. But one last picture reminder of the piney forests about 3,000 feet higher up: these gumdrop-colored houses that got a recent blanket of smoothing snow all around, reminding me of candy decorations on gingerbread, and royal icing.

Grandma and Sweet Olive

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The butter started to brown in the pan as I was frying eggs. Whoosh! Instant time travel, and I was back in my grandma’s kitchen about 50 years ago.

Browning butter is only one of a dozen smells that bring her to mind. Stock flowers, juniper bushes, lamb chops on the grill…even the combination of hot coffee and a certain quality of morning air one breathes in summer near the San Francisco Bay.

My sisters and I would go by train to visit her in the summers of our childhood, and stay for some weeks. Truly, I don’t know just how long we stayed, but in my consciousness those visits are huge, even if they were only a fraction of total hours and days.

The long and quiet days on our farm, where I wandered along the river nearby or read books by the hour, were certainly just as formative, but the events during those summer vacations with our mother’s mother made a more noticeable impression for two reasons I can figure out.

The first is the common one, that when you are in a new and different place, your mind is stimulated to remember a larger portion of the sensory information it receives. I’ve had this experience on other vacations my whole life. And my grandmother was a very different person from my mother. Her town, her house, the climate, were like another world for me.

From the window of our bedroom in that world we looked out at night on the Bay, the bridges all lit up, beacon lights always scrolling the sky from somewhere down below and dissolving into the darkness above; street lights, skyscraper lights, traffic. There was so much happening. At home, if you’d looked outside at night, you’d see: nothing. It was pitch black, and no sound but the dogs’ breathing.

A kitchen is another world–or universe. Grandma rarely used frozen vegetables, but sat us girls at the kitchen table to string beans or shell peas. Grandpa was at another table cracking walnuts. We would drive an hour east to buy boxes of apricots from the farm, of the sort that are so juicy and yummy they don’t ship well. Grandma used real butter, whereas we were used to margarine, because it was cheaper. Lamb chops belonged only to her world; as a child I never knew them elsewhere.

Food differences bring me to the other reason for my piquant memories: my nose. Back home, the atmosphere was permeated with the smoke from my mother’s cigarettes, and I think it deadened my olfactory receptors. When they got a respite from the fumes, they woke up and flooded my brain with news of the aromatic world. I can still bring her to mind in all her loving dedication just by thinking of Palmolive soap, the smell of the tiny backyard lawn when the sun shined on it, and the face cream she would smooth on her ever-silky skin at night.Grandma died, 103 years old, the year that my eldest child married. She passed her behind-the-wheel driving test when she was 100 so that she could renew her license, the same year she visited the house she was born in and had this picture taken.

As I said in a rhyme to her at one of her birthdays, “I’d like to write a book of her life…” She was the most important person in my life for a long time, and there are many other aspects of her long stay on the earth that make a good story.

Today is her birthday, and I only want to post this small bit. And as delicious smells are so often linked to her sweet memory, I will also share with you a bush that didn’t grow in her yard, but does grow in mine: osmanthus, or sweet olive. When it blooms several times a year, a few feet from our front door, the fragrance is like dew from a benevolent Heaven, or incense in church. I know God loves me, when I walk out the door and that smell greets me.

There’s nothing flashy about the flowers visually. They are so tiny, I never notice them until they announce their bloom by their perfume. When I first caught that scent on the air, it wasn’t coming from this bush, which had just been planted, but was on a path in our neighborhood. I said to the children, “Ooooh, someone is baking an apricot pie!” Funny thing was, a few days later they were baking pies again. Eventually I located the source of the fruity smell and realized that we also had it growing by our house.

 

I’m pretty sure the osmanthus is blooming this week in honor of Grandma’s birthday.

Mountain Retreat Complete

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As I wrote in my last post, I was departing for a mountain retreat. And I made such a big deal of my delight in anticipating it, I also promised a report.

It takes a full six hours to cover the 300 miles to my destination, and most of that time I listened to various things on tape or CD. As the library didn’t have anything promising on my last-minute visit there, I was forced to remember that we had taped readings of the New Testament in the cupboard. As with books, I took way more CD’s and tapes than I could possibly use….

On the trip down I listened to the latest Mars Hill Audio tape. Please ask them for a free sample if you’ve never heard their interviews with various authors, teachers, musicians. It’s like an audio magazine where you eavesdrop on discussions between thoughtful people. And I heard the whole Gospel of Matthew on tape–what a perfect intro to a prayerful couple of days!

Sierra vinegarweed

My least beautiful photo, but the best of my attempts to capture this flower that graces the roadway, around 5,000 to 6,000 ft elevation, with a misty lavender haze. When you get close, the effect is spoiled as the plants are revealed as dry and stickery, puny individuals. (That sounds like a description of us Christians relative to the whole Church.) I don’t know what it might be, do you? It was the first of my pictures on this expedition.

It’s about this point on the driving, an hour and 3,000 ft down the mountain from Our Lake, I always have to turn off all recordings or radio and have quiet, so I can focus on the smells of the trees and hear the quiet of the forest.

Incense Cedars contribute one of the aromas. As a child with my family, on trips up the mountain it was filling my senses about the time I got carsick, and it took me most of my adult life to get over this association and develop an appreciation for the tree. But I haven’t known just what they looked like, so I found this photo on the Net.

Far in the distance at left you can see a lake that is not our lake. But this photo was mostly for the sake of the manzanita that I love, and in the absence of the wildflowers that catch your eye earlier in the summer, it takes center stage for me, so I made it fill the foreground here.
Ah…the first view of Our Lake. Other than that purple haze, all the wildflowers I saw at high elevations were white. Like this Pearly Everlasting. I just looked up its name this morning.
Ranger’s Buttons along the road going in. I picked up some granite rocks near here for the garden at home.

Yarrow was growing next to the cabin. I saw it when I was turning on the water down the hill. There are various things to do when you first arrive: turn on the water, turn on the solar, turn on the water heater. Bring your stuff in from the car. My legs were so heavy and I felt generally exhausted, so much that I wondered if I could resist falling on a bed and sleeping immediately. It must be the altitude. All evening my brain was slow, and I was so sl-e-e-py.

yarrow

For that reason I didn’t start right in on heavy reading, but took advantage of the magazines my sister had left. When my father’s mark was more on the place, you would find old issues of California Farmer, National Geographic and Sunset piled up everywhere. Now I find the New Yorker! Well, as I haven’t been on the treadmill for some time, where I used to read New Yorker, it was a welcome change, and just the thing for an oxygen-deprived brain. The most interesting article I read was in two parts, on Siberia, by Ian Frazier. His book on the subject is due to come out next year, and it looks to be worth reading.

This old coffee table caught my eye when I walked through the cabin door, the only furniture from our childhood home that never varied or wore out, and the only piece that we have (just since my last visit) installed in the cabin. Either my father or another ancestor built this table, I’m pretty sure, but none of my siblings can remember, so I guess we will never know its origins.

I brought some candles for indoor prayer times, and then was pleased to discover I had a little icon card of Christ the Shepherd in my purse to display with them. I prayed He would shepherd me through my weekend in the way of the 23rd Psalm, and give me light, and Himself as Light.

Speaking of light, I did lie out under the stars in my sleeping bag the first night, for a couple of hours, until my narrow bed (a lounge chair cushion) made it impossible to sleep. The stars and night sky were comforting, like an angelic blanket. This time little wisps of clouds were decorating the constellations; I could smell the trees, sweet and dry and piney-sharp, with a bit of wood smoke from the campground down the hill in the mix.

Much of the time I spent on the deck, reading this book, drinking tea, and watching the hummingbirds battle over the feeder. If the sun goes behind a cloud, or a breeze comes up, the temperature drops, so you find yourself putting on and taking off your sweater, moving under the umbrella and then back out in the sunshine again.

When I was wearing my red sweatshirt the hummingbirds would buzz threateningly behind my head as long as it took them to figure out that I wasn’t a giant flower.

The Inner Kingdom had been on my shelf for a year; I’m so glad I threw it in the box to take up! The author Kallistos Ware was a convert to the Orthodox Church as a young man in Britain and was a lecturer at Oxford for a long time. I have read other books by him, as a catechumen and since, and was able to hear him speak in 2008, which was pure pleasure.

This one is first in a planned six-volume collection of his works. He is a wonderful writer–so scholarly yet easy to read. I’d say he is more teacherly than devotional in his style, and he treats the subject matter so thoroughly that most every intellectual question I might have was answered; I was spurred on to love the God he so lovingly describes. I finished the whole book! What a satisfaction to finish something so nourishing.

Soldier came up to be with me for part of the time. He also read a lot, and hiked, and played his guitar, everything from Dylan to gospel. It was a rare treat to be just the two of us together.

Here are the books all packed up and ready to carry home again. I only used about half of them, and there is an extra in the box going home, the novel by Jane Smiley that my sister had left in the cabin and that I am borrowing. It looks small enough for reading in bed, but I didn’t take the time to dip into it yet.
On the way down the mountain I had to stop and try once more to capture the beauty of the manzanita. I couldn’t, of course. And those tree smells wouldn’t be bottled up. I could never get a picture of the night sky that would make you feel the weighty silence of the Holy Spirit in it. But you know how it is–I had to try!