Evening Light

At a certain time of day in a certain time of year and only when the weather in rainy Washington is clear, the sun reaches through the trees at the precise angle to illuminate a section of the woods behind our house that normally lives in shadow.  To the tree, it must feel like the direct gaze of the Almighty at the time.  Unless you wander by just then, give or take a very few minutes, you would never see it.

In the picture, it’s clear that Spring is on the way.  The ferns are there, as they always are in the shady woods, and the moss on the trunk shows you the way north.  The dead remains of last year’s leaves are becoming one with the earth as the new growth begins to poke through.  The Lindbergh High School athletes run through these woods regularly, so the windfalls and dead stumps are pruned away from the trails, but every winter brings new ones as the standing cottonwoods rot and the winds blow.  The trail passes through groves of cedars that would make a Druid happy, and here you will see a nurse log, there may be an owl or a bobcat.  Viburnum, salal, holly and salmon berries jostle for position with the blackberry vines as the maples and cottonwoods leaf out the upper terrace and the birds go into nesting mode.  In the background the traffic noise, as thousands of people drive by daily on Petrovitsky Way without a second glance, is a dull roar.

Our access to this wonderland through our own back gate was once threatened. The six lots behind the dead end street on which we live represented the last possible building lots on the edge of an unstable slope, at the bottom of which was a salmon bearing wetland named Molasses Creek that flows into Soos Creek as part of a system that flows south along the plateau between Kent Valley and Maple Valley.  A developer had purchased the entire plot, and one day we saw a track-hoe crashing through the brush, stopping to dig a pit for the perc test.  As luck would have it, the soil sample proved that the hillside would not support buildings on the edge, and it failed the perc test, so he stripped the development rights to the parcel and sold them separately to someone else to offset the destruction of somebody else’s wetland, then deeded the entire piece to the County to be used as a passive park.  At some point in the future, the Soos Creek trail will come through here on its way to hook up with the Cedar River trail, and that will be some fine walkin’, indeed. Everybody in the cul-de-sac neighborhood has permanent access now, which is a wonderful thing in a time when little sections of woods are disappearing all around us all the time.

It occurs to me that the same sun that has set this trunk ablaze with light must also, by virtue of the distance from us to it, be repeating this performance all over the world, twenty-four hours a day as the world spins.  That means there must be a similar light show waiting for you somewhere close by in a patch of woods, or a sand dune, or a river bank accessible to you.  You better get out there, you might miss it.   :-{)}