Okay, it’s time. I’ve
been here long enough and I’m done bellyaching about Western Washington
weather. And though it’s stretching me, I may even be ready to begin making
peace with it.
No, Colorado,
that doesn’t mean we don’t still miss you desperately, and the utopian weather
we’d relished all our years with you. Your year-round nearly predictable
sunshine was a hiker’s delight, and this Vitamin D deprived region could use a
bit more of it. Oh, weather is predictable here from October to May, too, if
you want to call ‘rain and within six
degrees either side of forty-two’ predictable. It’s just that it’s about
time I stopped moanin’ and groanin’ about how much we dislike the rain here.
They said it would take a year for us to get accustomed to it. They lied. We’re
still not used to it. That being confirmed, it’ll take an act of the will to
make that happen.
And so, as an
expression of that will and a symbol of my new resolve, Gail and I went to REI
a few days ago and I outfitted myself with some serious Gore-Tex raingear,
inaugurating it yesterday with relative success. No, I’ve never paid that much even
for a Minnesota-worthy winter parka, or maybe even the three winter jackets put together that I’ve owned in my entire
adult life. Still, though I can’t yet say that I LIKE hiking in the rain, at
least I’ve made a start of it.
But in addition
to my brand-spanking-new orange raincoat, there’s another thing that is
motivating me these days: we’re coming up on rhody season here in the Pacific
Northwest. Yup, the Pacific Rhododendron -- the Washington state flower -- is
about to make its annual showing. Our little acre here in the woods outside of
Coupeville, in fact ALL the wooded areas in the region, are nearly covered with
the dazzling things, and we can hardly wait to see them in bloom, yes, even
while we hike in the rain. In fact, it’s going to take a hike in the rain to
see them, rhodies, among the loveliest of state flowers.
Rhododendrons are
found in numerous places around the world. In fact, a thousand of these
evergreen species are known in Europe, China, Australia and North America.
Besides, horticulturists have cultivated many hybrids for garden plantings over
the last two hundred years. But the wild Pacific Rhododendron, rhododendron macrophyllum to be precise,
may be one of the most beautiful, especially in the context of its natural
environment. A leggy, understory shrub that can grow to twenty feet and more
while it reaches for light beneath towering conifer groves, its large, showy
and prolific light pink to purple blooms stand out refreshingly on gray, misty
days, particularly amid the dark, wet trunks of enormous Douglas Firs nearby. Made
prolific due to toxins in the plant that make them unpalatable and unbrowsable
to deer, it is that aforementioned rain combined with the acidic soil beneath
those gargantuan conifers that make conditions right for the rhody to thrive.
And those trees
themselves present another ambience unique from my more familiar Midwest
haunts: on wooded trails snaking through giant fir groves, it might be upwards
of fifty feet from the forest floor to the lowest branches, leaving a
cavernous, auditorium-like opening akin to a large room, one full of flowering
bushes. R. macrophyllum, which
literally means ‘rose-tree large-leafed,’ stretches from southern British
Columbia to northern California, and is variously known as the Pacific,
California, Western, Coast or Big Leaf Rhododendron, or the California Rosebay.
It was first described for science by famed botanist Archibald Menzies, who
collected the plant in Washington while accompanying the Pacific Northwest
exploration of British sea captain George Vancouver in 1792.
So back to the
rain. The Bible says that God causes his rain to fall on the just and the
unjust (Matthew 5:45), inferring that his manifold blessings are heaped upon both those who
revere him and those who have not yet learned to do so. I am grateful for wild
rhododendrons, how they will beautify the forest under dark and rainy skies. My
new raincoat and I are ready for them now.
“Consider the lilies,” Jesus said, “how they grow. They don’t toil or spin, yet I tell you that even
Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as one of these. But if God so clothes
the grasses of the field… can you not trust God to care for you?” (Matthew
6:28-30)
~~ RGM, February
26, 2018
