Earth Day! And we take in the glory of spring in the mid-Willamette Valley. Glory indeed unless you have allergies, in which case this is the time to stock up on antihistamines against the clouds of pollen that waft unseen (that is, until July when all-too-visible mists rise off the grass fields) as the days clear. It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad.
But one thing we could use around here—not that there are many, mind you; the Grand Artificer gave us an abundance of gorgeous: the way the clouds pour over Mary’s Peak on a spring evening, the wild iris punctuating the hillsides—is a few fireflies to blip their greetings as the weather warms.
They are the icons of early summer for those of us who have not forgotten that we herald from the Midwest where every rural kid has fallen asleep to their blinking in a bedside jar after chasing them through the already dewy grass in the hours between dinner and bedtime. Later in high-school we learned about bioluminescence (something fireflies share with plankton, jelly fish and glow-worms) and only much later could we spell it. But every kid recognized it for what it was—pure magic, way better even than lightning (which shattered trees and cancelled parades). And they were nearly as awesome as tornadoes, heralded by the flat-bottomed wall clouds that turn the sky the mottled yellow of a four-day bruise, the kind you got when the demonic Shetland pony your parents thought you’d like stepped on your bare foot when all you were trying to do was push it into a stall as a storm approached. I was that barefoot kid one spring day, pushing our disaster of a pony into a shed on an April afternoon as the tornado siren in town (the same siren that summoned the volunteer fire department, the same siren that told us it was noon) announced not just a tornado watch (we had those all the time) but an actual warning: something nasty and nearby had been sighted. The horses were skittish—so were we since in the space of a few minutes the wind dropped, the sky went yellow, and everything fell still. And that afternoon, as you have probably twigged already, I got my foot stepped on. I think that’s the reason I don’t particularly like horses, but there are others, equally personal and some that involve winter chores which I won’t go into now. In any case, that particular afternoon, after the horses were shedded, my grandparents picked us up despite the tornado warning and drove us down to a restaurant (called, oddly, the Colonial Inn but was neither colonial, having been built in the 60’s nor an inn, being just a place to eat, not stay) on the east bank of the Mississippi just opposite Hannibal (Mo.) that served pretty good catfish, which is where we were when this particular tornado rolled through.
We fared better than the horses in the barn, I think. The staff cleared us away from the wobbling windows as a huge sign crashed down on someone’s car (not ours); big stuff was flying about outside for a long time. On the drive back through the floodplain up into the bluffs there was a lot of exciting debris, and we came home to see that our big barn was fine but the tornado had erased the horse shed—we found it later in a field, spatchcocked like a chicken ready for the grill. And the horses, which we had sheltered in that shed, seemed decidedly not amused at having their structure plucked (we could only imagine the noise!) away, and ever after were decidedly leery about entering the replacement we built. For the first time, I sensed that horses were not all that dumb, even if they crushed your feet and you had to lug hay to them through the snow before school.
Only a few years later—lightning bugs already doing their thing across the darkening lawn—the sirens again sang their warning and we all ran around scanning the sky (we had a storm cellar we knew we could hide in) — I had been reluctantly mowing the lawn (does anyone do it otherwise?) and stood amazed as a thin dark finger with a messy end touch down again and again along the near horizon. I knew exactly whose farms it dropped in on—but we were clear since it was nearly a mile from us, moving away.
So, fireflies, yes but Wizard-of OZ tornadoes, maybe no. I think we’re better as we are. And who knows what species will come as the climate changes? Already certain beetles have infiltrated from more southerly climes into the ranges I grew up among, decimating white pines and other species. I suppose Earth Day is all about the earth, not us, so we take what she gives— whether on the vast and rapidly- changing canvas of a storm, or more gently, in the scene we see when we kneel, as that most dissolute of all dissolute Irish poets – Patrick Kavanagh– remarked when he left the streets of Dublin for a visit to his rural roots. . .
“But here! A small blue flower creeping over
On a trailing stem across an inch-wide chasm.
Even here the wild gods have set a net for sanity.
Where can I look and not become a lover. . . “
I’ll try to remember this when weeding the raspberry patch, opening myself up to the beauty of our smaller world: a scattering of spiders, the little golden leaf that soon turns green, the network of grass.
