The View

The porch at our house affords a view across plains that stretch far out into the horizon as they move expansively away from the mountains behind us. We’ve been enjoying the view from this porch for years now, especially so over summer months as they have always sported a reliable weather pattern. That pattern goes something like this…

Bright blue, crisp mornings beckon you to the great outdoors and mount to a toasty crescendo of sunlight. A teatime clap of thunder rings out signalling hikers to get off the mountain tops, golfers to come in and parents to get their children out of the pools. This is followed by a lovely shower that, for variety’s sake occasionally includes a brief pea sized hail storm. The end of showers is more often than not signalled by a rainbow and you’re back to blue just in time for all the hues of sunset to dance across the sky. On a dozen nights or so over the course of summer, there are electrical storms off in the distance maybe five at a time, dotting the horizon. We can take them in from the comfort of our porch and marvel at their far away power. In the certainty of these rituals afforded by Mother Nature, the community at large plans garden parties, barbeques, lawn concerts, outdoor weddings under starry night skies…and oh how the dogs and me too, howl on magical full moon nights. Until now.

We’ve been being warned for years that it could come, could meaning would but atleast in my mind it seemed hypothetical as long as we were, I don’t know…recycling? Being more conscious about using big anything and switching, however slowly, as a society to electric cars and renewable energy sources. I think I first noticed things start to shift when I got to sail again in the waters of British Columbia after an earlier foray some five years prior. Glaciers that had previously come right the way down to the water’s edge were now noticeably retreating. At first, I thought I was mistaken…but this pattern of retreat repeated itself in too many inlets to be denied. Six years ago now I think it was the western skies where I live opened up and for four minutes dropped hail stones the size of softballs.  Animals at the zoo were killed, over 30k cars were destroyed, countless roofs, including my own were decimated. Miraculously, no one was killed.  Two years later it happened again. You get the idea.

This summer, we returned after a time away ready to enjoy the season ahead and the traditional dance with nature. At first the differences of what we were experiencing were fun. Towering cumulous clouds more associated with tropical climates, mushroomed out of low, giant slate misty grey slabs and dominated the traditional blue dome for days at a time. Rain pelted for hours at a stretch for nearly a week. People started making jokes about being in Seattle. Never before seen plants started coming up out of the ground. Perhaps they’d been lying dormant all this while just waiting for life giving waters? I turned the heat on in July. What used to be distant thunder storms are now quite often happening right above us in great claps and enormous striking bolts that run fearsomely into the ground or in a mile’s long and nearby jagged streak across the sky parallel to the ground. As these unusual patterns have begun to be the norm that sense of fun has been replaced with something unsettling.  Things are not normal. Normal is gone.

As I write, reports continue to flow in of the devastation in Lahaina.  Southern California awaits its first ever tropical hurricane.

My son was five when the Twin Towers came down. That horrible morning when all our worlds changed, he asked me in effect what physical structure could we rely on if we could not rely on something as solid as a tall building? I told him we could always rely on nature.  That he could go, as we often did during his childhood, out on a hike find a favourite tree or boulder and just soak up its calm and majesty. That that was reliable.  What do we tell our children now? That we blew it? That we did not heed the decades of warnings?

There are some trails I like to hike in the mountains. This year with some shock I noticed that the roots of several pine trees on the trails have been exposed not by the usual inches but rather by several feet.  Also, surprisingly I came one day to a massive boulder smack in the middle of a trail, a boulder that had not been there a few days earlier.  My first thought was that the obstruction had made the path impassable.  On closer look, I realized you could just get around it without falling off the mountain, and so I did. In other words Mother Nature for all our folly is still saying to us…roots can be exposed but you can still stand.  Boulders come in life but there is, usually, a way around them, no matter how narrow the path.  So… a grace note but the bellwether is ringing loud and clear.