World of White
Yesterday’s post was epic. Today’s will be photographic.
Sunrise over the east moraine:
Then, for three straight days the moraine, lake, and lower fields were shrouded in constant fog. Not once did the fog burn off. The view from the lake house was nothing but white. It felt like living in a cloud. But one mile down the road, I had a different vantage point and was able to photograph the “ghost breath” (as Craig Lesley calls fog in Winterkill) where it rolled off the mountains and hugged the slopes, then stopped as if the valley was a forbidden line:
The pines and fir trees seemed to glow with the suffocating white, even though no direct sunlight filtered through the clouds overhead. It looked like the forest was breathing color from the inside out. Deep, dark, black-green…and yet, so bright it almost pulsed, each individual needle ensconced in frozen fog that didn’t melt until the weekend:
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The last picture provides me a reminder of the one thing I remember most strongly about western Oregon: the scents. Everything is clothed in the sharp cleanness of evergreen, as if God scrubbed out everything nasty with a living filter of thickly-needled trees. The hemlock forests on Mt. Mitchell are nothing like it — they smell of humus and decay. The pine forests in eastern Carolina are different, too — they smell dry and sticky. The chaparral oak forests of northern California smell richly intoxicating with their sage. The Douglas firs of Colorado approach the scent; theirs is clean, yet open and crisp. But western Oregon sticks in my mind, separate from all of these.
Does the land around glacial lake smell yet different?
yeah, there is a distinct smell here, though i haven't tried to put it to words yet. my first week on the lake i had an evening outside that was just amazing and it had everything to do with the air. maybe i'll write about it for a post one of these days. which jared is this, by the way?
~ks
Jared Buckner of Raleigh, NC.