Read Hall’s Lay of the Land, “Brilliant Forests, Burning,” in our Summer 2020 issue here.Despite planning my weekend to allow for a slow, careful reading of this book I ended up plowing through it at warp speed. She was the Lighthouse Writers 2019 Emerging Fiction Fellow and recently finished a novel. Oīecca Rose Hall lives near Seattle with her daughter and directs Frog Hollow School, a writing program for children. There is no line, now, if there ever was, between there and here, burning and breathing, their life and our own. Hundreds of miles from where they grew, these forest particles become part of our place. A film in our water glasses, grime on our windshields, dust on our backyard tomatoes. It is weasels and martens and fishers, Pacific tree frog, giant salamander, old and particularly slow-moving lynx.Īll of them burning, rising, floating, flying, settling in our lungs, on our skin, on lawns, skyscrapers, and lakes. It is thousands upon thousands of mosquitoes. It is spiderwebs and spiders, iridescent flies. It is the leaves a mountain beaver dried and stacked like hay for winter. It is the black-and-yellow millipedes that smell like almonds when scared. The orange tint to the moon is the burnt bones of long-dead wolves, the flesh of whole voles. It is the rust of broken culverts beneath old logging roads, pressure-treated posts holding road signs and trail signs, the grasses and oxeye daisies that grow in gravel roads. The rasp in our throats is slime from stones in small streams turned to steam. It is the medicine of devil’s club and corn lily. It is the foxglove and fireweed of clear cuts, and the trillium and wood violet of old forest glades. It is cow parsnip and lady’s slipper, columbine and bleeding heart. And the berry bushes: huckleberries red black blue, serviceberries, thimbleberries, salmonberries, blackberries, black raspberries, dewberries, elderberries, snowberries, gooseberries, mooseberries, kinnikinnick, salal. The weird redness in the few beams of sunlight is the berry seeds from black bears’ scat. The dust in our lungs is lettuce lung and lungwort, pimpled kidney and peppered moon, frog pelt and freckle pelt, forking and beaded bone, ragbag and tattered rag, antlered perfume, sulphur stubble and common witch’s hair. It is dry and dormant mosses flash-charred into dust. It is licorice fern, deer fern, maidenhair fern, bracken. It is flame-orange northern flicker feathers fallen in sword ferns, and the sword ferns. It is empty shells (brown-spotted, pale blue) in Swainson’s thrush nests in curving Douglas maple trees. The haze between the hills is black-tailed deer hair caught in salmonberry thorns, chickaree middens and the stumps that held them and the chickarees, too, when the fire trapped them. It is whole alder leaves, blackened and untouchably delicate, swirled up, blown south, crushed finally by air. The spring green of bitter cherry saplings. It is the orange punk of ancient western red-cedar stumps. It is mycelium-laced snags sprouting witch’s butter and artist’s conk and varnished red-brown reishi. And farther east, the puzzle pieces flaking off ponderosa pines impervious to fire to a point - and then past that point ponderosa needles, branches, limbs.Īnd smoke is the claw marks in aspen trees climbed by bear cubs, and black scars in white bark of birches where elk scratched their antlers. And spruce needles, bigleaf maple twigs, alder catkins, yellowing green cottonwood leaves, hemlock heartwood, root tannins of yellow cedar, pitchy upright alpine fir cones, resin blisters of western white pine, the hands-breadth bark of old Douglas firs. Which are first of all trees: snags, sprouts, saplings, old growth, monoculture third-growth firs. Particulates: the particular bits of burning things, the things burning being the Northwest’s forests, the forests and their beings. BRITISH COLUMBIA is burning, like so much of the West - and like so much of the West, Seattle is smoky, streets dim and Victorian, mountains hazy, particulate levels exceedingly high.
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