Mountain Springtime

This is the wettest Spring I can remember up here. This morning it was snowing on the muscaria and dog violets in the lawn, and overcast enough, at two in the afternoon, that when I came out from an afternoon appointment I found I'd left the headlights on. Which called for a run on the freeway to charge the battery. I drove down to Dunsmuir, to Tauhindauli Park, a green spot on the Sacramento River that's been restored to its natural vegetation. Umbrella in hand, I walked over underneath the double freeway bridge, listened to the trucks roaring North and South high overhead. The river is high, too: - high enough that a kayaker, there in wet suit to put in, took a couple of looks at the white-water, and repented:- hopped back in his pickup and left instead. So then I just had to drive back uphill the six miles to see the river further upstream, a thousand-some feet higher in elevation at Box Canyon Dam. I've been checking the spillway for a few weeks to see how much water there is over the dam. This was the first day there was a large waterfall of it, loud, massive. At this rate, Shasta Lake will be full pool soon. (Yesterday the lake level was only lacking twelve feet of totally full.) Water isn't just a symbol of abundance. It IS abundance. Maybe tomorrow I'll drive up North Fork road until I hit the snow line. That's as far up-river as I get in my non-4WD sedan.

DRY YEARS

Look for a little cloud, like a man's hand

Rising from the sea, an end of drought.

Some curse was said over us--as to Elijah

After many days the word of God came--

So also to us, worshipping images,

Puzzling over secret aridities.

Someone says: surely heaven's hand shall bless,

As He approved Elijah's holocaust,

As He consumed the doused half-beeves, the twelve soaked stones.

We're listening for sounds of rushing water

To sheet the Carmel plains with runoff,

For dry years to end, for words to have meaning.

Then if I stroke your face I have touched you.

Then they can plant the Delta rice again.

Trout may be let swim, unsalinated.

The Son of Man says: The wind blows where it listeth.

On us, not knowing whence it comes or goes--

Here or on the coast--but never where most needed,

In the hills, from where our help is said to come.

The lake's concave fingerlets still crack dry,

While TV screens show joy in drowned autos.

What's to break loose next? We wait, watching where

White water whirlpools, marking wrack beneath,

Let sorrow flood, acceptable disaster,

Heaping trash on fence posts, seeking its level.

Iowa, 1993