I've declared yesterday as The Last Day of Winter. There's nothing you can do about it so don't try.
I had to go out to North County, and rather than lurk around Sumas or go hang out in Lynden (aka Dutch Reformed Hell) thinking Liberal thoughts and dodging thunderbolts from Heaven, I thought to myself 'Self, why not go hunting for Spring?'
So off I went, AND I BROUGHT MY CAMERA! (NOTE: Exciting eagle digression ahead!)
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There is a certain way the air smells on a winter day. Like getting ready for school in the morning, like the way a rain barrel smells in the cool of the day. Everything is waiting to grow. Cold damp earth and old leaves, damp wood, you smell that, and moss - it's the moss that smells the most like Winter, I think.
There's still a little ice in the air, but no movement. Not even a breeze today.
Here we are under the eaves of a storm I've spent three hours travelling beneath, just skirting the raindrops. I'm standing in a ditch looking out over a fallow corn field. It is so, so still.
This is a favorite place of mine way, way up in the brush. Not a ripple on the water. Not a sound. It's a view that hasn't changed in hundreds of years.
Up in that tree ^^^ there is a little dot. When I utilize the miracle of modern technology, lo and behold:
...we get a lovely little kingfisher!
I have found my way out onto Rez land today. Here is what it looks like when you cross onto a Native Reserve:
See the line in the pavement? That's it. One side - the left, here - is maintained by the County, and the other side is maintained by the BIA. There you go.
That field is planted in year-old raspberry canes, and the white things are bundles of string used to tie the canes over to one side in order to train them so the pickers can go among them later in the year. You can make out tan patches on the hillside in the rear - those are managed clearcuts.
I thought about going around taking pictures on the Rez but aside from that being in poor taste, there simply isn't anything to see. Here's what I mean:
Up the road and....
Down the road. No buckskin-clad Indigenes shooting flaming arrows or anything.
My people are boring.
Here we have a field full of sad, sad Brussels Sprouts - that have spent the last month under water - and in the distance a line of trees along the upper Nooksack River. In those trees there is a little clump way up in the branches...right in the center...
....and here's what that's about - an eagles nest the size of an ATV!
A month ago this nest looked like it had been hit by the truck. But the eagles came back from their winteer sojourn up in the Haida Gwai, found love, and began hauling around huge broken tree limbs getting the nest fixed up, and now the hen eagle, I presume, is hunkered up there on a clutch of eggs.
These are Ball-Headed Eagles.
*ahem*
As they are known locally.
From my personal store of nature experiences: Bald Eagles don't mess around. When they decide to settle down, stand back. They'll scream at you. They'll fly low and hiss and clack. They'll tear limbs off trees and take stuff out of construction site dumps and off beaver dams and it's just a hazardous situation. They don't care if they drop a huge branch on your car in the process. And the nearer to their nest they are, the more a Ball-Headed eagle likes to shit, which is an impressive sight; but not so much when one ass-blast paints your entire windshield.
I mean it. Eagles don't care. They don't.
Nope.
Aha! Here's the eagle. You bet he just shit a gallon bucket full of Fuck No before he flew up to this branch to take a look at me.
You might think "Poor bird, what are you going to eat? All the field rats drowned and washed away. Why are you hanging around here by the Brussels Sprouts?'
The eagle doesn't give a rip about field rats. That eagle is waiting for a duck to swim by in the river down below, and then it will have a duck dinner. I deliberately did not take pictures of all the duck parts that were lying around in this area by the eagle nest. People get squicky about Nature doing things like that. But yeah, that's how eagles live. They rip up a chunky duck and sling the beak and feet just wherever.
First sign of Spring - check!
Now here we are waaaaaaaaaay up the mountain.
This tree would have scared the life out of me when I was a little kid.
This is another lake out in the brush that I've fished quite a bit. It's loaded with fat cranky bass and aggressive trout. The water is clear as a bell and the marsh and woods are verdant and beautiful and alive with birds in the summer.
Now here it is in winter.
And this is beautiful too, in its way.
If you want to live in the Pacific Northwest, you need to accept this ^^^^ reality. This is what Winter looks like here. The sky is silver, like a pearl, like the inside of an oyster shell. The fields are tan and the forests are grey and black.
This is what life looks like sleeping.
This cold, wet, waiting silence is what births the Spring.
I will never love another place as much as I love this place.
