Francesca G. Varela's Blog

We sit on the rocks by the river, the alder trees whippling, each leaf pulling in different directions. The water casts its own shadow, billowing like window blinds, and as the wind reaches us we can see its path, lit and flickering atop the water, constellations of cold, white sunlight darting across the green river. The water is deep, here in front of us, but we can hear the current just around the bend, moving around moss-covered stones. A small, grey songbird dives underwater in short bursts, swimming along the shoreline, floating like a duck or a goose. He perches on a stone, mid-river, and he bobs his head in some sort of dance, his long beak rising and falling, his tail fanned out, wide as a maple leaf. And at our side the sedge and bulrush grow, ankle height, tucked between stunted young willows, and the rock is warm beneath us, a balm to our goosebumped skin, still tacky with wind-dried water, and we watch these last moments unfold before the fir trees steal the light, before the river turns sap-dark, before there is no more flickering.

There’s a certain kind of darkness the desert has, the kind that seems to rise from the ground itself, latticing its way, muted, through the air, and yet you can still see the knotted limbs of the junipers, and the pock-marked openness, the rock fields and buttes, all of it encased in a muffled kind of brightness, an effect I’ve seen above snow, where the light reflects back strange and silver, the entire world like that except for the highest arch of the sky, which stays porous, and black, like basalt. And here in the desert there is also a point on the horizon, a small dip where the sunset pools, golden, long past dusk, weakening the earliest constellations, bleaching them, until at last that, too, darkens, and I nestle myself into a sandstone divot to watch the stars, feeling the day’s heat leaving the rocks, conducted into my outstretched palms, little by little, until the earth grows cold.

Maybe we can still remember
the closed-in darkness
long ago
before we had eyes,
and maybe we can remember
the sensation of
the jolting waters,
thick with calcite
and aluminum dust,
the shallow ocean clicking
against our keratin bodies,
the dull, brainless consciousness
softened into us,
our lives dark and endless
among the lacy mats of algae,
days and months and years
wrapped into a felted ocean
which was, to us, everything.

This is what the world once was,
low wind across
dimpled grasslands,
a warm, bruised sweep
musked with
far-pressed rain,
gall oaks whistling
as air falls through them.

This is what the world once was,
a far, clear view,
long to the east,
to the blue shoulders
of the Gorge,
the river tucked there,
imperceptible,
but felt,
sensed
in the angle of
shadow.

This is what the world once was,
muffled creek silence,
the sun lying flat
on vine maple leaves,
curled bracken fern
rising, pungent,
from the mud.

This is what the world once was,
kestrel wings
beating
above lupine meadows,
field sparrows
calling
from leather leaves,
their eyes dark
as cascara berries.

The Willamette River has started to thin at the edges, its murky spring sediment swept downstream, emptied into the great confluence of the Columbia, meandering miles and miles before sinking later into the wide, slow Astoria estuary. And so now, if you look into the shallow waters of the Willamette, right along shoreline, you see a clear, marbled view of the rocks at the bottom, all the little pebbles, silver and white and salmon-pink, and the rare green rock, pale as sagebrush.

The water stays clear as long as you don’t disturb it; the clarity is quickly lost to our wading footsteps, or to the geese who reach their long necks beneath the surface, loosening the silky, amorphous mud.

Things have changed, too, above the water; all the swallows flying in quick, buzzing lines. They’re tiny, almost as small as hummingbirds, but longer, more gracile, their wings papered and batlike. And above them, too, the turkey vultures ride the low drafts, circling lazily, and the great blue heron flies, all tucked into itself, the shape of an arrow, its wings unmanageably large, and the osprey watches all of us carefully, locking black eyes with me for just a brief, small, fleeting, almost imperceptible moment before diving into the wide, clear water.

It is early night.
One side of the sky
is bleached but
halted,
waiting
for the rose-gold light
to reach it,
to slowly catch
the edges of
the kindling,
the fibers curdled
to a red so dark
they are purple;
a coagulated flame
that simmers low,
held steady
on the shoulders
of the sun.

Within the movement,
the lifting and falling
the wind's low tremble,
the waves are
sculpted, patted, stretched,
flattened
to the long, sprawling curve
of the earth,
and if you look far enough
you can see the stillness,
the place where the water
plunges to an impossible blue
so dark it fades into itself,
that long stripe
leading into the horizon,
perhaps it, too, is the sky
or a slab of granite,
polished and warm in the sun,
made darker
by the turquoise band
that plunges, there,
the kind, ocean abyss.

The river—pale-brown with sediment, the color of fossilized soil—moves in one great heap, a sweeping rush like wind through a tunnel, and I swear I can feel it, the low-down coolness it forms from itself. The river is high, and in places it has risen halfway up the willows and alders, painting dark rings on their trunks, submerging their roots as though they are mangrove trees in some tropical estuary. The day has a tropical quality to it, warm-clouded and humid, even though we’re thousands of miles from the tropics, not even by the sea, but on the other side of things, across the mountains, in the dry Columbia Plateau; the sagebrush desert.

As we walk, we keep our eyes on the basalt cliffsides, looking for bighorn sheep who are supposedly sitting up there, napping with their lambs, heads bowed, pink noses tucked against red-rock crevices. A few times we think we see them, little white dots against the cliffs, but they turn out to be white speckles on the rock.

Around us, the mint-blue sagebrush gives off its incense scent, especially in certain areas, certain turns in the trail where for some reason the smell is stronger, perhaps from the shade and the morning dew.

By afternoon, the sun comes out. We don’t see any sheep, but we see several geese floating the river, looking gangly and out of place in the desert, and we hear white-crowned sparrows hopping the hackberry trees, and red-winged blackbirds making their glock call from the scouler willows. At one point we look up, and we see hundreds of cliff swallows darting in frantic circles, dark as bats, their v-forked tails streaming behind them. A larger bird flies among them. It calls out, and I realize it’s a red-tailed hawk, probably hunting the smaller birds. The swallows don’t seem to be fleeing from the hawk, though—they’re just circling there, like a school of fish trying to confuse their hunter.

Eventually we part from the river and head up to the grasslands, wading through the dry bunchgrasses and yellow balsamroots. We stop to have lunch on a hillside, and from there we look down on the river, on the sagebrush plains, on the ancient plateaus, once piles of lava, where the bighorn sheep are hiding. The shadows seem plastered to the cliff faces, clinging there like wet curtains against glass. And between the plateaus there is the river, now golden and glinting in the sunlight. We look down on it, all of it, knee-deep in silver-tipped grasses where cattle once grazed, surrounded by purple lupines and tiny white woodland starflowers, watching the valley as it flows.

You there,
scraping through the salmonberry leaves,
slow-footed in the chutes
of terraced clay,
your eyes yellow,
and seemingly lidless,
the kind of eyes
that belong to fish
or reptiles.
You walk,
each step halting,
perched,
one leg lifted,
talons stretched
like spider-web,
like an octopus wrapping
its cloth body over a fish,
parachute-like,
the knobs of your leg joints
carved from driftwood
and bone,
your feathers
made of pampas grass,
and blue cloud-light
smoothed into porcupine needles,
your head held straight
and slinking,
the creek reflecting up against
your underbelly
blue against the blue. [image error]

I woke up just before dawn. For a moment I laid there, watching the wind smooth the fabric of my tent, its touch gentle, like a hand pressing lines from a t-shirt. I could hear the rest of the group outside, whispering to each other, rattling metal coffee mugs and plastic cereal bowls, their silhouettes blocky against the lantern light, all of them standing hunched in their down jackets, rocking back and forth as they chewed. I crawled out of my tent and into the packed-down sand. The ground was colder than I’d expected, but the air had a warmth to it; a stagnancy. We’d camped down low in the dunes, where the wind couldn’t reach us.

I poured hot water into a pack of oatmeal and took hurried bites while I packed down my tent. I was late, and we were leaving soon.

When the entire group was ready, we put on our head lamps and trudged up the sand hills. It was still dark, but it was a paler kind of darkness, and the smell in the air had changed, had opened up, and the birds had started their single-note songs from the far-off scouler willows.

It didn’t take long for me to warm up as we walked. Each step felt slippery in the soft, sloped sand, and my backpack was heavy. I could feel it digging into my shoulders, irritating the still-sore skin from yesterday.

We walked for a long time, going uphill and then down, up and then down. Finally our guide stopped us. He pointed to the edge of the dunes, where the sand met the forest, and he told us that we would go down the trail one at a time, each person spaced out by five minutes so we could each have a moment of solitude. By the time it was my turn, the sun had mostly risen, the light growing up from the earth.

I walked slowly, taking it all in. It was foggy under the trees—a gray-blue kind of fog that was easy to see through—and the ground was soft, almost spongy beneath my boots, covered in fallen needles from the hemlocks and shore pines. It was so much easier to walk on than the sand that I felt like I was floating.

I caught glimpses water, but I couldn’t quite make it out. And then I rounded a bend, and I could see it—a small, dark pond. I stopped to look and, right there, illuminated in a ribbon of light, was a large, white swan, almost completely still. I had never seen a wild swan before—I would never have expected to see one in the forest.

I knew I would remember that moment forever—the air just starting to warm, the ocean a thin trembling in the distance, my skin dry with salt, wind-hewn, my heart beating fast. And I was right. I still remember it well, all these years later—how I stood there watching the swan until I heard footsteps behind me, the next hiker in the group. How I ran up the trail to increase the distance between us. How, when I looked back, the swan had left the light, slowly gliding, turning silver in the shadows.