Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

Field Notes for an Aesthetic of Storms

m 31 Field Notes for an Aesthetic of Storms Frank rolled down the window and shouted over hammering rain to a man who was lifting a chain saw from the bed of a pickup truck. “Any chance of getting through?” Rain drove in the open window, wetting our laps and filling the car with the smell of crushed bracken ferns and pines. A shattered Douglas-fir blocked the road, lying full length where it had fallen in a litter of cones and needles, taking out a three-strand barbed-wire fence. A cow picked its way through the tangle of wire, clambered up the bank, and stood dumbfounded on the pavement, rain eroding the mud on its flank, wind catching at its tail. “Easy, easy,” the man said, but he was talking to his cow. He reached into the pickup and pulled out a can of gas. The cow swung its head from side to side as if to survey the possibilities, then turned abruptly and swayed down the road. The man jerked the cord on his chain saw. Exhaust fumes sank under the weight of the rain as he pulled the chain smoothly through a limb. I turned back to the maps, while Frank jockeyed the car around. We had tried to approach the coastal forest from the north, but downed trees and power lines blocked that road at the river. We circled down the coast and tried the Beaver Creek road, but that was impassable too: bridge out. Everywhere, we had come up against shattered stumps and limb-littered highways where trucks flashed yellow warnings that blinked in the water drops on our windshield. 32 m Holdfast My map showed one more possibility. So we turned south on Highway 101, dodged around sawhorses blockading a parking area, and finally came to a trail that descended through ancient Sitka spruce to a saltwater cove. Gale winds were plowing through the crowns of the trees, dragging clouds and sheets of rain, making a tremendous noise, but on the forest floor a hundred feet below, the air was still and saturated. Water sifted through spruce needles, collected in the old-man’sbeard , glistened on the spikes of sphagnum moss. Before long, my mittens hung low off my hands, dripping as if they’d sprung a leak, and my long underwear stuck to my legs. We climbed down the raw bank of a creek, where flash floods had torn out a section of trail. Sword ferns dangled over the cliff, holding on with a few black threads. Enormous cedars, unimaginably old, had toppled into the creek and shattered, broken ends splintered into daggers of raw wood, branches embedded deep in the duff, upended roots clawing twenty feet in the air. “Oh deathly quiet pandemonium,” Nietzsche would have called it, this stillness under the chaos. The smell was overwhelming. It filled the gully to the brim. Heavy, dense, sweet—never has air been so sweet—it was the smell of cedars netted with the roots of sorrel, the piney dark smell of old stone churches at Christmastime. Rain pants shushing, one leg against another, we walked along as well as we could, climbing over fallen trees or crawling under on our hands and knees. When we came in sight of the steep sandbank where the forest gave way to the beach, a limb arced past our heads and shattered across the trail. I have sought out storms all my life, without thinking much about why. Long before we knew better, my sisters and I played with lightning on the crest of the Rocky Mountains, reaching our hands toward rocks. The closer we came, the more furiously the rocks buzzed with electricity. We skipped and spun mindlessly in the electric charges, creating music with our bodies, the way Field Notes for an Aesthetic of Storms m 33 children dance in fountains and make music with splashing light. Certainly this was stupid, but it was also irresistible. “Consider bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps,” Immanuel Kant wrote in 1790, “ . . . hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up . . . The sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is.” What reed in the human spirit vibrates with the violence of storms? Sprinting the last few yards of forest trail, Frank...