Iceland Impressions 1

“Life is but earth translated into force. . . . We are only earth transposed into force, just as coal is formed into flame and heat by the transmutation process applied to it.”
— from The Notebooks of David Ignatow, edited by Ralph J. Mills, Jr.

The landscape around Keflavik, Iceland

Lava rock

In Iceland, you can’t escape noticing the violent volcanic forces that shaped, and continue to shape, the landscape.  Coming from the Pacific Northwest, I was especially aware of the almost total absence of trees.  During my two-day stopover, I limited my explorations to the area near the Keflavik airport — I did not even make the hour bus ride to Reykjavik — and this rocky, moss-covered lava landscape was what I saw in all directions.

The Blue Lagoon (notice the people in the foreground soaking in the thermal waters)

Stones and waters in the Blue Lagoon

Of course, no trip to Iceland is complete without a soak in the thermal-heated waters of the Blue Lagoon, this country’s number one tourist attraction.  While Iceland does have plenty of natural thermal pools, the Blue Lagoon is actually artificial, created from the overflow from the adjacent thermal power station.  I enjoyed a relaxing soak and my skin felt revitalized from silicone mud available in tubs around the pools.

Iceland’s stark and alien landscape feels not forbidding, but rather remote and barren.  The wide open skies give a feeling of clarity and expansiveness.  I felt that my impressions were best captured by some of my camera’s photographic effects like the following:

Lava rock with tunnel effect

Blue Lagoon with kaleidoscope effect

Mossy growth on lava rocks with tunnel effect

And these photos taken on a short hike over the lava rock:

The Last Day of Winter

“There’s no question winter here can take a chunk out of you.  Not like the extreme cold of the upper Midwest or the round-the-clock darkness of Alaska might, but rather the opposite.  Here, it’s a general lack of severity — monotonous flat gray skies and the constant drip-drip of misty rain — that erodes the spirit.”
— Dylan Tomine, Closer to the Ground:  An Outdoor Family’s Year on the Water, in the Woodland and at the Table

Moss-covered tractor, Whidbey Island

Lest you think I moan too much about the winter rain and gray skies, I am submitting today’s photo as proof that reality matches my glum outlook.  I saw this moss-covered tractor in a field on Whidbey Island.  This is what happens if you remain immobilized for too long during winter in the Pacific Northwest!  The moss takes over!

So it is with great anticipation that we greet the vernal equinox in Seattle.  It arrives in Seattle tomorrow, March 20th, at 4:02 a.m.  Welcome Spring!

Of course, Spring here is not without its April showers — and March, May and June showers, too.  But the longer days make a huge difference.  Still, as Emily Dickinson knew, Spring is an “Experiment of Green.”  The tractor might just be destined to stay a “green machine.”

Rain
by Frances May

Rain
on my window
Rain
on the ground
Rain
in the sky
Rain
all around

 

Winter Fun in the Cascade Mountains

Snowshoers on the trail

This weekend was the annual Team Survivor Northwest Snowshoe Event at Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades, and it was my one day to play in the snow this winter.  (Although winter is not yet over, and March can hold some surprises.  My mother always used to say of March, “In like a lamb, out like a lion.”  And this year in Seattle, March 1st was a mild day.  So it is always possible that we might get a snow storm yet this month!)

I, of course, wanted it to be actually snowing, but the temperature was too high.  We were fortunate that the rain held off while we were in the mountains.  (Back in Seattle, it was a very rainy day.)  The light was flat and gray, and the magnificent tall trees along the trail were cloaked in darkness.  The colorful jackets of the cross-country skiers and showshoers along the trail contrasted sharply with the dim, cloudy surroundings.  It was still and quiet though at times we could hear the hum of the distant freeway traffic.

There was something almost gloomy about the still forest in the muted light.  Along parts of the trail, trees were moss-laden or furred with lichen.  I came to play, but this wasn’t a playful landscape on this day.

“Many trees are soulful.  These are trees that are old enough and large enough to shelter us.  These are the ones that draw a stillness in us.”
— Jean Shinoda Bolen, Like a Tree:  How Trees, Women, and Tree People Can Save the Planet

“And there never yet has been a nature writer who, confronted with primitive forest, has not resorted to the vocabulary of architecture.  Indeed, since it has been impossible to visualize or verbalize nature in terms free of cultural association, the woodland interior has been habitually conceived of as a living space, a vaulted chamber . . . curved and bent boughs and branches suggesting arched portals to some grandiose vaulted hall.”
— Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory

Lichen-covered trunks of tall trees along the Cold Creek Trail

Moss-laden trees along the trail

Piece of fallen moss on snow

Lichen-covered branches

Fallen lichen on snow

Lichen on a cracked boulder

My eyes were drawn to the branching patterns on the tall evergreen trees.  They seemed quite fern-like.

Layers of branches in a cascade down the trunk of s tree

Branching patterns

Branches like ferns

Fern revealed under melting snowbank

I was startled to see blue — almost a tropical blue — in the shadows of the snow along the trail.  Where did this blue come from?  There was no sunshine to reflect and refract the light on snow.  It was as if the snow held its own glowing lantern.  Miraculous!

Glow of blue shadows on snow

Pleated snowbank

Something restful about the soft curves of these snowbanks

Slush in a creek

Cold Creek Trail at Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascade Mountains

Relearning Winter

“Other seasons come abruptly but ask so little when they do.  Winter is the only one that has to be relearned.”
— Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life

Green moss on a roof

Pinecone

One thing I am relearning about winter is how long it lasts.  This is what winter asks of me, to slow down to its glacial pace.  To take each day as it is instead of wishing it were already spring.

As I walk my neighborhood streets, my eye craves the excitement of color to lift me above the muted grays.  And most often the reward comes in the brilliant green of our mosses, which thrive in winter’s dampness.  This will have to do for now.  Spring’s explosion of other colors will come at its own sweet pace.

Countryscapes

Yesterday’s post offered some cityscapes.  So today I will give equal time to rural images.  What a contrast to the gleaming, shining, reflective glass and steel surfaces of a  modern city.  Yet each is beautiful in its own way. 

Old barn in the Skagit Valley

 

Weathered siding, old barn

 

Leaky roof on an old barn in the Skagit Valley

 

Rustic barn

 

Old Barn
by Janice Blanchard 

On the edge of the town
See the old barn sag
With a drop in its ridge
Like a sway-backed nag,
And the shingles torn
By the west wind’s will
Fly from the skeleton rafters
Until
You may count its starved ribs,
One by one;
Old barn, old horse,
Your day is done.

Playing Tourist in Seattle: Washington Park Arboretum

One of the items on my “To-Do List” this year is to visit Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum when the azaleas are in bloom.  In a more normal year, this might be a Mother’s Day outing.  But this year I suspect that the azaleas will bloom early.  I have already been seeing some rhododendrons in bloom in sunny spots around the city.

I made a visit to the Arboretum this week to see what was blooming.  It’s still too early for much color on Azalea Way, but I did see one bush in bloom.

Azalea bud on a mossy bush

Azalea flower, an early bloom

Fat robin at the Arboretum

Bench and blooming forsythia, Washington Park Arboretum

Mossy limbs frame the budding trees

Walls

Richly textured wall

 

Mossy wall

 

I have been noticing gray stone and concrete walls lately.  Covered in moss and lichen, they seem to stoically endure — a fitting image of this winter, I think.  Of course, this brings to mind Robert Frost’s famous poem about walls. 

Mending Walls
by Robert Frost 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
     That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
     And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
     And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
     The work of hunters is another thing:
     I have come after them and made repair
     Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
     But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
     To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
     No one has seen them made or heard them made,
     But at spring mending-time we find them there.
     I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
     And on a day we meet to walk the line
     And set the wall between us once again.
     We keep the wall between us as we go.
     To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
     And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
     We have to use a spell to make them balance:
     “Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
     We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
     Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
     One on a side. It comes to little more:
     There where it is we do not need the wall:
     He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
     My apple trees will never get across
     And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
     He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
     Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
     If I could put a notion in his head:
     “Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
     Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
     Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
     What I was walling in or walling out,
     And to whom I was like to give offense.
     Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
     That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
     But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
     He said it for himself. I see him there,
     Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
     In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
     He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
     Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
     He will not go behind his father’s saying,
     And he likes having thought of it so well
     He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” 

Stone wall with berries

Wall with ivy