Witness to the Rain
This Oregon rain at the start of winter falls steadily in sheets of gray. Falling unimpeded, it makes a gentle hiss. You’d think that rain falls equally over the land, but it doesn’t. The rhythm and the tempo change markedly from place to place. As I stand in a tangle of salal and Oregon grape, the rain strikes a ratatatat on the hard, shiny leaves, the snare drum of sclerophylls. Rhododendron leaves, broad and flat, receive the rain with a smack that makes the leaf bounce and rebound, dancing in the downpour. Beneath this massive hemlock, the drops are fewer, and the craggy trunk knows rain as dribbles down its furrows. On bare soil the rain splats on the clay, while fir needles swallow it up with an audible gulp.
In contrast, the fall of rain on moss is nearly silent. I kneel among them, sinking into their softness to watch and listen. The drops are so quick that my eye is always chasing, but not catching, their arrival. At last, by narrowing my gaze to just a single frond and staring, I see it. The impact bows the shoot downward, but the drop itself vanishes. It is soundless. There is no drip or splash, but I can see the front of water move, darkening the stem as it is drunk in and silently dissipated among the tiny shingled leaves.
Most other places I know, water is a discrete entity. It is hemmed in by well-defined boundaries: lakeshores, stream banks, or the great rocky coastline. You can stand at its edge and say “This is water” and “This is land.” Those fish and those tadpoles are of the water realm; these trees, these mosses, and these four-leggeds are creatures of the land. But here in these misty forests those edges seem to blur: rain so fine and constant as the be indistinguishable from air, cedars wrapped with cloud so dense that only their outline forms emerge. Water doesn’t seem to make a clear distinction between gaseous phase and liquid. The air merely touches a leaf or a tendril of my hair, and suddenly a drop appears.
Continue reading “Witness to the Rain” in The Way of Natural History.
