I’m in the cool temperate rainforest of northern California, home to Avenue of the Giants – a breathtakingly beautiful primeval forest of giant redwoods.  Sounds are different here.  Some carry farther through the synapses of moisture in the air, but others are muffled by the weight of droplets hanging heavy on ferns, moistened bark, towering trees.  


Some people complain about the rain, but this place is rich with life and history recorded not in pen and paper, but in tree rings and fossils of Scotia Bluff.  There aren’t enough words for the varieties of fog.  From this one spot I can see ocean fog that advanced over the coast, then ebbed as the day warmed; sinuous fog that sweeps like a bridal veil along the curving river; low-lying clouds wrapped around hilltops; and little fog ghosts hovering between trees and over a deep gully.  Who knows why they appear where they do?  


Here it smells like hands in soil; like Christmas coming. How lucky I feel to experience life on mirror coasts.


On a forest note, here’s an educational site called silva rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric, by Gideon Burton at BYU:  http://rhetoric.byu.edu/, for you practitioners of rhetoric. 🙂


Word for the day: petrifaction ~ the process of fossilization.