North Coast Idyl

The rain came in periodic waves on Saturday, hitting the north coast in gusts. The Pacific had that chalky blue-white hue that it gets when it’s been churned up. Sea birds held onto the shifting wind currents, darting in jagged motions, finding and then losing channels of pressure in the air.

Driving the truck along the coast route I listen to Marilyn Robinson’s “Gilead.” It’s good. Like Russell Banks’ “Cloudsplitter,” it imagines the harsh rural life of the 19th century and particularly the lives of pious Midwesterners and their Abolitionist forebears.

I get to the house in the woods just as the sun is fading behind a wall of rain-infused clouds. The temperature inside is a chilly 50 degrees, demanding a fire in the woodstove. After several hours the area around the stove is finally comfortable. Outside I can hear the rolling thunder of the Pacific hitting the shore, even though it is five miles to the west over several ridges.

All night long the rain will start up and then stop again, pelting the metal roof like a drum roll for fifteen or thirty minutes and then taper off. I huddle alone in the bed and listen to it go on and off.

In the morning I take a walk with Eloise. She periodically shoots off into the underbrush and reappears a hundred yards or so further up the road. She’ll require a tick check when we get back to the house. No Marcel Proost siting today. Completely alone on the road. I walk for three miles and don’t see a soul. A layer of ground fog hugs the vineyard that is a half mile to the northwest along the road. The vines are in their winter hibernation, bare and scraggly. Two crows fly over, coming close enough that I can hear the seesaw movement of their wings.

Later in the day, towards sundown, the mushroom hunters arrive. They have been dawdling along the coast, stopping at Fort Ross to admire the vista and to look at the little Russian display inside the restored wooden roundhouse. Emily, who has been studying icon painting all year, tells me that there are Russian icons inside.

We go through the deep, soggy woods, scouting for fungi. Thinking of John Cage, I realize I am a poor forager. My eyes are not sharp. Or rather, my concentration wanders (nothing wrong with my eyes). Nonetheless I spy the season’s first sprouting of black chanterelles. Debbie finds a tiny little hedgehog, promise of a bounty to come in a month or so.

And I find a young coccora, beautiful with its cream-like veil covering half the mahogony-brown cap.

There are thousands of mushrooms all about. You can’t take two steps without coming upon one or another. But they are almost all of the non-edible variety. I can’t recognize many of them.

Just as the sun begins to disappear I take the truck over to the storehouse and fill it with the logs I cut and split last summer. They are from two madrones that had to be cut at the order of the Forest Department for fire safety. Now they are themselves fire wood.