Lichen-Me

I thought of Noah and the Ark and I thought, it has come again. 
-Charles Bukowski

 

Forecast: “Sunny, Sunny, Partly Cloudy, Rain, Rain, Rain…” We had no doubt which exact day autumn arrived in Portland this year. After fifteen dry weeks, the earth suddenly tilted, the jet stream sagged, and rain arrived like elderly auntie returning home after her summer cruise. We kiss her mossy hair, lug her drippy bags down the hall, thinking “How we’ve missed her; how right it feels to have her back again!” But as she settles into our favorite chair and begins her familiar, monotonous chatter, we sigh, knowing she will overstay her welcome once again.

Rain usually makes me feel mellow.
Curl up in the corner time, slow down, smell the furniture.
Today it just makes me feel wet.
-Jeff Melvoin

Vocabularies expand in this humidity: “showers” are different than “rain”; “scattered” isn’t “intermittent.” “Hail” is quite deeply misunderstood here. Fog, surprisingly, can be “freezing,” or “upscale.” “Mists” and “clouds” need modifiers. Late afternoon “sunshowers” mean a crop of rainbows; “sunbreaks” lure locals outdoors for a quick walk. And why had I never known about “virga” – the rain that doesn’t reach the ground because precipitation and evaporation have meshed so elegantly?

Siberians have their vodka and suicide rates; Caribbeans their sunny music and devil-may-care dispositions. Wouldn’t our long rainy seasons have a profound effect on the Pacific Northwestern personality? What’s the effect on our minds of living in an “insanely green” place, as poet William Stafford described Oregon? Of confronting the schizophrenia that winter appears greener than summer?  After leaves have turned and fallen, moss furs the bare crotches of trees, neon algae drips like phlegm off rocks, something moldy slimes our brick patio and asphalt driveway. My favorite greens are in the lichens – clever plants who are really fungi and algae combined, with such lassitudinous names:

usnea longissima  is Methuselah’s Beard lichen; there’s evernia prunastri  (oakmoss), parmelia sulcata (hammered shield), and the enchanting cladonia chlorophasea, or mealy pixie-cup. I can’t resist gathering it all, stuffing it in my pockets, strewing it about the house and garden.

Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about
spiritual patience?
-Mary Oliver

What  temperament steeps in our dark, wet season? Does the incessant and slow trickle of drops through the world’s tallest trees explain Oregonians’ reputation for being laid-back? Is there a meteorological  base behind the Keep Portland Weird bumper stickers? And whatever should we make of the locally-produced TV show “Grimm”?!

By contrast, the Midwest is surely shaped  by the drama of its storms. One of my earliest memories is a late summer afternoon in Oklahoma. Mama sat on the floor just inside our front door and pulled me, maybe three years old, into her arms. Only the screen door separated us from a purple-green monster thunderheading across our pasture. The barbed wire fence is blown taut, the prairie grasses laid prostrate, the lone tree gestures tempestuously. A wall of cloud slings lightning and ice pellets, booming and cracking, threatening to spin out a deadly, twisty tail.

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
it’s a hard rain gonna fall.
-Bob Dylan

Around the same age, I remember curling up on Mama’s lap on Sunday mornings during the long, windy sermons. I startled awake repeatedly as the preacher blasted prophecy and cracked his Bible on the massive pulpit. Surely it’s not far-fetched to link hail and damnation? In both memories, Mama is patting my shoulder, murmuring calm words since I was unaccustomed to commotion. Temperamental people found our family atmosphere mushy; their edginess rubbed us raw. On another afternoon my mother hauled a hefty neighbor-boy, Tommy Stritzke, out our front door to have his tantrum, banished, in the dirt. Temperance of many kinds was expected indoors.

Aristotle first labeled the earth’s “temperate zones” those latitudes with climates balanced for livability. Folks from Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Oregon doubt the other two states are livable due to their extremes of hot, cold, wet, and dry. These conditions correspond to the four humours that Hippocrates used as a foundation for his medical theory. Galen then devised corresponding categories of personality temperament: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic.

Extremes of wet and cold result in phlegmatic personalities –  quiet, relaxed, sluggish. And Oregonians have many role models for sluggish.

The notion of temperament has gone out of scientific fashion, but variations permeate our language. The root is Old French, tempre, to bring something to its proper condition by mingling it in correct proportions with something else. I temper teapots and beaten eggs before adding hot liquids. It’s the term for mixing water into clay or mortar. I’m learning a piano piece from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, an instrument attuned, brought into harmony. But there’s also hard reality in the term: steel is heated red-hot and plunged into cold water; this tempering process develops qualities of strength, elasticity, and resilience.

I have always motivated and defined myself by intemperate passions, even though they are quiet ones. Moving to this new country, I’ve found the currency exchanges for passions confusing: how many commitments to liberal arts education can I trade in for one grand scheme to finish a novel? What is the alloy of social work and moss gardening? How to keep a focus on social justice from dissolving into artistic reverie?

I welcome the return of rain more calmly this year. Maybe I’m grasping how to steel myself into flexibility and resilience. Learning finally to combine identities into a new lichen-like self, seamless and goodly-proportioned. These processes creep forward, slow as Methuselah, but they seem less daunting in this autumn’s patient rain.

…you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head-
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.
-William Stafford