Fifty Shades of Gray, Green, and Impossible Blue





Morf Morford
 





© Copyright 2025 by Morf Morford



 Photo by Lalit Gupta on Unsplash
Seattle skyline with Mt. Rainier in background.   Photo by Lalit Gupta on Unsplash

I live in the Pacific Northwest. That means the upper left corner of the contiguous 48 states.

Our reputation is of rain. But if you know real rain, you won’t find it here.

I live in what is known as a drizzle belt.

In terms of days of rain, or even the amount of rain, we get far less than many places.

It’s rarely foggy, like the San Francisco Bay area, but it seems, in small doses, to be damp – even when it hasn’t rained.

In many places, the rain drifts across the landscape. Here, the rain just seems to sit – like part of the landscape up above, or like that friend who never seems to know when the party is over.

I live in the part of the Pacific Northwest that has a range of mountains to the east, culturally – and sometimes literally – separating us from the rest of the United States.

Sometimes weather closes those mountain passes, sometimes an accident, or an avalanche. Or a forest fire. Or a flood. Or an erupting volcano.

Even in the best of times, our connection with the rest of the USA is tenuous.

We like being left alone.

Some of us like being left WAY alone.

We have a mild maritime climate -it rarely gets hot and rarely gets much below freezing.

It is the ideal habitat and climate for lowland mammals, who love our sub-alpine and very dense forests.

Like deer and rabbits.

And Sasquatch.

Washington state, where I live, has the most Sasquatch sightings in all of North America.

And my county has the most evidence/sightings of anywhere in Washington state.

Sasquatches, as you might imagine, are difficult to track down.

I’ve written about my semi-encounter with Sasquatch here.

Sasquatches, like the rest of us, don’t like extreme weather. So they like it here.

Most “evidence” of Sasquatches is not actual sighting.

They stay away from humans and don’t like noise.

If you look at the reports, you will notice that most of them are not visual views – but of “howls” or “vocalizations”.

I must admit that crazed, unearthly “howls” and “vocalizations” accompanied by thrashing around in the woods, with confused, terrified and often contradictory reporting, sounds more like my childhood than I am usually willing to admit.

I was always told that there were wild things in those forests that surrounded us.

But I always thought they were talking about people.

I’m almost relieved that witnesses seem convinced that they were sasquatches.

Almost.

Like cougars and a few other sly wilderness creatures, if you see them, it is only because they let you. And have been watching you for some time. And have probably been considering how or when you might be the next entrée on their menu.

Sasquatches, like most North American bears, are primarily vegetarian – with a taste for fish. They are pescatarian – until they aren’t. Even bears would rather eat roots and berries – until they get too hungry.

If the creatures don’t kill you, the land itself might…

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have few, if any poisonous or venomous insects or snakes.

And we don’t have hurricanes and only the very rare, and not very powerful, tornado.

But we do have earthquakes and volcanoes.

You may have heard of hurricane season. Earthquakes don’t have seasons.

The earth could literally open up, or shift – up or down – multiple feet any time.

And we are long overdue for our next “big one”.

Volcanoes can also erupt any time.

You may have heard of our last big eruption; Mt. St. Helens, in 1980. You can see a video of it here.

If (when) Mt. Rainier erupts, it will be far larger and vastly more destructive.

And yes, it is about 100 years overdue.

We also have tsunamis and lahars. Of all the possible threats from a volcano, lahars are the most dangerous and vast. They could easily bury – essentially erase – a whole city.

We wouldn’t be preserved like Pompeii, we would be buried.

There are three categories of earthquakes; and yes, we have all three kinds here.

Most of us locals, like our terrain, and our four-legged companions, keep a light grip on our physical existence.

We know that it could all evaporate, borderline immediately, with very little notice.

And no, volcanoes don’t have seasons.

This tenuous grip on our own existence has some intriguing consequences; if we take as a given, that our lives, legacies, accomplishments and reputations could be swallowed up and erased forever, most of us hold a view not so different regarding our earthly, that is, political leaders.

They make noise, and think they are in control. But we know that they are not.

We rarely speak of such things, but with our mortality so tangibly in front of us, it’s difficult for us to take seriously the controversies and conspiracy theories that seem to obsess so many beyond what we call the Cascade curtain.

Our precarious mortality, after all, is not really so different from everyone else’s.

You may not have a volcano that you see every day and promises, ever so subtly, to blast or suffocate every living thing for hundreds of miles, in front of you, but life, no matter where or how you hold it, or what you believe comes after, this life is as fragile as a candle in a rainstorm, and for better or worse, nothing we can see or do can rescue us.

Gold or silver, or fame and glory are all paltry pursuits. We, all of us, will leave them all behind.

And forces far larger than we are, will, one day, no matter where we are, or what we believe, or what we have built or accumulated, sweep us up into another place, possibly more stable, but also possibly more precarious than this one.

We don’t have the lush deciduous, multi-colored forests of New England, but we have fifty shades of gray, green and impossible blue.

We have mountains that will probably kill us all, and an earth that surges from miles below, but we know, in our bones, that celebration and savoring every moment is not only a survival strategy, but the ultimate expression of a life – of life itself – in motion.

And isn’t that what life is? Just a flickering, beautiful miracle emerging, like a fragile bloom against the impossible…



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