Willamette Valley

The Willamette is a sigh that never finishes. It breathes through orchards swollen with dusk and hesitation. Fog kneels at the ankles of the hills like it’s asking for forgiveness. Crows interrupt the sky. They do not mean to. Somewhere a tractor idles without a driver, the engine humming the same tired hymn that soil remembers. I walk between rows of pinot noir vines that twist like questions no one asked, and the earth smells like something old trying to become young again.

I am no larger than a wine cork. The valley does not notice me, not yet. For a long time, I believed that was safety. I lived in the hollow of a thimble buried near the roots of a wild rose, drank dew from acorn caps, wrapped myself in the torn skin of a grape. My heart beat quietly. I watched the seasons shift like shoulders in sleep. Once, I waved at a snail and it stopped to look at me. We said nothing. That was the beginning.

I began walking. I wanted to see where the river ended. I wanted to know if something waited for me there—maybe a voice, maybe just an opening. Every mile was a cathedral of obstacles: blackberry thickets like barbed wire, wind that could lift me like a scrap of cloth, the shadow of a hawk that made me lie flat in the dust for half a day. I crossed a puddle by raftleaf. I climbed a mushroom and looked out over a wetland that pulsed like a sleeping lung. I saw a pair of boots in the distance, unmoving, half-sunk in the mud. I thought of gods and fathers.

This valley doesn’t perform. It waits. It listens with its soft wet fields, with the hush of filbert trees holding last year’s wind. Even the light here feels reluctant, like it’s unsure whether to stay or move on toward the coast. And still—still—the grass grows like it believes in something. I reached the river one evening when the sky was the color of cold tea. I stood at the edge and waited. I didn’t know for what. Maybe for it to speak. Maybe for myself to.

A salmon leapt and fell. A cloud tore slightly. The wind moved in all directions. I picked up a stone the size of my chest, dark and smooth and quiet. I held it like a question. And for a moment, the valley turned its head, just slightly, like it almost saw me.