Pentimento

2/8/2001

Pentimento: Painting the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been painted over.

It's January, and I'm standing on my back porch watching a heavy lace curtain of snow fall. And in the space between flakes is the pentimento of a midsummer day: our meadow clothed in tall grasses woven with wild roses, lupine, and yarrow.

I go inside, build up the fire in the hearth, take out my dog-eared field notebooks, and get comfortable on the couch. My fingers trace pages pocked by cool spring rain and smudged with pollen. Wavery notes and rough sketches tell of flowers whose metaphorical common names harken to the simpler, harsher era of our forebears: prairie shooting stars, pearly everlasting rosy pussy toes, queen's cup, virgin's bower, meadowrue. Their scientific names are there too, by which they are more properly identified, but I find their homespun names more memorable. Saying them feels like greeting old friends. Indeed, these flowers have become my friends, and in getting to know them, I've learned that their short lives are filled with practical as well as aesthetic purpose. Wildflowers nourish us in mind and body, heal our ailments, stop us in our tracks, bring us to our knees in wonder, and remind us of our mortality.

An entry made in early May takes me halfway up the mountain behind my cabin, searching for morels in a hemlock and spruce forest. My mud boots make sucking sounds on peat saturated with snowmelt. I scan the ground systematically for the tessellated forms of morels, which are easy to miss because they are the same sienna color as peat. Among the morels, I find trillium (Trillium ovatum), newly opened and displaying three pearly white petals. Six yellow anthers spring from the floral center; three narrow green sepals alternate with the petals. Each solitary flower lies on a whorl of three dark green leaves that duplicate the shape of the petals, but are much larger. The entire confection looks like a corsage. Save for this glad harbinger of spring, all else in the forest understory is still colored in shades of winterkilled brown.

A few pages later it's mid-June and things have brightened considerably. Deep in the woods on my land, pant legs soaked with morning dew, I hunt for medicinal herbs. I skirt a red willow copse and follow a shaft of sunlight to a patch of yarrow (Achilles millefolium). A flat inflorescence of minuscule white-ray flowers is turned toward the sun. Tall woody stems with feathery leaves support the flower heads. From a distance each flower head looks like a single blossom, but actually comprises five ray florets and ten to thirty disk florets, each of which constitutes a complete flower. Yarrow's therapeutic use has been well documented since medieval times. It's a warrior plant that defies domestication; the image of Joan of Arc riding into battle, yarrow blossoms in her hair, comes to me as I cut the tough stalks with one clean stroke of a small, sharp knife. Later I'll tie the harvested stalks together with white string and hang them upside down from my kitchen ceiling.

I thumb to late July, and I'm in western red cedar rainforest. The energetic trills of a winter wren echo through the forest nave. There's a wet primeval smell in the air; ghostly garlands of pale green lichen hang from tree limbs, and the forest floor is riddled with the mossy pit and mound architecture of decay. It takes as many years as a tree has lived for it to return to the soil. Everything has slowed down in this perfect eutropic system.

The presence of two species indicates this is old growth forest. The understory is waist-high in devil's club (oplopnax horridum), a broad-leafed shrub with fierce yellow thorns and a deep affection for moisture. Spiky racemes of homely yellow-white flowers crown the stem of each monstrous leathery leaf. Tucked beneath the devil's club I find delicate foam flower (Tiarella trifoliata var. unifolita) as lovely as devil's club is grotesque. The blossoms are minute, less than a sixteenth of an inch, with slender, branching stems. Each flower forms a star-shaped cup filled with ten stamens. As I sketch a spray of foam flower, I make the interesting discovery that their maple-like leaves are a miniature version of devil's club leaves, minus the thorns.

I turn to early August. My husband and daughters have brought me to a field camp for writers, where IÕll spend several days immersed in nature and trying to write about it. We make trips from the car to the primitive cabin I've been assigned, unloading my gear. Our route takes us through a meadow filled with a constellation of blackheaded daisies (Erigeron melanocephalus Nels), their spry white petals radiating form bright yellow centers lined in black. My daughters lie down in the meadow and roll in the daisies, and I badly want to join them. Instead, I hug and kiss my family good-bye, feeling guilt for abandoning them to pursue my craft. When I go to bed that night, I discover my daughters have sprinkled daisy petals on my pillow in benediction of my retreat.

I pick up the next field notebook and open it to mid-August. My writing retreat is over and I'm hiking the ridge line of our mountain with my sister-in-law, a stressed-out New York artist. Heat is rising from the valley in waves, and itÕs hard to believe winter ever touched this ridge. Beargrass wands crowned with creamy aureoles of blossoms spill down the south face of the mountain. Bright red tongues of sun-loving Indian paintbrush flame low to the ground among the beargrass. Harebells, showy asters, and Payette penstemons line the trail in a symphony of blue. The luminous white faces of mariposa lilies peek out from cool, dark shade--which there isn't much of because we're almost above tree line.

We stop at a small glacial tarn. While my sister-in-law sunbathes on a rock, I stroll around the lake. Next to the stream that feeds the lake I discover a moist clump of DutchmanÕs breeches (Dicentra cullaria), members of the bleeding heart family. What process of natural selection resulted in these fanciful flowers that resemble nothing so much as a pair of pink pantaloons sized to fit a fairy? A cluster of pendant racemes hangs from the end of a floral stem. Each blossom displays two petals and mostly hides another two. The outer petals form baggy pants tailored at the waistband to display yellow and violet tips. I wish I could spend more time sketching these flowers, but a horde of bloodthirsty mosquitoes descends upon me, effectively ending my work.

I meet my sister-in-law on the path back to the head of the lake. She has a serene expression on her face and is clutching a spray of small white flowers. I examine the tell-tale circle of chartreuse hearts scalloped around the center of each star-shaped blossom and inform her that what she holds is mountain death camas (Zigadenus elegans), a plant that contains extremely poisonous alkaloids. It is the kissing cousin of blue camas (Camassia quamash), a benign plant whose bulbs were a vegetable staple of Pacific Northwest Indians before the arrival of the white man. The long, grass-like leaves of these two forms of camas are so similar that Indians only harvested blue camas root in July, when deep azure blossoms make it impossible to mistake one for the other. While I calmly explain all this, my sister-in-law throws her bouquet to the ground in revulsion and washes her hands over and over in the cold, clear lake water. There is freedom in wilderness: freedom from urban stress and also freedom to make fatal foolish mistakes.

A few pages later it's early September on the Highline in Glacier National Park. Flurries feather down in the still air as I hike along the base of the Garden Wall. Across sparse fir stands lies an alpine tundra zone laced with trickling cascades and the seasonÕs last tenacious wildflowers. Standley's columbines (Aquilegia x elatior) poke out of snow pockets. Five rounded purple petals come together to form a trumpet. Five larger petals gracefully flare out and taper into distinctive curved spurs. The nectar contained deep within these spurs can only be reached by the long tongues of hummingbirds, moths, and butterflies. A phalanx of pale yellow butterflies rises skyward at my passing. Mountain goats graze on vertiginous scree slopes carpeted with blanket flowers (Gaillardia aristata). Cadmium yellow three-lobed petals ray out from a deep maroon center and make a vivid splash of color against dull gray scree. These heavy flower heads are attached to tall stately stems that move in the wind, making the petals flutter.

The sun comes out, melts the snow, entices me to shed layers of clothes. I pause at a stream that is milky with glacial silt. Below lies the U-shaped McDonald Valley. Above the valley, directly across from me, is Mount Oberlin, and in a narrow hanging valley midway up its flank I make out the white dots of mountain goats next to a blaze of yellow that could be blanket flowers. I try to memorize this landscape, because a month hence it will be covered with snow, and it will be many months before I'm able to come this way again. In case memory fails, I make a detailed sketch. Months later, this sketch brings it all back with an intensity that makes me weak in the knees.

I shut my field notebooks and walk back out to the porch. Nothing has changed; it is still snowing. As I watch the snow come down, I think of a verse penned by English poet Robert Herrick. "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying. And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be a-dying." Three hundred and fifty years later, Wyoming poet James Galvin put it more succinctly when he said, "The industry of flowers is dying young." That may well be, but beneath the clean, wet smell of steadily falling snow is the lingering fragrance of