Madrones

     Every spring as I walk through the mountains and drive through the valley, I find myself repeating the first line of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. "Nothing is so beautiful as spring," he said. It's a line that occurs again and again as the daffodils amass and the maples take to leaf and the birds sing to each other from the tree tops. 

    This year the line has been amended. "Nothing is so beautiful this spring as the Pacific madrone," I say to myself, again and again, as I walk through the mountains or contemplate Humpy Mountain from my deck.  Never have the madrones been so beautiful as they are this spring, with their masses of showy white blossoms. "The tribe gathers," Rumi says. "Who has a chance against such an elegant assemblage?"

    I've lived on this mountain almost fifty years, and I've never seen the madrones bloom so profusely. It's a once-in-fifty-years phenomenon, or, as far as I know, once-in-a-hundred-years. It's as though that rose bush you love suddenly put out three times as many roses as you've ever seen on it. It's like the burned-over hillside I saw in the Marble Mountains, made pink with masses of pussy-toes. The madrones this spring are like the richest cream whipped into peaks, the frilliest organza ball gown, the thickest patch of stars in the Milky Way.

    Only the female madrone puts out flowers, but this spring I'm wondering if every tree could be male one year and female the next because not only are there more blossoms on each tree than ever before but more trees with blossoms, too. The flowering trees are so many and so dense with blossoms they make splotches, lines, and patches of white on the distant mountains. Even from my house I can distinguish individual madrones on the evergreen-forested hillside of Humpy.

    During the day the trees absorb the heat of the sun into those blossoms, hoarding it for an alchemical reaction that they release in the evening and early morning—as far as I know, throughout the night—in the sweetest, most intoxicating scent in the mountains. I lift my nose like a bear. I can't get enough of madrone perfume, which, usually given in stingy whiffs, this spring saturates the air.

    I realize that not everyone appreciates this abundance of madrone fragrance.  One woman agreed to the observation but not to the exultation. "Yes," she said, "my sinuses have never been so stopped up!" My deepest sympathies to those who cannot enjoy the wonderful gift of this year's madrone sweetness permeating the air.

    The birds take that sweetness and turn it into music, threading it with the needles of their beaks through the fabric of the air.

    It cannot last, of course. "Nothing gold can stay," Robert Frost reminds us. "So Eden sank to grief./So dawn goes down to day./Nothing gold can stay." Already the golden white madrone blossoms are fading, turning dull, dropping their tiny buds like hailstone beads on the trails. Already their lovely scent is growing faint, becoming memory. The sensual wealth is giving way to the maturity of summer. 

    And then—ah! Already I anticipate the abundance of bright red berries on each madrone tree next fall, brightening the woods with autumn's bounty, the fruits of spring's beauty.