Cascades of Green

Climbing in the Cascades, the train plunges into disorienting darkness and emerges back into mountains again and again and again.  Between tunnels, the view shifts by the second.  The peaks are layered like theater sets, stacked on top of each other and sliding across the horizon at different speeds, like they are pulled by husky stagehands with enormous ropes.

The distance must be an illusion.  How could there be this much wilderness left?  We're connecting major cities here - how could it be possible to look in either direction and see endless, uninterrupted woodland? Our steel-and-glass presence is the only disruption to the pine forests and the curving, tree-topped mountains.  And that seems peculiar.


"The Cascades" is a good name for them. They tumble over each other, flowing like waves, layered like sheets of water, like tiers of tumbling ivy. They look softer than they are, with the fierce pointy edges of the Rockies traded for the deceptively alluring curves of a waterfall.  Then a dormant volcano soars to the sky, a rock amidst the green waters.  I have approximately a lifetime's worth of transcription to work on, but it sits in my lap almost untouched.

I read somewhere that the human eye can discern more variations in the color green than any other color, which is why night-vision goggles show the world in tints of green. Possibly a trick evolutionarily acquired  to help tell plants apart more and separate poison from food. Maybe, I think as I stare out the window, I'm practicing. I'm training my eyes to tell these leaves apart, burning the slight changes in color deep into my retinas.  The dark green of old hemlock needles, the toxic-bright green of new ones; the yellow-green of maple leaves, the silver-green of spruces, the blue-green off old pines, the brown-green of maples.  The gray-green, the black-green, the cold-green, the warm-green, the gold-sunlit-green, the burnt-shadowed-green of the distant mountains.  The orange-green of moss.  The burning green of what might be poplar leaves.

And then the sudden black of another tunnel.  A flash of bright light, new colors of green, rock walls and then, for three seconds, a waterfall.  Thin and white, it splashes so clearly that I imagine I can hear it over the quiet rumbling of the train, although I'm sure that's not really possible.  Another instant and the last glimpse of white is visible through sturdy pine trunks.  Then it's gone, and we're in another tunnel.  I gaze deep into the dark, and it seems to carry fleeting hints of green.