By Jana Harris
from The Armageddon Horse,
Essays & Observations from the Farm, a climate change memoir
It wasn’t even the spring equinox. On the Saturday after St. Patrick’s Day, 2023, out of the endless cold, gray doldrums of sleet and fog, temperatures skyrocketed to a chirpy clear-eyed seventy degrees. This was almost unheard of in the coastal foothills of the Pacific Northwest. Our low-growing purple crocuses usually pushed themselves out of the loam before any of the other flowers. But this year the strap-like green leaves of daffodils shot up at the same time as the crocus. By the end of the afternoon the showy lavender crocuses with their saffron centers were in full bloom and plump daffodil buds were obvious. On Sunday, their yellow petals and trumpet coronas burst open. Suddenly the lawn needed mowing. Our horses, which provided fertilizer for our organic vegetable business, paced the fencelines of their paddocks. Though their pasture hadn’t yet greened, our resident equines could smell the aroma of resurrection. Best of all, the air was lucent without a whiff of the charred timberland a few miles to the east. The Bolt Creek forest fire that had threatened us last summer and the nightmarish winter that had followed were all but forgotten.
We’re aces at brushing off catastrophes around here. Other mostly forgotten cataclysms include the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 that spewed fire and ash across the landscape and interrupted weather patterns. The volcano killed fifty-seven people and devastated 210 square miles. If, like most of the population of this state, you were born or moved here after 1980, this geothermal event now exists merely as a bronze bas relief erected along the Interstate. More recently there was the horrific 2014 Oso mudslide. On a Saturday morning in April, a forested rain-soaked hill to the north of us collapsed and—in a heartbeat—killed forty-three people, destroyed forty-nine homes, and forever changed the landscape along the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River. The powers that be in this state rarely cast aspersions on developers or the timber industry, so we never got a clear answer as to the reason for this catastrophe. Even though the mudslide left a fresh scar visible from as far away as the shore of the Puget Sound—like the eruption of Mt. St. Helens—it feels as if the event happened in the Pleistocene.
Now the winter of 2022–2023 was also history. The morning smell of woodstoves suddenly carried notes of cheer, helping us cast off the depression headaches of the cold months. We behaved as if the sky would always be the color of forget-me-nots and the fresh intoxicating sunlight a given. Heads held high, shoulders unburdened, we had improbable, almost superhuman, energy. What a gift, this surprising spring that usually didn’t arrive until late May or early June and sometimes not even then. As the week wore on, however, the mountain wind that blows intermittently from October to March began to dry the fields in what was usually considered the mud month. The fragile new grass faded to a jaundiced yellow as if it had been sprayed with herbicide. Our paddocks turned to dust. As I carried hay out to the horses because they had no grass to eat during their morning turnout, a pair of big-bellied robins hopped after me, waiting for a few seeds to fall. Odd, spooky even, that the landscape looked like late summer. Nevertheless, this situation was preferable to the three of us: me, my husband Mark, and Alouette (called Ali) our hundred-pound, mostly out-of-control Alsatian-cross we rescued from the pound. Usually, we were glued to our kitchen window waiting for the rain to stop.
The Mediterranean days didn’t last. It was still March, after all. Temperatures plunged. Black clouds moved in, bringing rain with thunder and then more rain with wind-driven hail. We woke up morning after morning to fields of snow, which might or might not melt by sunset. Woodfire smoke again sullied the landscape like coal dust. Surely April would bring an end to the necessity of wearing these layers of insulated clothing—fleece hats, neck gaiters—and mittens for our frozen fingers.
It did not. It was the second coldest, wettest April on record. Nothing grew. Neither the purple nor the white lilacs burst forth. The evergreen rhododendrons surrounding our house failed to offer even a hint of their gigantic ruby blooms. The horses held on to their winter fur. I kept them in insulated turnout rugs when usually, by now, I would have dressed them in rain sheets. The pink and white dogwoods remained dormant and might have been dead, likewise the fruit trees: apple, pear, quince, white fig, black fig, and Italian plum. The mountain wind which usually petered out by the end of March kept blowing, gusting with renewed muscle. The crocuses faded. The only good news was that the refrigerator air kept the daffodils fresh all month long when their usual lifespan was about ten days, despite torrential rain that caused a flash flood in the barn and an ice storm that temporarily laid the daffodils prostrate on the ground. Oh, thank the angels for those strong-stemmed marvels. Otherwise, the gray cold wore on us like being forced to eat past-its-shelf-life oatmeal without raisins for three meals a day.
The barn swallows, which were due back on April 15, slowly drifted in, perching in the rafters where they set up housekeeping in their age-old mud cup-shaped nests. Two years ago, there had been more than a hundred of them, last year only about thirty returned, this year I counted maybe six pairs. Their dwindling numbers were a worry. We had been hosting generations of these tiny migratory birds for more than thirty years and until last spring their numbers felt infinite.
This year the stunted grass in the back pasture hosted one lone Canada goose of unknown gender. Usually there was a pair that arrived at the end of March to set up housekeeping but never seemed to find just the right place to build a nest and start a family. In the hay field they were vulnerable to Mr. Coyote. One year the shake roof of the shed where we stored old farm equipment collapsed under the weight of Goose’s nest, and the sheet metal replacement must have turned their eggs into omelets. The cattails in our pond seemed an ideal site, but the pair always chose a spot beneath Redtail’s flyover pattern or Eagle’s perch in the craggy old cottonwood. Either way, calamity ensued. These geese don’t migrate like the rest of their species; they hopped the chain link fence from a neighbor’s pond where the owner propagated them and, at one time, had a breeding colony of as many as seventy-five birds. As to the “why” of this, I have never been able to discover. I’ve lived on this farm for more than thirty years whereas my elderly neighbor, the goose master, was born here. We have had a total of two conversations over the past three decades, and neither went well. Let’s just say that he only engages with the man of the house; otherwise, he’s not a listener.
This spring the lone goose squawked as much as an entire flock. Often, I mistook his honk for a frantically barking dog. Mark and I felt sorry for him. Like the barn swallows, Canada geese mate for life and we didn’t want to think about what had happened to his partner, which would cause us to brood too much about our own mortality. When Goosey rose out of the grass flapping his wings as if trying to take off but then seemed to think better of it, the horses’ ears pricked in alarm. Sometimes the bird did take off and flew over to one of our plastic wind tunnel-shaped greenhouses, landing near the pond on a large sheet of black plastic that Mark had spread out to warm the soil. The bird spent hours there standing on one leg watching my husband transplant tomato seedlings of his more than one-hundred heritage varieties—Bloody Butcher, Homer Fikes Yellow Oxheart, Pink Berkeley Tie-dye—some with fan clubs and websites. One rare heritage potato had a band named after it. Mark cultivates heritage spuds in the old stallion pen. The stallion, a story for another day, is long gone.
As they waited for the grass to grow, the horses stood at their paddock fences for hours transfixed by Goosey’s dramatics. The only resident delighted by the cold wet spring was our newest equine, Scifi, our Armageddon horse, as we referred to him because he had been purchased on a whim the day before we received evacuation orders concerning the Bolt Creek Forest Fire. A tall, lanky five-year-old Thoroughbred that had injured himself on the racetrack, Scifi was raised in South Texas and was unfamiliar with grass, rain, snow, and now it seemed mud. Rain annoyed him at first. Snow flummoxed him, though eventually he learned to make snow angels. Mud, however, he embraced as his art form: he pawed the ground, enlarging his roll spot, deepening it, wallowing then rolling, over and over, swishing his tail in the slush, itching his stomach on the slime, allowing the ooze to dry on his body and turn his mane and tail to what looked like dreadlocks.
Until we had purchased him, Scifi had been a working horse with a career, not a pet or a companion or a riding horse like I was trying to convert him into. In addition to the grass, rain, snow, and mud, he was also unfamiliar with treats. When I’d first offered him a sugar cube, he snorted at it suspiciously. A carrot? Half a carrot, an apple, a piece of apple? I dropped them in his rubber feed dish. His prehensile upper lip maneuvered each to the edge, then he nosed the treat over the rim and out where it couldn’t contaminate his grain. When I cut the carrot and apple up like wafers or chips, he began to get the point. Eventually, he took to most treats like a duck to water. A whole new world opened up even though he has yet to grasp the savoring of a sparkly mint, those round red-and-white hard candy disks seen at Christmas. Bite and chew? He let it fall from his mouth. The other horses stood at the ready, eager to accept any ABC (already been chewed) candy. Now Scifi demanded his share of daily treats like the other horses, except that each time treats were offered, his expression was one of happiness rather than a sour complaining never enough.
Early April came and went, each day filled with inchoate weather. The first of May would be the traditional march of the goslings when my neighbor’s flock paraded this year’s new crop of youngsters in front of their professionally landscaped lagoon. Adorable! I never tired of watching the fuzzy yellow bowling pins scurry around as the parent birds squawked with pride. Geese raised their young communally, so it was hard to tell which gosling belonged to which adult; I’m not even sure they knew. The adorable factor of their chicks aside, the thing about geese is that even the excrement of a single twenty-pound bird like the one that had migrated our back pasture can qualify it as a pest species.
On the last weekend of April, the southeast wind ceased, and we were struck by a surprise heat wave. The temperature reached eighty degrees by midafternoon, up from a low forties-something high the previous day. This was heat we usually didn’t see until summer if we were going by pre-climate change guidelines. The fruit trees burst forth along with a few of the white and deep amethyst hybrid lilacs; the early variety of rhododendrons suddenly produced what looked like lipstick red pineapples. Walking down to the barn to feed, I stopped to inspect a pear tree that grew beside the front gate. Each branch, like a wooden tentacle, bore thousands of delicate white petaled flowers amongst bright waxy leaves that were just breaking out. I walked around the trunk, studying every branch. All I saw was one bee with a tree full of pollinating ahead of it. One bee? How would the pear bear fruit? Other insects helped pollinate, but I didn’t see any of those either. And there were no biting flies, not yet, a relief for the horses that were persecuted by them as temperatures rose. But what about pollinating our crops? One bee? I spotted two tiny insects crawling up the pear tree’s trunk, so I guess you could say that help was on the way.
Ten swallows, one bee, and I hadn’t seen any bats in two years. We’re an organic farm and never use herbicides or pesticides. What happened? There was a lot of pollinating to be done or else all our sowing and nurturing of plant life would be for naught.
Not to dwell completely on the negative, in the glass-half-full category our hay pastures and paddocks turned emerald overnight, the alder and maple sported new leaves while neon-green tips lit the evergreen shrubs. Weeds flourished in the graveled paths, and raincoat-yellow dandelions dotted every open space. But speaking of color got me again fixated on the glass-half-empty subgroup: When had I last seen a swallowtail or monarch butterfly? They’d been absent for so many years that I feared they belonged to the classification “glass completely dry.”
May first is International Workers’ Day, which celebrates the codification of an eight-hour workday. It’s also Law Day, which commemorates the rule of right, not might. In Europe it is the first day of summer, halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice and celebrated with May poles and May Queens. Early in the morning of the first day of May, I drove past my neighbor’s well-manicured goose pond. Not a newly hatched gosling in sight. Actually, I saw no geese whatsoever. Where had they all gone? Relocated, gassed, succumbed to avian flu? If they had decided to migrate north, that would be a first. The renegade bird that inhabited our pasture and pond seemed to be the last goose standing. This year could have brought an end to the problem of increasing numbers—along with the problem of goose excrement and the accompanying E. coli—it might bring down the curtain in our area on Canada geese entirely.
On the second of May, temperatures again plummeted. The darkening heavens knackered my spirits. The dingy sky’s smudged horizon left little certainty that the heavy clouds would clear any time soon. Endless rain felled the orchard’s blossoms like wet confetti. Venturing up the driveway to get the mail, I could smell the fire azaleas even though their tangerine flowers were still only faintly tinted buds. It wasn’t the blooms that I found intoxicating, but the resin in the new leaves—the smell of my Oregon youth on the Clackamas River. I would know the scent of a flame azalea anywhere. It was the smell of destiny.
After checking the mailbox, I went back into the house to fix lunch. While washing arugula leaves, I studied the rangy rain-bent forget-me-nots in the kitchen garden. The house shook as the mudroom door slammed shut. Mark, who wears a size 12D boot, and Ali, the out-of-control but always rhapsodic hundred-pound dog, came gallivanting into the kitchen from the pond. “Guess what?”
“Can’t possibly guestimate.” The answer to Mark’s last “guess what” had been beyond even my powers of magical thinking: a feral mink from the derelict mink farm had killed a rat larger than itself and dragged it away into the briars. If I was phobic about anything, it was rats, both living and dead.
“The goose,” Mark said excitedly. “He (for some reason we’d decided the bird’s gender was male) didn’t lose his mate. She just swam across the pond with six goslings, and the two adults are barking like drumfire.”
My spirits levitated. “A good omen,” I was sure of it.
Be careful what you wish for. On May fifth, the forecast on my phone predicted unprecedented weather conditions for Mother’s Day: ninety plus degrees accompanied by a hot Santa Analike wind. The laggard azaleas, rhododendrons, dogwoods, old-fashioned lilacs of all hues, the late bluebells and all the other flowers that hadn’t yet come into full bloom burst into color within a day, then by evening turned brown around the edges, wilted, and fell to the ground. All I could think of was the international general call of distress, Mayday, derived from the French m’aider (help me).
Jana Harris has taught creative writing at the University of Washington and at the Writer’s Workshop in Seattle. She is editor and founder of Switched-on Gutenberg. Most recent publications: You Haven’t Asked About My Wedding or What I Wore; Poems of Courtship on the American Frontier (University of Alaska Press) and the memoir, Horses Never Lie About Love (Simon & Schuster).