The Mountain and Snow Envy

Around here, Mt. Rainier is "The Mountain", needing no other naming. We were driving down to see Scott's family in Graham, about an hour south of us. The drive takes us through the small town of Orting, whose main distinguishing feature is a bell tower sporting a gigantic metal daffodil at its base (in honor, I suppose, of their spring Daffodil Festival). Rainier looks enormous from there. The sky was typical January, all cold blue and rose and grey. The snow-clad surfaces of the mountain were exactly the same color as the surrounding sky, so all you could see of the mountain were striations of exposed rock, doing an excellent imitation of twisting charcoal clouds. Strange, when the eyes don't accept what the mind knows to be there. It was very surreal, and beautiful. Rainier is always stunning, never the same twice, and it's easy to forget the danger of living on its skirts. It's a dormant volcano, but not a dead one, and eruption is a very real possibility. Not to mention the threat of scenarios short of a full eruption that could still send lahars, mud flows the consistency of cement down the valleys at 60 miles per hour. They have reached all the way to Puget Sound in the past; everything in the valley from Orting to Auburn is built on what's left of them. Regardless, the area around Orting (right in the mouth of the beast, if you will) is being developed at a scorching rate. I wonder about the thought processes of the people who buy these homes. Are the prices too good to pass up, or do they just figure "it will never happen here"? What do they make of the "Volcano Evacuation Route" signs spaced at regular intervals along the two-lane road that could never handle that kind of traffic?

This is the time of year I always fall victim to snow envy. It's hit and miss for us in Seattle -- most years we at least get a dusting, maybe a couple of inches, but it's anyone's guess ... we have the most apologetic weather forecasters I have ever heard. I guess being stuck between two mountain ranges in proximity to the ocean makes for an ... interesting meteorological situation. And apparently, snow is especially difficult to pin down (or so they would have us believe). We had maybe a half inch Saturday night, and now they're saying maybe tomorrow night we might get a bit more, but it's a crapshoot. I can't complain; it's been a lovely winter so far, with (it feels like) more sunshine than usual. But I crave the snow, and it has to be here. When I whine to my friends about failed forecasts, they always say, "Just go up to the mountains, up to the pass, it's so close." Which, indeed, it is. But it's not the same. There's something about the smell and the silence of snow, of standing under your own streetlight, mesmerized by flake patterns, and knowing you can go inside and curl up with hot cider whenever you get cold. And it's the transformative power of snow I desire ... all the known things, all the dead patches in the lawn, the sewer drains, the terrible hack job the neighbors did on their weeping Japanese maple -- all covered over and perfected.