Witness to the Rain · by Robin Wall Kimmerer
This log, inches above my face, weighs many tons. All that keeps it from seeking its natural angle of repose on my chest is a hinge of fractured wood at the stump and cracked branches propped on the other side of the stream. It could loose those bonds at any moment. But given the fast tempo of raindrops and the slow tempo of treefalls, I feel safe in the moment. The pace of my resting and the pace of its falling run on different clocks.
Time as objective reality has never made much sense to me. It’s what happens that matters. How can minutes and years, devices of our own creation, mean the same thing to gnats and to cedars? Two hundred years is young for the trees whose tops this morning are hung with mist. It’s an eyeblink of time for the river and nothing at all for the rocks. The rocks and the river and these very same trees are likely to be here in another two hundred years, if we take good care. As for me, and that chipmunk, and the cloud of gnats milling in a shaft of sunlight—we will have moved on.
If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are. So I stretch out, close my eyes, and listen to the rain.
The cushiony moss keeps me warm and dry, and I roll over on my elbow to look out on the wet world. The drops fall heavily on a patch of Mnium insigne, right at eye level. This moss stands upright, nearly two inches tall. The leaves are broad and rounded, like a fig tree in miniature. One leaf among the many draws my eye because of its long tapered tip, so unlike the rounded edges of the others. The threadlike tip of the leaf is moving, animated in a most unplantlike fashion. The thread seems firmly anchored to the apex of the moss leaf, an extension of its pellucid green. But the tip is circling, waving in the air as if it is searching for something. Its motion reminds me of the way inchworms will rise up on their hind sucker feet and wave their long bodies about until they encounter the adjacent twig, to which they then attach their forelegs, release the back, and arch across the gulf of empty space.
But this is no many-legged caterpillar; it is a shiny green filament, a moss thread, lit from within like a fiber-optic element. As I watch, the wandering thread touches upon a leaf just millimeters away. It seems to tap several times at the new leaf and then, as if reassured, stretches itself out across the gap. It holds like a taut green cable, more than doubling its initial length. For just a moment, the two mosses are bridged by the shining green thread and then green light flows like a river across the bridge and vanishes, lost in the greenness of the moss. Is that not grace—to see an animal made of green light and water, a mere thread of a being who like me has gone walking in the rain?
“Listening to rain, time disappears. If time is measured by the period between events, alder drip time is different from maple drip. ”
Down by the river, I stand and listen. The sound of individual raindrops is lost in the foaming white rush and smooth glide over rock. If you didn’t know better, you might not recognize raindrops and rivers as kin, so different are the particular and the collective. I lean over a still pool, reach in my hand, and let the drops fall from my fingers, just to be sure.
Between the forest and the stream lies a gravel bar, a jumble of rocks swept down from high mountains in a river-changing flood last decade. Willows and alders, brambles and moss have taken hold there, but this too shall pass, says the river.
Alder leaves lie fallen on the gravel, their drying edges upturned to form leafy cups. Rainwater has pooled in several, and it is stained red brown like tea from the tannins leached from the leaf. Strands of lichen lie scattered among them where the wind has torn them free. Suddenly I see the experiment I need to test my hypothesis; the materials are neatly laid out before me. I find two strands of lichen, equal in size and length, and blot them on my flannel shirt inside my raincoat. One strand I place in the leaf cup of red alder tea, the other I soak in a pool of pure rainwater. Slowly I lift them both up, side by side, and watch the droplets form at the ends of the strands. Sure enough, they are different. The plain water forms small, rapid drops that seem in a hurry to let go. But the droplets steeped in alder water grow large and heavy, and then hang for a long moment before gravity pulls them away. I feel the grin spreading over my face with the aha! moment. There are different kinds of drops, depending on the relationship between the water and the plant. If tannin-rich alder water increases the size of the drops, might not water seeping through a long curtain of moss also pick up tannins, making the big strong drops I thought I was seeing? One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.
Where new gravel meets old shore, a still pool has formed beneath the overhanging trees. Cut off from the main channel, it fills from the rise of hyporheic flow, the water rising from below to fill the shallow basin where summer’s daisies look surprised to be submerged two feet deep now that the rains have come. In summer this pool was a flowery swale, now a sunken meadow that tells of the river’s transition from low, braided channel to the full banks of winter. It is a different river in August than in October. You’d have to stand here a long time to know them both. And even longer to know the river that was here before the coming of the gravel bar, and the river that will be after it leaves.
Perhaps we cannot know the river. But what about the drops? I stand for a long time by the still backwater pool and listen. It is a mirror for the falling rain and is textured all over by the fine and steady fall. I strain to hear only rain whisper among the many sounds, and find that I can. It arrives with a high sprickley sound, a shurrr so light that it only blurs the glassy surface but does not disrupt the reflection. The pool is overhung with branches of vine maple reaching from the shore, a low spray of hemlock, and, from the gravel bar, alder stems inclining over the edge. Water falls from these trees into the pool, each to its own rhythm. The hemlock makes a rapid pulse. Water collects on every needle but travels to the branch tips before falling, running to the drip line, where it releases in a steady pit, pit, pit, pit, pit, drawing a dotted line in the water below.
Maple stems shed their water much differently. The drips from maple are big and heavy. I watch them form and then plummet to the surface of the pool. They hit with such force that the drop makes a deep and hollow sound. Bloink. The rebound causes the water to jump from the surface, so it looks as if it were erupting from below. There are sporadic bloinks beneath the maples. Why is this drop so different from the hemlock drips? I step in close to watch the way that water moves on maple. The drops don’t form just anywhere along the stem. They arise mostly where past years’ bud scars have formed a tiny ridge. The rainwater sheets over the smooth green bark and gets dammed up behind the wall of the bud scar. It swells and gathers until it tops the little dam and spills over, tumbling in a massive drop to the water below. Bloink.
Sshhhhh from rain, pitpitpit from hemlock, bloink from maple, and lastly popp of falling alder water. Alder drops make a slow music. It takes time for fine rain to traverse the scabrous rough surface of an alder leaf. The drops aren’t as big as maple drops, not enough to splash, but the popp ripples the surface and sends out concentric rings. I close my eyes and listen to the voices of the rain.
“I can see my face reflected in a dangling drop. The fish-eye lens gives me a giant forehead and tiny ears. I suppose that’s the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little.”
The reflecting surface of the pool is textured with their signatures, each one different in pace and resonance. Every drip it seems is changed by its relationship with life, whether it encounters moss or maple or fir bark or my hair. And we think of it as simply rain, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. I think that moss knows rain better than we do, and so do maples. Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story.
Listening to rain, time disappears. If time is measured by the period between events, alder drip time is different from maple drip. This forest is textured with different kinds of time, as the surface of the pool is dimpled with different kinds of rain. Fir needles fall with the high-frequency hiss of rain, branches fall with the bloink of big drops, and trees fall with a rare but thunderous thud. Rare, unless you measure time like a river. And we think of it as simply time, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story.
I can see my face reflected in a dangling drop. The fish-eye lens gives me a giant forehead and tiny ears. I suppose that’s the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little. Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop. The drop swells on the tip of a cedar and I catch it on my tongue like a blessing.
Thanks to Ellen Anthoni for pointing out this source.