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I returned home last night, from a month away, and the creek was running. The sheer sonic size of it—the entire canyon seems to be reverberating and echoing with the noise of it—adds a different dimension to the day. When I am in the Northwest, it strikes me that one of the things I hate most about Portland is the lack of kinetic force in the winter. The skies are leaden, the wind does not blow much, there is no ocean to punch a hole in the monotony. The weather, the time, just sits there day after day.

That, of course, is how I experience it, not an absolute observation. Nonetheless, though the Willamette Valley winter rots my soul from the inside out, I think that I could probably endure a winter on the Oregon Coast. The ocean, the storm wind, these events alleviate the grey tension of the winter day for me. Clear and cold is my favorite winter recipe; the interplay of sunshine and stinging air is completely invigorating. I love mushrooms and fungi, but I am not myself suited to winter where they thrive.

In any event, the creek is rushing along and a big windy storm is on the way. After breakfast I could not take it any longer and decided I had to finally go for a run up in the "closed" national forest.

By the time I was a mile or two in, the rain picked up and the dozer-loosened soil was soft under my feet. I came around a bend where the true forest trailheads begin and saw in the distance a vehicle parked at the end of the access road around the dam. I turned around.

Further up the Carmel River I could see the blackened hillsides, though the water spilling over the dam did not look muddy or really even very brown at all. I could not help but notice though, that it seems to take very little rainfall anymore to fill the silted-up dam and get the spillway flowing.

Back toward the parking lot, a Forest Service truck was heading out into the rain. I slowed down, ready to take whatever warning the driver might wish to saddle on me for jumping the Cal-Am fence. But he rolled down his window and just asked how far in I had been, whether I had seen anyone else. I mentioned the rig at the trail up toward Blue Rock and we waved each other on. Sometimes people are just plain reasonable.