I rediscovered a few paragraphs that describes the symphony I feel. Tell me what you think.
"...the flats of the river's floodplain, several square miles, are dense with an even growth of willow, six to eight feet high. The undersides of the long, narrow leaves are a lighter shade of green than that above; their constant movement, a synaptic fury in the wind, makes them seem all the more luminous. Moose are bedded down among them, beyond the reach of our senses. Their tracks say so.
The river's banks, flooded with an aureate storm light underneath banks of nimbus cloud, are bright enough to astonish us - or me at least. My companion's anttention is divided - the direction of the canoe, the stream of clues that engage a wildlife biologist: the number of raven nests in that cliff, a torn primary feather which reaches us like a dry leaf on the surface of the water. Canada goose.
What is stunning about the river's banks on this particular stormy afternoon is not the vegetation (the willow, alder, birch, black cottonwood, and spruce are common enough) but its presentation. The wind, like some energetic dealier in rare fabrics, folds back branches and ruffles the underside of leaves to show the pattern - and the shorter willows forward; the birch, taller, set farther back on the hills. The soft green furze of budding alder heightens the contrast between gray-green willow stems and white birch bark. All of it is rhythmic in the wind, each species bending as its diameter, its surface area, the strength of its fibers dictate. Behind this, a backdrop of hills: open country recovering from an old fire, dark islands of spurce in an ocean of labrador tea, lowbush cranberry, fireweed, and wild primrose, each species of leaf the invention of a different green: lime, moss, forest, jade. This is not to mention the steel gray of the clouds, the balmy arctic temperature, our clear suspension in the canoe over the stony floor of the river, the ground-in dirt of my hands, the flutelike notes of a Swainson's thrush, or anything else that informs the scene." - Crossing Open Ground: Yukon-Charley: The Shape of Wilderness by Barry Lopez.
