The Desert It Ain't

I'm sitting here looking out my bedroom window and watching the tide go out. The sun coyly peeks out from behind the cloud cover every once in a while, then after a few seconds hides again. The air is dense, quiet, and heavy with moisture. Moss grows on everything.

Some guys here make a living scraping the moss off people's roofs; I've seen the advertising on their trucks. I'm definitely nowhere near the desert now.

Unless you live in a place in the Pacific Northwest that's paved over or manicured, you're surrounded by a profusion of greenery. Evergreens, maples, birches, wild shrubs, long, high walls of blackberry, and explosions of ferns pop out of the mossy ground like mushrooms and become dense and tangled with one another if untended. Portions of Seattle used to look like that until the 1970's; large parts of the Olympic Peninsula, where I'm living now, still do.

Armies of large, salad-eating banana slugs -- one of nature's most repulsive and most useful creatures -- possibly keep the vegetation from suffocating all other life forms. Slugs' bodies are composed almost entirely of soft tissue; they're moist, slimy things, with a single foot which oozes and undulates along, sliding over the wet earth. If you see a banana slug, you can be certain that the place you're at is the exact opposite of the desert.

It's very quiet here, and what sound there is seems muffled. It's a good place to live. Right now the air wants to rain, but it's not quite full enough to overflow.