Beyond the divide, up through some winding pass in the mind, as we leave the dry world behind and descend into the foggy, mossy forest on the wet side of the Cascades, we enter not just the rain but the rainworld - a clean-washed, sparkling realm of sights, sounds, smells and textures as rich and as dramatically seasonable as the dry world, and yet, for all our human prejudices, a veritable secret.  

The heralds of rain to come are harmless-looking puffy white clouds that begin to appear, usually in August, above the ridge to the West of our place. They are there in the early morning, usually; there may be evening clouds as well, but it's the morning ones that matter. Early in the cycle they vanish with the first rays of sun, but as the weeks pass they lose their wispy character, their bottoms turn charcoal gray, and they last longer. By then evening clouds have also become the norm, and each day they seem to form a bit earlier.  

Sometimes, in this late summer season, there is a rainstorm. There was one this year. But those rains are an effect of the summer cyclones that sometimes travel up from California. Our own monsoon builds slowly, almost patiently, with the clouds of morning stretching to meet the clouds of evening, with the sunshine and blue sky caught in between. Then, finally, the clouds meet and we have a day or two without sunshine before the blue sky reappears and the whole process begins again. The second or third cloudy period may bring a few drops of rain, or even a shower. Each year is a little different. But whatever the details, the climactic scale has tipped and now the blue sky seems to fight a losing battle with the increasingly aggressive gray clouds. Eventually the sun shines only at mid-day -- and, sometimes, not even then.  

From my vantage point behind the glassed-in front wall of my home in the Coast Range, some twenty miles from the sea, I can watch the weather come through the pass on the far side of the Luckiamute. Imperceptibly, as the summer ends, the eye's appreciation of distance changes. In the clear, dry air of July the ridge that defines the pass seems to be but a block away. But by September the moisture content of the atmosphere is high enough that the ridge has receded to a more realistic three miles or so.  

The first rains of Autumn typically come at night. It lays the dust, and we awake to an odor I can only call freshness. Outside, the sun-parched wood on the deck is almost dry already, but the top quarter-inch of soil is still moist. That first rain, slight as it is, is often enough to wake up the mold, and I will be prompted by sneezes to double up on the antihistamines. If I have been lax at cleaning out the fireplace for a new season, it is time to do so. The gutters must also be checked, for they will soon be needed. The first soaking rain can't be far away. We will get it a week, on average, before the valley.  

This signal that the seasons are changing registers all up and down the food chain. We are the fair weather hosts to some 20 or so rufous hummingbirds, for example. They arrive about the first of March and their bumblebee-like flight noises become the sound of our summer. In the week following the first rains they become noticeably agitated. A few days later we will be stunned by the silence they leave behind. The fields, wheat-colored from the summertime drought, explode with green. The robins summer in the valley, where they can hunt worms on the well-irrigated flatlands; now they are back in our yard, feasting at dusk and dawn on the season's first slugs.  

We do not have the brilliant autumns here that characterize the eastern hardwood forests. Of the common western deciduous trees, only the diminutive vine maple turns red. Most of the rest, including ash, wild apple and plum, turn yellow or orange. All else being equal, this is drab compared to the crimson of the sugar maple in Pennsylvania or New Hampshire. But where environments are concerned, all else is rarely equal. The yellow-orange of our bigleaf maple, for example, seems fluorescent against the backdrop of conifer green, which darkens in the wake of the first rains.  

The forest floor is a bit slower to register the new season. The spreading droop of fir boughs tends to carry droplets outward so that they serve as umbrellas, depositing the moisture in a ring. Nearer the trunks, the ground remains hard and dry. At first, the huge white oaks don't shed water at all -- they absorb it. It soaks into the dormant fronds of lichens that drape their outer branches and into the moss that thickens their heavier limbs. A full month may pass between the first rains and the time the forest floor becomes wet.  

The mosses, meanwhile, are rejuvenated by the water. Their rich plentitude here in the rain forest reminds us that the earth was once dominated by the family of mosses, which in the age of the dinosaur grew to the size of today's trees. When more efficient modern plants crowded them out many of them adapted and survived in the niches created for them by their competitors. The great mats of moss that encase the lateral branches of both the oak and the fir may be as thick as the branch itself. During the summer they serve as home for insects; these, in turn, are prey for the descendents of the dinosaur, such as the Western Tanager.  

As the leaves fall in other forests, they reveal the bare branches of the deciduous trees. In Western Oregon, however, the disappearance of the leaves only serves to reveal the drapery of lichens. Lichens are one of nature's oddest partnerships, a tightly bonded symbiosis of fungi and algae that gain from their association an almost matchless durability. Fronds of the lichens, typified by Usnea hirta, or "old man's beard," festoon Oregon's deciduous trees. In the summer they are concealed by the leaves. But when those leaves fall the lichens thrive in the moist air, soaking up the dim sunlight of late fall and early spring. Sometimes, when low-angled shafts of sunlight find their way through the clouds on a late winter day, the old man's beard captures the red from the light and the leafless oaks and maples glow with a beautiful, yellow-green luminescence against the muted, conifer-covered hills in the background.  

As the rains begin in earnest other species of lichens and mosses appear everywhere. Staghorn ferns, which are really lichens, grow from the bark of trees; other species sprout from fallen logs and even rocks and brick. Mostly they are more or less the same sickly color as the old man's beard, but they also come in many brighter varieties. Cetraria canadensis, a crinkled growth that is often found spotted on the barks of trees, is chrome yellow; the frothy Xanthoria polycarpa is deep orange. Some lichens have fruiting bodies that resemble thick red flowers; others, in more subtle hues, are reminiscent of the shapes adopted by colonies of coral.  

The rain is a magical thing, the child of land and air. We seek to understand it by sampling it, measuring it, and charting it. The result shows that, in the Oregon Coast Range, precipitation varies roughly with topography and proximity to the sea. Along the coast, where the sodden winds hit the first rise of black stone, 100 inches or more can fall in a single year, but by the time that same air reaches the far side of the range, where I live, it can produce but 55 to 70 inches. The middle Willamette Valley, a few miles further inland, will get still less. But the rain itself, in its dance and its fury, will not be encumbered by statistics. The coastal winds do not flow over a model mountain range, they howl through twisting, deep-cut valleys, producing a jumble of mini-climates. Along the headlands, rain may fall up instead of down. On some slopes further inland it may rain almost continually for a month or more while just a few hundred yards away - beyond, say, the crest of the hill -- the precipitation will be relatively light.  

Water, Aristotle said, was the universal solvent, and his truth is revealed in the deeply etched landscape of the Coast Range. Basalt is the basement rock here, and it is as hard as it is black. But water, allied with time, is its equal; as the millennia pass and the warm rain patters and pounds, the basalt dissolves into mud and washes away. This leaves steep, narrow valleys drained by frothing rivers cut deeply into their own black-rock gorges.  

The rain gives, and the rain takes away. Where the soil can cling, the disintegration of the bedrock frees nutrients, but at the same time the leaching rains threaten to carry those nutrients down into the soil and away. This advantages deep-rooted plants, like the fir, which in the wettest part of the range can grow three feet a year. The Sitka spruce grow almost as much. Further inland, where the rain is somewhat lighter and the dissolution of the land less rapid, the same species grows only half that much. Even that, however, is impressive. The Douglas fir is said locally to be a weed. If human beings were to disappear there is no question but what it would take over the land once again, resuming the ancient, 500-year cycle of seedling, growth to maturity, and fire.  

Tall conifers are majestic in any season, rising as they do in one vertical pillar of wood and bark, lateral branches sweeping sideways to support blurs of green needles. In the summer their height is set against the clear blue sky, and their thin, light green leaders move to reveal zephyrs that never reach the forest floor. They provide shelter for chattering red squirrels and sustenance for cheeping and usually invisible flocks of chickadees that dine on the delicate fir cones. Inquisitive, black-hooded Stellar's jays hop sideways on the thick mats of moss that cover the branches, looking for insects. Beneath the tree there is a thick layer of cool, half-rotted branches and needles. There, where the muscled roots of the tree snake into the soil, newts and salamanders hunt beetles and slugs and are in turn themselves hunted by gopher snakes and coast moles.  

The forests of the Coast Range are hauntingly beautiful places, which has contributed to the modern urge to protect them. In decades past, the giant trees attracted immigrants who would work in the forests, to cut them. Today a new wave of immigrants are drawn to protect and restore them.  

About two thirds of our own acreage, for example, is what's left of a failed Christmas tree operation. The trees were planted in what was formerly a pasture, which in the more distant past was carved out of what had been a fir forest. Now, under our supervision, the would-be Christmas trees are growing to serve as the basis for a new forest. So the sentiments of the Twenty First Century replace those of the Twentieth.  

The remainder of our acreage includes much blackberry and swale, which is nesting ground for foxes and a breeding pair of harriers. But there is also ten or so acres of tall timber. It is not virgin, by any means. It may have been cut over not once but twice. Still, the high growth rates of the Doug fir has already yielded an impressive stand of 100-foot-high trees, some so large in circumference as to defy the combined embrace of Lynn and myself.  

The mere presence of such a forest changes the perimeters of the human psyche. One particularly large tree, for example, dominates the view from the kitchen side of our deck, and in the first few years we lived here we'd often just sit and look at it. I'd caress it with my eyes as I wrestled with some problem, literary or academic - it was a visual version, perhaps, of a feeling piece.  

I knew we had become tree-huggers the day a local politician, visiting for dinner, stroked her chin and remarked that the tree was probably worth several thousand dollars.  

Lynn's face went stony. "Don't even think that," she snapped. "That tree's a pet."