The cold fogs are gone, now, replaced with heavier, more misty varieties. The rain, if anything, is harder. Yet the chilly wet hand of winter is lifting, and tentative new life appears everywhere from the squishy ground. Daffodils unfold their flower stalks as they race to beat the deciduous trees to what little sun there may be. They tolerate the sodden clay soil surprisingly well, and their tough flowers stand up to the hardest rain. The buds swell on the hazel and the forsythia. Mushrooms once again pop out of the forest floor, and though spring varieties are sparse, compared to those of fall, they are definite signs of the changing season. The forest smells decidedly clean and new.  

But the most definite harbinger of spring is neither the warming rain or the budding plants, but the arrival of the first rufous hummingbird. The rufous is not as punctual as some other birds, and all we know is that he will arrive sometime in the last week in February or the first week in March. I say "he" because it will definitely be a male - a dominant individual sent ahead as a scout. "Advance man" may be a more accurate phrase, because his mission seems to be to make sure the accommodations are in order. He is all business, from the moment he arrives. He buzzes officiously around the deck, locating the quart-sized hummingbird feeders that Lynn, who is the mistress of hummingbirds, has hung out for his inspection. He samples each one, very much in the manner of a taster of fine wine. Then, satisfied, he perches on the deck railing, under the roof's overhang and out of the wet, and indignantly shakes his iridescent feathers dry.  

We all gather around and watch through the glass as he preens his feathers and complains, in the incomparable body language of the rufous hummingbird. Nature spent so much energy making the hummingbird beautiful that she skimped a bit on personality, and the rufous is notoriously irritable even for its kind. But perhaps he has reason to complain. It WAS a long trip, for a creature his size. He came up through the desert, along the Sierras. He then angled west and flew through the cold southern reaches of the Coast Range. There were flowers in the desert, probably, but on the last leg of his trip up the coast range he was reduced to subsistence on early-hatching insects. Mosquitoes. Yuck. And it rained, of course. Constantly. Constantly. Always. Whole damned trip.  

Hummingbirds are like people. They love the lush summers that the precipitation makes possible, but they love even more to bellyache about the rain.  

The scout will rest, a day, fluff his feathers, refuel, then vanish . . . and reappear a few days later with the whole hummingbird clan in tow. Individual hummingbirds live a decade or more and exhibit distinct personalities (titrations of aggressiveness, generally), and so we know them and recognize them individually. We have even given some of them names.  

One year the main flock passed through our valley, and several hundred hummers landed in a single red-flowering quince bush. The bush seethed with life. It reminded me of a swarming hive of honeybees I once observed. If you have never bees swarm, imagine an amoeba on steroids. Seethed is the right word; the individual hummingbirds, as they moved, produced a swarmlike effect. Only it was louder than a swarm of bees. More like swarming lawnmowers -- or, given the temperament of the rufous, chain saws.  

The black vultures appear in the sky within a day or two of the arrival of the hummingbirds, lending credence to the old legend that the hummers ride North on the vulture's backs. The vultures are another sure sign of spring, whirling lazily against the gray backdrop of cloud. The clouds, for their part, tend to be higher now, as if they are drawing back from their union with the earth. Then, come the first day of spring, the swallows arrive. This is always a grand occasion, partly because it's so predictable and partly because the whole flock does a joyous dance in the rain in front of the house. I don't know what the dance means to them; to us, it means winter is over.  

The rain, though, is not. It will linger, patchy, for another month, or perhaps even two. One year, known locally as the "year with no summer," the clouds never went away. But usually, after the swallows come the change of season develops rapidly. The fogs, now, shrink back into the edges of the day, coming only at twilight and dawn, and the midday sunshine lengthens rapidly. In April we will still have the clouds, but it may be days between rainfalls. In May, the rainless days build up to become drought.  

May is a critical period for gardeners in Western Oregon. Our minds are still full of rain and the persistent gray skies strengthen that sense. But in fact there is no rain, and the ground is rapidly drying out. Small seedlings, if not watered constantly, will die. One week we are complaining about the rain and the next we are scrambling madly to repair the winter damage to the irrigation system that feeds our shrubs and orchard.  

It all happens with excruciating slowness. The clouds hang there, even when you close your eyes, and even the most diehard Oregonian duck now craves the sun. But it hesitates to shine. Casting a broad hint at the gods and goddesses of weather, we quit carrying umbrellas. Our hubris is answered by a sudden cloudburst.  

But then it is summer. The sun comes up at 4 a.m., the clouds burn off at 9, and we go to bed in the daylight. The deer have fawns, the swallows are sitting eggs, and the tourists appear everywhere -- great lurching vans swaying along the narrow mountain highways, long-distance bicyclists in fashionably tight pants, hikers in camo beside the highway, leaning on huge packs and holding out their thumbs. The hummers have built a nest in the rhododendron at the corner of the house but, try as we might, we can't see it and don't dare get too close. The bobcat is pregnant again. In another six weeks a new set of coyote cubs will be practicing their harmony - out of tune and, like as not, in the middle of the day. They won't get it right until October, but October, now, seems a lifetime away.  

Undeniably, the Oregon summer is grand. The air is cool and the land is bright, and each afternoon a sea breeze comes in from the Pacific. The fir trees stand tall against the blue sky and the giant mycorrhizal creatures that dwell amongst their roots are quiescent and invisible. Such weather is made for human joy, to cheer the cynic and the depressed.  

Yet, yet . . . last August, for reasons I didn't immediately grasp, I found myself growing antsy and restless.  

It had been a typical, beautiful, breathtaking summer. The garden had done well, the harriers had successfully produced two young, and there was a bumper crop of Stellar's jays. But the season had somehow outstayed its welcome. The dancing swallows, which were well on their way back to central America, had left behind an aching vacancy that nothing seemed to fill. My walks in the forest no longer satisfied me; the ecology seemed inexplicably dull and lifeless, and great cracks had opened in the parched earth. The sunshine that I had so craved in April seemed now, in August, sterile. The heat - it must have been 90 - grated on my nerves. The air was dry and the dust kicked up by the cars on the road down the hill had settled on everything.  

Once, when I was visiting a Panamanian jungle station baking at the peak of the hot dry season, an ecologist there told me that the jungle was, in effect, enduring a winter. Winter, he said, was defined less by temperature than by the availability of water. In the temperate climates, water was trapped in ice, and the plants went dormant, and we called that winter. In the dry season in Panama, the water just vanished, and the plants went dormant.  

And so it was now, in August, in the green place called Oregon. The metabolism of the land seemed to be holding its breath. Everywhere there was a sense of malaise and irritability. Politicians, anticipating November, growled and snapped at one another. The juvenile hummingbirds fenced angrily, fighting for possession of a late-flowering lily, or a sprig of sweet pea, or just for the hell of it. The yellowjackets, set on their own by the breakup of their hives and the disappearance of their queen, were in an ugly mood. I sat on the deck, no less pugnacious, smashing them with a flyswatter as they made bombing runs on me.  

Then, finally, as the sun set in the late August sky, a few puffs of cloud appeared on the far ridge. The following hour they built and spread until it was too dark to see them. The next evening they built again, and quickly, and more quickly yet the day after that. Eventually they spread out across our little valley to eclipse the harsh sun and bring a sweet-scented dampness to the land. A drop of cool water fell, and then another. The cloud lowered itself delicately into the forest.  

Tiny droplets of water collected on the fir needles, dripped onto the leaves of the snowberry, which, bending with the weight, transferred them gently to the soil.  

The air changed, took on the odor of wet dust and regenerating fungi. It was a fine rain, in all the word's many senses.  

I inhaled the fresh wetness.  

Ah, rain.  

And none too soon.  

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Jon Franklin is director of the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. Special thanks to Daniel Luoma, of the U.S. Forest Service and Daniel Luoma, of the Department of Forest Science at Oregon State University, and to Kelly Redmond and George Taylor, co-authors of Climate of the Coastal Temperate Rain Forest, which is Chapter 2 in the book The Rain Forests of Home (Island Press, 1997). The author is grateful for their assistance, while acknowledging that any errors of fact or interpretation are his own.