Seattle Missoula: Where is Fall?

The winding forested tracts of the Cascades outside of Seattle gave way more quickly than I had anticipated, right after Snoqualmie Pass. At 10 am I was in Pike street market, grabbing cheese, coffee and breakfast sandwiches for Drew and I while he circled the block; by 11am I was doing almost 100 miles an hour on the straight, wind farm covered rises and golden grazing land that surround the i90. And all around me, the warm wind that felt so strange for this time of year. I stepped out of the car near Moses Lake and the dry grass scent of late summer hit me like a sauna. Where was Fall? I wondered.

Idaho, as well, was not what I expected. As we crossed the border, clouds and rain hemmed in the road and the pines gave way to cedar, a carpet of moss and tamarack. The forest continued all the way through the top end of the state. No potato fields, no wheat, no chasing the harvest up the continent, as that beautiful article in Harper's told of, years ago. After I crossed over the pass near Coeur d'Alene, cedars changed to black spruce and then back to high mountain pine--untouched, as far as I could see, by mountain pine beetle. Sage brush and cactus reappeared.

My friends Meera Subramanian and Rusty, who I have met met here for two days of hiking and, hopefully, raptor banding, before the Society for Environmental Journalists' annual conference begins, explained to me that Missoula County's lack of topsoil is due to the glacier movement and melting that occured during the last ice ages. As the ice melted, it took the sediment with it down into the Walla Walla region of Washington, where the topsoil is eight feet deep in some areas.

Lucky them; hardscrabble but beautiful Missoula. As I drove into town, the first thing that greeted me was a giant "350" pinned or placed onto a hillside above town. Yesterday was 10-10-10, the grand culmination of the 350 parts (of carbon) per million movement. 350 is the number over which we cannot go, if we expect the world to survive and look anything like what we know it to be at present. Beyond this level of carbon in the atmosphere, mass extinction and the extreme effects of global warming may render the world uninhabitable. I joined Rusty and Meera on the B&B by the river that we're staying in for the next two nights. We drank wine and ate cheese on the wide wooden porch; the warm wind continued into late evening and made the river flow both ways.