Guest Column: Rain draws a torrent of reflection

Aug. 3 — today, I heard a sound that I have not heard in months and didn’t expect to hear for several more: rain. But not just rain — rain falling on a million leaves.

On the city streets it was dull and dreary day, a day to snuggle back under the covers. Even the usual Sunday morning motorcycle screeches up Angeles Crest Highway were missing. But out in the national forest a few minutes from Foothill Boulevard, it was uplifting. I had so far forgotten the sound, a mysterious swish that comes from every side, that when it started I looked up to see if a strong wind had sprung up among the treetops.

It didn’t last long and, in a place that takes the full brunt of those moisture-laden bags of cloud that burst on these slopes every winter, it was derisory. But you could imagine every parched plant and insect — and firefighter too for that matter — breathing a sigh of relief.

Amazing (isn’t it?) that life can endure, even proliferate, in so testing a place. The vegetation is so dense that, for anything other than the shortest distance, it is truly impenetrable. Every now and again even in the middle of the trail, where a little soil has accumulated, a few tiny yellow flowers are growing and one beauty, startlingly white with a dash of purple at the edge of each minute leaf. A few new green leaves are sprouting among the chaparral too, bright and fresh against the somber colors around them.

At one point, I noticed newly trampled brown grass on a side trail where animals had found something and following came across a tall bush weighed down on every branch with large clusters of blueberries, a little touch of paradise for dry throats, not so succulent as those sold at Gelson’s, I must admit, but not at its daunting prices either.

There used to be a dense wood of pine trees on this hike, known locally as the plantation, which at dusk felt exactly like entering one of Grimm’s black and foreboding fairy tales and where I made a point of proving to myself that I was not afraid by refusing to say any of the magic words learned in childhood but which I was always thankful to emerge from without having been turned to stone.

Now that spellbinding wood is a wreck of blackened stumps and bare branches, caused by the infamous Station fire five years ago. Yet even on a few of these apparently lifeless hulks a lonely cone can be seen clinging to life and all around, thick and luxuriant, undergrowth is springing up in a profusion undreamed of before.

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” says Alexander Pope. And in every seed too, it seems.

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REG GREEN lives in La Cañada. His website is nicholasgreen.org.