The Green Mountains are Seldom Green ~ CAROLINE McCALL

The Green Mountains are Seldom Green

CAROLINE McCALL

I am lying on my stomach with my hands by my sides and my face sleepily pressed into the white flannel pillow case. My eyes flutter open. I can’t tell if I woke up because of the numbness in my toes or the soft light shining through the window, tickling my eyelashes. I push myself out from under the massive comforter to meet the crisp air and come to a seated position on the birchwood bunk bed, the upper bunk of which the top of my head now touches easily. I look northeast out the window in front of me, which is divided by white horizontal wooden slats. A cascade of gentle white light pours into my room. Each branch in the vast forest in front of me is enclosed in an envelope of translucent ice, trapping twilight inside. The sky is painted in messy swaths of pink, orange, and peach. The sunlight, peeking curiously over the rolling mountains, is refracted in every direction by the prisms of ice on the branches, creating tiny beams of rainbow over the forest. It occurs to me that the Green Mountains are seldom green. This morning, they are white, covered with snow and ice from the storm the night before. Mount Ascutney, straight ahead and ceaseless, stands tall above the other hills in the range. They look now like the whitecaps of waves breaking close to shore on a stormy grey day. If you look closely, you can see the observation tower at the top of my beloved Weathersfield trail, and two cell towers on Ascutney’s lower peak. I find myself there in the summer, when the mountains really are green. But the forest that gives them their namesake hue is so much more complex than that. Each family of trees has its own shade of green. The pines that dominate much of the forest are a deep hunter green, so ubiquitous that it’s subtle. The oaks are lighter, almost like emerald but lighter still, with lofty branches that let dappled sunlight reach the ground. Chipmunks rustle the leaves on the forest floor, and frogs repose in rivulets that diverge from waterfalls out of sight, but near enough to be heard whispering secrets to any creature who wants to listen. Summer is my dusty brown hiking boots and the fresh smell of the morning breeze, infused with pine and earth. It’s swimming in the glacially cold snow melt of Buttermilk falls and eating strawberries so fresh they stain my fingertips. In the fall, the same range that is today a silvery white looks like a Jackson Pollock painting of deep amber and auburn with splatterings of gold. Early October is gorgeous and teeming with memories of roadside maple sugar houses and warm apple cider donuts. The air shivers with premonitions of the impending winter and annual excitement over the first flakes of snow dusting the treetops. Spring is lamenting the end of ski season with my siblings, accepting that in the coming months, I’ll rarely see my cherished friend, constant and dynamic. It’s watching her through my window in anticipation of the moment that the buds burst and spread their color—unmistakeable chartreuse—over her resting body.