Earth Speak Sunday #10

The Sound of Rain by Sigurd Olson

Last night in my tent I listened to rain. At first it came down gently, then in a steady drumming downpour, and I lay there wondering when I would began to feel the first rivulets creeping beneath my sleeping-bag. The deluge continued, but there were no exploring trickles, no mist through the roof of balloon silk. The tent, on its little rise with its thick cushion of bearberry, had perfect drainage all around, and the ropes were tied to two good trees. The gale could blow now and the rain come down, but I would be safe and dry the rest of the night. I settled down luxuriously to enjoy a sound I had known on countless campsites in the wilderness.

Like all woodsmen, I had planned for the morning, had tucked a roll of dry birchbark and a few slivers of pine under one end of the canoe. My packs were in one corner of the tent, the axe handy just in case something snapped during the night, The canoe was snubbed to a rock well up from the shore.

The wind came up and the tent swayed, but the ropes held; in the rain they grew taut as fiddle strings and the tent more waterproof with each new assault. A branch swished close and two trees rubbed against each other. The woods were full of sounds, creakings and groanings, with branches dropping from the trees.

How much good the rain would do, how fresh the water in every stream, how flowers would pop with the sun, the linnea, the anemones, the dogwoods and everything else along the trails. The ferns on the rocks would began to grow again, and the silvery caribou moss would be soft and resilient with just a tinge of green. The dry and brittle lichens along the cliffs would turn from black to velvet green. Mushrooms and toadstools would suddenly emerge from every dead log, and the dusty humus would bring forth growths that had been waiting this very hour, for no rain had fallen in a month.

The coming of the rain soothed a longing within me for moisture and lushness after the long-continued drought. As I lay there, I too seemed to expand and grow, became part of the lushness and the rain itself and of all the thirsty life about me.This is one of the reasons I like to hear the rain come down on a tent. I am close to it then, as close as one can be without being in it. I have slept in many primitive shelters, under overhanging cliffs, in lean-tos made of spruce boughs and birchbark, in little cabins roofed with poles and sod. I have slept under canoes and boats and under the spreading branches of pines and balsams, but none of these places gives me quite the feeling I get when sleeping in a tent.

The drops are muffled by the cloth, none of the staccato drumming there is under a hard roof. Once I slept in a cabin with a tin roof and listened to a chorus that night that was too violent to enjoy, a mechanical sound as though a thousand drums had broken into a rolling crescendo all at once.

Not long ago I met an old friend, C.K. Leith, one of the world's most famous geologists He had been a professor of mine, and for a time I had worked under him on the Wisconsin Geological Survey. After his retirement, he had served  as a consultant to the government, using his great knowledge of the world's minerals to guide exploration and development.

We sat in the Cosmos Club one rainy afternoon talking about the old days, the days in the bush when he was a legend of endurance and fortitude, of the treks he had made into the far north that even today are contemplated with awe and wonderment my hardened prospectors. He was eighty-two when I talked to him last, but still as straight and energetic as ever. Suddenly he was very quiet, a faraway look came into his eyes as he sat watching the rain spatter down into the courtyard.

"Do you know where I would like to be right now?" he said finally. 'In my old tent somewhere, safe and dry with nothing to do but listen to the rain come down."

He smiled and I knew he was cruising the back country of the Canadian Shield, down its brawling rivers, across its stormy lakes, knowing again the feeling of distance and space, the sense of the old wilderness.

"As you get older." he said, "and more involved with world affairs, you lose that life, but those were the good old days for me."

When I heard of his passing, I knew that somewhere back in the bush he was listening to the rain come down and that he had found again the life he loved.

In the woods of Listening Point, the drops soak into the ground as they should, stopped by an intricate baffle system of leaves and pine needles, small sticks and bits of bark, the partly decayed vegetation just underneath, and finally the humus itself, rich, black, and absorbent, the accumulation of ten thousand years. Here in the north it takes over a thousand years to form a single inch of it, and the glacier receded from seven to ten thousand years ago, the humus on the point has taken just that long to form.

Below the humus id the mineral rock soil, the result not only of the grinding of glacial ice but the gradual breakdown of the granite and shist and greenstone by the frost and rain, the action of the acids of countless roots, the burrowing of hoards of insects and worms and beetles. This later rests upon the native ledge, but by the time the rain reaches it, it has slowed and soaks into without loss. There are no rivulets except where the rock is bare, no erosion or run-off to the lake. All that falls stays there and move into the water table of the area to be held in reserve.

It was good to lie in the tent knowing that the rain was replenishing the water supply, that none of it was being lost except where it ran off the smooth rocks, that even between them, in every cleft and crevice where there was any accumulation of humus at all, it would be held for months to come.