Watercolor Spring

Excuse me, while I brush the sky

Seasons echo themselves. Not just from one year to the next, but deep in the -ness. Spring unfurls, hurls echoes of itself as the blooming of flowers, of leaves and  fronds, of eggs bearing Spring chickens and flower-scented air spurring mating season. At the fat fractal base, a reaching of life out onto the huddled greyscape of a temperate Winter.  Spring is Open(ing) Season.


As such, psychedaelians appreciate it, perhaps none more than here in the Northwest, where sunshine daydreamy days induce long blissful sighs from fabulous fuzzy mammals pleased to be free of wintry darkness and the dankness of wet season. Last week, I heard an echo of this on Grateful Dead & Friends, a show on KBOO radio.


Often as not, peoples' minds bend toward California when they think of hippies, and the Dead are at the Bay Area epicenter of this perceptual vortex . No arguing that. But furthur north than Northern California, in the Oregon of Kesey and the Washington of Hendrix, psychedaelia blossoms as well. 


Especially in Spring, to echo myself. From the southernmost tip of Washington, I drove up out of the Columbia valley with a Help-Slipknot-Franklin's prechoing out of the speakers. [That hyphenated thing is Deadhead shorthand for a three-song medley, in case you've not conversed with this tribe. Deadheads are also into encyclopaedic knowledge of their priestly class and lore, as evidenced this day in the DJ's question--the answerer of which would score tickets to a Furthur (ie, post Garcia) concert!--which was "What's unique about this Help-Slip-Franklin's?" I think the answer was that whatever show he was playing was the first time the Dead had played that particular combination, although the guy was open to there being other answers, 'cause competitive encyclopaedism doesn't have to devolve into fascism, man. But I digress.]


So as it slips into the middle of the medley, I settle into interstate pace on my instrastate drive, and the landscape flows by. Against the dark evergreen background, maples and alders and cottonwoods have appeared into the scene, watercolor reds yellows greens and in-betweens where a couple months before they'd been retreated into grey invisibility. Leaves and sheathes may not fit the saturated vivids we associate with the psychedaelic pallete, but ephemerality and life force are not to be dismissed as color flavorings. Splashed here and there on this quiet tableau, occasionally inexplicable daffodil patches and explosions of cherry blossoms make sure all is not subtle. Meanwhile, sunbeams and liquid clouds dance and share the sky, and the white stripes underfly my red Ford hood. 

By now, they're into Franklin's Tower, the last song. "Roll away the dew" refrains again and again on the recording, and you can hear the crowd. If you are experienced, your body feels the memory of that moment when unison converged on these few words of hope and emergence. Being peripheral to deadheadery at the time I heard this chorus in concert (if I even heard it at all, this  could be false memory talking), I think  I thought the words were "Roll away the doom," which works as an echo for sound and meaning, I guess. Better, even, if you like your watercolor with  some morning dew.