Long Ways from Home

It is funny how seeing something triggers a thought. A couple of weeks ago while I was commuting to work on Route 50, I saw an orange "O" like this on the back of a car in front of me. My first thought was an "O" for Oregon State. Re-calibrating for present geography, I made the correction that this was an "O" for the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, not the OSU Beavers. When I first started driving in the D.C. Metro area, I had to make similar adjustments when seeing freeway signs for "Washington" which meant District of Columbia, not State of Washington - as in the northern neighbor of Oregon that is at most 300 miles away when in the south of the state, not 3,000 as when in Annapolis on the Chesapeake Bay. The same was when I first saw LAX in Annapolis - why so many bumper stickers indicating Los Angeles International Airport? Oh! - lacrosse, the game that every kid here plays like Oregon kids play soccer.

As mentioned in a previous blog about the Washington Irving Biography (named for the General who the District, the State, and a county in Oregon are named as well), the eastern hardwoods are a novelty to me. The forests here in the mid-Atlantic region are unlike the western Oregon woods that are dominated by Douglas Fir with oaks mixed in which still have a pale green appearance in winter from the bearded lichens that hang from the limbs. Back here in Maryland while driving Route 50 every week, I see the progression of the four different seasons displayed in the stands of trees, with autumn's rich mosaic of red, orange, and yellow colors the annual crown. What turned out to be a surprise for me has been the phases of color changes in spring, with different species leafing at different times, and light-colored leaves darkening into deeper shades of green. All the time this is happening, the housing and business areas that are off the freeway and which don't change color with the seasons, become less and less visible and eventually are naturally camouflaged by the time June is here. However, six months later, with all leaves on the ground and none any longer floating in the air, the different shaped and colored stems stand in ranks but are alone, with branches indistinguishable among their crowns.

It is also funny how different people from the same family describe the winter trees here: my wife, longing for the evergreen woods of Oregon, uses stark to describe the woods during this time of the year; my son, the diplomat, prefers to describe their condition as barren. As for me, I speed back and forth from work where as many as ten lanes cut through woods, hoping my speed doesn't drop below 65 miles per hour so my 29 miles can be covered in 35 minutes - a sight far different and far distant from my Oregon commute at 25 mph, not even thinking much about the three miles of two lanes winding up hills and around bends, ending up in a parking lot full of cars bearing the other orange "O".