BY LESLIE REGO
I have a tradition of visiting my brother and sister-in-law every year during the end of April or the beginning of May. They live in Hood River, Oregon, and during this time the early wildflowers are in full bloom.
We hike every day amongst the local beauties. This year we hiked along a trail lined with a profusion of glacier lilies. I have seen one or two during the early spring months here in the Valley, but I have never seen such profusion before! The bright yellow petals and sepals shone in the sunlight. The forest looked as if it were filled with lantern lights guiding the travelers through the trees.
Walt Whitman wrote in “Leaves of Grass,” “The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much, I have early gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.”
We certainly did loiter along the trail, gazing from one grouping of flowers to the next, following the light as it caught on one flower head after another. It seemed as if the lilies were fairy dwellings collected together into hamlets, the hamlets into villages. Within the villages, “doors and windows” materialized, beckoning us to come closer.
As we journeyed farther along the trail, we arrived at an open area where the flowers were jaunty, much like the daffodils in William Wordsworth’s poem, “fluttering and dancing in the breeze… tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” The sun streamed in the open space and the glacier lily sparkled. Dozens of them were sprinkled amongst the meadow, dots of light moving back and forth, scattered throughout the green grasses.
To paraphrase Wordsworth, one cannot help but be delighted when witnessing a host of glacier lilies stretching in a never-ending line. They make for jocund company. This vision will stay with me, flashing upon my eye, filling my heart with pleasure.
Leslie Rego is an Idaho Press Club award-winning columnist, artist and Blaine County resident. To view more of Rego’s art, visit leslierego.com.