I had been told, upon arriving in Oregon twenty years ago, about the Thaw — a magical week in February, a brilliant island in the vast ocean of winter, when the rains ceased! and the roses bloomed! and the temperature rose sometimes into the seventies! and Oregonians emerged from their holes, blinking and scraping off the moss with special sticks carved from cedar and fir and shaped like magic animals and surfboards, and kneeling in the moist steamy streets and holding up crucifixes with gibbering joy and moaning songs of praise to the Wonder who let the sun out of its dank drizzled dungeon! But it was hard to believe, those first few thrumming winter months, that the rains ever ceasing ever again was even in the least conceivable, the silver drumming of the rain being so insistent, the brooding ceiling looming day after day like the biggest gray blanket in the history of the world, the gray mornings chased by grim metallic afternoons and lowering evenings, week after week, month after pittering plodding precipitous month; but then o my gawd it happened! And the next year it happened again! And over the years I have learned not only to crave The Thaw but to savor every sunny scrap of it: the light pouring clean and crisp over the steaming earth, the tree frogs roaring, the newts making out furiously in their muddy lovers’ lanes, the soggy citizens stumbling out of their homes into their muddy gardens, the first thunder of lawnmowers, the murky thuck of children running across playing fields that look dry but most certainly will not be until probably August for heavenssake but let us not carp and cavil. For a while, in February, a great gift arrives, and it would be a mean and shriveled soul who would complain, perfectly logically and correctly, that the rains will return in March, washing back over Oregon like vast roiling armadas in the sky, until Independence Day (really, has there ever, ever, been a dry Rose Festival?). Yes, the wet tide will rise again after The Thaw, and we will shuffle along mooing in the mist, umbrellas jostling, shoes sloshed, socks soaked, suits splashed, sunglasses sequestered in a lonely drawer, the dog writing muddy music all over the floor again, until that brief weekend we call high summer here in the North Wet; but for a moment, late in our winter, there is a week of shocking and wondrous and generous light that thrills the shivering mammal inside each of us, and makes us mumble happily, and write silly essays about it, and understand why our forebears worshipped the sun before they did the Son, and dig the deep genius of Easter, which is about unthinkable brilliance emerging from the long dark, pure life from sure death, yes? So then, all together now, a salute to the Thaw! and o my god who let the dog in the house without wiping him down! Look at his muddy boots! Am I the only blessed soul in this moist blessed family who does not want to have the whole blessed yard in the blessed kitchen bless my blessed soul? Where is the towel? Don’t use your shirt! I have already done sixty loads of laundry this morning alone! Sweet mother of the mewling baby Jesus! Is it ever going to stop raining so we can stumble out of the house and sprawl in the holy grass and moan happily as we steam redolently like fresh loaves of bread and hoist our crucifixes with a real and roaring joy? Yes, I am talking to you! O my gawd where is the dog?! g Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine and the author most recently of a novel, Mink River.
PHOTO: JORGEN LARSSON / GETTY IMAGES
THE THAW