Each time the American River floods big and brown with snowmelt and rain, I remember better the way huge drift logs turn ponderous circles in eddies, and where the river is carrying away land at the outside of turns, and where it builds beaches at the inside of them. Later, on warm spring days after the rains are past, I remember how little pink trumpets of bilobed clarkia and yellow daisies of eriophyllum float, as if mounted on some transparent medium, a certain number of inches, according to their species, above the steep hillsides; and how for 10 or 12 feet above that colorful surface there is a layer of air that hums and sparkles in the sun, composed substantially of insects seeking nectar. I know where a tiny patch of a St. John's wort, called gold-wire for the shine of its filamentous stamens, grows tucked up under the chemise brush at the top of a red clay bank on a turn in the old Doc Gordon Road above Lake Clementine; it took me ten years to find it. Sometimes in summer one of the thunderstorms that boil up against the Sierra Nevada every afternoon reaches out as far as the foothills to the west, and a sweet damp smell rises from the dust just before the first drops of rain.
