Willkómmen to Cascadia
by Sean Stiny

Cutting a trail through a light snow, mashing the leaves under our boots into a russet porridge, we made haste up the closed campground road and reached the trailhead in the lee of the mountain. On approach, a flash of gold lit up the hillside. Then another. And another. As they came into full view, golden centurions dotted the ridge like a Pollock canvas, standing guard amongst the firs and pines, shepherding its evergreen brothers and sisters.

The larch. The enigmatic golden larch. Commanding the Cascade spotlight each Autumn, its needles yellow drift earthward and bequeath their carbon to the soil. They masquerade as an ordinary fir or pine standing sentry at the timberline all Spring and Summer. But come Fall, they ripen and golden and delightfully give away their position to the pileated woodpeckers and Northern spotted owls, to the yellow-pine chipmunks and solitary black bears.

And they’re boundlessly yellow. So yellow that you’d swear they’re an Autumn aspen or birch palling around with the persnickety evergreen. They punctuate the hillsides, lanky and solemn and candle-flamed, then drop their golden needles and hibernate like the lone black bears.

The larch is keen on the heartiness and symmetry of the evergreen noble fir (your common Christmas tree), but envious of the spontaneity and romance of a deciduous aspen. And a shrewd harbinger of both Spring and Fall. Green shoots in March that signal the thaw has begun, then yellowing needles in October declare that Jack Frost is soon to town.

Down from that mountain, in the swaddle of those Cascades, is a hamlet of similar bewilderment. A township where lederhosen is chic, a stein of bier with a soft pretzel is table fare, and the nutcracker is a talisman for Bavarian goodwill. Just north of the town lies a petting zoo of fenced-in reindeer. Condos are being built near it at present, presumably for some elves.

Here lies Leavenworth. A Bavarian village smack in the middle of Washington state. If at first it may feel like a trap sprung for tourists, it soon charms with its nutcracker museum and bier gardens, its ye olde 76 Station and thyn Coldstone Creamery.

A carnival of Christmastime color, a German mobile that dances the schuhplattler on the hour, fanciful horse-drawn carriages, and Yuletide trinkets in every shop window. The town a child’s imagination of how the world is and always will be. How rich the possibilities and pageantry, how enchanting the trimmings and accoutrements. They turn a man of forty into a boy of twelve. Like a St. Nick fever dream.

Revelers come for the sausages and twenty-five corresponding mustards. They come for the lights and the gaiety and Jack Frost indeed nipping at their noses. But mostly they come to Leavenworth for reasons they can’t plainly fathom; they stroll around as harmless as children, longing to kindle past innocence, longing for a time when Santa was certain and something welled up inside you every December. Of course, Leavenworth won’t mind if you look around. It’s only twenty dollars for a stein of bier, twenty-five more to see the reindeer. And we’ll pass over the charge card without a thought in our heads. For its money we cling and wonderment we yearn.

The town, brimming and cheerful beneath the slopes and switchbacks, doesn’t yet hold a candle to the golden larch from which my eyes can’t be peeled. Like a solo concerto, an aria in an opera, like the bull elk with the largest bugle and tallest rack of antlers. King of the forest for a short but distinctly spirited time in October and early November, then their needles fall, the symphony quiets, and they slink back to anonymity.

Some of the wisest of larch germinated during the Gettysburg Address. Others during the landing on Omaha Beach. And the younger ones, the fall of Saigon. The ones on the forest floor, sodden and decayed, might’ve never been seen by any living human. At their golden climax, their display lights a respite in the alpine forest. Their winsome presence gives the niveous peaks a gentleness normally lacking in the furrowed outcrops.

Leavenworth may be the spectacle, fruitful under its electrified merriment, but it’s the hike into the mountains that will indeed stay with me the longest. A cloud of musky, steamy, earthy stench wafted over the trail ahead. A bull elk was present and seeking courtship but evaded our gaze. At eyeline, the forest was made ethereal by arching boughs of white. The songbirds chirp their warnings before ceasing at once so as not to give up their coordinates to the hiking bipeds and hungry claws.

And the larch remains next to its evergreen siblings through the steadfast Winter and early Spring. Long may they yellow in Autumn and declare that Cascadia is the true marvel, the true enchantment, unrivaled by our own attempts to light up the village below in red and green.

So, come visit the lichen-hanging heart of Cascadia sometime before every last conifer is felled for another subdivision, another two-by-four or sheet of ply. Or, worse yet, another cardboard box for a prime capitalist. Witness the golden larches against a snowy backdrop. Slather a bratwurst in apple cider sauerkraut. Wake early like its Christmas morning. Burn the day on a larch march. Then give in to the impulse like that of a little boy each evening, giddy seeing the lights and beguiled by the mystery held in the night. Snap back to reality only when the mountains are in your rearview. Keep the clandestine thoughts about such giddiness to yourself and the melancholy that soon followed.

~

Sean Stiny grew up in Northern California. A writer, woodworker, and owl box maker, he lives in Petaluma, California. His writing has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Los Angeles Review, Grit Magazine, Bend Magazine, True Northwest, Kelp Journal, and Wild Roof Journal.

Featured Image: Sean Stiny, 2024

Author’s Note: This piece was inspired by an Autumn trip I took in 2024 to the town of Leavenworth in the heart of the Washington Cascades. I try to bring a bit of enchantment to the Bavarian / Christmastime village as well as reverence to the larch, a “deciduous evergreen” if there ever was one. The larch were fully golden at the time I visited and provided a flash of light in the chilly and damp forest.