There's a hole in the sky.

At first I just thought the afternoon sun was peeking through the clouds as
I got to the point on the climb where I was at bluff's edge again. It had
been dark and shadow free down in the kettle. The shadows returned in the
last fifty yards of the climb. I paused at the switchback, first glancing
out at the water of Admiralty Strait, and then I looked back and up. The
thought was there again. There is a hole in the sky. Okay, it isn't a hole
in the sky I corrected myself. It is a hole in the green canopy I run
under each day. The hole in the canopy reveals a kaleidoscope of greys,
white, and a streak of blue with wind curled patterns. But, the first
thought I had was that there is a hole in the sky.

The next switchback is only about a hundred feet up the trail. There were
several ruby crowned kinglets playing in the salal. They are part of the
vagrants of winter, never fully disappearing in their southerly migration
as a few are always seen each week. Their bright red crowns and acrobatic
flitting here and there caused me to pause. I would have paused anyway. I
had just seen the reason for the hole in the sky. One of the big trees has
fallen. Three feet thick is my guess. It was broken by the wind about ten
feet above the ground. I had just ran this way on Wednesday. Yesterday's
wind that had started as just a whisper at sunset and then turned to a roar
late in the evening had won an age old battle. The trees at bluff's edge
lean into those winds, twisting branches to grasp at each gust, hoping to
stay upright. How loud would that splitting cracking crashing surrender
have been? In over twenty-five years of running on trails I have only got
to hear the falling death song twice; twice that I knew what I was hearing.
There was a third time; the first time. It took two days of running and
pausing and looking to figure out what I had heard, but at the end I could
go back to that point on Raider Creek and look down toward Shepherd's Crook
and follow the whispering and cracking to the ground.

This fallen giant--though not a true giant, not like some of its six or eight-foot
diameter elders just a hundred yards away--had broken and fallen away from
the trail taking half a dozen smaller trees with it. It was a Sitka spruce.

Other times I would count the rings as I cut the trail blocker
into pieces I could roll off the trail. That would not happen here. The
jagged ends of the stump were ten feet up. The upper part of the tree had
fallen away from the trail and was buried deep into the salal, Oregon
grape, and wild rose thickets. In the years after I am buried the fallen
log will become a nurse log. Eventually some winter will pass when some
other generation of ruby crowned kinglets will play here, but they will be
in the shade of trees already as thick as a man's waist tho' only forty
years old and reaching upward to fill up the hole in the sky that gave them
the sun when they were born.