Fossil weather has taken a tailspin over the past few weeks, with bouts of hail, sunshine, snow, high winds, frigid temperatures and warm spells crashing through the area – each weather pattern lasting a few hours before the next set spins in. It feels more like March than early May. After months of balmy, sun-soaking warmth in Costa Rica, this topsy-turvy weather at Fossil is unnerving. When it’s cold outside, it seems to penetrate to the inside of our bones, as if we are structured of metal.
On a drive to The Dalles a few days ago, tumbleweeds the size of large boulders bounced rapidly at us from across high, stubbled wheat fields. Jumping ditches and slopes, these scraggly, three-ft. balls of densely-packed thistle were escaping, dashing in all directions to freedom. A tumbleweed the size of a Volkwagen bug bounded toward us from a great distance and leaped across the highway right in front of us. I slowed our vehicle to avoid having the briar-like branches get stuck in the radiator.
Pecos and I marveled at how the high winds had blown smaller tumbleweeds against miles of wire fencing; in places the fences were now a solid mass of pointy weeds that clung together to form a thick knotted edge to the fields. Farmers would not be able to untangle the prickly, grey-brown clumps. The fencerows would have to be burned.
In Costa Rica, jungle plants leap up wildly, needing to be kept in check constantly with machete, yet always their roots are kept in the ground. Families remain in the same village for generations; coffee trees produce beans for forty years. In rural Oregon, it’s different. Crops change; people migrate.
Here on the high prairies, brittle Russian thistle plants break loose to ride gusty winds toward distant horizons – striking free of place of origin. Pecos and I are the same age and we’re both from western New York, yet our separate tumultuous lives brought us each to Fossil – one aged tumbleweed coming to rest happily against another in a place where change can blow in when you least expect it.