In the Cloud Forests

The Forests of the Pacific Northwest are temperate rainforests, but that doesn't tell you anything. The Oregon Forests are giant sponges, made to absorb water until it's dripping off everything, wetter than straight liquid would be, poised between solid organic matter and dissolved mulch floating in a halflit world between the forest canopy and the slightly denser ground. Does that tell you something?

It is the shame of our species that we are, willfuly or not, destroying these forests; or at least changing them beyond all recognition. Already this process is centuries under way, the climax forest that once stretched from the arctic circle to the Tehachapi Mountains is naught but a memory and what we revere as ancient forests are in fact second growth tree plantations, mere shadows of the biome that predated the europeans on this continent.