The North Coast Stirs Awake

The week begins with rain — a light, equivocal sort of rain, the kind that cannot quite commit to being weather. By Sunday the skies will clear to sixty-three degrees, which in Humboldt County constitutes a heat wave and will prompt at least one person on social media to announce they are "finally" going outside, as though the previous months were spent in captivity rather than merely in Gore-Tex.

The new moon arrives Wednesday, which means dark skies for anyone inclined to look up, and the spring equinox follows Thursday — a date the calendar considers significant even if the fog has not been consulted. The gray whales continue their northbound procession past Trinidad Head, the trillium have opened in the redwood understory, and Humboldt Brews has booked what appears to be an entire festival's worth of live music into a single week. There is much to attend to.

Dan Hoyle brings his touring one-man show to the Arcata Playhouse this Friday and Saturday, a piece of journalistic theater that has been called "funny and essential" by people who review such things. Lady Humboldt appreciates any performer willing to visit a town where the audience arrives in rain boots and the theater shares a parking lot with a community garden.

The western wake robin — Trillium ovatum — has begun its annual appearance in the redwood understory this week, those three white petals arranged with the sort of geometric precision that suggests the forest floor employs a decorator. The fairy slipper orchid (Calypso bulbosa) has joined the display, preferring the deep shade of the old-growth floor where it can be admired by those willing to kneel. California poppies have opened on the coastal bluffs, the Douglas iris is showing in the grasslands, and the redwood sorrel — which never entirely stopped blooming, being constitutionally unable to quit — has renewed its efforts with particular vigor. Lady Humboldt counts six species currently in bloom, which is either a sign of spring or an elaborate conspiracy by the wildflowers to make everyone go outside.

On this week in 1860, a powerful late-winter storm battered the North Coast, flooding rivers, destroying trails, and cutting off Humboldt County's scattered settlements from one another for weeks. The storm reinforced the county's extreme isolation — a reality that would persist until the railroad reached Eureka fifty-four years later. Lady Humboldt notes that the county's relationship with isolation has changed somewhat since then, though the internet connection on the Lost Coast suggests the matter is not entirely resolved.

Jonathan Scales brings his steel pan-driven power trio to Humboldt Brews on Saturday at 8:30 PM. The combination of electric bass, drums, and Caribbean steel pans is not something one encounters on every North Coast evening, and Lady Humboldt considers novelty of this caliber worth the price of admission.

The new moon arrives this week, and with it the particular darkness that allows the stars to do their best work. Lady Humboldt has always found mid-March to be the county's most honest season — winter has finished making its case, spring has not yet made promises it cannot keep, and the land simply is what it is. The trillium bloom in the dark places. The whales pass without commentary. The tide goes out farther than expected and comes back on schedule. One could do worse than to pay attention.

Until next week — Lady Humboldt