Into the Woods

Something calls us.  One spring when I was twelve I stuffed my Trapper Nelson backpack – a brave ashwood frame lashed to a tough khaki canvas sack – with the essentials for a hike into the wilds of the northern Cascade mountains: jeans and a wool sweater, a chicken-feather army surplus sleeping bag, plastic sheeting and string for a tent, a shiny flashlight with new D batteries, a compass, pocket knife and the thick unfinished novel I was reading, and set off with my boy scout troop #645 well before dawn on a Saturday morning.

Young, we were all excited.  The trucks bounded up the endlessly ascending road, over rocks and potholes, surrounded by peaks and towering trees. At last we rattled into the parking lot by the trailhead somewhere in the heart of the mountains.  We piled out into the wild air scented of fir boughs and running water.  It was still early. The green slopes swirled around us, densely covered with maples, alders and massive douglas firs that flowed up the hillsides, not to civilized boundaries of streets, buildings and parking lots as did the woods where I lived, but to craggy outcroppings and long ridges bound by nothing but sky.

The trail plunged into wet forest.  Seeing it, something sharp jumped up in my gut.  An ancestral memory in my heart and blood leapt alert, enthralled and immensely eager.  What excited me so?  It was no one thing.  It was the myriad of wild presences that surrounded us, the confluence of so many sounds and silences, and scents and textures, which, together did seem one thing, one mysterious powerful, brilliant spirit of this place.

This presence was already settling over me even before I shouldered my pack or tread the first gnarly root.  It was visible and invisible at once, seen and beyond seen.  It flowed into my lungs as I breathed the scent of nettles and wet stones.  It filtered into my imagination and muscles while the men gathered gear and herded the boys.  It catalyzed an exhilarating blend of caution, abandon and imperative.

There were sounds in the air. Somewhere up the mountain a stream was roaring down its steep granite-strewn course.  An almost inaudible yet vast sigh moved over all the great cloud of trees at once, the air sifting through countless twigs, brambles and ferns.

Birdsongs rode upon this gentle bass note like clear glass floats upon a sweeping tide.  Beneath my feet no hard sidewalk or street, but moist, soft earth and layered leaves.

This sensation welled up in me at the outset of every hike.  Almost feral, it gripped me with an irresistible instinct to get into the woods, to plunge down the trail where the trees would be all around and above me, where my feet would move over stone and log and through clear water and moist mud, where my bare legs would be brushed by willow twigs, soft thimble berry leaves and stung by nettles, pricked by blackberry thorns.

Inexplicably, the unknown, wild, boundary-less truth of the woods and the mountain trails was also the most familiar, the most instinctively “known.”  The excitement at a hike’s outset settled into a deep well-being as the wild presences that teemed all around settled into me.  Whatever it was in me that recognized these wild presences and responded to them was something deeper than language, beyond familiar joys like meeting school friends or visiting aunts and uncles.  It was a wondrous meeting of myself, of a timeless part of me I had forgotten, which waked now with the call of the timeless wildness of the forest.

Read this week’s poem: Listening to Lagunitas Creek

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