Forest (essay)

(I’m determined to start writing about more than my woes and get a bit creative again – so I’m reviving the one-word essay).

I haven’t hiked in awhile – not the serious kind of hiking where you put on your pack for several long days and come home with tanned shoulders, a hiking boot slightly melted from the campfire, and a distaste for dried fruit…. I haven’t even recently taken the type of day-adventure that leaves one looking at a map of the neighbourhood mountain after six hours and wondering how to get home. I’ve been lazy when it comes to putting on the boots and filling the water bottle… and to be honest, somewhat hesitant to venture beyond the well-travelled hiking paths and logging roads that criss-cross the mountain behind my home. Partly this is because of the accident two and half years ago which has left my right leg unpredictable (my hip and knee cramping to a crippling degree at times), and partly my distrust of the forest has grown in the space between then and now. Becoming unaccustomed, I have allowed my civilization to root ever more firmly in me – that which fears the dark woods so must clear them, frets about the animals so must shoot them, doesn’t understand the vegetation so must poison it – the slash and burn innate in “new world” mythology and on which we were raised.

I grew up on the outskirts of a second-growth forest, a modest one of 60 acres belonging to an old man I never met by the name of Mr. Bear. My parents had bought their five acres off Bear in 1972, the only cleared acreage on the parcel with a small 1940s house perched on the edge of the gravel road at one time housing the family who logged the property years earlier. By the time I grew up there, the forest had come back in many parts, full of secret logging debris in the undergrowth and marked by the old roads narrowed over time with salal growth to become trails. A creek in the heart opened up to a tiny grassy meadow where my neighbour brought her ponies to wander, always watchful for the cougars our parents half-heartedly warned us about. Stinging nettles and cedar bark rashes, hornets nests and losing one’s way – the dangers were around every boulder and tree, and we knew them intimately. But we also knew where the earth had shaken down to leave a secret cave in the rocks above the meadow, and where the best cool creek places were in the hottest summer. As a teenager I discovered the softest mossy outcrops for making love, and even without a flashlight I knew the trails well enough to negotiate them in complete darkness to get to the other side of the lake for a party…. The forest gave us freedom from our elders, a place to hide from problems in the house, an independence children growing up in the city rarely got – to be gone for hours but still “just out back”. As young as three years old I was known to have “gotten lost” in the forest and trapped in a blackberry thicket from which I couldn’t extricate myself (my parents couldn’t see me, only hear my wailing until they realized I had followed a deer trail into the centre and now was being scratched on every side by the thorny bushes). My mother seems surprised now when we recollect these wanderings – that she allowed her small children out to play in the secret wood behind the house with little supervision.

There were things about those woods that scared me, and do even now – so many times the police came and told of escaped inmates from the prison down the road, or that someone had gone missing in there. It always seemed to me if one would abandon a body, the road leading up to the other side of the wood would make a perfect entrance point, the desolate roundabout being a popular place to dump garbage of all kinds. Sometimes we woke in the night to hear the voices of people cutting through the yard to the treeline, and into the dark night we could hear the shots of poachers out for deer not so far away from our backdoor. On the trails by myself, I would jump to the side and hide in the thick salal if I heard another approach, afraid to run into strange men out there where no one could hear – but most often the passerby was simply a neighbour from down the way, and I never did have the type of encounter I was raised to fear.

I forget sometimes, the richness of growing up in the trees, the opportunities afforded for self-exploration because of those dark and leafy stands behind the house – how the land changed to meet our own growth year after year as it came back from the cutblock it once was. I go back there now and see how much the land changes year after year, growing up and opening to new life just like any family left to its own expansion. And like something not quite understood, I feel a vague fear when I stand on the outskirts of the forest looking in.

Outside of the forest and in my imagination, the woods carry a mysterious and sometimes frightful potential. But once I enter on the path to finally plunge within the universe of leaf and root, I find myself quickly embraced and the darkness of my imagination recedes to allow that wildness to enter me, to chase the civilized fears away. To get over internal barriers, to walk beyond the stiffness where the metal plates rest on my bones, to re-enter the forest…. to go home. I’m sure there is little else that can heal me now.