A Walk in the Woods

I took a walk in the woods today, to clear my head, and to be for a little time in the company of nature.

It's fall here, in the Pacific Northwest. Early September. It was as it often is in September here, sunny and, in relative terms, hot. I went not to be with myself, or with my camera, or with my thoughts. I had no problems to sort through. I went to be with the forest. It's a small forest, in the center of town just up behind the university, but it is a more or less properly wild northwestern coastal forest.

It's fall here, and so the trees and the shrubs are starting to go to sleep. The leaves are starting to brown off. There are few birds, not much animal life awake at midday, only the trees and the shrubs and the plants, the mosses, the fungi, and the lichens. This is a rain forest, at the end the dry season. The fecundity of spring which follows hard on the heels of a winter of rain has long passed. There is no water above ground here, though the ravines run with it in spring. The earth is dry and dusty, the leaves crunch. The moss hangs on, waiting for winter and the rain.

The signs of the violence of nature surround me. The density of the growth is chaotic, overwhelming, even now as it pauses. The forest floor is jumble of fallen branches, fallen leaves, fallen trees.

Thrusting plants teem upward, sleepily now, from the earth. The forest is violent, but without malevolence. The war moves on the timescales of plants, the warriors are not even aware of us, and even so, they are resting now. This is not a monoculture, not, for instance, a silent grove of redwoods which have murdered all but a small population of hangers-on, plants adapted to the whims of their massive lords. This is a forest in transition. A tumultuous chaos of ceders and hemlocks locked in combat with maples and alders and ferns and grasses and mosses and shrubs of every kind. Everything strives to cover every inch of earth, of rock, of one another, with its own growth. If you could stand still for a week in spring, it would cover you as well, but you can't. My attention expands and contracts like slow breathing, drawn in this moment to the very small and stepping back a little later to drown in the depth and scale and chaos of the forest. The colors in this season are dusky greens and yellows, greys, and muted browns,

the colors of military camouflage, by of course no accident at all. Everything is mosses and bundles of seed and cobweb; and also massive boles of bizarre forms craning themselves to the sky and to the light.

The light, as in any forest, dapples and changes moment to moment, picking out a fern now, a leaf now, a stone. The root mass of the fallen tree is lost in shadow and moment later the tangling upward-reaching limbs of torn root glow for a minute, for two, in a stray spot of sunlight which shortly moves on. It is both dim and bright in here, all at once.


A bird, rare in this season at this time of day, bursts from cover and flies off a dozen yards. They do not fear people particularly in this forest in the city, but still if you break the invisible barrier which surrounds them their simplest instincts command a perfunctory flight, and so in a brief bustling clatter of leaves and buffet of wings, they do that.

The forest is vertical.

The land here rises briskly from narrow ravine to narrow ridgeline; one might imagine that if you turned the topography upside down it would look very much the same. The trees follow this, narrow and tall, reaching from the depths of the ravines upwards, striving past the ridgelines, past the other trees, reaching to the sun.

The forest is deep.

Nothing but the very closest things can be seen clearly. Tree and shrub and fern stalk away from the eye in rank on rank, each obscuring the next, but not too much. From one vantage point or another, you can spy the depth of it, marching away down some narrow ravine endlessly downward toward the sea. Tree, and tree, and tree, jumbled and dense and deep.

As I climb the trail everything around me seems a hole filled with trees. Increasingly I look down on the fecund, sleepy, mass of the forest, except when I look up. I am midway now, with enormous reaches above and below me. The depths end in dim fern-filled reaches. Above, the tallest trees thicken first into the dense light-eating canopies and then open to the sky. The sky appears more and more as I rise, the depths sink further away, until I reach the top. Even then, the tallest trees loom above me, but if I turn and look the sky is open and wide there, and there, and there.