God is alive.
Magic is afoot.
— Buffy Saint-Marie
Several years ago for a few weeks, I lived in the middle of the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont. One day I decided to hike into the mountains several miles from the campus where I attended graduate school. The day dripped humidity, but when the breeze slid across me I felt cool. I drove the six miles from campus to the top of Middlebury Gap where the Long Trail, a path that snakes along the tops of the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Canada, crosses the highway. As I applied insect repellent, and situated the water bottle and lunch supplies in my back pack, cars and lumber company trucks rumbled past where I had parked on the side of the road. Finally, with all my preparations complete, I waited for a gap in the flow of traffic, crossed the road and entered the forest. Fifteen yards into the trees, the road disappeared. Another twenty yards into the forest and I came across a National Forest Service sign that read: “Now entering a Primitive Wilderness Area.” I laughed to myself. My mind conditioned by the graduate classes I had sat through for the last three weeks to split differences in meaning from one word in a poem to the next dryly provided, “That means on this side of the sign I’m in civilization.” The trees on either side of the sign stood mute to my humor.
Below the sign, inside a covered box , a registration book lay filled with the names and the cities of hikers ranging from Maine to California, who had passed into the woods before me. The book requested that I sign-in, like a hotel, in case of an emergency and the park rangers needed to help someone locate me. I dutifully signed in putting the day’s date next to my name as I wondered if the group who had signed in two days before me were still on the trail heading south toward Georgia. My planned four to five hour hike seemed like a lark.
When I first left the mid-June heat of Texas for the green of Vermont, I was amazed with the lush variety of greens that blanketed the rounded mountains. But the green that I encountered as I left the road overwhelmed me. Fern and day lillies burst forth from the forest floor. Moss grew thick across fallen trees and rocks. The Blue Spruce and pine trees threw a dark green canopy over my head blocking the sky. The sunlight that managed to pierce through the tree tops stabbed down in white columns similar to the light I once saw pour down through a window of the Vatican, bathing a priest saying mass to the left of the main alter with an angelic glow.
As I walked up the trail, using the roots of the trees that crawled across the path like steps, a faint breeze would peer from around the trunk of a pine and touch me lightly on the forehead like a benediction before disappearing into the woods on the other side of the trail. The hike proved not overly difficult, but my lungs raised on the flat terrain of the Texas Coastal Plain forced me to rest after an hour of the steady climb from the road to the top of Bread Loaf mountain. I sat down on the large root of a pine that climbed forty feet above my head.
Between sips from the water bottle, I nibbled on the trail mix I had bought down at the Ripton General Store earlier that morning. The nuts tasted stale, but the gooey sweetness of the raisins and the dried date pieces quickly formed the mix into a satisfying mouthful. I leaned back against the tree’s trunk, letting the rustle of the leaves and the infinite green of the forest wash out all thoughts of the semiotic deconstruction of Virginia Wolf’s essays and the level of Dante’s Purgatorio which we had reached that week in class from my mind. The immediacy of the forest surrounded me; the beauty of a birch bending its white trunk through the thick green firs and the chatter of the jay and grey squirrel wove an ineffable web about me as effortlessly as the spider weaves her threads about an errant moth. Fifteen minutes later after luxuriating in the forest’s calm, I put the water bottle and the rest of the trail mix back into my pack. I stood up, brushed the moss from my pants and continued up the trail.
Shortly the path became steeper forcing me to watch the ground a few feet in front of me in order not to trip over a root or a fallen tree. Not that I was missing that much by looking at the ground for I could only see about ten yards up and down the trail before it would bend out of view. I walked on for an hour in this manner, stopping momentarily to pick up a piece of slate that caught my eye or to look at an odd mushroom growing out of a tree stump. Every once in awhile, I would hear the quick flutter of rain on the forest canopy, followed by water dripping off of the leaves. But it never turned into a real rain, just enough to increase the rich humus smell of the forest floor.
As I walked, I thought about the first people who had come into this country. How odd it must have been: no trails, no General Stores down the road, no roads. Just miles of green surrounded by still more green miles.
“I placed a jar in Tennessee,” I thought, then laughed suddenly understanding Steven’s poem more than I ever had sitting in Dr. Malof’s undergraduate poetry class. But I defined nothing in the forest, it was its own definition.
Finally I came to a bridge, two planks laid across cut telephone poles, that spanned a small brook. I squatted on the edge of one plank and stared into the running water. The sound of the water over rock whispered softly like a seductive spell. After several minutes I looked up, somehow everything was different. The forest had become imminent. The lush green of the forest had become palpitant in the air, which itself seemed to be thicker than before. I sat down on the plank and looked up through the trees trying to see beyond the green canopy to sky. But the forest held dominion. I felt like a protozoa, surrounded by an amoeba, slowly being absorbed. The forest was alive and I had been devoured.
I suddenly felt an urge to tear off all of my clothes and run laughing through the forest, leaving the trail and its traces of civilization behind. I stood up confused. I was lost. I knew where I was, the trail only led two ways: farther in or back to the road. But I, my self, was becoming lost in the overpowering green of the forest. A line of David Wagonner’s poem Lost ran through my head, “The trees know where they are.” Yes, they knew where they were. They also knew that I did not belong. An exhilaration mixed with fear rippled through me like wind through leaves. I turned and walked quickly down the path I had just climbed. Before I could think about it, I was stumbling down the trail. Leaping from rock to tree root, almost falling , just catching myself before another leap sent me farther down the path.
Twenty yards from the entrance sign that I had so glibly passed several hours before, I fell. I landed belly down, sprawled across a bed of moss and pine needles like a supplicant before a saint’s shrine. I rolled over on my back and began laughing hysterically between gasps of air. Several minutes later I struggled the last short steps out of the forest. I sat quietly in my truck recollecting myself before driving slowly back down the mountain.
I had left that morning with the intention of taking in a bit of nature. Instead I had been taken in and spit back out by nature. Philosophers speak about the numinous, the glimpse of God you catch on the edges of your peripheral vision. But the blinding face of God does not simply burn out your eyes as I had imagined as a child in Sunday school; it ignites your mind with infinity. The forest is alive. Not just the individual life of each tree, fern, moss or bird, but a life that encompasses all of the life in the forest, including the life of the individual man that enters into the forest’s domain.
(Spring 1993)
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