The Forest’s Edge

This question beggars my mind. How tired this world grows. I know there is a grace in every living thing. I must remember that. I must live in the most fragile place imaginable, this “now” that flies away from me in two directions. The past will not suffice and the future is an illusion I create to ease my conscience. To dwell in either place is not to act. I touch the grass, the needle of a spruce, lichen on a stone, and that is enough. Each word I write is an emblem to my thought. This, I can preserve this: water, tree, stone.

It is early evening. I sit on the steps and watch a raccoon as he stares down at the ice that covers the pond. The scratches his claws leave on the ice are a kind of writing. Come morning, I will read his story in the delicate arabesques he has left behind.

I remember a morning years ago, when the earth turned slowly and light moved like a child’s hand into the needles of the trees. It was the hour before dawn and I sat under the sloping arms of a black spruce in the boreal forest. The tree had been my mother tongue when I lived there and her speaking to me was the oldest sound I knew. I carried silence to her and came away with song. I went to her with grief and with joy, and there I learned to rest. With my back against her trunk I heard the north stir in her needles and branches. I heard the click and drum of her cones. I closed my eyes in that place where the trees live. I lay myself down in the forest that lives below the land of the little sticks.

She was one of my mothers, and on that day I had come to ask her forgiveness. I was leaving the north. I was still young and I had a need for cities. The night before, the fire had gone out in the stove. The frost had taken its hands off the windows. Young moths were suddenly awake in their wings. I had seen a beetle on the kitchen floor. It was spring and it was time to go.

When I lived there the spruce had pointed me to the forest and there I found the white-throated sparrow and the orange-crowned warbler, the golden eagle, and red-tailed hawk, the peregrine falcon, and common raven. She sent me to the lynx and bobcat, the moose and caribou, the bear and cougar, and I watched and listened and their stories became my stories.

At the edge of a clear-cut, I squatted and grubbed away the thin soil until I uncovered the tip of a root from a young spruce. It was entwined with the root of the tree beside it. Their roots touched each other all the way from Alaska to Labrador. Tree spoke to tree on the old earth.

Last year I went back to the black spruce’s forest. That tree is dead and I am older, yet I knew, sitting there, that the story was the same as it was when I left many years ago. I had learned when I was gone that a man can slip into the smallest world and find himself again in the memory of trees.