Assorted notes from today's walk.
-- Basically, a temperate rainforest is a temperate rainforest is a temperate rainforest. It doesn't matter whether said rainy and temperate forest is in Australia, or California, or Canada; I will still feel perfectly at home there. Not that I was ever a particularly outdoorsy kid but when I did go outdoors, it was to the wet green woods around my father's house, where the light felt prehistoric on the skin. Strange to think about.
-- In any moderately dense copse of tall trees, the visible portion of the sky takes on a funnel- or cup-shaped aspect, being widest at the very uppermost limit of vision, where the trees are spaced out on either side, and narrowing according to perspective down to the pointed tip where far in front of the viewer the distant trees are set too close. Curvedness is introduced into this narrowing by the shape of most tall trees, which is less triangular than ogive, so that the bottom point of the funnel, being defined by a pair of partial parabolas, ends up resembling more than anything the place where the bowl meets the stem of a wineglass. Obviously this description of the form is a gross oversimplification-- plenty of sky filtered through lower branches, in a particulate way, and the edges of the funnel-shape are fractal, indeterminate, necessarily so given that the boundaries are composed of sparse irregular treetops-- but as far as it goes it is accurate enough.
-- The trail was almost invisible at a casual glance; exposed roots rose in mounded tangles everywhere from the damp earth, without any clear patches, and the bases of the trees were generally spaced enough to pass easily between, perhaps a little wider around the trail but hardly consistently, and there were very few markers. Fortunately it was crossed frequently by streamlets of varying viscosities, and rough footbridges had been provided accordingly, so if it came down to it we could move, not along a path as such in our minds, but from bridge to bridge, while around us the scattered trees said nothing, thought nothing, gave nothing away.
-- The spaced out unidentifiable trees weren't giants; they were skinny greywooded things, with faintly ridged bark and only a few dark wet knots like eyes to spice up their texture, and they had never been burned in their lives, you could tell, and wouldn't have lasted if they had.
-- But they were, as I say, tall, not as tall as the sequoias at home, the giants, but they made more dramatic use of what height they had, because they were so slimly built: I did not look at any individual one and think, here is a living thing, too large to comprehend, as I would with a redwood, huge every which way, but neither did I see most of them in their entirety. My sight was barred with their midsections, which broke up the space in neat parallel geometries, but they went on for a long, long time, would have if I could have looked up without tripping over all those bloody treeroots, and I guess that is something. To extend so far: to touch, from end to end, so much surrounding air.
-- Speaking of bridges. There were two bridges, or actually three, but two depths that needed bridging anyway, that stood out from the rest. One was almost a box canyon proper, perhaps two dozen meters (see! I'm getting into the Spirit Of Canada) across and dozen meters deep, with water running darkly at the bottom over stones; the bridge there was a hanging construction with wood planks strung together on bottom and barbed wire, of all things, for the railing, barbed wire over tarp. My mother instructed me to walk it blind. This had no handy dandy symbolic significance-- the bridge was a nice bridge, mostly unswinging and impossible to fall off of unless you really made the effort-- but I mention it because my walking it blind the first time made me want to turn around and go back when I came to the end, so I could see the canyon's contents proper. And when I turned around I saw that on my side, the other end, there were two plastic orange cylinders pinning the corners of the bridge, and on one someone had written, in what looked like black sharpie, the words
EACH BREATH CAN SATISFY
The 'E' in BREATH was a little smeared, and the handwriting was actually quite similar to my own when I am writing large, in capitals, although slanted forward more than I typically slant my handwriting.
I walked back. I looked down and saw the water at the bottom that I mentioned. Turning around again to actually, you know, cross, this time with my mother and my stepfather coming behind me, I accidentally tore the fleshy part of my palm beneath the index finger on the barbed wire; very shallowly; it did not bleed, but there was a trail of ripped skin. I sucked on that as I went. My flapping hand covered my mouth, and so the breath came out of my nose when I exhaled, and fogged my glasses, and fogged them again, whiting out the scene.
(Have Googled the quote. Found related things, but not that exact phrase.
Strange.)
The second depth that needed bridging and warrants special consideration was a mere gully, scooped, muddy, without angles in its absences. You could either scramble down into it and up the other side or use one of the two logs that had thoughtfully been provided. One log's near end was securely imbedded in the earth, as solid as you could wish, while the other's near end was balanced on a stump, although not, I didn't think, the stump it had been cut from. Anyway, to my surprise my mother was afraid of both, and was delighted and surprised and somewhat annoyed when I trotted over it without much trouble. She first blamed the tread of her shoes, or rather the lack of it, and second blamed the fact that she was growing old, and that her body wanted, she said, to fall over sometimes even on the ground. She said: I am weak in the knees.
She can be quite alarming. The second log was also a little alarming, atlhough I went over it too-- three times, actually-- because I was feeling smug. It wobbled. It wobbled harder if you looked down at your feet. I don't know. Logs. Contrary things. And mothers, too: I said she ought to go barefoot, and I said I'd carry her, and she gave me a headsmack, I simply can't understand it.
-- The last leg of this walk was a series of shallow steps carved into a truly massive log, to whom I ought to apologize for my disparaging comments about the general bigness of the local trees, really. Around it the hill was quite steep, and covered in a deep mass of leaves and ferns and god knows what else, complex and slimy and shiningly green.
-- The destination, in theory, was the beach. Mystic Beach: a short strip of sand, the pine forest curled around it parenthetically.
-- Much of the sand was covered with a sloping layer of smooth, slightly grainy-feeling, ovuloid stones. These came in various sizes, and were all a pale eggish blue-grey, somewhat bluer than the pale opaque gray of the seawater and somewhat grayer than the blue shadows on the flat undersides of the mass of cloud that occupied the sky. There was also a lot of driftwood, in large pieces, twisted like bundles of wool, or badly healed bones. I lay on one long flat specimen and found it slightly warm to the touch, which was nice in the earstinging cold of the day. I took a nap, actually, with the book I had brought for a pillow. No dreams.
-- In any moderately dense copse of tall trees, the visible portion of the sky takes on a funnel- or cup-shaped aspect, being widest at the very uppermost limit of vision, where the trees are spaced out on either side, and narrowing according to perspective down to the pointed tip where far in front of the viewer the distant trees are set too close. Curvedness is introduced into this narrowing by the shape of most tall trees, which is less triangular than ogive, so that the bottom point of the funnel, being defined by a pair of partial parabolas, ends up resembling more than anything the place where the bowl meets the stem of a wineglass. Obviously this description of the form is a gross oversimplification-- plenty of sky filtered through lower branches, in a particulate way, and the edges of the funnel-shape are fractal, indeterminate, necessarily so given that the boundaries are composed of sparse irregular treetops-- but as far as it goes it is accurate enough.
-- The trail was almost invisible at a casual glance; exposed roots rose in mounded tangles everywhere from the damp earth, without any clear patches, and the bases of the trees were generally spaced enough to pass easily between, perhaps a little wider around the trail but hardly consistently, and there were very few markers. Fortunately it was crossed frequently by streamlets of varying viscosities, and rough footbridges had been provided accordingly, so if it came down to it we could move, not along a path as such in our minds, but from bridge to bridge, while around us the scattered trees said nothing, thought nothing, gave nothing away.
-- The spaced out unidentifiable trees weren't giants; they were skinny greywooded things, with faintly ridged bark and only a few dark wet knots like eyes to spice up their texture, and they had never been burned in their lives, you could tell, and wouldn't have lasted if they had.
-- But they were, as I say, tall, not as tall as the sequoias at home, the giants, but they made more dramatic use of what height they had, because they were so slimly built: I did not look at any individual one and think, here is a living thing, too large to comprehend, as I would with a redwood, huge every which way, but neither did I see most of them in their entirety. My sight was barred with their midsections, which broke up the space in neat parallel geometries, but they went on for a long, long time, would have if I could have looked up without tripping over all those bloody treeroots, and I guess that is something. To extend so far: to touch, from end to end, so much surrounding air.
-- Speaking of bridges. There were two bridges, or actually three, but two depths that needed bridging anyway, that stood out from the rest. One was almost a box canyon proper, perhaps two dozen meters (see! I'm getting into the Spirit Of Canada) across and dozen meters deep, with water running darkly at the bottom over stones; the bridge there was a hanging construction with wood planks strung together on bottom and barbed wire, of all things, for the railing, barbed wire over tarp. My mother instructed me to walk it blind. This had no handy dandy symbolic significance-- the bridge was a nice bridge, mostly unswinging and impossible to fall off of unless you really made the effort-- but I mention it because my walking it blind the first time made me want to turn around and go back when I came to the end, so I could see the canyon's contents proper. And when I turned around I saw that on my side, the other end, there were two plastic orange cylinders pinning the corners of the bridge, and on one someone had written, in what looked like black sharpie, the words
EACH BREATH CAN SATISFY
The 'E' in BREATH was a little smeared, and the handwriting was actually quite similar to my own when I am writing large, in capitals, although slanted forward more than I typically slant my handwriting.
I walked back. I looked down and saw the water at the bottom that I mentioned. Turning around again to actually, you know, cross, this time with my mother and my stepfather coming behind me, I accidentally tore the fleshy part of my palm beneath the index finger on the barbed wire; very shallowly; it did not bleed, but there was a trail of ripped skin. I sucked on that as I went. My flapping hand covered my mouth, and so the breath came out of my nose when I exhaled, and fogged my glasses, and fogged them again, whiting out the scene.
(Have Googled the quote. Found related things, but not that exact phrase.
Strange.)
The second depth that needed bridging and warrants special consideration was a mere gully, scooped, muddy, without angles in its absences. You could either scramble down into it and up the other side or use one of the two logs that had thoughtfully been provided. One log's near end was securely imbedded in the earth, as solid as you could wish, while the other's near end was balanced on a stump, although not, I didn't think, the stump it had been cut from. Anyway, to my surprise my mother was afraid of both, and was delighted and surprised and somewhat annoyed when I trotted over it without much trouble. She first blamed the tread of her shoes, or rather the lack of it, and second blamed the fact that she was growing old, and that her body wanted, she said, to fall over sometimes even on the ground. She said: I am weak in the knees.
She can be quite alarming. The second log was also a little alarming, atlhough I went over it too-- three times, actually-- because I was feeling smug. It wobbled. It wobbled harder if you looked down at your feet. I don't know. Logs. Contrary things. And mothers, too: I said she ought to go barefoot, and I said I'd carry her, and she gave me a headsmack, I simply can't understand it.
-- The last leg of this walk was a series of shallow steps carved into a truly massive log, to whom I ought to apologize for my disparaging comments about the general bigness of the local trees, really. Around it the hill was quite steep, and covered in a deep mass of leaves and ferns and god knows what else, complex and slimy and shiningly green.
-- The destination, in theory, was the beach. Mystic Beach: a short strip of sand, the pine forest curled around it parenthetically.
-- Much of the sand was covered with a sloping layer of smooth, slightly grainy-feeling, ovuloid stones. These came in various sizes, and were all a pale eggish blue-grey, somewhat bluer than the pale opaque gray of the seawater and somewhat grayer than the blue shadows on the flat undersides of the mass of cloud that occupied the sky. There was also a lot of driftwood, in large pieces, twisted like bundles of wool, or badly healed bones. I lay on one long flat specimen and found it slightly warm to the touch, which was nice in the earstinging cold of the day. I took a nap, actually, with the book I had brought for a pillow. No dreams.