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Publishers Note: We are grateful to Brian for being one of the first contributors to the Journeys Corps of Storytellers.
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In a light eastern Cascades snowfall, if I wait patiently, I can hear it. The language of trees, utterances of fir and maple, the soft hum and sigh and clearing of the pine's throat. An opinion offered from cedars.
Fallen needles and decomposing leaves are the adjectives and past participles that have been edited from their conversations. What remain - nouns of heartwood and verbs of sap - will reach into the mist and tell me a story, if I wait long enough, patiently enough, to hear it.
I think I'll sit here on these bones of a tree. This fir trunk was thrown down in an autumn windstorm roaring out of Clover Springs. Its limbs splay, like fingers and toes, at the sky. The root ball at its base still clutches twelve cubic yards of earth. When it hit the ground, there was a loud sound in the forest, even though there was no one around to hear it. But if I sit quietly, I may be the first.
The trunk rests here against a tall red cedar. In the relief of its bark face is a series of ever-changing glyphs. One time I look at it and see a brown bear's head. I look again: it's changed into a leaping salmon. Again: a thunderbird.
Perhaps I can gather my thoughts next to this grove of aspen. They may speak to me of the cycles of deer and elk, for they know the touch of elk's teeth and have felt the rubbing of velvet from deer antlers.
And then suppose I examine the last unfallen leaf from this tangle of vine maple. I'll note its symmetry, and sense the last gasp of its chlorophyll engines, a pang of deciduous regret that joyous gossip will die down for winter.
Over here is a strong western hemlock, pointing at the sky. At night, it tracks the movement of stars. When wind comes up, it sends messages to Polaris. And over there is a gray snag with a hawk's nest. If I put my ear up to the bare wood for seven days, will the faint meter of the forest's history tap out a rhythm in my temples?
I can depend on junipers and hickory on the south of a ravine to tell me rumors of the ocean. They've heard fabulous and wonderful things from the creek at the ravine's base, which heard them from a stream, which heard them from a river - the stories changing at each fork, becoming more fantastic or more tragic at each bend. But the same plants to the north know nothing of the outside world. This is the result of coriolis, the same principle that makes the lost walk in circles. I will need to listen to the moss on the north side of a dogwood's trunk to find my way, to receive repatriation from the consequences of my choices.
A yellow tamarack pine will tell me a legend if I let it. A Douglas fir will help me locate water if I'm thirsty.
I just have to listen long enough.
Long ago I abandoned my rifle and lamp. I wandered lost past trees, into ravines and up game trails that might have been familiar. I gained the upper hand on hunger. I dreamed of the rhythm of mountain seasons.
I began to appreciate the distinction between random sounds and the thoughts of plants and animals, even stones. I found that I had been given all the names of the foliage - the mountain currant, bearberry, myrtle boxwood. I understood the forbs of the understory, the arrowleaf balsamroot, cinquefoil, western yarrow, the vetch. Placing my hand on a tree, its name would come to me: I am Engelman Spruce. Entering a stand of trees: We are Western Larch.
A lynx sat down next to me one afternoon and shared a poem, then a rumor of hard winter. My news came on the wind: angels have been discerned on the wing as ravens; the constellations have taken on new form and position. Glancing up that night, I saw that, indeed, Orion - closer in pursuit of the Pleiades - had raised his sword.
Rain fell. I tasted the heritage of each drop.
Elk and deer came to me and communed in low, long language.
The rustle of wind migrates across a mountain hillside. The resulting babble I hear in the needles and leaves and moving branches is not the words I'm telling you about. They are deeper in the wood than that.
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