|
|
It has been said that philosophy is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat. I affirm that existentialism is like being in a dark room full of bobcats looking for a tail.
It’s hard to write a poem which ends insightfully about going into the woods in August. Three times we went out the back door into the woods in different directions, following game trails (or following dog trails), or following my instincts (or experience), or the compass, or a drying stream bed.
If I look at the forest, I’m reminded of my great epiphany upon leaving Dublin by bus and then hitchhiking through the countryside: I saw why it was called the Emerald Isle. Everything was green. But, most importantly, it was all a different shade of green. It is less so here in the boreal. There are the conifers and the deciduous. Some leaves (a mountain ash or a few woods honeysuckle or wild sarsaparilla) are turning yellow already.
I’m surprised how homogeneous the woods can seem, because I am naturally an identifier, a distinguisher, a discerner. I could identify each tree, but there’s probably only eight or nine species total in six hours of walking. There’s one young red maple leaning out with the cedars over the lake shore, out of her element. Crowded but alone.
To be fair, walking true or tacking, I can move from one ecosystem to another in just 10 minutes give or take. From the open, vertical uniformity of the sugar bush to the high, north slope of a stunted boreal, to the cool, sometimes impassible but sometimes park-like cedar bottoms, to the steamy beaver meadow, and the hot, dry clear-cut of young popples and white pines and raspberries.
Most of this is contemplative, later.
Honestly, when we’re very alone deep in the woods, I count. I count footsteps. Count the seconds when I rest. Count just to count.
I swear when I trip, or when I slip and get my feet wet.
Much of the time a tune is in my head. Almost always it’s a tune that I don’t like. Always just two or three bars, over and over. Even if it’s a song I like and that I’ve listened to 10,000 times, I can only recall a verse or two.
I guess I go looking for something interesting, or at least interesting to me. Fruit, flowers. An antler, a skull, a bone. Maybe wolf or bear scat. A moose wallow or deer bed or bird’s nest. A deer stand or whiskey bottle from a fellow deer hunter. A crushed beer can, a tin pail, or shotgun shell from a fellow bird hunter. Something that says that someone’s been here.
We found only bear scat this week.
Except we did find our first lobster mushroom of the year, on an old, abandoned, still-packed foot trail. Bright orange and standing out like a red maple in the cedars. It was almost half a pound. I took it back to the cabin and sautéed it. And I ate it. It gave me neither “s” nor giggles, but like everything, I did it for my own “s” and giggles.
This uninsightful ending reminds me of William Carlos Williams’ poem about the plums, which I can’t recite of course, and which was much shorter than this, and probably better. I’m still grasping at very short, very primal tails.
Leave a Reply