the cassandra pages: La cathédrale verte

We had been walking well over an hour, mechanically swatting the mosquitoes and horse flies that buzzed around our heads, through overgrown fields bordered by white birch and pin cherry, and then into a sandy clearing where thin soil was covered by moss and lichens and dotted with the first seedling pines, as thickly sown by the birds and wind as radishes needing to be thinned in a child's garden.

Then we entered the woods and began an upward climb along an old fenceline, thrown up when the farm was abandoned some forty-five years ago, now all but obscured in the tangled forest of hemlock, maple and birch. The footing was rough and we moved carefully, the four of us keeping sufficient distance between us to protect the follower from a sharp whip of a branch in the face, but close enough to see and help if someone stumbled. G. carried her secateurs, the heavy pruners she used to clear the old path during this once-yearly circumnavigation of her 150 mountainous acres; when we came upon a fallen tree or limb too large for the secateurs' throat, we all helped to pull it out of the way. The path had been marked at the time of her purchase, a dozen years ago, by bright pink plastic streamers - forester's tape - tied at eye-level on branches, but the markings were far apart and occasionally one had fallen with its branch or disintegrated, as even plastic will do when exposed for years; we needed all four pairs of eyes to keep ourselves on the trail.

Wherever a little light could reach the forest floor, bunchberries, the ground-hugging variety of flowering dogwood that defines these acidic northern woodlands, grew so thickly underfoot that you couldn't avoid crushing a few; there was gold-thread, and partridge-berry, and dense carpets of various lycopodiums - clubmosses or ground pines - that have become rare further south; partly from habitat destruction, partly from overharvesting by New Englanders who traditionally used them for Christmas wreaths. Everywhere there were ferns, and mushrooms in dusky shades and lurid bright colors, and in a few places, rare, shy woodland orchids.

Up we went, and down into a wet swampy area, and up steeply once again onto a moss-covered small rise where the early afternoon sun streamed in, warming the soft ground beneath us and turning the furry moss from emerald to chartreuse. "C'est une belvedere, la," remarked G., smiling beneath her beige cap with its rolled mosquito net above the brim, before plunging down the steep hill again. Her partner, S., took the lead then, and after another twenty minutes of walking, she stopped suddenly and stood very still, pointing with one finger, as a large partridge emerged from the brush ahead of us, ruffled its neck feathers, and disappeared quickly into the trees.

It had become very dark under the trees, nearly all conifers here, with a greater predominance of cedars, tall and gnarled, with beautiful smooth reddish roots polished like mahogany. S. unrolled her mosquito net over her head and secured it around her shoulders. We heard running water. "La rivière," announced G. and soon we saw it; rushing water dark with tannin, running incongruously and unseen through the middle of these deep woods. "There used to be a huge beaver dam here," G. continued, quietly, "up above here - they had created a veritable lake. And then one year, they simply moved on and abandoned it. You'll see all the dead trees." My three companions stood near a large cedar, talking, while I moved away to the south, edging closer to the spongy bank of the stream; insects hummed in the steamy air; a huge dragonfly rose from a clump of reeds and headed downstream. I sat down on a sphagnum-covered stump and peered into a pool of water above an eddy where a school of striped minnows swam back and forth. A small frog jumped into the water before my feet and disappeared.

"Will they think I'm being unsociable?" I wondered, after a little while, and got up and rejoined the group. For the past hour, my thoughts had been full of memories: of my mother, with whom I had walked in similar, but less extensive woods, and who would have been as captivated by this one as I was, and of Herm, my mentor, a biologist and skilled woodsman who had taught me where my mother's knowledge left off; his love of primitive plants - the ferns and mosses, lichens, liverworts, horsetails and clubmosses - had transferred to me, along with his battered, water-damaged Peterson guide to the same, dropped in a stream much like this one on a walk with me more than forty years ago. I smiled at G.: "I'm very touched by this sort of place, thank you so much for bringing me here," I said, simply, and she smiled back, understanding showing in her eyes. We walked ahead for a few hundred metres; the forest became even darker, trees meeting over the stream. Narrow shafts of light filtered down from the tall canopy onto the moss and shiny russet roots of the cedars; water dripped from leaves above us, and everywhere lush moss crept up the sides of rocks, of fallen trees and their upturned roots, beckoning us to sit, watch, listen.

The stream had divided into two branches, with a small island in the middle. I looked for a crossing place where the rocks rose above the water, relatively dry, at stepping-stone distance, and carefully made my way to the island. The others followed. We sat on a fallen tree, and on rocks, and were silent, each with our own thoughts. Mine were awe, gratitude, and a feeling that I was not alone. I looked out into the forest, my eyes following a path from tree to tree. "Herm," I asked in my head. "Are you there?"

J. came and sat close to me. "What are you thinking?" he whispered.

"I was saying hello to Herm," I said. "I've felt like he was with me for the past half hour." He nodded and smiled, not judging.

Who's to say? Perhaps some of us leave this earth, and some do not; perhaps the spiritual world does not exist at all except in our emotions and longings, our hunger for companionship on this lonely journey of walking with our own mortality; perhaps immortality is to be found precisely in this act of acute remembering, when time and separation dissolve into presence. I do know that on the rare occasions when I am filled with the kind of awe and gratitude that take me beyond inadequate language and the naming of those emotions, beyond self at all into some sort of space where I simply am, along with everything else that is, that has been and will be, it is generally not in the man-made world, but in some place such as this: untouched yet created; quiveringly alive; evolving and dissolving back into the elements from which it was made, continually animated once again into new life by water and light. The one-celled microscopic life of the vernal pools and stream; the moss's spores on their hairstalks, stretching a determined inch toward the distant sun; the marvelously adapted primitive plants that once towered above forest floors like these old cedars, long before flowering plants even existed, let alone frogs, partridges, or clumsy two-footed naked beasts in sewn clothing.

We rose, and set off again, uphill and away from the stream, leaving it to its silence, and the remembrance of dreams.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline