A woody and earthy scent dominates, dry and musky, something like the heady, dusty smell that comes with the first drops of rain after a long dry spell, but cooler and more inviting. Most of the trees are alder, their limbs thick with moss. The older ones carry young saplings in their joints and small ferns queued along their trunks and lower branches like school kids on a cafeteria bench. But evergreens are numerous here as well: spruce and Douglass fir, with a smattering of red cedar.
The trailhead is at the edge of a recently paved parking lot and marked by a large plexiglass-protected informational sign. The sign has been turned into a makeshift shrine, with spent candles, plastic flowers, and a few waterlogged stuffed animals piled reverently on the ground around a framed photograph of a teenage girl who died in a freak accident a few months back. She was crushed when a 70-foot Douglass fir fell on her. The tree and three of its siblings sharing the same root ball lost their grip on a hillside that had been supersaturated by a spate of spring rainstorms; they toppled suddenly as the girl and a friend were passing through ground zero. The local newspaper reported the friend was “unharmed,” but such a statement assumes a surface physicality that has never applied to any sentient being, and especially not to such emotionally fragile creatures as humans. The newspaper also said, as a thin offering of solace, as a way of assuaging any pangs of personal mortality triggered by news of such a random and arbitrary death, that she was killed instantly—as if the transition between life and death follows a temporal course that makes sense, as if duration has any meaning at all in this context, as if it were possible for any life to end in a timeframe greater than an instant, as if there can be any real solace in the knowledge that the period of trauma that immediately preceded her death was too brief for her to feel pain or to have anything more than a fleeting awareness of her terrifying fate.
Immediately beyond the sign-turned-shrine the path moves sharply downhill, a hard-packed weather-washed rocky road perhaps twelve feet across, narrowing quickly as it funnels the light of exposed midday down toward the perpetual morning twilight of the understory. Today, a light fog clings to the lower canopy, and the soundscape narrows as well—echoless footfalls reach my ears too fast, they sound clumsy and ill-paced as I fight the steep slope, and my breath is too loud and too close. A few paces more, and I am completely subsumed within tree-shadow, where the trail’s unyielding rocky surface sinks beneath elastic layers of decaying needles and alder leaves, and my footfalls are pleasantly muted, although my breath is still uncomfortably conspicuous. The air is different here, less viscous, folding easily around my face and arms, and at the same time it feels dense, rich, thick with potential—a feast of scents, a cornucopia of potential meanings and nuanced signals that fall stillborn upon my puny primate olfactory system.
Shortly into the understory a tree splits the trail like a large boulder cleaving a shallow river, where no clear consensus has emerged across generations of hikers making the choice of left or right. From the tree’s perspective, I imagine the flow of humans up and down the trail is something very much like so much ephemeral river water splashing past; trees exist on a temporal plane that is qualitatively different from ours, where time flows over seasons and decades rather than hours and days, where childhood can last a century or more. The alder trees along this trail are short-lived, as trees go, with an expected lifespan of a mere 150 years. But a Douglass fir can stand for 1000 years or more—assuming it has the appropriate ground support. The oldest known Douglass fir, a couple hundred miles to the northwest of here on Vancouver Island, is estimated to be upwards of 1400 years old, germinating about the time Muhammad began receiving his feverish revelations, about the time the Tang Dynasty began, eight centuries before Machu Picchu was built, back when the global human population had just crested 200 million—less than 3% of what it is today.
There were a lot more trees back then as well. A recent study found that the world currently nurtures something on the order of 3.04 trillion trees, and that there has been a 46% decline in the global tree population since the beginning of the Neolithic. The rise of civilization, and the concomitant explosion of the human population is, of course, directly responsible for that decline. Mathematically, it comes down to the permanent elimination of 231 trees for every single digit increase in the human population. Every new baby comes into the world an unwitting participant in civilization’s global deforestation mandate.
There are treated logs, perhaps old telephone poles—I can’t help but see them as corpses—embedded crosswise in the trail at irregular intervals along some of the steepest sections. I can’t decide whether they were placed here to ease navigation or simply to prevent erosion. My feet gladly accept their assistance, regardless. A rivulet emerges from a spring in the underbrush, and runs along the path for a short distance before being siphoned into a black corrugated plastic culvert embedded in the trail like the logs. There are several other places where smaller rivulets cross the trail without the aid of a culvert, gouging slender canyons at angles determined by the cant of the path, and then spilling freely downhill to join the small salmon spawning stream in the floor of the ravine that runs a parallel course to the immediate south.
Less than a quarter mile in, the land ahead drops precipitously, and the trail makes a sharp left turn to become a sturdy staircase built into the hillside. The steps are little more than lidless wooden boxes packed with hard earth. The railing that runs along the downhill side is green-stained with algae and moss, and many of its posts slant outward, listing downhill at the same angle as the trees on the hillside above. A section of the rail has recently been repaired and squared with the steps, but the newer wood seems out of place: its un-weathered moss-free surface still reeks of the sawmill. The stairs elongate and form an awkward trapezoidal corner, and then end abruptly, replaced by ten- or twelve-foot segments of packed clay bordered by embedded logs and square-hewn timbers the width of railroad ties. A bench is anchored against the hillside a few paces from the foot of the stairs. The descent is still very steep here, and from the downhill side the bench looks like a normal park bench, but at its uphill terminus, the seat is virtually on the ground and entirely unusable. There is a plaque mounted on a wooden post next to the unusable portion of the seat, with the names of the bench’s donors, the late Duane and Mary Acheson, and a blurb about their enduring love for hiking this valley memorialized in metal for weary hikers to admire. I stop here for a moment, read about Duane and Mary, and glance upward—and realize that I have not looked up once since I started the descent. The fog-laced canopy above is its own vast spectacle, and I have missed it entirely, with my head bent instead toward the sloping ground immediately in front me, where even a brief glance upward would be dangerous, where large gnarled roots poke out of the path unexpectedly, sometimes offering my feet a helpful brace, but always threatening to make my toe or ankle pay for moments of inattention.
At about the halfway point, the path begins to level out, and the grade becomes more gradual, imperceptible in places, with an occasional brief uphill stretch that serves as welcome relief for the muscles around my knees that have begun to complain under the strain of the perpetual downhill. I read once where it is the negative movement, the controlled extension of the muscle under load, and not the positive muscle contraction, that causes the most muscle soreness, something about the muscle fibers grating across each other during the weighted extension; paradoxically, it is the trip downhill, rather than the arduous climb back up, that I will be feeling the most in my legs tomorrow.
The soundscape changes along with the leveling of the terrain, and my breath loses something of its raspy resonance. Although the fog has dissipated, it is darker here as well. A perpetual evergreen twilight filters through conifers, the majority of which are Douglass fir growing in loose clusters, with their tall limbless trunks jutting skyward. The spaces between the fir clusters are filled with young cedar, and there is a conspicuous absence of alder—in fact, I can’t see a single broadleaf tree of any kind. There is a pleasant floral scent rising from the ground alongside the trail, which is littered with fledgling ferns, small plants with leaves that remind me of Italian parsley, and what I suspect is an invasive nonindigenous species of ivy. But it is the strange quality of the sonic space that I find myself drawn to most: muted, hushed and cloistered, as absolute as being underwater but without the loss of clarity and fidelity. If anything, the sounds here are clearer, sharper, and more distinct, but they dissipate quickly, with no residual overtones, absorbed almost the very instant they emerge. As if to underscore this effect, my ears are besieged by a graceful series of perfect triplets in a brief staccato barrage, and a tiny black-backed woodpecker tilts his head sideways at me, then stutter-steps out of sight around the far side of the trunk he is working on.
Humans are meant to inhabit quiet spaces like these, a quiet that is not at all related to silence. Silence is absence; the quiet of a forest is a kind of presence. Quiet involves a stilling of mind, a welcome release of attentional focus, a penetrating and persistent expression of the passing moment in all of its immediacy. Perched on a mossy stump next to a fast-flowing stream surrounded by the rush and pop of wind through the trees, with birdsong and squirrel chatter and insect buzz filling every millisecond to capacity, I am immersed in the most overwhelming quiet. We are meant to be surrounded by sound, but we find ourselves instead drowning in noise: the noise of traffic, the noise of passing airplanes, the noise of a stranger ranting into a cellphone, the noise of electrical appliances and water through pipes, the noise of our own thoughts struggling to accommodate our machine-gutted lives. We are meant for a life embedded in sound, but cities offer only noise. The rush and pop of wind through trees encased in concrete is quickly sullied by echoes from the street, and the birds that scream at each other as they rest in the deformed branches—branches brutally hacked and stunted to accommodate electric wires and streetlights—can barely be heard against the grating cacophony of the highway, in the same way that, at work, inside my climate-controlled box, the gentle rain against the window can barely be heard above the ticking clock and the furnace growl and the high-pitched whine of the overhead light and the mechanical crash of doors opening and shutting down the hallway and the footsteps on the waxed tile floor and the elevator bell and the desperate laughter of my fellow wage-slaves. Beneath all the noise is silence. Beneath all the quiet-destroying racket of civilized existence is emptiness, bleakness, void. The quiet found in natural spaces—the spaces we are meant to occupy—is saturated with life and purpose and meaning. The noise of civilized spaces is a death rattle, masking, but only for the moment, civilization’s ultimate meaninglessness.
Silence itself cannot exist in nature. Silence is an artifice, an invention, a creation of civilization. Silence, like the Christian’s Hell, is an instrument of intimidation and control. The ever-present threat of silence helps keep us occupied. The threat of silence keeps us from questioning the purpose behind the noise, keeps us from questioning the meaning of civilization itself. The need to avoid the dreadful silence we imagine waiting just below the surface makes long pauses in our conversations awkward and uncomfortable—during the breech, you can almost feel the emptiness of the deadly void rushing forward. And what else can explain the gratuitous insertion of music—or what passes for that—into virtually every public space, in every retail store, in every restaurant, in every doctor’s waiting room, and on the other end of the telephone line as you wait on hold for “the next available service representative.” In our desperation to avoid silence, the beaconing quiet entirely escapes our notice.
The smell of saltwater is co-emergent with a sudden and dramatic increase in light, and the trail splits in two. The right fork continues on through a stand of young alder and blackberry bushes. The left fork runs past park ranger quarters, and then turns into a narrow, paved roadway that runs through an open grassy area with scattered picnic benches and a covered picnic structure flanked by a drinking fountain and a sign offering information about how to rent the structure for private events. The paved path makes a sharp right turn at a tall cyclone fence in front of raised railroad tracks, and then meets with the right fork at the salmon spawning stream. There is a low-ceilinged concrete pedestrian tunnel under the tracks. The floor of the tunnel is a metal grating over the salmon stream, and at the other end, the stream spills out onto a rocky beach, and then merges with the island-spattered southern portion of the Salish sea known as Puget Sound.
Today the beach is the dominion Crows, who have, for the moment, gained the upper hand in their perpetual battle with seagulls for local terrestrial space. Apparently unconcerned with their temporary expulsion from solid ground, the seagulls have congregated in the water and atop the weathered pilon remains of an ancient wooden fishing dock. Across the water, to the west, resting atop a feathery strand of blue-gray fog, the Olympic mountains congregate in a dense pile, with snow-speckled Mount Olympus challenging the sky in a way that suggests it too, like its ancient Macedonian namesake, is a place where the gods dwell. While the cool moist breeze seeks out the weak spots in the shell of my jacket, I spend a few long moments allowing my eyes to trace the contours of the horizon and wonder what deities might reside there, and then begin the return trip.
Shortly past the midway point back up the trail, my pace slows sharply, my breath becomes synchronized with my footsteps, my leg muscles start once again to voice their displeasure, and I mourn the loss of my younger body. As my stride becomes even more labored, I recall an obscure song from 80s avantgarde artist Laurie Anderson, titled “Walking Falling,” where she explains that walking is really just a matter of falling and then catching yourself over and over again. The lyrics become a mantra as I lean into the steepest parts of the 435-foot ascent, trying to give as much of the effort over to gravity as possible.
Soon, open sky ahead cues that the parking lot is near, and in a few more paces I am out of the understory, approaching the trailhead and the sign-turned-shrine, and my thoughts turn once again to the young girl—who will never be anything other than a young girl. And just then I see it. Her name was Diana. It is hand-painted in large, artistically-crafted and carefully spaced white letters on the rough wooden backside of the sign. A white heart sprouting angel wings is painted just below. Diana, sister to Apollo, the Roman woodland goddess of the hunt, an immortal denizen of Mount Olympus.