It’s the middle of winter, but the fifty-five-degree air says something else. The ground is damp, and my shoes make a gentle sucking sound as they sink and release against the trail surface. Small birds pinball their way through the brush. Their strident call trills like an old-style bicycle bell, only two octaves higher. At intervals through the leafless brambles I see casualties of the windstorm that slapped its way through the region last week: a large limb with freshly exposed heartwood rests horizontally on its branches, appearing to hover above the ground, frozen in mid-fall; a thick, bark-less snag lies flat in disarticulated sections at abrupt angles from each other, reminding me of those hollow segmented tent supports with a central elastic cord that keeps disconnected pieces in close proximity to the joint.
The dog and I decide to leave the main path and explore a narrow spur trail that leads us downhill through a series of switchbacks to the bottom of the ravine, to the shallow creek that moves in pulses between waterfall-bounded pools formed by previous years’ treefall. It is on our way back up the switchbacks, toward the top where the panorama of the ravine opens up, that it hits me.
Hit is not quite the right word. Hit works well to describe both the immediacy of the insight and the instantaneousness of its initial effects—its impact, if you will, but fails to capture its emergent quality, its insidiousness, the sense that it has been there all along in a primal form, latent, inchoate, incipient, gathering its strength imperceptibly, building slowly until it crosses some critical threshold and explodes into being like a sudden afternoon thunderstorm.
It might have been the way the noonday sun fell into the alder trees, their trunks and leafless branches resplendent, completely enwrapped in moss, emitting a luminous green glow somewhere between emerald and jade, radiant and seemingly in motion, a terrestrial aurora borealis. Or maybe it was the large stump to my right, also draped in moss, its base rotted into three sharp spires like stalagmites thrusting skyward, longingly, as if lost in nostalgic reminiscence. It could have been the fragrant shadow of the cedar behind me, or the perfect line of tiny golden mushrooms cued along the slab of rotting bark at my feet. Or the small spruce, recently snapped by a falling neighbor, its slender and limbless trunk bent at a sharp angle to the ground, wet outer layers of wood at the break still intact, peeled back in scallops like the lid of a rusty tin can opened by a cartoon can opener. Or something else sitting just beyond my perceptual grasp.
My life is here, my past and present, written in the wood around me, captured in a fidelity that mere language could never match. A multivolume biography with copious endnotes. Every trivial detail, every nuance, every tragedy, every fear and challenge and hope and regret, all here. Exactly this!