AdventuresNW
You want to keep moving forward, but shrubs form a wall at the forest’s edge. You see no way in. As you explore the tangled greenery, you push and probe. Two branches swing open like doors—the first with a gentle push, the second with a vigorous shove. The branches close behind your back as you wander into the mansion of the forest, entering hidden rooms. Trees rub their trunks together, creaking like the boards of a haunted house. You laugh to calm your nerves. Your spine and stomach are alive with fright. But you press on, deeper into the mossy damp because your curiosity is larger than your fear. You need to know what lurks in the dark.
Rare is the person who achieves happiness without following a path that leads through the wilds. And no sage arrives at enlightenment without first getting lost.
Secret entrances appear. Arched passageways and vaulted halls. Amphitheaters. A temple built of trees, a Parthenon painted every shade of green. Monuments made of sunlight and shadow shift as clouds morph overhead. This forest has existed forever, it seems. Yet, every moment, this place is made anew by changing light. The trees are solid, their wood as real as stone. But in the spaces between them, your imagination can slither and soar. In the forest, you may be an emperor or sage. Reach toward the ground and grab a stick. Lift it to the sky. This staff you wield makes you a wizard. Anything is possible among the trees.
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” This quotation is usually attributed to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw but is tricky to pin down. American psychologist G. Stanley Hall wrote in 1904, “Men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth.”
Regardless of who first said, “We grow old because we stop playing,” we should never stop saying it. And we should ensure that forests exist in the world so we never stop following our curiosity, never stop pursuing “research from sheer love of truth.” To take forests away from adults is a tragedy. To steal them from children is a crime.
And we must do more than preserve these temples where the imagination plays. We have to make sure all can enter.
Enter the forest and draw your fingers over velvety moss. Feel the lace of ferns. Touch the corrugated bark of trees. Breathe in air spiced with cedar and sap. Light pours between trunks, pooling among shadows. Through an opening in the canopy above, rays slant toward the ground, spotlighting a couch made of moss. This plush furniture invites you to lie down. Press your cheek to the soft upholstery and listen to a liquid song.
The voice of a Swainson’s Thrush is an ethereal flute that spirals upward and fades, as if pointing toward a place no mortal soul can go. As you close your eyes and listen, your body sinks into a soft mound, and your feet slip into a pit.
The floor of this ancient forest is lumpy with hillocks—an intriguing landscape of pits and mounds. How was this playground created? Pits open when wind-thrown trees rip their roots from the earth. Mounds form when soil and moss blanket upended root balls and bury fallen trunks. When you walk over a mound or tightrope your way along a fallen tree, using its horizontal trunk like an elevated runway, tread cautiously. Avoid stepping through holes in decomposing wood—these gaps can open like trapdoors beneath your feet.
And mind what you grab: handholds that seem solid could be soft with rot, too weak to hold your weight. The path you forge is filled with danger and delight, never dull. Every walk in the woods is an adventure when curiosity is your guide.
Look for the fruiting bodies of fungi known as conks. They grow in horizontal shelves on trees, both standing and fallen. Conks are as solid as ladder steps and can be gripped like handholds as you climb a log. But some conks have surfaces so slick they seem to have been smeared with lacquer by mischief-makers in the woods. Your shoes slide off as you ascend, and your hands cannot hold them—no matter how tightly you grab the conks, they elude your grip. This happened to you in a dream; now it is happening in the forest. You are desperate to hold onto what you love, but everything slips away. The people you care about pass on. The woodlands where you go to grieve could be razed at any time.
Save this stand of trees so that others may seek solace and inspiration here, as you have. Keep this last remnant of ancient forest from slipping away so that others may enter the temple. So that others may heal in this place.
Another forest dream: A root wad from an upended tree presents a climbing challenge, like scaling a cliff, but this obstacle also offers strange rewards. Rocks wrapped in the tree roots look like eggs clutched in the talons of a prehistoric beast. Or amulets seized by the bony fingers of a witch.
The rocks may be thunder eggs: nodules filled with agates. They could be geodes, spheres that cup quartz crystals in their inner caves. Or they could be chunks of jade. Pry these rocks loose from the grip of roots. Glimpse the treasure. Stash it in your memory. Then return the stones to the fingered roots where you found them so they may stir wonder in other curious minds. Or throw the rocks into a pit, a root crater large enough to swallow a house. Make a wish as you hurl these stones into the abyss.
This pit formed when a tree that grew for centuries fell, wrenching open the earth. Centuries may pass before the forest fills this gap with soil.
After a rainstorm, the pit becomes a pool. You slip into the water and float with newts. The water is warmer than the forest air. The newts don’t seem to mind you joining them. With legs splayed and toes extended, these creatures look as though they are forever falling. They hang suspended in the pool. The water, stained by wood, is as brown as tea. You cannot see the bottom of the pit. You wonder how deep it goes.
Later in the summer, during a month of drought, you discover that the pool has drained. The moist void challenges you to descend into its depths, as if spelunking in a cave. Put on a headlamp and climb downward, into the earth. Take care that a bear isn’t denning there. A forester said that once, when he peered inside a hollow in the ground made by a fallen tree, he saw the eye of a bear blink open.
While descending into this tree pit, consider a line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake: “down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way till a void boundless as nether sky appear’d beneath us & we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity.” An immensity that shelters a bear with a blinking eye? An immensity where newts once swam in a pool? There are places in the forest that run deeper than your imagination.
What you learn in the wilds is that the world is larger than you are: more immense than your suffering, greater than your grief. The forests are filled with the sounds of creatures who called and sang long before our species learned to speak. There is music in this temple, and it is sublime.
Not only can this music heal you, it can lift you on feathered wings toward heights you didn’t know existed. Close your eyes and listen as you slip downward toward a dream.
Napping on a moss-covered log in a forest is especially stirring if the soundscape includes a Pacific Wren. When this creature flies on whirring wings, it may seem more like a big bumblebee than a bird. You would hardly feel its weight if it perched in the palm of your hand. Yet the voice of this tiny sprite is so large it fills the forest with song.
Why does the Pacific Wren, a bird no heavier than a few pennies, produce a cascade of sound? Birds vocalize not in exultation, as the poets suppose. Many of their calls warn of danger. And what of their songs? Females of many tropical bird species sing, but in northern temperate regions of this planet, males are generally the songsters. Male birds tend to sing for the same reasons that bull elk clash their antlers and silverback gorillas beat their chests: to repel rivals and attract mates.
Birdsong sounds cheerful to our brain, but the voice of a thrush or a wren determines how a contestant will fare in the cutthroat competition to pass genes on to the next generation. If birds made a habit of battling each other with beaks and claws instead of competing in singing duels, their lives would be much bloodier. Birdsong is a beautiful way to manage brutality.
Is it more than that? I keep up with the latest scientific research on birds. But while walking in the woods at dawn to listen to their music, I wonder if they sing because the splendor of the sunrise invites a response.
Some birds sing duets, and some perform as members of synchronized choruses. A Hermit Thrush, one of the world’s great vocalists, sings in two voices simultaneously—a solo songster produces overlapping notes that harmonize. The music of the Hermit Thrush has inspired symphonies.
When a friend got hearing aids, birdsong stopped him in his tracks on a forest path. Suddenly, he could savor sounds his ears had stopped detecting decades before. Tears blurred his eyes, blinding him because he could hear that sweet music.
Some scientists think our human ancestors used song to communicate before language evolved. The vocal anatomy of early hominins suggests they produced a wider range of sounds than Homo sapiens. Also, comparisons with non-human primates, our closest living relatives, show that they produce a wider range of vocalizations than we do. Maybe we sang like birds before we spoke like humans. Perhaps birds move us because their voices stir ancient memories.
To a modern human mind, bird calls and songs may seem like a beautiful babble, a background of indecipherable sound. But for most of the past 300,000 years, our species has lived close to the natural world, and fluency in the language of other species meant the difference between life and death.
Our ancestors may have been alerted to predators moving through the brush by tuning in to the calls of birds. Their songs could have led us to water and food and made us aware of changing weather and seasonal shifts. Paying attention to birds may have saved our lives as we coevolved with these winged and vocal beings. Now, watching birds and listening to them enriches our lives, keeping us connected to the last of the wilds as we clearcut the woods, fill the wetlands, and pave the plains.
Our shift to cities is so recent it constitutes a tiny sliver of our evolutionary history, like the last few seconds on a timepiece that has ticked for countless years. Wildlands are swiftly disappearing, replaced by sprawling development. What will become of us as we confine ourselves to the world we are building? Zookeepers know that animals thrive only in the habitats where they evolved. The more artificial an animal’s confines, the sooner the crazed creature dies.
This isn’t to say we should live naked in the woods. Technology is the inevitable result of the big brain and opposable thumbs that evolution endowed us with, and cities are a natural expression of our gregarious tendencies as social animals. But rare is the person who achieves happiness without following a path that leads through the wilds. And no sage arrives at enlightenment without first getting lost.
The English nature writer Roger Deakin notes, “To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn, and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost.”
After moving to the Pacific Northwest, I lost myself in forest listening. While lying on mossy logs amid the busy silence of the woods, I let my ears sample the soundscape. When I learned to pay attention to birds, my world expanded. Birdsongs that had previously blended in a jumble of background noise started to seem as distinct as the music of Beethoven and Metallica. Each song seemed as real as a rock, as tangible as a tree. It was as though I had gained an entirely new sense.
For years I had resisted birding by ear. Bird calls and songs seemed too vague to mean much, too difficult to discern. But when I started listening to what birds had to say, the woods were forever changed. Whenever I stopped running on a trail and listened, I was transported along a pathway of sound to a realm I hadn’t known existed. Birdsong showed me a dimension of nature that had remained hidden by my unwillingness to hear.
During moments of intense listening in forests, I journeyed beyond the incessant dialogue in my head, the inane chatter that numbs us all to awe. While fully immersed in listening to birds, I lost myself and gained the world. This was the greatest freedom I had found.
But what is this freedom worth if other people cannot follow the path I have pursued?
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” said civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hammer in a speech in 1971, the year I was born. Throughout my life, I have been able to access nature due to characteristics I did not choose. I did not select my genes or the environment in which I was raised. Any of us could have been born someone else. No morally sane society would construct a social system that allows a roll of fate’s dice to determine freedoms some people enjoy, and others are denied.
Access to wild spaces should be a right granted to all, not a privilege enjoyed by some. No person can fully enjoy nature until everyone can benefit from nature.
I’ve taught teenagers who live within sight of wilderness but have not had the opportunity to explore the forests and ascend the peaks. Their bodies and minds have not been able to “climb the mountains and get their good tidings,” as John Muir encouraged us to do. To children born into communities without the economic resources to enter the wilds, the Olympic Mountains of Washington State that these young people see in the distance might as well be the mythic Mount Olympus, home to the gods of ancient Greece. Lofty and inaccessible. Unattainable.
The Greeks gave us the ideal of democracy. Their noble aspiration was marred by barring many people, including women and slaves, from participating in politics. Democratizing nature by removing barriers to access is a process that must continue until all are free—until all can pursue their curiosity on outdoor adventures. Until all can play in the woods and heal in the wilds. Until all can get lost in nature so that they may find what is best in themselves.
As a species, we have come a long way from the days when members of the Miwok tribe were displaced from their land to make way for the California Gold Rush and a wilderness preserve in Yosemite Valley. John Muir called Yosemite “by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter.” Not everyone could access Yosemite in Muir’s day, nor can everyone access that temple now. We have a long way to go before all can enter.
Physical barriers like inaccessible infrastructure and lack of specialized equipment prevent people from entering the wilds. Travel costs, limited transportation, and work schedules can be prohibitive. Cultural factors such as lack of inclusivity and fear of discrimination further limit access for diverse communities.
How do we ascend the Mount Olympus of moral progress? How do we democratize nature? Follow one of the paths that have been blazed, or pioneer a trail of your own. Support programs in communities that lack access to outdoor adventure. Start an organization that ensures parks and preserves are accessible to all, regardless of background or ability. Guide children to a wild temple so they can hear the music of birds.
Stephen Grace studied prose poetry and fiction writing with Stratis Haviaras, founding editor of Harvard Review. His book, “Grow: Stories from the Urban Food Movement” won the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Some of his nature photography was recently published in the book “Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain: Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.” He gets lost often in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and is working to ensure that these forests are not lost forever.
