Artifacts

In New Brunswick, I soon learned “bush” means something quite different from the lilac, rhododendron, forsythia, or hydrangea bushes of the south.

New Englanders do talk about bushwhacking, meaning to leave a path and find your own way through the trees; but bush, as wilderness, was something I had not encountered until I came north. To “go in the bush” sounded odd, to my ears, like floundering in the branches of a vast garden shrub. But this, it seemed, was what it was like to be in an apparently endless forest, as if you had become tiny and found yourself clambering about in a world of leaves, twigs, and insects.

In cities, we learn to pinpoint location by remembering businesses, parks, buildings: this is the block with the coffee shop, this is the street with the museum. In the country, we read trees. Here is the stretch with the poplar stands. This is the place with the third-growth fir, so dense not even a deer could force its way through. There, exposed to the wind, are the grey maples, stumpy, like miniature trees. Here, for miles, is a plantation, row on row of spruce trees, all the same age. There are the tamaracks, twisting out of the marsh, yellow-needled in November.

The predominant sound, in a forest, is made by trees; they rush and roar against the air, restless as the sea. Trees transmute the hillsides, subtle as chameleons, shifting endlessly through the spectrum, hard grey in winter, soft pink in spring. On summer nights the air is sharp with spruce resin; in autumn, when the hills are hidden behind hanging clouds, every water drop carries the scent of leaf mould, of decay and rebirth.

At first, learning a new land, I did not connect the smell of the forest with my tea kettle spurting steam on the wood stove. The pervasive essence of trees was not yet part of my concept of home, like the geraniums on the windowsill, like toast, or wooden spoons. The woods were far way beyond the fields; our house sat solitary in the grass, every tree banished, except for the maples which stood like schoolchildren at the edge of the lawn.

One morning, that first summer, I leaned in the doorway of the farmhouse, hands around a mug of tea, watching the sun rise over the spruce trees. I decided to take the morning off, to head out over the fields and explore the woods. I thought I’d take a book and prop myself against a tree: read for a while, perhaps, by a stream.

The woods were rough, ragged, impassable in places. Most of the firs were dead or dying, their bud tips hollowed out spring after spring by an epidemic of budworm. The weakened trees went down easily in winter storms. Dead firs piled across one another like Lincoln Logs, and grey beard moss claimed the carcasses. I couldn’t walk; I scrambled. Save for the logging roads, or clearings where forgotten piles of logs rotted into the soil, there were no easy paths. I tripped on fallen branches, slipped on half-buried mossy rocks. Crouched, arms pushing aside alders, I fought my way along a stream that emptied into a marsh, blackflies chewing my neck and clinging to the soft skin behind my ears. There were animal trails everywhere, but they overlapped, making a wandering, directionless maze that led into thickets too dense to enter.

I carried a backpack containing a paperback book and a thermos of tea. When I reached a grove of beech and maple on the first ridge, I stopped; it was high enough that I could see, if not the farms and fields of the valley below, at least the shining brightness of clear space. Panting, insect-bitten, scratched, I leaned against a beech, listening to the blood rush in my ears.

I looked at the bowl I had just climbed. Leaves rustled high above the slender trunks of young trees, the breeze made a flicker of light and shadow, fingering through the ferns; and I realized I could not distinguish this particular hollow from any other. I did not know the hillside where trillium grew, could not find the tree with the witch’s butter, or the dried-up brook bed, or the place where the deer yarded.

If I continued, there would be more hardwood stands like this one, more close-standing spruce in damp river valleys, marshes spiked with dead trees, raspberry-choked clearings, old clear-cuts tossing with fireweed and bowled with a hard blue sky, and then a ridge of birch again, another clump of spruce, on and on with no centre, no pattern, no beginning, and no end.

The quiet became suspect, taunting, and I felt the cold edge of unknowing. I was afraid to go on, afraid to go over the next ridge. Somewhere, deer stood frozen, waiting. Rabbits had gone to ground. Black bear, moose, foxes, coyotes, snakes: all knew, or so I felt, my exact place. All smelled my alien heat. All paused, sensing, waiting. The rustling of the leaves came in waves as the wind ebbed and strengthened, capriciously. It was a sound that excluded me. It was not like the whish of wind coming through a screen door; it was without comfort or reference.

This was a world of wariness; the soft-footed coyotes would flicker easily among the grey trunks, coats dappling, shifting, paws stealthy and silent; their quick steps would pick around this tree, steal down through the shadows of the bowl.

I had crossed a boundary. Even though I might see the remains of humans — clear-cuts, saw marks, barbed wire embedded in bark — this was a place that followed its own course as steadily as the rivers that flow beneath cities. The heart of these woods was hidden, buried deep. I could walk here, but until I had watched and listened, patiently, and without expectation or design, until then I would move as if through the corridors of a museum, viewing artifacts that my hands could not remember, my soul could not celebrate.

On this day, leaning exhausted and bewildered against the beech tree, I felt the weight of the forest and knew why the early people had removed it so far from their farms. I felt its danger; I understood its affront to human sensibility. This was not a place for us. I was alone here, and utterly without importance. This was not the somnolent paradise of my childhood. The woods are to work in. You don’t go walking there. I rose abruptly and shouldered my pack, slipping, ducking, scrambling noisily as I picked my way down the hill. I felt my self, and confidence, returning, bit by bit, as my feet crunched along a gravel road made by humans, as I swung along the edges of fields, as I turned my back on the wild.