I sit with my back to the shade of an old forest, my butt cushioned by beak moss. Early morning smells like long angles of sunlight shattering on alder leaves, becoming bright shards that tumble into a fast creek. Water sings over salamander-slick cobbles, furrowing this consternation of fifty-million-year-old mountains. Ears gather the tweet and burble of Song Sparrow in thimbleberries to my right, the trill of Lewis’s Woodpecker flapping like a rose-breasted crow into the big Douglas-fir behind me. Eyes and skin register a down-canyon breeze dancing to creek music, swaying the leaves of bigleaf maple, osoberry, hazel, and windflower.
After three covidian years, I return to this place above a wild creek with students who help me stay young. But this morning the canyons of my brain register the years. This class could be the children of those first students 26 years ago. Life winds backward, becoming a stream of memory and stories and questions. Somber conifers, what else would you want from me? I’ve already promised you the gray sift of my ashes, bits of bone that will dissolve in winter rain, mineral transiting to root to trunk to overstory shading the living wetness of dead logs. What now, furrowed trees? What now, while I still have agency over this small slice of infinity? What more than my exhalations, the carbon in my breath inhaled by your needles, recorded in the long legacy of wood? What will be contained in the remaining rings of my life? Someday maybe I could break off at the roots and tip over, become a haven for Oregon slender salamanders.
The forest is stories. Overstory, understory, trees speaking through roots in words measured by months, sentences that become years. Trees who know the long view of stationary beings, centuries of adherence to place. They exhale, whisper that it’s time. Time to transform past into present. Time to send memory downstream into rill and riffle, a turbulence capturing airborne oxygen that bathes the blood-filled gills of trout, tailed frog tadpoles, and all others who will live on. This is the flow of memory and return. This is the best version of truth that I know.
[NOTE: For about a decade I’ve engaged my Amphibians and Reptiles of Oregon class in two creative writing pieces based on a one hour solo meditation in the field. The Deal: I write one at the same time and read it in class before theirs is due. I believe there are many paths to knowing. Returning is my first offering for 2022.]
I read your lyrical description of your surrounds while crows get drunk, fight, caw, and fall from our cherry tree. I need to know what beak moss is and fall in love with that Lewis Woodpecker. Your students are so lucky to have you. Generationally, we note our place in this world. I have come to love my wisdom and crone status. You bring to their attention the way of the elder like a Trojan Horse, slipping it to them in an understory of language. So happy you exist.
You've done it again, Tom. I simply love your use of language and the way you touch on so many important issues. Your students are lucky to have you and to see how you experience this world.