Wildernessed
The calming peace the forest brings.
These past few weeks I’ve done my best to escape north to our cabin in the Adirondack mountains, to fish, sail, hike—just marvel at the night skies, to fall asleep to the indescribably provocative, echoing loon-song or brash hoot owls who sometimes come so close their calls and murmurings reverberate through the pine board wall interior of the cabin and startle you out of any deep-woods reverie.
I try to get there a lot in the fall because I know everything is ending soon. The lush ferns that surround the cabin are mostly brown and dying, each chilly fall night claiming another patch of them. The leaves, which perhaps due to dry conditions never really achieved their usual magical fall glow, now coat the forest floor, giving my footsteps a percussive, rhythmic sound as I move through all that still-beauty. The light is thinner somehow, and even on warm days, which there have been plenty of this fall (I even took a frigid, quick swim a week or so ago after a long, sweaty hike), the warmth feels false, hiding just behind it the chill of night, the impending chill of winter.
A few days ago, I bushwhacked along a stream and into my “secret valley” where last year at around this time a large buck in full antlered splendor came from the pine shadows, silently high-stepping through the tall-dying fall grasses to sip then pause to look up cautiously from the tiny stream there. It was quite some time before the winds shifted, and he caught my scent, or something unseen to me caught his large, wary eyes, and he bounded away in one, two great leaps into the thick of the forest, still somehow without making a sound.
I feel so utterly alone here. A lone chick-a-dee flitted away calling out an angry “chick-a-dee” when I arrived to nuzzle up against the pine-needle-littered embankment that sits just a human body length or two above the hidden valley floor. It’s not a valley really, more just a clearing left by the eons’ meanderings of a stream not large enough to have a name, the stream that passes beneath a snowmobile trail bridge not far from here that my dogs love to leap from and splash about and lap up large mouthfuls of Adirondack runoff—incautious, aloof, as unlike the wild buck as you can imagine.
I sat and listened to the wind, the scraping of leaf fall, the many sounds of the stream as the sunlight came and left, came and left, the wind pushing clouds steadily along.
I waited for some grand insight to descend. In a place of such deep beauty, it seemed that should occur, but it didn’t, or maybe it did, and I was simply not perceptive enough to catch it.
One insight I did come to: stepping into the wilderness, especially moving in off the human-made trails, roads, walking through spider webs and saplings and thin sharp dead pine boughs, finally finding a comfortable place to rest and watch and listen…does something to you, pulling you momentarily (and completely) out of the rush of your life.
It didn’t surprise me a few days later when I read about what the Japanese call “Shinrin-yoku,” which literally means “bathing in the forest atmosphere—“Shinrin” meaning “forest,” “yoku” meaning “to bathe.” I remembered from my study abroad in Denmark the Danish word “hygge,” which has to do with a deep feeling of comfort and calm. A little research brought me to the Swedish word, “lövskogsensamhet,” or “the feeling of being alone in a deciduous forest. The Germans have “waldeinsamkeit,” “the feeling of being alone in the woods.
It seems to me we should have a word for it in English as well. I offer: woodcalmed, forestented, wildernessed.
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My family has always referred to a walk in the woods as a woodsoak. 🍁🍁🍁
Rooted?