Shades of Black

As part of the Andrews Writers Residency, we are required to visit and reflect upon three sites in the experimental forest; a fourth site is optional. Two of these four sites have undergone some sort of intervention; in other words, wood has been extracted from them. Andrews is an experimental forest, after all, and one of the ongoing goals of research here is to evaluate the impact of different forms of harvest on the forest ecosystem.


Yesterday I wrote about the old growth forest, but that was only half of the story I had to tell. On the day we visited old growth, we also stopped by the fourth ‘optional’ site, as it is situated more or less along the same road, albeit much further up along the ridge. This site is an experimental plot where, from what I understand, wood was harvested in a selective fashion, and then the remaining forest burned in order to simulate the effect of natural fires on forest regeneration.

The feel of the site is -- as you might imagine -- completely different from old growth. The primary forest is characterized by countless shades of green, which when the sun shines are further diffracted into even subtler tones along a broad spectrum from very bright to very dark. But on the burned landscape of this fourth reflection plot, colors are not subtle and the vast shades of green have been distilled into a few dominant tones that tend toward sage.

The dense stands of trees of various ages and sizes have been replaced by a handful of giants with blackened trunks – though black is not quite a dark enough word to capture the color of the charred bark. ‘Ebony’ is too beautiful; ‘stygian’ too malevolent; ‘charcoal’ too tame. ‘Raven’, perhaps, would capture the color. But does anyone ever say ‘a raven-scorched tree’ or ‘a tree scorched to raven’?

Anyway. These giants with raven-scorched trunks are still alive, which I find remarkable. Somehow their thick shaggy bark bore the brunt of those deadly flames, protecting the living tissue in the cortex and allowing the trees to maintain admirable crowns of verdant needles. (Do trees have a way of feeling pain, I wonder? Can they, in the absence of a nervous system, still sense their bark melting, bubbling, steaming, smoking, crackling under the lick of fire?  The Magas, I think, would say 'Yes'. )


Despite the persistence of these old trees, the canopy as a whole is wide open, and that makes for a very different kind of understory, in which there is nothing ‘soft’ or ‘subtle’ as we might find in the old growth forest. The mosses and ferns have vanished, replaced by stiff prickly bushes and young firs just beginning their multi-centennial climb toward the sky. Underfoot crunch countless bare branches bleached white by fire and sun, like the scavenger-cleaned bones of some old and forgotten battlefield.

Beneath the bleached branches of dead trees, new life emerges.

I was pleased to find, in this field of destruction, plants belonging to one of my favorite families the Ericaceae (this is the same family that gives us the blueberry), growing in abundance under the mountain sun, their clusters of white bell-like flowers bringing a spot of cheer to an otherwise bleak landscape.

It was nice to run into my old friend, Ericaceae.

More than indignation, what I felt when comparing this razed patch of forest to the old growth was disappointment, a frustrated desire to find something more. If I were to return in a hundred years (or two or three), after the forest has been allowed to regenerate, that ‘something more’ would probably there, thriving in the quiet hum of a dense forest understory.

I have to admit, a single blog post is not enough to capture a day in the Andrews Forest. I’m trying to give simple snapshots here, and even so I’m two days behind on all the wonderful experiences that could be shared. Yesterday we hiked a watershed trail up through yet another tract of stunning forest, saw a multitude of fascinating creatures and then nearly got ourselves lost; well not entirely lost, but certainly headed in a direction we hadn’t quite planned. All I can say is: Thank goodness for Forest Service radios. Then today, I visited the third reflection site on Lookout Creek, which was just marvelous. That will be the focus of an upcoming post, either tomorrow or the day after.

This morning, I started on a fantasy fiction short for Briana, a scene from her youth set in the forests of East Selen. I’d give you a preview of that, except I’m not quite sure where it’s going to lead yet. Still, it’s a great feeling to take some of what I’ve experienced here and begin to channel it into a story. Writing about the magic of the forest allows me to experience it all over again.

 
This is the third installment in a week-long series on my experiences as a writer-in-residence at Andrews Forest in the Cascade Range of Oregon. 
 
Many thanks to Rafael Aguilar Chaves for the photos. 

Old Growth Forest

In my first fantasy fiction publication, the short story ‘Turning Point’ ( Zahir, Issue 17), two women struggle to understand the highland forests of Costa Rica, one from a scientific perspective, the other as an artist in the making. Their passionate focus on distinct modes of inquiry generates tension – each comes to resent the other, and neither is capable of seeing the forest through her companion’s eyes. The story ends in separation; one woman abandons her present life to disappear inside a fairy ring; the other remains faithful to her career as a scientist, yet loses herself in the endless task of cataloguing the forest’s smallest creatures.


While this denouement may seem kind of depressing, in truth both women are satisfied with their choices; both will come to know the forest in a way few others have had the privilege to experience. The real tragedy, I suppose, is that no one else will ever learn of the wonderful secrets they discover.

As we hiked through the primary forest of the Cascade Range, I was reminded of this story, and I realized that whether I enter the forest as a biologist or as an author, the challenge remains the same: How can I hope to capture this world and communicate its magnificence and complexity to others?

This is the first time I’ve been asked – formally – to study the forest from a writer's perspective, and I’ve found that my approach in the first moments of the encounter is the same:

I stop.

And then I ‘listen’. With all my senses.

From the sequel to EOLYN (currently in progress):  She pressed her hands against the rough bark, closed her eyes and heard the pulse of the tree, solid and slow, a steady current that stretched toward the sky and descended into the deepest places of the earth, a quiet murmur of indomitable strength.


It is not an easy task to listen, and it is especially difficult to listen to creatures who speak in ways completely foreign to our experience. In the world of Eolyn, Mages and Magas must learn to understand the plants, animals and rocks before they can hope to master any other form of magic. Nor do I – as the author -- make their task made simple by introducing animals that speak English; rather, the maga must come to understand each animal (or plant, or mineral) on its own terms, through its own language and behavioral patterns. This is, in essence, the same task of any modern-day biologist. What we are really trying to do, with all those instruments, data points and statistics, is translate the language of ecosystems into something that can be communicated in meaningful ways to other members of our own species.

Jewels of the forest:  rain water caught by a Trilium plant.

When I ‘listen’ to the forest, the first things I tend to ‘hear’ are the familiar – a plant that belongs to a family I recognize, for example. The way the moss hangs from the branches or covers the logs. The chill of the air. The shape of the fungi. The quiet – which, as I should point out, is not the same as silence. In a forest, sound is ever-present, yet understated. The flow of the river, the hushed sway of the canopy in response to a breeze. The rhythmic chirp of a small bird, like the intermittent squeak of a tiny gate, interrupted by the sudden chatter of another. The distant monotone trill of the varied thrush. The scratch of my pen on paper, the plasticky crunkle of my rain coat.

Now there’s a phrase: ‘plasticky crunkle’. Neither word can be found in the dictionary, but then again, much of what I would like to describe about the experience of old growth forest cannot be found in a dictionary. Imagine if we had a word for every mood, texture, sound, sensation that one experiences in the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. What a rich language ours would be.

Walking the trails through Andrews Forest sometimes leaves me at a loss for words – a terrible feeling for a writer – and my immediate response is an intense desire to create new words, new ways of saying things, so that I might capture and communicate the experience.  I will, for example, study the bark of the Douglas-fir for several minutes at a time trying to decide how best to describe it.  This inner tension between a loss for words and the need for words left me wondering today to what extent wilderness has given us our language.

How many times in our long history, has someone walked into a new territory and been compelled to invent novel words or phrases because nothing he or she had handy was sufficient to describe the plants, the animals, the personality of that particular place which had been woven by nature in all its complexity?

And if we destroy old growth forest, leaving behind only the barren earth, or monotonous stands of young plantations, do we not also obliterate the potential for new ways of communication that verdant maze might have inspired?

I don’t have answers to these questions at the moment, but I believe they are worth thinking about. 

This is the second installment of a week-long series of reflections on my writer's residency at Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon.

Many thanks to Rafael Aguilar Chaves for the photos.