Faded Glory

I am certain that I could live here forever. I could pitch a tent in the center of these snapped off cedars and wake up every morning as sunlight first perforates the game trails. Some part of me must realize this area cannot be more than a square mile but I have yet to see its borders, so my mind is free to weave miles of trail and swiftly flowing streams between its old growth trees.

My crew boss, Mike, interrupts my musing to play tour guide. He reveals my cedars to have been splintered at the hands of a microburst, a downdraft less than 2.5 miles in diameter. In those few short sentences he lets loose a pebble; it breaks the surface and sinks into the pooled up portion of runoff in my mind. A few ripples radiate, tiny but distinct: new knowledge and with it a strand of mystery lost. It toys with the perfection of this place in my mind.

It has been three days since my high school graduation, by some miracle I’ve gotten a job at Priest Lake State Park; the place that I have come to for a few weeks every summer of my life. My boss, Mike is taking the other park aides and me on a tour of Shipman Point, the nature trail opposite the campground we maintain. It lies in the low lands just off the lake’s northernmost point. Runoff comes from Lionhead Mountain miles above. Thousands of gallons of water a second force their way through every remotely low area between tree roots and boulders creating new pools and streams every year that dry up my mid-July. We are getting paid killing time walking the ancient trails admiring the thick, damp, late spring forest.

We wander farther and encounter a foot bridge crossing one of the wider sections of stream built by the workers who had my job last summer. The bridge is the familiar rust color of treated lumber. Below it a clear stream flows past the bridge’s supports, leaching invisible arsenic from the wood grain. Last summer’s workers were stoners; they grew pot in the bedroom that is now mine. They rarely completed a project and the ones they did were frivolous. Unused lumber surrounds the foot bridge. Mike goes into detail about the great lengths they went to in order to keep the bridge standing, just how far the supports extend into the ground to remain solid during high water. The color of the wood is a vibrant contrast against the green ground cover. Mike lights a cigarette. The smell of tobacco mingles with cherry Kool-aid on his breath. His K-Mart boots stamp Faded Glory in reverse on the muddy creek shore as he returns to the trail.

From there each step is something new and breathtaking. Every pool is a deep emerald green that I know exists only here, only today. I wish I was alone to appreciate the trees moaning as they rub against each other encouraged by the cool spring breeze. Every inch of soil is saturated from spring rain and runoff. I want time to bend, place one knee gingerly on the ground and press my hands into the soft soil that borders the trail, moisture seeping up to cool my palms. Even the cobwebs that cling sticky and wet to my face are welcomed and magnificent.

Our group reaches the end of the trail. A narrow rotting log crosses the rushing creek in our path. The water is too high and the walk too dangerous. We turn back the way we came.

I am less taken by the beauty this time. My eyes flash, frantic, from one mossy surface to another searching for something I’ve never seen. Everything is familiar. The beauty is watered down.

It seems impossible.

How can 30 minutes change my mind so completely and leave me so unsatisfied?

I feel a twinge of guilt for not appreciating this place as I feel I should.

I’ve known it less than an hour and already my body and my eyes, want something new, another mystery to uncover and abandon the moment I see it and tire of its beauty. This seems impossible. Maybe it isn’t newness that I am seeking. Perhaps the reason that I tire of places so easily is that I never find what I am looking for.

Nature to me is endlessly beautiful. But not beautiful alone; it is also frustrating. Nature teases me, and is smug and exclusive. My dissatisfaction is partially a matter of scale. There are trees on Shipman point that cannot be surrounded by five adults with their arms outstretched and hands joined. They are simply too large, and too old, two qualities I will never accomplish but always crave.

I want to part the branches of the largest of these trees, stand with it back to back and compare. I want the soft tip of its new growth to measure evenly with the top of my head where the ridges of my dreadlocks lie in messy rows. I want to live through four centuries growing ever more solid, my roots reaching further and deeper with every year and every rain. I want my very top to penetrate low hanging fog. And when finally I can no longer sustain my own weight and age I want to simply fall. Not lightly, not feather-like, I want to fall with force, and crush smaller versions of myself on the way down, bounce once, and leave a depression in the earth where I land. Finally, with my roots broken off because they have grown too deep to be removed, I want 5 more of me to spring out of my body, with the same desires. I want to be monumental, in size and in stability.

My frustrations with nature extend beyond impossible scale. On Shipman Point as I further explore the winding creeks and the mysterious pools left by even higher waters, I find myself oddly jealous. I realize that I misidentified my first desire. I don’t want to live here forever; I want to be here forever. In the sense that I want to exist here not as a person but as some invisible being or better yet some physical part of this place. I want to be the rock at the bottom of the pool that watches every part of life through a pulsing emerald lens. I want to be a single leaf in the yards of groundcover, my top fiddlehead green and my bottom a silvery white.

I feel left out when I am in this place. I am jealous, forced to the painful realization that I am human. It is not that I don’t believe humans have a place in nature. I do not believe that McDonalds and Microsoft have created us an unnatural species capable only of viewing nature from the comfortable confines of an SUV. Even if I immersed myself in nature, if I eliminated all things technological from my life I would still be unsatisfied. My desire is an impossibility. I would not even be satisfied if I was a deer or a bird or a rabbit. I do not want to live in nature. I want to be nature. My desire is to be inanimate, to survive season after season without sensation or risk of death. I want to be a rock or a handful of sand and move only when moved, travel by way of water, or be water, but then I fear I would never get enough of a place before evaporating or dripping away.

The physical feeling I get from this desire is somewhere near homesickness. Suddenly I am nine, away for a week at summer camp, all the kids hate me, it is raining, and I want my mom.

My insides ache.

I feel like my organs are being firmly compressed.

I have never believed in spirit, as I have never believed in god or ghosts. But there is some part of me that longs so completely, and feels so utterly cheated. I think I may be finally understanding the idea of spirit or soul. There is a thing deep inside me that is so desperate and so frustrated that it is causing my body physical pain, because it is something I can understand.

The trail is firm and not exceptionally wet. But Mike collects the group in a circle to the side where the earth is mossy and saturated. He rambles on addressing the finer details of Shipman Point history. I’m distracted by the water seeping into my boots at the seams where the rubber soles meet leather. I notice a low green ground cover over everything but the winding path. This plant is admirable in its persistence; it grows from every horizontal surface I can see. It grows from the moss on fallen trees; giant green snowflakes suspended 4 inches above the ground, perfectly still, protected by the canopy above.

I tune back into the lecture as Mike explains that years ago hunters and trappers were the only ones venturesome enough to visit places as remote as this. They were able to track the animals by studying this groundcover. The tops of the leaves are light green and the bottoms silver. When the plant is disturbed by a deer or rabbit the bottoms of the leaves show and the hunter can follow the animal’s silvery path. This is probably how these game trails developed, the animals found it safer to travel over the same bare ground, constantly disturbing it never giving plants a chance to seed and sprout. The crisscrossing pine needles here now never reveal those who walk on them.

I want a similar protection. I am ashamed at the thought of someone sensing my dissatisfaction with such a perfect place. My hands shake at the thought of confessing that I crave the city. For the first time in my life I want the comfort of drab gray buildings. I imagine cinderblocks would ease my shame. I wouldn’t be mesmerized by their beauty, their uniform lines and pocked texture, but nobody would expect that of me. I wouldn’t expect that of me. My chest is growing tight; my lungs push against my shell when I breathe.

Some children run to their parents or to their bedrooms when they are scared, some hide in the closet. When I was young, out the back door, was my safe place, as well as my playground and the place I slept as soon as the spring rains had retreated.

On Shipman Point surrounded by winding creeks, smooth polished river rocks and coworkers who I am sure are just as taken by all of this beauty the second time around. I find myself hopelessly jaded. For once in my life I want nothing more than to leave nature. I am experiencing the most beautiful world that I have ever seen and I want to weep for the shame of not appreciating it.

I begin to struggle with my former self, the girl who left the house every morning in the summer and did not return until the moon was out and her dinner cold. She is, after all, the reason that I am here. She is the one who dreamed of spending all her life in the woods surrounded by streams and cedars. I wish she could have known that I’d be the one living her dreams. I am the one realizing that the culmination of a childhood spent wishing for total immersion in nature is a lifetime of dissatisfaction. Wishing for anything is dangerous. Imaginations as wild as this one create impossible expectations.

Daylight shocks me as we emerge from the false dusk of the dense forest. Our crew converges on the gravel road that borders Shipman Point. I wonder if anyone else pondered life altering matters in the past thirty minutes. Am I the only one who has just discovered that their dreams have been irreversibly altered? Is there anyone else among us who feels ashamed? Some part of me, perhaps my childhood, is pulling me back into the comfortable darkness of the forest. Maybe I can be satisfied with a little more time and a little more scale and a little more age. The ground hardens beneath my feet as game trail turns to roadside. I feel the gravel beneath the worn parts of my boot soles. We return to the shop; the cement walls are cold and unwelcoming. I climb the stairs to my room. The floor is thinly carpeted like an office building, like the city.