A Walk in the Woods
January 28th, 2024
"I want to go home!" she huffs, half joking and half serious, as she frees her foot from one rhododendron branch and crawls under the next one. Her pants are wet from crouching in the snow for the last hour as we push through the dense thickets of rhododendron and mountain laurel that separate us from the trail.
We were pushed off the trail we had been following for the morning after it tried to lead us across a creek too high to cross, still thrashing with the snow melt of last week's big snowfall. Already too far along on our hike to want to turn around for home, we choose the only other option we could see: meeting up with our trail on the other side of a half mile of backcountry in a forest known for rhododendron hells.
After a morning of walking along the footpath well-worn by other hikers, hitting the backcountry is like meeting it with a belly-flop. Smack! Momentum stopped. Where before our movement felt like gliding, soaring smoothly over the sights of the woods like an airplane while our heads floated in the clouds, our movement now requires constant attention. The odd shape of our bodies becomes apparent to me: long and rigid appendages bound together, with joints that bend in some directions but not others. I want to be a giant amoeba, nearly liquid, flowing through openings in the branches large and small, not needing to exert myself against wood and thorns but able to leave them alone, to pass through as a mere observer as we had done while hiking on the trail that morning. Our task now is to bring our will to get to the other side of this mountain ridge against an established community of woody plants, woven together as they seem to like, propping up their leaves as high as they can to receive what little sunlight can reach this hollow. Would any single bush have preferred to have been an ornamental plant in some person's yard somewhere, surrounded by grass trimmed low, with as much sunlight as it could ever want? Or does it like to be a member of a crowd?
A half hour goes by, and the little blue dot on my GPS app has hardly moved. Still, despite my scratched knees and the wet snow packed into the sides of my shoes, I am having fun. I notice I sometimes get into a flow state where my arms, legs, and head all seem to know exactly where to place themselves to weave my body through the woody maze. My mind sometimes snaps to observing the complexity of these movements and is thankful that they seem to know what to do. My movements are much more complex than when I am walking in a straight line down a sidewalk: arms loosely swaying, thighs lightly lifting my feet back and forth like a pendulum. In the rhododendron, it goes like this: crouch, bend, slither, pivot, extend, pull, crawl, hop, twist. The thoughtfulness and attention required to move here feels at times unpleasant, but that feeling of unpleasantness may be only the feeling of having to actually be present.
We find some cool sights along the way. Pillars of ice have formed on the rocky outer creekbank, perfectly clear, like the ice in a whiskey glass. I chuck a chunk of it into the creek. "Chuck a chunk!" I holler, breaking from my usual trail etiquette of being quiet and not throwing things. There is a striking view of the creek cascading over a drop in the creek bed, and I consider how most people see this waterfall from the trail on the other side of the creek and wonder whose view is better, like the Canadian and American sides of Niagara.
Eventually we can see where we will reconnect with the trail, marked by a red ribbon someone before us has tied to a tree branch. Our final challenge to reach it is to cross a swiftly-flowing run by balancing on a mossy log that fell in just the right place for us. I choose to believe in serendipity because life is more fun that way, and I thank the tree for falling here for us. Without hesitation, we step carefully over the icy water across our friendly log bridge that brings us back to the trail.
In a way, being out of the rhododendron forest and on a trail felt like we just took off a hundred-pound backpack. Gliding again. Ten miles of hiking along the footpath remained for us after that, and they went by quickly as we enjoyed the ups, downs, and turns of cruising the mountain, like taking a scenic drive. We saw grand boulders, lush bogs, red-tinted streams, and communities of red spruce standing, silent and wise, in their high places. Still, there was something worth remembering about our time tangled in the rhododendron backcountry. When I am hiking on a trail, information about the space I am in is perceived primarily through sight, but I got to know the spaces in the rhododendron more so through touch: through the rumpled texture of the bark on the vines, the waxiness of the leaves, the subtle bounce of the mud against my knees, the slushy snow meeting my ungloved hands, the pinpointed prick of the thorns through my pants, the dull thud of a thick branch springing back to hit my chest. There is something else worth noticing, too: the way that place brought me for a short time out of the realm of thoughts of the past, future, and hypothetical, and into the present moment, as quiet places always seem to do for me.
