The path here forgets its own edges in May. The ferns come up overnight along the soft side, and the moss creeps in from the wet side, and somewhere around the third bend the trail is no longer a trail but a kind of suggestion the wood is making to you. You take it on faith. You walk down the centre of the suggestion and trust that someone will have walked here before you, the way you trust that a sentence will end before it loses you.
The new beech leaves are the colour of nothing else. They are not green yet — they are pale chartreuse, almost yellow where the light comes through, and they have a slight translucence that means the canopy at this time of year is closer to a paper lantern than a roof. You walk for an hour and your skin takes on the colour. Your hands, looking down, are vaguely the colour of a leaf.
The Kamenice runs cold even now. It comes off the sandstone in dozens of small springs and only loses its winter at midsummer, so even on a warm afternoon you can put a hand in and your knuckles ache by the time you count to twenty. I do count, sometimes, just to mark the place.
14:08 · The first turnThree things happen at the first turn that I would not have known to notice ten years ago. The river makes a different sound when it splits around an old log. The light moves differently when there is one large gap in the canopy versus three small ones. And the air, very briefly, smells like the inside of a piano — wood, and metal, and something patient.
The understory is the layer of the forest that exists below the canopy and above the floor — a slow, patient room. It is where most of the wood's actual events happen.
I keep coming back to that word — understory. It is the right word. It contains its own quiet. The forest above and below it both make sense without it, but it is the place where most of the wood actually happens: where the saplings wait, where the birds nest at a height people can almost see, where the wind is broken down into a thing the smaller plants can survive.
A list of greens, in the order I saw them.
Pale chartreuse of the new beech, almost lemon at the edges. Olive-grey of the older alders, which have already finished growing and are working now on the season after. Deep moss green of everything below the knees — a colour with weight. The pine green of the spruce on the far bank, which the eye reads as blue if you let it. And the strange near-yellow green where the sun catches the underside of a beech leaf and bounces back up to the next one, so that the canopy seems to be lit from within itself, like a lamp.
There is an hour in any long walk where you stop being someone who is walking and become, briefly, a person the wood is letting through. You feel it as a small relaxation in the shoulders. You stop watching for the next thing and just see the present one. Today it came around three-thirty, in a patch of ferns where the light was coming down in thin warm rods and the river was just out of sight but very close.
I sat on a moss-covered rock that was almost certainly older than the trees around it and counted the things I could hear. The water, of course — but the water in three or four different voices depending on which stones it was talking to. The wind in the high spruce, which is a long sound, almost a sigh. The wind in the alders, which is a quicker, papery sound. A thrush, very close. A jay, very far. And the small, almost-imagined sound of insects, which at this time of year is more like a tone than a sound.
A heron passed over once, very slowly, and the shadow of it moved across the water and I thought — this is the thing. Not the heron. The way the shadow of it moved across the water. The thing the wood was doing without trying.
What I brought back.
A leaf, pressed in the back of the notebook, already going the wrong colour. The sound, still in my head, of the water around the third bend. A small pebble that the river had worked on for what was probably longer than human time and had decided was finished. And the word chartreuse, which I had not used in a long time, and which now I will use again.
I will come back here next week. The leaves will be darker. The path will have less edge. The river will have a slightly lower voice. None of this is a metaphor for anything. The wood is only doing what it always does. We are the ones who have to keep coming back to notice.