Scene Two: Oddity in Nature

I have a great deal of memories involving nature, many take place right in my backyard. My parents house borders a National Forest land. This is not a park, very few people wander in unless they know how to get out. Parts of the land are used as private tree farms though the evidence of any human interaction in the forest is slim. It is often only comprised of years old forest service access roads and the occasional deer path. 

Today I wandered into the forest. It had been years since I visited my favorite path that I was so familiar with when I was young. When I was ten years old I took a bright pink plastic Barbie camera out on a hike with my sister. It would take me years to develop the photos, and in high school having to get rid of the camera the roll was finally rendered. The pictures that I kept were those that seemed the most familiar. Three prints of a quiet green landscape only marred by the evidence of fire on the soft bark.

In college I would do a writing exercise that would try to describe the pictures to the best of my ability and then turn that description into a short story. Here is how I described the only pictures I kept of my backyard forest two years ago:

"Here, in the cascading morning light resides a modern Avalon, it is an island of soft greenery.  The burnt incense of the forest stands, a flock of ebony cedar trees guard the virgin forest.  Their masses raped by fire and branches weeping, wind passes through their barren sticks, click-clack, the sound of bones being broken.  The forest waits to be entered, but the fire branded matrons makes eerie company."

Today, I spent two hours wandering out into the virgin forest. The sound to pine cones falling and the occasional lizard in the brush gave little comfort to the thought in the back of my head, that nagging sensation that never leaves me, "Something is watching me."

When I was young my mother used to try and stop me from hiking, trying to be protective, in a way her annoyance  at our hobby of hiking had to do with abandonment. We would rather be in the forest than in the house where the atmosphere is filled with negativity.

"You have to watch out for bears." She would yell as we ran out the door. "There are people and things in this world that can kill and hurt you, some poor girl just got raped and murdered last week."

To which I would reply before closing the door: "Yes mother, I'll sure be sure to watch out for those rapist bears."

A person can't live in fear. I know the pressure of fear, my childhood home was filled with an abundance of fears, and warnings all the terrible things in the wide open world.

I sat out in a clearing, listening to my tape recorder. My voice stale and distant, repeating words of a short story I had written. I let the device rewind and I began to log my thoughts as I only could in the quiet space of the woods:

"It's not uncommon to travel out into the forest and find awkward things within the ground, pieces of metal and machinery abandoned in the dirt. Sometimes its not man made but beauty in  the natural formations that make the landscape seem foreign." 

But as I sit there is one landmark that seems the most odd and unnatural, my own body. I sat on a fallen log, cut down and left behind in the midst of a large dirt circle. The land uprooted years before had not been touched and new leafy growth covered the tractor marks.

 Yet there are no trees in a large radius around me. 

And I realize that maybe I never was a piece of this setting, not meant to thrive in this kind of landscape. I can feel the eyes of a hundred different kinds of animals watching me, waiting for me to vacate the landscape. 

Still I am not the only oddity in nature, I have gone hiking everyday since my arrival and found others. Evidence of a human hand in a natural landscape. A sled and water pump. 

Even so I find that natural oddities abound, like a pine needle warped by the weather.

There are so many different oddities, awkward moments, and that is what makes each moment spent in nature special. 

And I realize that the land doesn't need me, it doesn't have any concern of me, but I am constantly inspired by its fierce beauty. And because of that I need it. Its image lives in me. 

Its menagerie of natural artifacts fills the imagination with endless possibility.