Faerie Hunting

The woods in the deep places--not far back, where no one has ever tread, but far enough that few people bother--are full of the sense that Moses must have had once he backed out of the cleft in the rock. The beautiful mystery and awe at that which had been here but a moment before paired with the keen awareness of the no longer.

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Here, near the top of Mt. Battie, I'm caught up in a different cloud, one of the ordinary everyday ones, except I'm not in an airplane and I can feel it passing over the mountain. It has embarked on a journey that no mere hill can disrupt, though it makes its way like a river, around, passing slowly but surely without demanding that the mountain move... Though perhaps a million years of rain and wind and strong tree roots will move the mountain all the same, and then even the low clouds will look down as they pass over unencumbered.

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There were many naturally occurring beauties, but some of the most enchanting involved some human trace--a bridge, even a corduroy bridge made of sawn birch logs, can be a lovely punctuation to a little rill that sings quietly over rocks and between low, dark evergreens. (If Barthes's punctum can escape the photograph and hide in the world that lives and dies, I think perhaps a bridge in the woods would be one of its manifestations.)

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A river weaving through a misty coastal plain appears out of air thick with chilly morning damp. It would be a quiet sight, except for the piercing whiteness of the birch trunks that proclaim the worthiness of Here.

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The ravens suit the north country, a space where humans are most noteworthy for their absence and all of the animals--bald eagles, moose--are somehow larger. Where woods and fog defy Donne's immortal rejection of absolute solitude (no man is an island, but can we lose again what we have lost by forgetfulness?), the raven is the spirit of the space, flying always by itself with its black feathers sharp against the pale bleach of a cool world.

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You start to believe in the reality of nowhere when you drive long enough through fog. Your surroundings, such as they are, barely change. Signs pass, suggesting that if you veer a bit to the left or the right, you may eventually happen upon somewhere, but for the time being, you're probably more likely to hit a moose than you are to see and speak words of greeting to a fellow human being.

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I made the mistake of driving without a map. Strange, how lines and dots that can only be called representational in a cartographic wonderland nonetheless serve to make me feel at home in the world, if only by connecting my here with a somewhere else. We are all contained, not by the internet which still falls short of complete comprehension, but by the map, which leaves no stretch of land uncharted. Though abstract and "untrue" in that way, its lines wrap us in their arms and save our minds from slipping off terra firma into a wild, fantastical sea.

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What is a trail through the deep woods without human eyes to map human intentions? A bare, hardened stretch of dirt indistinguishable from the forest floor? But no, this takes too high a view of human cognition vs. animal awareness. I have heard of deer paths, which perhaps are barely visible to any but the experienced tracker. Once, these ways were widened to make space for other travelers, and now no trace of the original light-footed pathfinders remains. Perhaps the essence of trailblazing lies in an ability to identify and widen the way that is already there, rather than some brash, foolhardy determination to plow headfirst through unbroken wilderness and thereby to eventually bash one's brains against the unbreakable.