Old-Growth Children
We’re chatting like vireos as we hike with long, easy strides through
rolling stands of Doug Fir. Then, at some invisible boundary, the
temperature drops in a cool breath and we descend into a basin.
The conversation halts.
Fluted trunks rise from a lawn of deep moss-green, their
canopies lost in the hanging mist that suffuses the forest with hazy
silver twilight. Strewn with huge logs and clumps of ferns, the forest
floor is a featherbed of needles dappled with sun flecks. Light
streams through holes over the heads of young trees while their
grandmothers loom in shadows, great buttressed trunks eight feet
in diameter. You want to be quiet in instinctive deference to the
cathedral hush and because nothing you could possibly say would
add a thing.
But it wasn’t always quiet here. Girls were here, laughing and
chatting while their grandmas sat nearby with singing sticks,
supervising. A long scar runs up the tree across the way, a dull
gray arrow of missing bark tapering off among the first branches,
thirty feet up. The one who took this strip would have backed away,