The Furious Spinner

I'm hoping to get work done on my novel this week, so here's an essay from Falling: A Memoir in Nature. This one is from April 2002, and it's the first time we've seen a deer's head orchid. Enjoy!

April 22, 2002

Monday Mario and I walked the upper falls trail at Falling Creek. We followed the path into the quiet tangled woods. Mario stopped at a fallen Douglas fir and counted the rings.

Two hundred and sixteen rings.

I looked up at a fir next to me. Its girth was nearly twice that of the fallen tree. Was it then 400, 500 years old? I could not see the end of it—or was it the beginning? I supposed the end of it was beneath my feet. How deep did the roots go? Did they spread out and meet with the roots of other trees, wrap around each other and exchange information and nutrition like some species of trees did? A close-knit community underneath it all.

This Douglas fir had weathered all kinds of...storms.

“How do you do it?” I asked the tree. “How do you make a life?”

Put down roots.

“Find a place and stick with it,” Mario said outloud.

Mario and I looked at each other.

We had gotten the same answer.

Mario gave me a look that seemed to say, “What else would a tree say?”

I had tried to feel at home here—at home anywhere—but I most often felt uprooted. Root-less.

We continued our walk. Mario spotted a lone fuschia-colored flower. Five petals grew straight up and a pale red pouch drooped from the midst of the petals. I wondered what kind of tiny magic was hidden in that flowery pouch. Yellow violets began popping up. Flowers of the fairies. They looked delicious. On occasion, I had sipped a cup or two of fresh violet tea and noshed on violet leaves and flowers.

Perhaps we were in Fairy Country. Bigfoot country for certain. Some people believed Bigfoot was the Northwest equivalent of an Irish fairy. Others thought s/he was an “undiscovered” animal species. Some Native American tribes believed s/he was a spirit and if you saw her, it was not good news: it meant things were out of balance and the proverbial shit was about to hit the fan.

When I mentioned Bigfoot to people who did not live in the Pacific Northwest, they looked at me as though I were a crazy person. Was I really seriously discussing Bigfoot?

Yes.

The United States was one of the few places on the planet where a belief in fairies—or pixies, hobgoblins, spirits, invisibles—was not prevalent.

At least in the Pacific Northwest, we had Bigfoot—whether s/he was a monster, spirits, fairy, or unclassified ape. S/he was part of the real.

It was illegal in the county where I lived to kill Bigfoot. It was an actual law. I wanted to feel at home in a place where it was a crime to harm Bigfoot.

The following day I returned to Falling Creek—this time to the lower falls trail—with my friend Linda. Neither of us had slept much the night before, and we moved (and felt) like slugs coming out of a drunk. But the cold morning air was refreshing, it was sunny, and I wanted to take some photos.

As we were about to step onto the trail, a lone woman walked out of the woods. We greeted one another and talked about the beauty of the place, invoking the word “sacred” in hushed tones.

Wasn't all of Nature sacred?

Something about this place...

Listen.

“I never tell people about this place,” I said.

“You don’t?” the woman said.

“It may be selfish, but too many places I know have been spoiled by fame,” I said.

She nodded. “I agree. Have you walked the upper falls trail?”

“I’ve walked it a couple of times,” I said, “but never to the end. We went there yesterday, actually, walked about an hour and turned back. We weren’t sure how long it was.”

“I can tell you that,” she said. She went to her car and pulled out a booklet and flipped through it until she got to the section on Falling Creek.

“Upper falls. 8.7 miles,” she said. “One way.”

Good thing we had turned back yesterday.

We said good-bye to the woman, and Linda and I started down our 1.7 mile trail.

Linda touched nearly everything in the woods. Every leaf, trunk, flower, lichen, fungus, blob of guck. She was fearless. She plucked, too. If she wanted a cutting for home, she took it. She knew what was rare and shouldn’t be transplanted. Still, I sometimes cringed. I rarely took anything from the woods.

Linda began naming the various plants for me as we walked past them. I asked about the conifers; I had trouble distinguishing many of them from each other. Apparently it was something that frustrated many naturalists and botanists. Linda started pointing out which were which, then hesitated, laughed, and said she wasn’t sure either.

We walked slowly. No destination. We wanted to be on the trail. To be in this place. Linda stopped every few feet sometimes, pointing flora out to me. I was grateful for the leisurely pace. I began to take notice of things I didn’t usually see as I hurried to the end of the trail.

We stopped to touch the strips of gray bark peeling from a red cedar.

“I wish you could smell this,” Linda said. “It’s wonderful.”

We pet the flat green sprays of cedar leaves. Most Northwest totem poles were carved from these great cedars.

Linda and I had become friends several years ago when we formed a group to fight the county’s pesticide spraying policies. She was getting chemotherapy at the time for breast cancer and often stopped at our house with her then-preadolescent daughter, Serena, on the way back from her treatments in Portland. We had not succeeded in changing much of what the county did. Both of us became disillusioned by the entrenchment and idiocy of the good ol’ boy network, but we became close friends.

Unlike many of my acquaintances, Linda never had to work me into her busy schedule or pencil me into her datebook. She enjoyed my company and liked doing things on the spur of the moment, as I did. Our views of the world were similar, although she believed illnesses were great lessons we asked to learn. I definitely disagreed with that view, so we kept mum on that particular subject with each other.

Mario had a friend who said he had too many friends. His biggest complaint was that he did not have enough time to do what he really wanted to do because he felt he had to attend to the needs of his friends. Every time he told us this I wondered what it was like to have too many friends. A bushel of friends. A ton of friends. I tried to imagine letting go of any of my friends. My friends were hard-won, deeply loved, and few and far between. Some of my closest friends irritated me a good percentage of the time, but I figured I irritated them at least as much so it was a wash. When I finally considered someone a friend, I held onto them. We held onto each other.

Linda and I walked until we reached the log with the pumpkin-colored wedding bell mushrooms on it. Sunlight poured into the spot. Linda sat on a sun-soaked log and began looking through her flora identification books while I took macro photographs. The bells had already started to dry out even though only four days had passed since Mario and I had first seen them.

I sat next to Linda and drank some water. She showed me photographs of flowers in her book.

“We should see this,” she said.

She pointed to a photo of the fuchsia-colored pouch flower we had seen yesterday. Deer’s-head orchid, or Fairy Slipper.

“We saw that yesterday,” I told her. “Just one.”

“Where there’s one there’s more. You have to keep looking.”

Eventually we got up from our sunny spot and headed back toward the car. Linda looked tired. She was still recovering from a broken wrist. She lived on a farm with Serena where they raised sheep, chickens, geese, rabbits, and dogs, and grew much of their own food.

I slowed my pace to match hers.

“Wouldn’t it be great to come out here during the full moon?” I said. “Do cougars hunt at night?”

“Yes,” she said, “but you don’t ever have to worry about a cougar hurting you. If you come face to face with one, say hello and carry on.”

I wasn’t sure I could actually do that, but I nodded. Linda touched an old growth as she passed it.

I often thought of leaving this area, finding a place that was more pristine, less troublesome, with more culture and diversity. Someplace where I felt more at home.

If I moved away, I would have to leave behind this creek, the falls, Linda, Serena, pikas, and Bigfoot.

I didn’t know if I could live again in a place where the people didn’t believe in fairies. Or Bigfoot.

Linda gave the old Douglas fir a hug.

It had taken me all my life to find another person who hugged trees.

Yesterday the old Doug had told me to put down roots and find home.

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All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.