It is late spring or early summer. I’m six, or maybe seven, and it is time for the Sunday afternoon family walk, a beloved German tradition. We live in a village in northern Hesse, pretty much in the middle of Germany, surrounded by fields and pastures, the forest about a kilometre away in every direction.
As most often, our destination is the forest with its many walking trails, the walk through the fields to get there rather uneventful, a necessary but not particularly enjoyed part of the whole. Yet here, too, my brother and I find things that interest us: fragile snail shells striped in hues of yellow, beige, pink, pastel green and brown, probably the first object of my not-even-now stilled craving to collect beautiful things in nature, also—more exciting—snail shells with their occupants at home, the pale body filling the entrance but hidden otherwise. For them, we need to sing a song to entice them to show themselves to us: “Schneck’ im Haus, Schneck im Haus, strecke deine Hörner aus” (snail in the shell, snail in the shell, stretch out your horns). With a bit of patience and after a few rounds of the ditty we watch with great expectation how the first ‘horn’ (snail feeler) appears tentatively from the entrance, followed by another, then the two smaller ones below. Finally the whole length of the body is stretched out on our palm, the tickle an exquisite thrill. Slowly, slowly the snail makes its way across, leaving a faint trail of slime glittering in the sun. ‘Time to put them back,’ my parents tell us. ‘They need to be with their friends, and we want to reach the Wald--the forest--before it gets too late.’
The forest … for me, that word has always contained so much more than trees. It is a place where every sense gets filled to the brim, a place to turn to when I’m happy or sad, when I need solitude, breathing space, recharging.
My first memories, of course, are of the forests I started to come to know on those Sunday walks with my parents and brothers. Soon I could tell the names of the trees, knew them by their leaves or needles, their bark, their cones or fruits, acorn or beech nut mostly, even the seedlings that grew from those fruits. German forests have been cultivated for centuries and are harvested regularly, and what I knew as forest then is not what I find here in North America, of course, or in South and Central America where we’ve travelled quite extensively. Until I came here, a forest was what I had known as a child and adolescent: mixed forest, mostly, with beeches, spruce, fir, pine and oak trees, some birch, maples and sometimes chestnuts on the perimeter, with little underbrush, the deciduous forests filled with light, trees with all the space they need to grow thick trunks and huge crowns, evergreen forests dark and mysterious, the scent heavenly. The trails we walked were ‘roads’ to transport logs though I didn’t know it then: for us they were ‘Waldwege’, forest trails, and I’m sure I believed them to be there solely for people to walk on. Some of them stemmed from the times when the transporting was done with horses, just wide enough for what they were intended, often covered in leaf litter.
I loved—still love—to push away the top layers and expose
the rotting, composted matter underneath, bury my face in it, breathe in the
fecund smell of forest soil. I could lie there and feel like a part of it, the
faint rustle of leaves stirring in the breeze, a trunk moaning softly, small
creatures around me I knew were there but couldn’t see most of the time: a
beetle making its way to who-knows-where, a spider suspended from a branch. The
longer I stayed still, the more this world revealed itself to me.
Birds belonged here: black-capped and spruce chickadees, green finches and chaffinches, the Eurasian jay, ‘police of the forest’, as my dad told me, warning all the other creatures of danger.
I can’t forget about other plants in the forest: mosses, mushrooms, ferns, and tree fungi, all of them a never-ending source of wonder. How many kinds are there of each, and how they are all adapted to the exact place I find them, their place in the world. What could be softer than a bed of moss? What could be more beautiful than this bed of moss in bloom, the tiny blossoms lit by a bundle of rays of sunlight that has found its way through the spruce boughs?
In my teens the forest became my favourite place to take
Moni, the Haflinger mare after whom I looked while her owner worked as a
volunteer in Kenya. To gallop through a beech forest on an early autumn morning,
the trees lifting slowly out of the fog, dew-lined spider webs glistening in
the morning sun, the smell of decay a heady perfume—I knew that this was where
I belonged and was meant to be.
All this, of course, is part of my childhood, my growing up, and thus tinged with the tenderness and sense of belonging of memory. My love for forests, no matter where I find them, is undiminished, however. I think if I could choose one to be my favourite it would be the coastal forests of BC and the northwestern US, but since here in the prairies, or rather the parkland, is where I live I am happy to be able to enjoy my own piece of ‘magic forest’, an about 40 acre piece of bush consisting mainly of aspen, black poplar, birch and alder, on one of our quarters, about three miles from home. Here, I used to make my way through hazel, wild rose, gooseberry and dogwood underbrush to get to a group of birches, just to sit at their feet and enjoy their company. One year our kids decided to give me a special Christmas present and make walking easier for me. They had some cat work done close by, and our oldest son walked through ‘my’ piece of bush and marked a trail for the mulcher. That was probably the most wonderful Christmas gift I received as an adult.
Not long ago
this was followed by a birthday present: on a winter walk I found a bench along
the trail, perfectly situated to overlook a wetland where marsh marigolds bloom
in profusion and frogs hold their evening choir practice in the spring. I know
I will sit here often, surrounded by the trees which are, like me, rooted in
this soil.
