“A smile fell in the forest. Irretrievable! And how will your night dances lose themselves? Such pure leaps and spirals- surely they travel the world forever.” -Sylvia Plath
I remember the prancing smoke of the only forest fire I’ve ever encountered. I was a passenger, moving through proud, towering trees of eastern Oregon with my first Love, Anna, on the way to her family’s land. We passed llama farms, squinting, on the lookout for spitting mammals and the rustic structure we’d sleep in for two nights. Our headlights made the midafternoon ghostly. We strayed from the living world as our eyes strained to see through haze and wooded height.
While her family originated from Mount Hood, they also owned this land in eastern arid Oregon. It was August, and after a week together in the wet, Willamette Valley, we kicked off our cross country road trip in her 1987 5 speed lemon Toyota Tercel station wagon. Our plan was to spend a couple days in the desert. There, I broke in a new pair of boots bought the previous month in the Middle East, blistering my right heal to the bone on a long rocky hike. We learned how to change a tire in Oregon’s dust too. Anna’s mom demanded we prepare, get to know the donut, wheel, nut, wrench before driving two thousand miles back to school in Asheville, North Carolina. Both seniors, previously content relying on our bikes to navigate blooming academic careers, my Love was about to begin nine months of student teaching and needed a vehicle.
Oregon was a new beginning. A start of adulting in starchy, tall, structured ways. The dryness of our last days there a measurement and metaphor for how intensely we’d now have to compete and collaborate for light, water, nutrients, success. Like this new stage of life, the Pacific northwest was unfamiliar. I’d only visited the year prior just months after Anna and I started dating as our junior year ended. Everything about the western part of the state was wet, green, fecund, wild. I remember eating snap peas and raspberries out of her mom’s garden, greens up to my shoulders. Both of her parents lived simply. The values they’d passed along to their four kids apparent in their small homes and indigenous leaning ways of knowing the land, using only what they needed.
It was 1999, and I drank in every new opportunity that presented itself. In July, I studied in Palestine and Israel. A dream since I was in fifth grade, the land there is similar to Oregon. Rocky, bone dry and brittle trees like cypress and juniper dot the horizon across the region. Outside of the ecumenical school I stayed at, living with Jews, Christian and Muslim k-12 students, I walked empty river beds. Yet a lushness followed us as we learned about peace from a Palestinian priest who’d given his life to mending the conflicts of sacred land. I remember most the emotional fires there- people fighting for freedom all around us and the celebratory noise of weddings that stretched from sundown to sunrise weeks at a time.
Fire is about rebirth. During August, this time of harvest, as acres and acres burn across North America, I’m reading Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. Suzanne is the foremost expert in plant communication and intelligence. She’s proven trees are not simply a source of timber or pulp but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life. Her work has elevated the ideas that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives no different from our own.
Moored by memories of Oregon, peace work ,and Suzanne’s science, I feel my vulnerability as smoke finds us here on the bigLake and I listen to surreal stories from out west. I cried heavy, loud tears this weekend about our forests and the ancient knowing we’re losing by the minute. I hold on to how ecosystems are similar to human societies- built on relationships. The stronger those are the more resilient the systems. We adapt, our genes evolve, and we learn from experience as we evolve. These forests are older than I can possibly imagine. As I age, my trust deepens in the fact that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Our systems constantly develop into something resilient, self organizing, more intelligent.
I’ll keep going to the forest to remember our individual and collective consciousness is growing. While the earth burns, I know the fiery seeds of change in each of us are bright and will travel the world forever.