A talkative brook, 20 feet wide and the color of burnt midnight, runs by on the left. Patches of translucent sepia glow in sun-formed patterns. The stream speaks with the voice of a thousand whispers, taking occasion to slap the air with its wetness. Ever-appearing foam streaks accentuate the lumbering, potato-like stones. A mossy stick in all its daring leaps by on the tiny rapids.
The banks on this side are tufted this year’s swamp cabbage, trillium, and Jack-in-the-pulpit, pushing their way up and through last year’s foliage. The far shore boasts a waterfall that would drench an ant, but that would do little for a chipmunk. A leaking faucet, it dribbles out of a mound of root and moss, down a velvet-green stone and into the great river, to be carried into the ocean. Two felled pine-trees, now barkless, lie half-submerged in the water’s flow with bits of twig, leaf, and heaps of dirty foam backing up like a New Jersey interstate.
Further up-stream, in a small place spared of the forest’s thickness, delicate violet’s congregate like powder-scented ladies after Sunday morning service. Fully-formed swamp cabbage suns its leaves, giving the clearing an emerald glow. Another downed pine tree spills its time-worn innards, dusted with the tell-tale red decay.
The sun is warm, the temperature fair, and a gentle breeze cools. Springtime growth is only enough to catch a glimpse of green explosions to come. The conifers are full, but only a few coin-leafed deciduous are showing their colors. A knotty pine spreads its roots away from the trunk in a vein-like mound, half-covered with moss and pine needles, like gnarled fingers of some primordial beast.
I smell earthy and fresh air, with a mellow mineral edge. The forest floor is damp and loamy, covered in fallen needles. Hulking roots, rough and solid, veins of arborious life. With crisp, crackling stems, a few weeds, long-dead, still stand. Soft, velvet and damp mossy trunks tower into dusk-gray, looking like petrified squash.
I close my eyes and hear the forest breathing; wind, unseen, through boughs of endless trees whispering in small eddies of streams. The unchanging sun gazes down while the cool touch of damp grass on my hands speaks peace.
