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Entering the forest with your back
to Bell Common, skip out of your other self.
You are not who you were on the High Road.
In two hundred yards, ignore the waymarker.
Despite what they say, you can take this path,
that path, it doesn’t really matter.
by Lori Mairs:
Uphill from the chilled dark of the cedars and into the warm light of the desert scape above, it is here on this parapet that the formations of hoodoos begin and end and where the prickly pear cactus grows. In some parts of Woodhaven there's a visual and temperate signature where distinctive bi-zones intersect, where the crossing from one to the other sometimes happens within eight or ten feet. This is one of them.
The air is still cool from a surprising mid-March storm that thrashed down from an angry black sky. Window-rattling booms of thunder, sheets and strips of lightning ripped beyond the width of the horizon with a wall of hail pelting anything unsheltered below it.
I like to walk after big weather. Mostly the walk is driven by curiosity and a pull to witness the affects of a wild that can't be tamed. This part of the dry interior is a desert knoll and the highest point of the trail system inside the fence line. It's a sheer drop, sixty feet or so in some places, to the forest floor. Steep-sloped honeyed-grey grasslands are still flattened from a winter dump of snow. On the forest floor, dirt changes from mottled grey-rust to a thick reddish brown where the bio-zone switches from fir-cottonwood to cedar-cottonwood. The first has sparse and evenly-spaced trees while the latter hangs with a thick canopy darkened above and sheltered underneath. I'm eye-level with the tip-tops of new growth fir and pine and I can see a third the way up gnarly old cottonwood right into the habitat holes. If I stand here long enough the squirrels will show up and put on a Cirque de Soleil show, but today is for seeing what the storm brought in or brought down or brought over and what it left behind.
Where the trail sign marks the junction, I go up along to the old flume where fir branches are broken and scattered on the ground from the wind. I reach down, grab and throw, grab and throw, at least a dozen times, winging the fallen ones into the underbrush. I cross over the big fir root that makes a step on the path then dips under the old flume on the far side. This mess of gnarled tin and wood is all that's left of what was once a water carrier for the apple orchards in the Lower Mission. It's corroded in some parts and the wooden frame that held it up at chest height is mostly on the ground and rotting. In a few places the half-hoops of galvanized steel that braced the whole thing from underneath are lying about and poking through dirt especially where the wooden frame and the metal half-pipe are mostly disintegrated.
Next to this mangled mess of a flume sits the whole story of Father Pandosy, the mission priest who sailed to the “new” world to settle 'untamed' land. Father Pandosy planted food in rows and people in pews. He carved a path for Indian agents and land surveyors who would divide the place into parcels for grazing cattle and growing apples. The good Father and his flock missed the part where the land had no need of taming, the part where the effortless and obvious way in would have been to ask the people already here and thriving. The Syilx people have been in the Okanagan Valley for over ten thousand years, they could have been, and in the earliest times were, in easy partnership with European settlers. Father Pandosy did what new world priests do.
Sometimes this crippled flume is a memento mori to the courage of the settlers and their child-like trust of the vision that inspired long and treacherous walks across barren lands. It was a certain ingenuity required to survive as they were accustomed to surviving. But on days like today, days after a storm and strange unheralded weather, I only have a desire to want to reverse what was done and untangle it from the mess. I want to clean it all up and supplant this settler mentality with a little grace in a world that once was new and make room for the efficacy to ask about how to be in this place from the ones that already knew. A simple task: ask.
My dad picks me up and sits me on the metal edge of the ship's railing. My mother has the baby and my other brothers and sisters are standing below on the wooden deck and waving. We're all waving. My mother, without turning toward him, asks my father if he can see the Hendersons. He finds them in the crowd and points out their position so my mother can wave in their direction. There are coloured streamers going from the boat to the wharf where a crowd has gathered and when the streamers run out the people on the pier throw toilet paper rolls all the way up onto the boat decks. It's a celebration and wall of grief all tucked into the leaving.
Where the metal and wood lie abandoned along the trail, broken and forgotten, are remnants of ice balls scattered about and melted puddle-dregs of a brutal sky-fall that was the storm. Ice balls and puddles, it goes from one to the other and I imagine it will eventually go all the way back up again, after it's saturated the earth. The plants will cast it off into the wind and the wind will deposit it into particles that will carry it to the sky and become cloud again where it will rain or hail next season. These are the cycles that live in the flume.
I find a spot where the moisture has stayed well beyond the drift upward and it's here that moss grows luminescent green and glowing. The moss isn't a sign of the broken; it's a sign of the staying and reaping. There are teensy brown umbrella tops lurching out of cushioned pads, miniature capsules and splash cups all gathered into a Lilliputian garden to be savoured for those who venture to squat for the inspection. We don't get close enough sometimes. I want to see beyond the broken today, find the rich and nutritious in the cycles. Today I want hope and somewhere to pull back the tides and erase what keeps tugging at my midsection.
There's a Maori troupe on deck and they begin to sing “Now Is The Hour” and my mother starts to cry. She is broken. She doesn't want to go on the boat like I do. I can see them both, my mother and my father, because I'm up on the metal railing. I look away and look down. The water below is a long way away and it's black and swirling like a whirlpool. I get scared all of a sudden that my dad is going to forget that he's holding me and if he does I'll drop into the water and be gone forever. I grab at his arm to remind him I'm there and see that he's crying too. A roll of toilet paper whizzes by our heads. The Hendersons have spotted us and they're waving and jumping about to make sure we've seen them in the crowd. The streamers and toilet paper rips and floats away into the whirlpool. The captain comes over the loudspeaker and tells us to cover our ears then the big horn sounds loud and long and low, a final bellow as our ship pulls away into the harbour.
There's always a time after a storm when the little things flourish. The battering of hail has fallen to silence and if my ears were like the deer or bear I'm sure I could hear water being sucked up through the dirt. I move along up the flume until I get to where I can cross over it safely and make my way to a fallen log that's been placed on the hillside for watchers. I come to this spot when I need to have a think. It's mid-March and these are days and nights when I spend time with my mother. Her birthday is March fifteenth, she died March thirteenth.
As of today I've been a motherless daughter for 24 years. Seems like a long time when I think the words but it doesn't mean I can't still smell her. She would have loved this part of my life. She would have loved these days in Woodhaven at the in-between times of the season and she would have been here talking to the trees along with me. It doesn't matter how long ago something was, what matters is how much it mattered. Sometimes what mattered is the thing that purrs softly and cozies into a place in your heart that gets most remembered. Sometimes the most remembered is the unspoken agreements and all the un-saids that find a harbour in my midsection waiting it out for after a hail storm. March bites like that for me. It reminds me of the broken parts.
***
Lori Mairs (1961- 2021) was born in New Zealand and lived most of her life in British Columbia, Canada. From 2002- 2017, she lived in the forest as the caretaker of the Woodhaven Nature Conservancy in Kelowna, British Columbia. She completed her BFA and then an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She was a sculptor and installation artist, using natural materials as well as fabric, metal and beeswax in her work. She also participated as a lead artist in several eco art projects in Kelowna. In the last few years of her life, she began writing essays and poetry. In all her work, her primary concerns were the relationships we have with each other as humans and the deep and often reaching relationships humans have with the more-than-human world. For many years she wrote a blog, “The Land of 7:30.” She also practiced as a personal growth consultant until her untimely death. She is greatly missed by her friends, family, clients and fellow artists, as well as the neighbors and other-than-human beings of Woodhaven where she wrote and made art for many years.
By Paul Scraton:
It was a cold winter day when Eymelt invited us to her studio in Berlin-Weißensee. She had been looking for models, people she could photograph using a technique that dates back to the earliest days of photography. It would take a while, she said, to capture each image. We would – in this era of mobile phones and Instagram, when more photographs are taken in a single year than in the previous century – have to be patient.
The collodion wet plate process requires that a black tin plate be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. We spent a few happy hours in her studio room, laughing and joking and mainly talking to Eymelt’s legs, because she was usually under a thick blanket of some short, either behind the camera or in her self-made dark room where she prepared the collodion emulsion, coating the plates and then developing them by hand.
‘Did you ever try this outside?’ someone asked, and in those six words, an idea was born.
In early 2017, Eymelt had made a short film based on my book Ghosts on Shore about the Baltic coast, and we had been keen to work together on a project again. The idea of finding a way to take the collodion wet plate technique out of the studio and into the landscape was the starting point for what would become our new book.
In the Pines is a combination of words and images. It is my novella, a whole-life story told through fragments about a narrator’s relationship to the forest, sharing the pages with Eymelt’s photographs from between the trees. Some of the stories contained within the book gave Eymelt inspiration when she took her mobile darkroom into the forest. Some of the images she returned to inspired new stories in turn. Eymelt’s art both illustrates the text and inspires it, and I know I would have created something different, something lesser, without our collaboration.
To celebrate the launch of the book this autumn I wanted to celebrate Eymelt’s talent and her art. What follows is my short interview with Eymelt, about the photography in our book and what she’s planning next.
What is it about this technique that is so appealing to you as a photographer?
First, I love analogue photography in general. And then, what I find most intriguing about the collodion wet plate process, are the imperfections of the images. The photos are blurred; the images look liquid, creating blind spots. These are voids to be filled by the viewer’s imagination. And each photograph is truly unique.
When you first showed me the technique in the studio, it seemed almost impossible you could take it outside. What specific challenges did you face when taking your camera out into the forest?
The most challenging thing involves the developing, in that I have to do it immediately. The coated photoplate needs to still be wet for the developing process, which means I have about ten to fifteen minutes from coating the plate until developing it. I have to therefore coat each plate by hand before each photograph. I cannot prepare a batch in advance.
Once the photograph is taken, the plates can only be handled in darkness. So I need a mobile darkroom, and I built one out of a former steamer trunk. Transporting this monster out into the woods, to basically build a lab out there among the trees, was quite a challenge and was time-consuming as well.
Added to all this, and related to how much time everything takes, is that I am somewhat exposed. To the weather, and especially the temperature, which can have a major impact. During the winter, for example, the chemicals on the plates froze, creating some beautiful crystalline structures on the photographs. It was as if the environment had engrained itself on the image. But that is also what I love about the technique – you have to embrace the uncontrollable and see what happens.
In my introduction, I’ve written about how the photographs both related to the text and sometimes also inspired it. How was it for you, working on a collaborative project like this?
Generally, the inspiration for my works comes from fairy tales and myths, so the starting point is almost always a story. In the Pines was my first ever collaboration of words and photography, and as your language is very evocative, I could picture some of the images in my head right away. What also helped were the walks and talks we had, especially through the landscape. It helped me get a feeling for it.
Text is interesting because it can go into detail, and you take the reader with you. With an image it is slightly different. I am choosing the frame of course, the perspective and the light situation. But there is more there for the viewer to decide for themselves. Not least when it comes to how close or carefully they decide to look.
My favourite aspect of the collaboration was that it basically forced me to take the technique outside and into the woods. Without this project, I’m not sure I would have given it a try. And spending all that time out there with my camera and my mobile darkroom meant I had lots of beautiful encounters with mushroom foragers, kindergarten kids, horses and hikers.
So will you be taking more landscape or outside photographs using this technique in the future?
I’m certainly going to take some more. I would also like to experiment more, try some things with filters etc.
In the Pines is all about the narrator’s lifelong connection to the forest. What does the forest mean to you?
For me the forest has always been, since early childhood, a kind of retreat – a place of sanctuary. I could lose myself in fairy tales, and in difficult emotional times it was a place where I took refuge. To this day, the forest is still a place of solace for me.
It was also an adventurous playground for myself and my brothers. A place where you could pick berries and hunt mushrooms, where you could climb trees and build secret hiding places far from the parents’ eyes. It was our own microcosmic realm and it captivated our imagination.
Finally, what’s next for Eymelt Sehmer? You have a gallery in Berlin – are there any projects or news from the gallery you’d like to share with us?
Oh, I have lots of ideas! In early 2020 I took the Trans-Siberian Express through Russia to Mongolia where, thanks to the pandemic, I got stuck. Initially I’d intended travelling there to take photographs of the Dukha people, a nomadic reindeer tribe, and then, having got stuck in Ulaanbaatar with my guide and his family, I met his wife Mugi’s motorcycle club – the first and only female motorcycle club in the country: the Mongolian Lady Riders. Modern nomads.
I made a short film about the motorcyclists and have photographs from the entire trip, but it takes thought and care as to how they might be used. My experience with the Dukha, for example. It was a nice experience, but parts still felt awkward, and we as artists or tourists always need to be careful as to how we present, and indeed to an extent, ‘exploit’ such encounters and topics for our own artistic ends.
I’m also working on a portfolio of analogue photographs of female characters in mythology, and in the gallery we are slowly getting back to exhibitions, readings and film screenings. Thanks to the pandemic, and the ever-changing situation, it is hard to plan things in advance. But in 2022 we hope to host some photography workshops and collaborations with different people from our neighbourhood in Berlin.
Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer, Berlin
In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer, published by Influx Press
Photo: Helen Oldfield
By Emily Oldfield:
The Cragg Vale Incline has become the site of excited spatterings of conversation, speculation… Climbing 968 feet over 5 and a half miles, it is said to be the longest continuous road ascent in England. An endurance. But what about the descent?
Descent. A word weighted with downhill draw – the airflow of the ‘d’ angling the tongue against top teeth, the breath cast outwards, the body downwards. When we walk downhill, extrinsic muscles stretch, and the dorsum of the foot flexes open. Suspension into a kind of surrender? Descent – a word working back into our origins: where do you come from? What did you leave to be here?
Hence, we descend. We drop down through Cragg Vale largely at the roadside, having climbed out of the valley bottom – a fertile slit of land lashed in Silver Birch, Beech and Sycamore. The black mud of Withens Clough still slicks our boots, the souvenir of a walk over the moors from Walsden; at some point brushing between postcodes, the angry acronyms of OL and HX. Here on the West Yorkshire-Lancashire border, a bristling blend of wood-rush and cotton grass seem caught in the stupor of a wind that can settle on no one direction for more than a few minutes.
Distinct snapshots of the journey jolt through the mind like its chill - skin under a cold wind. The startled shrill of a pheasant tucked under a tumbledown wall, the farmhouse picked to ruins around her. I imagine her eggs, still intact, olive-coloured; their secret yellow only the bounty of stoppered life.
Here, there isn’t so much a ripening as a weathering, enduring. So much potential colour we never see. Plenty is on the edge – birth, bloom, kingdom. The bluebells wait close to the water, their buds weighted with the prospect of purple, like youth hangs at the edge of adulthood in a tender, tremulous body. Coveted, craved.
There are other edges. Stream surging on the edge of river. The steep valley side as we descend the road. A dip where mills once worked cotton and coyed young, agile bodies into early graves. Bound in their beauty. Perhaps like the chicks, still egg-wet and ordered in their thousands from the valley’s hatchery at the turn of the 20th century. The semi-ripeness of youth becomes an industry. Or fashion. Or art.
Today the air seems tempered with a semi-stickiness, a temperate sheen over skin. The sun’s light is beginning to warm. It works its curious fingers through the open beaks of young daffodils, their flowers mouth-like and hungry as they shuffle in series at the side of the road. A confetti for the coming season. Then suddenly, to the left, a field that seems suspended before the valley; a glut of manicured green against a shock of white geese.
It is the field of geese that stops us. Perhaps it is something about the manicured enclosure being rendered futile by their presence, their capacity to fly. And yet, they seem to busy themselves within the field; sure-footed, coral-coloured steps only interrupted by their own unpredictable shadows; the sashaying groundsheet of reflection rendered by swivelling necks and flexing wings.
Geese take so many of us back to youth; even an angry hiss at the river or canal-side enough to evoke that hot flush of muted panic often at its ripest in childhood. The child-like fear and fascination at ‘the other’. I think back to the tales of Old Mother Goose, The Golden Goose: birds basted in expectation, fattened by projected hope of fortune and learning. Now I look at the geese in the field and feel a kind of resignation – the body muted and limited by its enclosures.
Human enclosures. We see them as we pass by road signs, door fronts; names twisting through Turvin, Elphin Brook, Castle, Paper, Cragg. A geography lesson gone wild.
Wild too, somehow, is the impulse that arises – and opens those extrinsic muscles of the foot outwards, downwards. We find ourselves taking a sharp turn away from the waymarked road and down towards the valley bottom, encouraged by the occasional flash of brook like a wet cobweb caught in light. Cool wind tussles with spools of sun, our tread is tentative, not sure of our destination, yet committed.
This is a valley where concealment is part of the course… transgression touching its growth. I notice it in the tongues of wild garlic that lash many a thicket-floor, fragrancing the air with their bulb-heavy, bursting perfume. Although we have been on roadside and track for a good half an hour, I still feel the allium heat from an earlier stretch of woodland. The same heat that would have once stifled the raw rot of mill water, human sweat, hacked stone, bird shit, broken hands. Where industry clawed at contours, chewed terminology up to the point that Elphin, Cragg, Turvin – all became an interchangeable word for the water. A trickling childspeak.
Water. I feel it in the currents of your hand – skin itself a simmering breathing tide that sheds its cells not just with season-shift, but endlessly. Now we choose our own deviation from the incline, toes feeling the tip of anticipation as we head downwards and over a bridge.
And then, the sudden combination of stream-rush and a slight sulphur hits me. Brings to mind the air of an egg brought to boiling point: perhaps the goose egg we wrapped in tissue paper and had carried home just weeks earlier, as excited as children.
We have reached Cragg Spa – a site celebrated for centuries – its underbridge pool offering not only its own shimmering yolk of sky, but stirring that reflection with a drapework of greenery surging over the stone arch. The determination of young growth, despite the odds. It is here after all where eager opening hands would have snatched for Spanish water – what I remember my own grandmother calling sugarelly – a liquorice-smothered liquid weighted with sweetshop smell and the rumour of health. Here Spaw Sunday saw not just the youth, but bursts of locals and visitors alike visiting the Spa, some steeping the nearby well-water with liquorice to mask the eggwash. Others took to its waters, its spill over skin the same surge that brought life and death to this valley, woodlands and waterwheels, radicals and riches, youth and age.
And as we watch the pool, its patina of bluegreen like the gloss of a pupil or the pattern of eggshell – I think then, of an egg, its precarious potential for life, its closeness to death – and how to clasp it, tip to tip, yields a strength that never ceases to take us by surprise.
***
Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. She was the Editor of Haunt Manchester at Manchester Metropolitan University, explored Winter Hill for the Edgelandia project, and now is probably wandering somewhere in the South Pennines. Grit is her first poetry pamphlet - published by Poetry Salzburg (March 2020) - delving into histories of the Rossendale Valley and The River Irwell, which has continued its thread throughout her life.
By Sara Bellini:
I don’t know why the sea. I like expanding my gaze, following the waves in reverse until they reach the horizon and the water dissolves into the sky. It must be this idea of infinity - the line you can never reach, the water you cannot quantify - and of all the things that exist beyond the horizon and that I hold in my gaze without seeing them; another coast; another country; people and birds and trees. And while I contemplate these transcendental thoughts, I hear the waves in the background, repetitive and calming, always the same and always different.
When I was a child, we’d have a seaside holiday every year, and yet the sea of my childhood is different than that of my adulthood. The first one symbolised summer, ice-cream, playing and swimming, while the latter is more often a place of cold wind, of fish and chips, of walking and healing. This new relationship was forged around a decade ago, when I was living in London and unhappily so. Work was stressful and I needed to slow down. The lack of time, money and energy dictated my escape route: a Southern Railway train to Brighton. Every few months I would spend a day there, more rarely a night or two. I didn’t do anything special. I just wandered for hours and stared at the sea.
When I found myself in a similarly strenuous situation a couple of years ago, with no possibility of taking significant time off work, I thought of the sea again. The closest option from Berlin was the Baltic. My friend K. also needed to step out of her life for a moment, so we stepped out of our lives together, at the same time anchoring each other in order to avoid drifting away.
The trip itself was serendipitous, but the reason behind it was rooted in our existential impasse and the tiredness of not being able to find a way out. In our perception we were akin to severely ill pious women on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Our Lourdes was nature. It was the sea.
If you take a train from Berlin up to what the Germans call the Ostsee, you reach a city called Stralsund. But the railway doesn’t stop there - it arches over the water to land again on Rügen. The island is connected to the mainland via a bridge, it’s that close. And yet, like every island, it is its own world.
“Beyond their actual geographical coordinates, islands will always be places we project onto, places which we cannot get a hold on through scientific methods but through literature.”*
Rügen became famous during the 18th century, when the Romantics made art of nature and in nature itself found the sublime. It was the painter Caspar David Friedrich who showed the world the charm of the island, its stunning white cliffs covered in leafy trees on a background of cobalt and till sea. The Romantics had good taste and heavy moods, and we followed in their steps with a ravenous hunger for the sublime, looking for something that would overwhelm us with beauty and shake us out of our skin.
The core of our stay on the island was an excursion to Jasmund National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site in the north-eastern part of Rügen. To be precise, UNESCO granted the title to the primeval beech forests in Germany, which shaped the whole continent after the last Ice Age, and have been severely damaged by human intervention. The title is there to keep these ecosystems intact, to protect them from us.
Tourists visit the park every year, mainly to see the impressive chalk cliff known as Königsstuhl. K. and I found it rather curious how people would pay to step on a platform on the cliff, rather than admiring it for free from an adjacent cliff. This is named for Victoria of Prussia (daughter of the English Queen Victoria) by her father-in-law Kaiser Wilhelm I, because she loved that spot. We thought about how the fact that someone once found that particular cliff so lovely brought someone with temporal power to give it a name and put it on a map, initiating a process of conservation and meaning-giving. It reminded us of the many ways in which human and natural history were intertwined, and how the former - shorter and more insignificant - has so often tried to claim the latter.
From the Victoria-Sicht we walked along the Hochufer - the path following the shoreline down below - dipping in and out of the woodland. It looked like some trees were growing from the rock walls, almost parallel to the sea underneath. A sign told us that the cliffs were made of chalk, which has the property of freezing during the winter and then thawing once more in spring. When that happens, the cliffs crumble down, taking pieces of the forest with them. This process is called natural erosion and it made me muse on the idea that the island we were on was the same island of Friedrich’s, but also significantly different. If I go back to Rügen every year, I thought, it will always be a geologically altered place, where the cliffs scratch and reshape themselves ever so slightly each spring: an island of entropy.
That was the first time I’ve walked in a forest on a cliff, and it was sensorially baffling. The smell of the wet ground and understory mixed up with the saltiness, whose scent was coming in waves, mirroring the water that generated it. On our right slugs and mushrooms, and on our left swans and a lonely red sail.
All of a sudden we had to stop, stupefied and awed, on a man-made path descending towards the sea. The dappled light made everything look green: our hands, our faces, the ground. The phenomenon appeared almost fairy-like, and we felt like we were about to metamorphose into sylvan creatures. The light seemed to possess a tangible quality, a volume, a physical presence. A few steps away, everything looked normal, and wooden stairs led us down to a pebbled beach.
We sat in the sun, enjoying the marine breeze and the glistening depth of the Baltic. We had swum the day before and we would swim again the day after, allowing the cold water to remodel our skin and turn us into marine creatures, dissolving the distance between us and the natural world where we craved to belong.
Walking in the woods was a richly immersive experience and we felt we were part of our surroundings, just like the birches and the chaffinches, the fungi and the mosses. Our minds were too busy processing all these inputs, in being present, that we didn’t have the time to get caught up in anxious thoughts about the future and the lives we had briefly put on hold. Wasn’t that what we were looking for - a reminder that we were made of the same matter of the sea and the forest? The cliffs themselves didn’t worry about anything, including their own demise, so it felt silly to do anything other than simply being.
The trees suddenly ended at the outskirts of the village of Sassnitz. We walked silently under the sun to reach the station, barely meeting any other people. As our bodies moved from nature to tarmac interspersed with rose-studded gardens, our headspace shifted from a present mode to our city-life mode, at the same time leaning forward towards the future while looking backward at the past. And yet we knew we had left some of our worries back in Jasmund National Park, perhaps lifted up by the birch branches while we were staring at the green light.
We started and ended our stay on the island in the same way, with fish and chips and a cup of coffee from a stand near the beach in Binz. At that moment, it was the best fish and chips we had ever had.
***
Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.
* Judith Schalansky, Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands
A companion piece to Winter in Den Wood, published here on Elsewhere in January 2021.
By Ian Grosz:
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers – Herman Hesse
In late May I returned to Den Wood. I had last been here in the winter when the trees had been bare and seemingly lifeless. The small tunnel of twisted, comingling branches at the entrance to the wood was now almost a full leafy canopy, but it had been a cold and wet May, and the wood was late in its blooming; the ferns not yet unfurled and many buds yet unbudded; the growth of the wood almost a month behind its usual blossoming. The gorse was in full flower though, and there was a greater variety of birdlife amongst the trees: bluetits and yellow hammers; finches and robins as well as the ground birds I’d seen before: the blackbirds and thrushes. The lower sections of the wood were full with song and I felt my mind begin to slow with each step, the earthiness of the air in my lungs as I walked in the marbled light of the first warm days we’d seen since the onset of spring.
I had felt tense when I arrived. Both my wife and I had been bad tempered that morning, and I was still carrying the frustration and mild anger of our irritability. We’d been locked down together in our small home since I had lost my job the year before. We all need our own space from time-to-time, especially when under the added strain of uncertainty. Arriving at the woods, that space for me immediately opened up, but it can still be difficult to let go of our often, self-imposed time constraints; let life flow a little more freely. I walked too quickly along the path, headed for the grove of wych elms I’d last seen bare and ghoulish in the winter; headed single-mindedly to my intended destination with my camera as though I had some urgent appointment. I crossed the low bridge above the stream and forced myself to pause there, letting the trickling sounds of its meditative flow settle me a moment.
I’d been diagnosed with anxiety disorder the previous summer, and I had become more aware of its insidious nature; the way it can overtake me without my realising it; make me feel as though everything is urgent; everything time-critical and to be done quickly. As a pilot, a sense of time pressure and sometimes urgency had been an occupational hazard that had crept into the rest of my life, invading everything I did with its insistency. It had become so great I couldn’t go shopping or load the dishwasher without my chest tightening and my pulse quickening. Everything I did, I did furiously. Finally, I had developed vertigo, and my flying life was over. Now I needed to force myself to slow down; to let life flow a little just like this stream, and I stood on the bridge and allowed the sounds of the water to fill my consciousness. It did the trick, because I now ambled up to the elms, taking my time and taking photographs along the way, noticing details; letting the green light of the wood bathe me in its soothing balm.
It is now a well-known scientific fact that being amongst trees is good for us. Studies have shown that a walk in the woods reduces levels of cortisol and other harmful hormones in the body; lowers blood pressure and even boosts the body’s immune system through the release of phytoncides in aromatic compounds. A study carried out in Japan in 2016 on elderly patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, found that ‘forest bathing’ significantly reduced the production of chemicals that add to inflammation and stress. The exact mechanisms at play seem unclear, but perhaps it’s the way we simply slow down when in natural environments; allow our bodies and minds the space they crave.
I had seen the potential for life in the bare elms of the winter; the promise of the spring to come and the message it held for both my own situation and the world in the midst of a pandemic. Now they had made a healing canopy of patchwork green high overhead, the thin trace of blue sky and clouds appearing as though threaded through their branches; earth and sky connected by their reaching presence. I stood beneath them for a long time, just breathing them in, and the stresses in my body, out.
Finally leaving the grove, I sat on a low knoll amongst beech and hazel trees. Self-consciously at first, I closed my eyes to listen to the birdsong; the susurration of the leaves; and to better feel the earth under me. I stopped looking at myself from the outside in, and allowed myself to be. Dare I say it, for a moment perhaps, I felt almost part of things; connected by the trees around me. My heart rate slowed considerably; I know that. For once, I had let go of time; and time it seems, for a moment at least, had let go of me.
***
Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.
By Ben Tufnell:
Traveling north, the vast skies, marshes and glittering lakes of Corrientes province slowly give way to endless forest. There are winding red rivers and rule-straight logging roads and, as the horizon disappears, it becomes almost impossible to orient oneself. What towns there are resemble ribbons festooned along the edges of the highways.
Here, it is said, deep in the forest, the author Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) slowly lost his mind. Here, you are a long way from Buenos Aires or Montevideo and everything is tenuous. Life is fragile. Quiroga loved the jungle but understood that his presence there was at best contingent. In brilliant stories such as ‘Drifting’ (1912) and ‘The Dead Man’ (1920) he wrote of a constant and unceasing conflict between man and nature. He wrote of suffering, of life right at the edge of things. After his first wife committed suicide by taking poison and his second wife left him, Quiroga reportedly filled his empty swimming pool with snakes. I imagine him sitting on the veranda of the wooden house he has built with his own hands, in the middle of the forest, contemplating that febrile spectacle, a boiling, writhing mass of serpents.
Quiroga later committed suicide himself. Both his children killed themselves. These facts are like scenes from his own fiction. The river runs as red as blood, there are bird-eating spiders in the trees and there are hundreds of snakes in the swimming pool.
Travelling north, the air grows hotter and more humid. We took Ruta 12 north from Posadas to one of the most spectacular places in South America, the Iguazu Falls. The Rio Parana and the Rio Iguazu and the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay all converge here. The jungle here is improbably dense, excessively verdant, the air heavy with moisture and filled with the fluttering of masses of huge and kaleidoscopically coloured butterflies. Capuchin monkeys laugh hysterically in the forest canopy. The falls themselves are vast, overwhelmingly so. The roar of the waters is deafening.
This is Misiones province. In the seventeenth century it was one of the strongholds of the Jesuit faith in South America. At their peak the Jesuits had twelve major missions scattered across the region, each with populations in the thousands. They were eventually expelled from Argentina in 1767 and, hidden by the jungle, their cities succumbed, as all things must, to decay. Now, the very idea of the missions seems not only foolhardy but inherently doomed. The landscape ensured that the project was shadowed with failure from the very moment of its first imagining.
The biggest ruins are at San Ignacio, a few hours south of Iguazu, and they are justly famous, a must-see for any visitor to the region. Well-cleared and restored, one can wander through what must once have been a considerable town. There are the remains of many houses. There are information panels about life in the mission. And one can wander through the nave of the huge red sandstone church, now open to the sky, and admire the fig, olive, orange and lemon trees that continue to flourish amidst the crumbling stones.
But while the ruins of San Ignacio are the biggest and best maintained, a few miles south, down a red dirt track leading into the forest, we discovered a site that, although much smaller, was, in many ways, more affecting, and which seemed somehow to better illuminate the conflict between man and nature which so preoccupied Quiroga.
The Santa Luisa Mission was founded in 1633 and, alongside the Jesuit brothers, was home to some two thousand Guarani Indians. Deserted in the eighteenth century it was soon overrun by the jungle and forgotten.
This is a place in flux, where the principle of entropy is made visible. The site had been cleared, mostly, not long before our visit, and there is even a small (and empty) visitor centre, but the jungle was already reasserting itself. One of the first things we saw were the roots of a tree curling through the stones of an ancient wall and breaking it apart in imperceptible slow motion.
The site has been cleared, revealing its profound dereliction, but nothing has been reconstructed. A few fragile walls have been secured with wooden scaffolds but nothing more. And because of this it is extraordinarily evocative. The main square and the broken spine of the church are mostly clear of forest but everywhere else is doubtful. In comparison, San Ignacio seems too tidy. Santa Luisa, a ruined city in the middle of the jungle, could be a setting for a tale by Lovecraft or Borges (and of course the blind librarian was much in my mind during my travels in his country). Creepers cover every surface, gripping and pulling. There is incredible heat and humidity and a very strange kind of stillness. The forest was quiet, as if waiting.
Away from the main square everything is overgrown, is being overgrown. Santa Luisa is a place simultaneously taken from the jungle and being reclaimed by the jungle. The cracks widen. Huge flowers bloom, briefly. Things are drifting back into the entropic zone. It is impossible to tell where the old Jesuit mission ends and the jungle begins. I didn’t – couldn’t – go far enough into the undergrowth to determine that precise border. Thick spider’s webs were stretched between the trees and I turned back when I noticed the husks of some huge and grotesque looking insects, as big as my hands, clinging to the underside of a branch that barred my passage.
The old cemetery is the eeriest part of the site. The locals continued to use it until the 1960s and it is dense with graves, tombs, and even grand crypts, all now derelict. Dragon’s Teeth forces up through the graves. The once ornate tombs are broken open. The beautiful ironwork and stone carvings are now embellished with gripping tendrils of the very foliage they were meant to imitate. A steady humming of insects fills the air. Wasps nest in crypts filled with impenetrable shadows and dusted webs. Broken coffins are glimpsed through the wrought gates of the big family mausoleums, the heavy wooden doors long since rotted away. Flowers, creepers, vines cover every wall. Even in the bright sunlight, it is an unnerving spectacle. An old skull, missing its jawbone, dislodged by the ongoing collapse, had rolled from one decrepit sanctuary and lay in my path.
I wondered what it must have been like for the priests, their pale European skin blistered by the unceasing glare of the sun. How did they cope with the always encroaching darkness of the forest, the spiders and snakes concealed within every shadow, the overwhelming heat and humidity? How did they keep faith when His work seemed to be constantly undoing their best efforts?
It was clear to me that if the caretakers stopped maintaining the square and the broken church, it would be only moments before the jungle completely enclosed and obliterated the site, breaking down the ruins and pulling them back into the red earth.
We were not there long. We looked around together and then I wandered off to the edge of the site, where it was difficult to tell if I was still in the site. When I looked back I saw that C had crossed the square and was making her way back down the track towards the car. She passed out of sight and I was alone. There was silence. Or rather there wasn’t silence, for the forest is always busy, but there was a focussing. I became overwhelmed by my thoughts; I was aware of simultaneous registers of time (a sensation not unlike a fissure opening at what Robert Smithson once called ‘the cracking limits of the brain’). Undoubtedly, I was affected by the heat, the long drive, the ruination, the tropical Gothic of the cemetery, the pool of snakes, the blood red river, the huge waterfalls and the vast whirlpool that lies at their base. Standing there, a few minutes seemed to stretch like hours, years. I felt I could almost see the forest creeping forward, tightening its grip on the shattered brickwork, bright flowers like fresh wounds blooming and fading.
I saw that I was looking down into an open tomb. The sunlight at my back was so bright and the contrast with the inky darkness inside so extreme that there was an astonishing contrast, so that the shadows within that grim enclosure seemed to be solid. And I had the idea that I was looking through a point, a punctum, in its surface. I thought then of the Aleph, described by Carlos Argentino in Borges’s account as ‘the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending…’ For it seemed to me I could then see before me the unfolding of this place over time, from primordial swamp, filled with ferns, mosses and small crawling things, to the gradual encroachment of the forest and the eventual arrival of the missionaries (I saw their terrified passage deep into the unknown interior of dessicated deserts, fugal marshes and evil forests) and even the birth and death of the lizards, insects and trees, all those things that were here and now.
The Aleph was not an opening. Carlos Argentino himself described it as ‘a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance.’ He attempted the impossible task of writing down what he saw:
‘At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe.’
This mysterious object was located in the basement of an old house in Garay Street in Buenos Aires, now long vanished. We had been there, of course, and to Borges’s house too, hoping to discover some vague trace but finding, inevitably, nothing.
But now, in the jungle amidst the ruins, staring into that dark tomb, I had, just for the most fleeting moment, a glimpse of the Aleph (or of a kind of Aleph, for Borges himself said that he thought the one in Buenos Aires was a false one, and that there might be many). It was gone as soon as it was present. And then the darkness was only darkness again. I walked slowly onwards, wading through a warm viscous liquid: time itself. I saw human activity, the jungle, each assimilating the other again and again, not erasing the past but absorbing it. Endless and infinite cycles.
Something large moved in the forest. I had the weird notion that if I saw what it was, my reason would give way, would crack; for I fully expected a great and ancient lizard to come lumbering out of the undergrowth. Shuddering, I quickly made my way back through the trees to the main square, where the full sun had now attained an infernal intensity. Huge birds (or were they pterodactyls?) flapped wearily into the sky from the tops of some of the trees. I passed through the crumbling gateway and down the dirt track, past the empty information centre and back to the car, where C was waiting. Behind me the whole site shimmered in the heat, like a reflection in oil, unsteady. Already I was wondering if I had dreamt it.
I started the car in silence, drove us back along the track onto Ruta 12, and we headed north.
***
Ben Tufnell is a curator and writer based in London. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on art forms that engage with landscape and the environment. His most recent book is In Land: Writings About Land Art And Its Legacies (Zero Books, 2019).
By Ian Grosz:
There is little light in northern Scotland in mid-winter, and as we entered a new lockdown, everything seemed to get that little bit darker. Like most people, the freedom of the daily walk once again took on new significance as our worlds shrank back. We had been living in our village for over ten years and felt we knew almost every inch of it, but looking online for new places we could explore locally, I happened on Den Wood. The only Woodland Trust managed site in the North East of Scotland, it is a humble patch of mixed ancient woodland stretching to just eighteen hectares, but hosts a diverse mix of trees including pine, oak, alder, ash, rowan, hawthorn, hazel, silver birch, lime and beech. A thriving habitat for insects, birds, foxes, red squirrels and roe deer, it also retains the almost extinct wych elm, on which the equally rare, white-letter hairstreak butterfly caterpillar relies.
The wych elm has been decimated by Dutch elm disease, caused by the fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi and spread by the elm bark beetle. The fungus blocks the tree’s vascular system, causing wilt and eventual death. It first appeared in 1910, and quickly became an epidemic that spread across Europe, killing up to forty percent of the European elm population through the first half of the twentieth century. The disease abated by the 1940s, but a second epidemic beginning in the 1960s with a much more virulent outbreak was far more destructive. Arriving in the UK on imported elm logs from Canada, it killed tens of millions of trees, leaving the elm an endangered species on these islands.
The Woodland Trust is the UK’s largest conservation organisation set up to restore and conserve Britain’s remaining ancient woodland, now covering just 2.4% of the landscape and fighting for survival against development, agriculture and the mono-cultures of forestry. Supporting a greater diversity of plants and animals, ancient woodland represents the living memory of our lost habitats and the visible reminder of our old relationships with nature, once characterised by sympathetic husbandry more in tune with the seasonal ebb and flow of the land and its life-cycles. We took care of the land and the land took care of us. Only now are we realising the benefits of smaller scale farming and the greater diversity it supports, the importance of mixed woodland management to our plant and animal ecologies. I was looking forward to experiencing Den Wood: what we would find there, how we might feel.
We set out on a cold January Sunday, negotiating the ice-rink-like back roads. We eventually found the small car park that allows access to the wood, tucked away down a country lane amidst the dips and folds of the land. I wasn’t surprised that we’d missed it up to now. A notice board revealed a mix of short trails we could follow. The paths were muddy and icy, the trees bare, but still, it felt as though we were entering a special place as we made our way into the woodland through a narrow tunnel of comingling branches.
The air was still. Our feet crunched noisily through the trail in the snow, the branches hanging over our heads and the weak morning sunlight beginning to brighten the slab grey of the sky. Though certainly a cold, bleak day, our spirits were immediately lifted as we trudged along the trail, here and there robins bobbing amongst the bare branches and blackbirds foraging amongst the still frozen leaf-litter. We met a couple walking their dog and stopped to chat when their young puppy jumped up on us.
‘It’s a bit skitie today,’ the man said, meaning slippery. ‘But it’s a great place in the summer when the trees are full.’
He told us we could walk a circuit that would take us over a low bridge across a stream and then up onto a rise in the fields where we would get a good view of Bennachie, a popular hill which dominates the local landscape.
In a guide-book published in 1890, the locally born Scottish mountaineer and author Alexander McConnochie wrote that:
There is no mountain in Aberdeenshire – or indeed in the north of Scotland – better known, or more visited that Bennachie. This is easily accounted for. Its graceful outline; its standing comparatively alone, and being thus discernible and prominent from all points; its magnificent mountain and lowland views to be obtained from its summits; and its easiness of access – all contribute to render Bennachie familiarly known even to those who are not given to mountain climbing. [1]
This holds true as much today as it did in McConnochie’s time, and Bennachie remains, in many ways, the perfect mountain: accessible and easily climbed, yet giving that sense of elevation and escape that the high places bring.
We thanked the couple and continued on along the track, soon finding the low bridge that forged the stream running through a shallow gulley, before climbing steeply over a knoll into more open ground filled with, surprisingly, newly flowering gorse. Eventually we climbed up into a grove of tall wych elm, beyond an old estate boundary wall covered in moss and lichens and slowly submerging into the land. Here the woods felt dead and still, almost sacred in its silence; the trees, with their dark silhouettes against the flat light of a cold sky, waiting to come back to life just as the world was.
Staring up into the bare canopy of the elms with their ghoulish, finger-like branches knotted above us, it was difficult to imagine the woods in full bloom, filled with life and vibrancy. It spoke to us of the pause we all felt in life, somehow more poignant now in mid-winter than it had been in the summer. Then, many of us welcomed the change of pace in life, noticed the birds singing as though for the first time, appreciated our parks and gardens, felt that we were learning something of the importance of the simple things in life again. But now that stillness felt like purgatory, our lives shrinking with the light, the cold days and the inability to travel. Just at a time of year when we need human contact the most, it had been taken away.
Yet these seemingly dead woods were only dormant, and would surely come to life again. It was simply a matter of time; something this little patch of ancient woodland held like sap in its branches: slow and viscous now, but soon to rise and flow freely. That first lockdown showed us that to be dormant for a time, to be still and to reflect, is a great gift, and the woods seemed to be reminding us of this.
As we crowned the low hill at the centre of the elms, we could see the distinctive shape of Bennachie rising up out of the landscape beyond the woodland boundary. Covered in snow, it seemed much larger than it normally appears, its boulder-strewn summits strung out like small volcanic archipelagos across its long back. Too far away for us to be able to travel to under the lockdown, it looked more inviting than ever; but we knew that it wasn’t going anywhere: that it would still be there, signalling home to us, whenever this virus had been beaten, and that like these woods, life would return in abundance. We turned to make our way back to the car, quiet but happy, and silently resolved to keep a sense of the promise of the dormant wych elms with us through the long months to come.
***
Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.
Notes:
[1] Alex Inkson McConnochie, Bennachie, (1890, repr., Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire Classics Series, James, G. Bisset, 1985) p. 10
