Issue 3:2 | Non-Fiction | David Brendan Hopes

The Silver Wood
David Brendan Hopes


I must have noticed before. The forest is silver. The bare, stark tree trunks are silver. The ribs and skull bones of the mountain are silver, here and there pushing outcrops of granite, which are silver striated with ochre and cinnabar, and sparkled with diamonds of mica. Some of the tree trunks give off a cast of emerald from plantations of moss. The fallen leaves are ochre and cinnabar sheened over with the silver of winter and of the stone they sprang from. The extreme whiteness of the clouds, the absurd blueness of the sky, are set like gems in a thousand silver frames. I must have noticed this before. It must be written down in a journal at the back of the shelf, or in another backpack.

 
The pink of my hand writing is startling in a landscape in which there is no pink. I pull my sleeve down over as much of the hand as I can. The sleeve is pale yellow, like the scatter of trampled leaves, so the contrast is not so great. I think I am alone. I think I will have solitude enough in the high place to watch and think. Small knots of birds flutter in to investigate whenever you sit long enough, juncos and chickadees, with their inquiring little tweets in the twigs overhead. They arrive if you sit long enough and lose interest if you sit too long. I mean for them to forget I’m there.

Then, women are coming up the trail. I say, “Ah, humans” in the back of my mind, as though I were not one myself, as though I were warning myself against the perils of my kind. They are a long way off, but I hear them talking. They are very loud. There are three of them, I see now, walking single file, the lead one twisting over her own shoulder a little to give her attention to the woman behind, who is talking the loudest. She is Asian, and thinks, maybe, that she has to talk loudly to overcome her accent. I try to make up lives for them, to recognize them, to put them in context as they sway up the uneven, twisting trail, dead on toward me. They are talking about the places where deceased relatives have had their ashes scattered. Maybe one of them has said she wants her ashes scattered in the silver wood.

I’m wearing yellow and sitting on the slope ten feet from the trail, but they do not see me. I can’t believe that they don’t see me. They are wearing perfume, one of them, the waves of it strong even from this distance in a stiff December breeze. I could reach out with my walking stick and touch their shoulders. If I were a panther I bet it would be for them a memorable day-- if I suddenly stirred, tail twitching in the chiseled light, in the noisy blanket of leaves. And maybe I am indeed transformed into an animal. It would be so like God that out of all my many prayers he would choose this one to grant. But it would be all right. If this is what it feels like, it feels good. I feel light. I feel I could reach the women, or disappear from their knowledge forever, in a single bound.

The women pass and quiet creeps back, but the illusion of being alone in the wilderness is temporarily extinguished. It’s a warm day between Christmas and New Year, and everyone who can is upon the mountain, old people helping each other over the rough places, single women with big white dogs, knots and gaggles of teenagers carrying their loud days through the listening wild. For a while I took the high ridges where I knew I’d encounter no one, but something brought me down, back to the trail, where there might be collisions with my own kind. It must have been on purpose. I try to orient myself upon the mountainside. I try to work put what my relation to these hurrying creatures should be.


The trail is called Mountains to the Sea. I try to imagine walking it to the sea. I realize I don’t even know what sea it means. I’m walking north— The Arctic, then? Hudson Bay? When it descends from the Blue Ridge, whatever sea it’s aiming, for it must cut through farmlands and towns and across eight lane highways. Maybe there’s a corridor I don’t know about, for the trail to pass through, where you can walk all the way amid the trees and stones, and the animals which must be watching me as I watch my own kind.

I’m carrying the yellow Boy Scout backpack that I got on Ebay for five dollars, which I bought because it is as old as I am. “From the 50's,” the ad said, just like me. Burned into the leather “Property Of” tag says “Jack Schweitzer, Washburn, North Dakota.” The Ebay seller didn’t know who Jack Schweitzer was, but I’d like to know. I sit on the silver stone under the silver trees wondering how to find Jack Schweitzer, who was a boy when I was a boy. A fine dust of mica silvers the pack where the weight of me ground it into stone. The pack is bigger than I need for a day hike. I meant to find something to bring back with me. Something big. A skull, A beautiful stone. A lost handbag full of dollars. I haven’t found it yet.

On other days like this, I’d be in my studio, painting, or behind my computer still fighting for a career as a writer, but I’ve begun a new fitness regime. I have been growing afraid. My knees stiffen at the end of the day. My back sends me little messages of anguish. There are several motions my left shoulder objects to making anymore. My body wants to grow old, but I am refusing to come along. So I go to the gym every day I can, weights on three days, aerobics on the other three. On days off from work I follow with a hike, short or long, so I don’t freeze up, so I learn something about the world. My body wants to grow old. I refuse. Our battle, I realize, is to the death. Getting pushed over the high places, the silver mountain sparkling with its flakes of diamond, nearly at a dead run, my body says to me, “Oh, all right, if that’s what you want,” and we are boys again. It really is happier like this. So am I. This is my Boy Scout backpack. This is the journal where I keep a tally of wonders. This is me hiding on the sun-blasted slope, pretending I’m a panther, stalking, sniffing the perfumes of the hikers. This is the backpack slipping from my shoulders because I am becoming an animal.

“Panther” must still rule my imagination, for when I hear a stirring in the leaves above me, I whirl with more vehemence than is necessary. There is an animal. I don’t know what it is. This is North America, and there are only certain things it could be. At first it seems black, but that is only in contrast to the blazing blue of heaven and the silver of the mountainside. It is dark gray, charcoal or ash. I think it must be a fox, but my starting startles it into a tree, so it is no fox. Far too substantial for a squirrel. Is it a cat? I try to push its shape into the shape of a cat, but it’s not working. I watch it long enough to believe it’s a marten. I’ve never seen a marten, though I’ve seen pictures in a book. This is larger and more vivid than the pictures, but then, it would be. I make a note to check to see if there could possibly be martens on a mountain this far south. It’s waiting for me to define the moment, but I don’t know what to do. Is it there because it hasn’t seen me, silly as the inattentive hikers on the path? I don’t think so. Is it there because I am an animal too? We look at each other. Its eyes are blue, I think, or flash blue when struck by rays of the low sun.

The creature regards me for a good while. It is not “freezing” as some animals do, but simply looking. Neither of us is afraid. I think I might come a step or two closer, but before I take that initiative, it does an extraordinary thing. It rolls over on its back. Its belly is cream white, shadowed in four places by the fold-over of its white mitten paws. It rubs itself in the leaves. It’s scratching its back on the leaves and the little flashing stones. It has a look of bliss on its face. It has forgotten me. Or maybe it hasn’t. It stops scratching, leaps to its feet again, fixes its eyes on mine, then flips over, rubbing again, the blissful look back on its face. It is inviting me for a scratch on the stones. You’d like it, it says, with that yellow hump on your back that must itch so.


I’m confused. The rules of the game are not what one expected. It had been watching me watch the perfumed women. Maybe it watched me huff and puff a long way up the trail. Its was the play behind my play. I begin to move off, to give it more room, in case that’s what it wants. But it runs down the slope to the edge of the path, cutting me off from my intended route. It runs toward me a couple of feet, then scampers back to where it was and hunkers down in the leaves, innocent as can be, like my own cat in front of the fire. It is playing with me. I am meant to chase it. I do, a few feet, stomping through the silver scatter, stopping short, as it has done. It flips backwards, speeds off in mock terror, then stops, tiny legs apart, smiling, I would say. It lunges at me again, braking into a gather of leaves, like a kid diving into the leaf pile in autumn, squirming around until he is almost vanished in the leaves, only the twitchy black nose sticking out, and the blue gleam of eyes from the forest floor where there is no other blue. I squat down and begin throwing leaves into the air. I think this gesture, the antic throwing of leaves, will look to the creature like unalloyed mirth on my part, like something a creature of my kind, happy, not any threat at all, might do on a sun-blasted winter day. The creature edges toward me, flips on its back, then onto its white belly again, slides a little through the leaves like an otter on a riverbank. If my arm were twice as long at it is, I could touch the twitching black nose. It thinks I am a child, a pup, a kit just out of the nest. It is teaching me how to play.


We hear the new hikers at the same moment. They are a man and a woman. The woman says something, too low to make out the words, and the man answers with a guffaw of laughter. I look toward the sound. The man emerges on the trail first, still grinning from the laughter. On his chest is a sleeping baby, a red Santa hat crooked on its tiny head. Though much on the forest floor is reddish, ochre and cinnabar, the hat is the only red red, and no eye can keep away from it. The woman appears from the curve of the trail, a long walking stick in her hand. I’m closer to the trail than even I was before, standing in a blaze of mountain light, but they do not look up from the path. They do not see me. I’m afraid to speak, lest it startle either them or the baby or the creature on the slope behind me. When they pass, I turn to my little gray friend. Of course, he is gone. I don’t even bother to look for him. Lightning is not going to strike twice out of that blue sky. I climb to where he was rubbing himself on the stones. Uncovered of their leaves in the bright, low light, the scratching stones shine dull silver, flashing when I move with diamonds of mica. I climb a little longer before turning back, to give the creature something to watch, in case he is watching.