1. On my way into the forest my feet stumble over roots and rocks before they can sink into the soft pine-needle cushions beneath the trees. This ground is gentle to feet, even through the thick soles of my boots I can feel it.
2. Going off the path is easy here, where no underbrush grows for us to get tangled in. It’s a tamed forest, where the trees may raise their roots to trip you up but the branches they drop get cleared away to get piled into heaps elsewhere, like giant fallen birds’ nests, maybe to accommodate birds and bugs and rodents. The forest is more theirs than ours, or it should be.
3. Little twigs snap and leaves rustle with each of my steps. A week ago I watched the layers of leaves shift and shiver as a mouse hushed about a patch of forest ground and the sound was almost the same.
4. We’re all creatures who leave their traces in the landscape; I only wish our footprints weren’t quite so deep. Human weight has crashed into the forests, to cut out paths and clearings for ourselves.
5. I follow the path up the mountain, rocks and pebbles sliding and clicking against each other, rolling downhill for a bit, coming to rest before the next foot disturbs them. No ice age glacier needed to carry them.
6. Old stone markers line the edge of the path, marked by the elements in their turn. What they might say about distance and borders is a mystery to us now, though it was important enough for the people of the past to carve these neat little blocks from some other mountain to be put on this one.
7. The mountain beneath us is not empty, but a little emptier than it was a thousand years ago. We carved our way into its insides with axes and dynamite, to drain the veins of silver and lead. We also razed the silver firs from its skin but trees grow back, stone and ore don’t.
8. Walking among the trees, hundreds of metres above sea level and the sunlight on my face, I try to imagine myself wandering the tunnels that eat through the mountain under our feet and I see a different world. All this rock lifting the forest towards the sky – and below, the workers and mining ponies toil and crouch in the dark. I remember the stale, damp air from the times I went underground, to natural caves and coal mines in North-Rhine Westphalia, but I also recall the comfort of being so deeply enclosed in the earth. And the silence. Up here on the surface we’re exposed to the world and silence is too rare.
9. There is no silence in the forest and there shouldn’t be. Still, crickets don’t draw attention to themselves like the cars driving by, just beyond the edge of the forest, their noise intruding into the illusion of a peaceful nature. Nature herself never knew or needed peace before humans but humans have been fighting her for a long time.
10. The only fight I ever got into in a forest was my own fault and the deer’s antlers gave me dark bruises that took weeks to fade to a pale green. I’ve been more careful with wild animals since then.
11. None of our forests are really wild anymore. At least not around here. We pass by an upturned tree trunk, left lying where it fell to be slowly devoured by moss and fungi. Next to it, another gnarled old tree is still standing, leafless, dark green with moss, and split where a younger living tree emerges from the apparently dead one, winding its way out of its decaying twin, happily raising its crown towards the sun. This is what forests should look like, feeding upon themselves. These trees are beautiful because they’re not here to be useful for humans, for timber, a hopeful reminder of a forest that’s just allowed to be. I wonder if the dead tree doesn’t harbour more life than its siblings turned into fences and bedframes for our bodies. Bodies that have, after all, been tamed even more than this former wilderness.
12. In fairy tales the woods held danger, although as long as I can remember I felt kinship with the trees and the creatures that live amongst them. Even in fairy tales. I felt for the little boar whose lungs and liver were torn out so that the queen could be deceived and Snow White might live a little longer. I was never scared of wolves, only humans – because I grew up learning what had killed the wolves in our forests, and what was really preying on little girls these days. I always wanted to be a witch rather than a lost child trying to follow breadcrumbs.
13. In my imagination the forest has been my home for a long time, I just gravitate naturally towards it. As a child I constructed fantastical treehouses, little palaces with canopies of green, as a place in my mind for stories and music and mischief. I spent as much time with my feet dangling from my grandparents’ apple trees as roaming the forest with my dog, picking blackberries off the bushes and ticks off her fur. These days I do essentially the same, or almost. Alone in different forests, or with different, younger dogs in the same old forest, and I rarely get homesick but always, always nostalgic.
14. There are patches of moss among the trees, lush green islands amidst the brown hues of solid waves where the ground isn’t evenly sloping upwards but rising and falling, carrying driftwood, lichen growth, and fir seeds. Ferns and long leaves of grass have pushed themselves up through the dried needles beneath the moss. It feels just as soft as I imagined it would when I let myself sink onto the green bed. It’s a tempting thought, to just crawl under this blanket and let the earth reclaim my body, to stay and rot, at least for a little while.
15. I go to find the other humans and we leave the forest, only to put ourselves back here on the page. I imagine the forest in which my pencil was part of a tree once.
16. That night, I return to the edge of the woods, with a mind too restless to keep the body still inside. Not sleepwalking, though. The trees are now shrouded in enough darkness for me to really see, maybe even for the first time, why we call it the Black Forest. They’re thrown into sharp contrast by the Blue Moon and the shadows in-between beckon. It’s a pull that’s hard to resist but I left my boots behind this time and even the strange insomniac brain reasons against risking my toes.
17. Then my socked feet carry me up the mountain on the asphalt road made for my kind, empty and smooth, a black ribbon draped over the landscape. Eventually, I let it take me back to the house full of sleeping writers only to discover the door locked because sane people don’t wander off in the wee hours. The ones who do, without wasting a thought on their way back inside, deserve the chilly night. Waiting for someone to let me back in seems like the prudent thing to do but my mind is already flying back to the mossy beds, the giant birds’ nests, and the deep unseen tunnels.
18. The little wooden gnome on the doorpost smiles at me and I think his kind would welcome me, warmly, into their midst. Maybe, here it is: My chance to finally embrace life as a sylvan creature. Maybe this was the plan all along.
