Moisture seeps from every pore of the coastal mountains. It trickles downhill in rivulets of cold sweat, converging into a small creek that flows gently out of a flat-bottomed canyon, iced-tea water slipping past naked willows. Late winter rain drips softly from leafless limbs and evergreen boughs, murmuring an accompaniment to the whispering stream, a quiet symphony of tears. The canyon floor gives way to steep hillsides of dark green Douglas fir, interspersed by groves of leafless alder adorned only with cylindrical maroon catkins. Sharp contours of ridges and treetops are softened by pockets of fog settling in the draws like gray goose down.
This canyon is like many others in the Oregon Coast Range, with one important exception. There is no road in the bottom. An old roadbed is still visible along the west side, but it has been nearly reclaimed by brush growing in over a fifteen-year-old clearcut, and is now nothing but an overgrown trail. Deer still use it, hunkering under overhanging brambles and vine maple. The animals generally know best how to negotiate the steep terrain and dense vegetation. Walking slowly and carefully, I follow their lead, swishing against wet brush along the narrow path, cussing an overly aggressive blackberry bramble that grabs at my hat. I know where I’m going, but not what I’ll find along the way.
Leaving the clearcut, the trail enters a very old forest. Dark evergreen trunks rise from the floor and sides of the canyon, surrounding the creek in a womblike embrace. Gray light sifts through the evergreen needles high in the canopy, spreading across the understory, a wet film of tarnished silver. Logs in various stages of decay lie everywhere. Their rotting corpses are food for huckleberries, vine maple, and salal. Fresh, clover-shaped oxalis has emerged from the moss along the trail and I pick one, chewing gently, letting the sour juice seep slowly over the inside of my mouth.
Frantic regeneration of the logged hillside is replaced by quiet stillness borne on centuries of biological stability. Ancient forests are in ecological climax--the culmination of a long succession of changes in the community of life forms inhabiting the area. Each succeeding group of species produces critical habitat changes, increasing shade and moisture retention, enriching the soil with organic material. These modifications often eliminate members of the previous community. In an ancient forest this process of change and replacement has stabilized in an intricate network of sustainable relationships. This complexity and stability are cohesive in both time and space.
Our lives mirror the forest in that we have an emotional ecology. We change through time, becoming increasingly complex. Ideally our internal diversity results in an ecosystem that is stable and resilient. This cohesion is achieved through myriad connections to people, community, and the land. We develop a feeling of belonging, our sense of place. For me this is big trees and rain and wild salmon and blackberries and forest mushrooms and a mother who teaches me things like how to make great piecrust. I can always walk in the solitude of an isolated, drippy canyon.
The antithesis of emotional cohesion is depression. Depression is shutting down, a loss of the multifaceted rainbow of human expression. Depression produces isolation, an insular world separated from the intricate web of interactions that normally would sustain and nurture. Depression is not a stable state. Rampant clinical gloom in modern society may be the direct result of a culture that has produced a loss of social, and therefore emotional, cohesion. We have forsaken several million years of evolution as tribal beings by severing our connection to people and the land in order to participate in the economy of growth. We chase the carrot of a more satisfying, better-paying job in order to chase still bigger carrots--larger houses, better schools for the kids, blissful retirements.
Our existence has become more than a simple metaphor for the economics of expansion. Everything around us has been subsumed by this paradigm, including the great forests that once covered the coastal mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Cutting of those forests has produced instability and frenetic successional change, and it is neither accidental nor ironic, that, for many of us, life has become unstable and frenetic. We literally are the growth economy.
Old forests couldn’t care less about economics or economists. They simply exist, moment by moment, for their own sake. Their intricate steadiness teaches us that healing is a natural process of change, and that the end result of that process is an integrated, balanced existence. Perhaps they resonate with me because the frenetic phase of my life is coming to a close.
My pants are soaked to the top of my thighs. I’m moving too slowly to generate enough body heat to fend off the damp chill creeping up my backside. Shivering, I turn to follow the stream downhill, out of the canyon. The trail home is clear.