Nemophilia: (n); the love of spending time in forests or woodland
The woods are in my blood. The trees grow there, silently, root systems crawling through my veins. The creatures have left their prints on my bones. Coyotes bay and bound as I run from place to place. My laugh ranges from the squeak of a mouse to the bark of a fox. Their wildness flashes in my eyes when I am joyous or angry or particularly stubborn. When I close my eyes, I see shafts of sunlight nuzzling through new spring leaves that bud on oaks and maples, changing the wood into a cathedral with green stained glass. Evergreens soar through my head, birches tremble when I am afraid, and moss and lichen grow on old memories tucked away.
*
One night, in the indigo heat of summer, my dad whispered me awake. It was 10 o’ clock at night, and, for an eleven-year-old, that was irresponsibly late. “Come with me,” he grinned, and I stumbled behind him down our yellow hallway, sunny-bright against the middle of the night.
We walked through the kitchen, my bare feet slapping against the linoleum like wet seaweed. Only the light of the stove was on, but I still winced when it grabbed at my vision. My dad slid the back door open and muttered under his breath at the screen door. The hair stood on my arms as the night air licked at my skin. The stars were smears in a husky haze, and my father was silhouetted against it. “Listen, Annalise,” he murmured, and his hushed voice echoed in the bottom of my belly.
At first, I could only hear the deafening, beautiful song of the peeper-frogs and the shy responses of the crickets. And then, a voice of a coyote lilted to the sky, rising in pitch and intensity, cutting through the humidity of the night. The other coyotes joined in, shrieking and crying and enveloping me in their sound. In their voices I heard desperation and the fierce will to live, and it twisted into the middle of my chest like a corkscrew. I saw them in my mind’s eye: lanky but strong, tongues lolling out of mouths as they ran the ridges behind my house. These coyotes were not as scrawny as some; they were interbred with wolf and remembered their heritage well. There were many of them, bounding and yipping around the field next to my house, and I was only a small, prepubescent girl, staring at the stars and listening to their song. I was scrawny and small, but I remembered my heritage well too, and that gave me strength. I went back to bed with a wildness sparked in my sleepy eyes.
We got a dog a few years later, and I always looked to the ridges with awed caution when I walked her around the yard, the coyotes’ song coiled around my heart. I still hear them.
*
My backyard abruptly ends in a three-tiered ridge leaping up into the forest behind my house. The hill is steep, and in the winter, we fly down it on styrofoam gliders, whooping and calling until we are breathless and our eyes are wild. I remember sitting at the foot of that hill, crushing briers beneath me, watching my breath puff out in front of me and gazing in wonder at the silvered pines and oaks and maples. The shouts of my brother and sister at the top of the hill were muffled by the snow, and I was alone in the stillness. The quiet around me was a mountain, fresh and crisp and dazzlingly big. The silver silence, I thought.
*
When my family was younger— my brother a cherub whose tongue was always poking out from between his lips, my sister and I wide-eyed, tow-headed explorers—we would hike the perilous trails of Steep Rock—a state park whose broad, graveled paths wove along the river. The train tunnel was a bear’s den in our young minds, another world even. Winter lived there. Ice columns twisted from ceiling to floor. We were always silent in the train tunnel, because our voices bounded off the walls and sprang back at us. It was intensely terrifying, hearing your tiny voice become the bay of a coyote in the echo.
My sister and I go back to Steep Rock a dozen times a summer, and we walk through the train tunnel in awed silence. As I get older, silence is harder to find and becomes more sacred when it is found. The tunnel is no longer scary, but sometimes I think about playing a violin in that space. The echo is vast and lonely, a gap that cannot be bridged with any link of sound. I am reminded of my smallness as my own voice echoes and fades into reverberations.
We come out the other side of the tunnel into the sun and look up at the soaring evergreens, letting the cave water freefall like glittering diamonds and kiss our foreheads. And we struggle and huff up the mountain, going farther than we ever did as children.
*
My body was built for hiking, and I take my cues from the woods I walk through. I grit my teeth and struggle upwards like the tree-roots growing uphill, curling and choking and establishing themselves. A hawk flies overhead, scrutinizing the land with cold golden eyes, and in my mind’s eye I see it flying over the lonely face of the mountain and push towards that goal. I focus on the birds rejoicing in the day and the talkative brook, and it gives me the positivity necessary to shout between labored breaths to the other eight girls in my hiking group trekking through the Adirondacks the summer before college. We were thrown together, tossed leaves whirling in a windstorm. I surprised myself by being one of the strongest hikers in the group and more often than not walked in the very back of the line, where the hiker with the most endurance will walk. Cloaked in bug spray, I sing under my breath, my thick hair pulled back with a bandanna.
On a clouded, rainy day, we left our packs at the campsite and struggled forth, up a mountain into alpine foliage that I did not know but loved at first sight. The trees were sparse but strong, muted greens and silver-blues. The lichen spread over the rocks in a comfortable mint green, spongey and structured, reminding me of land coral. The land sprawled before us, clothed in the deep sensual green of summer. No birds sang.
We settled on a flat rock at the top of the mountain, shedding daypacks and shoes. Our guides took a camp stove and griddle out and lit it, and we feasted on pancakes at the summit. Our peanut butter rolled down the mountain and was lost to us forever. I walked to the edge of the rock and looked out over the trees, over the winding rivers carrying the lifeblood of the forest, over a falcon that flew below me. I saw how far I had come, and traced the map of it with my wild eyes.