A place to get lost, and found
Written: Dec 08 '00 (Updated Dec 08 '00)
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Pros: Unmeasurable.
Cons: Unmeasurable.
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| Urbanist's Full Review: Trapper Creek Wilderness |
If you think you can never get lost, check out the old-growth rainforest of the Pacific Northwest, a piece of which is preserved in this small valley of wilderness northeast of Portland.
This landscape, the one I perceive as home, is one of the few places where I can easily lose track of where I am. If you enjoy that sensation, and it does have its pleasures, this is the place to be.
In dense evergreen forest, space is topological: it has form, but no definite size. For the hiker, the only form is the lattice of trails. Only at intersections of trails (if signed) can I tell where I am on the map. Between the intersections distance is meaningless, arbitrary, unmeasurable. The trails may be punctuated by events -- a dramatic saprophyte, a herd of elk, even a sweeping view, but these events, impossible to find on the map, form bits of narrative strung like loose beads along the segment of trail. I may remember their sequence, but they can slide back and forth on the trail segment in my memory, so that there’s no pinning down where they occurred.
On a trail segment through dark woods, where can only be an extrapolation from when. If I watch the clock, I may know that the segment from this intersection to that one is, say, one hour. But on the rough trails especially, my speed is uneven, and I have distorted time further by stopping here and there to gaze or listen. In the end, I may know that I saw the elk on this trail between this junction and that one, but beyond that there is no knowing where they were.
The Trapper Creek Wilderness is only 6000 acres, small on a map of the National Forest, "minuscule" in the words of my Sierra Club book, which wanted it much bigger. Within it, though, it has no size at all. Maps, curiously, do not show mileages from one trail junction to another, as though nobody has really been able to measure the place. It contains enough trailstuff to fill an exhausting 10 hours of hiking, but since there is no way relate time to distance here, the place seems infinite.
I fully believe that when I next return there, the trails will be barely recognizable. In a different season there will be different blooms and berries of course, but even the trails will seem to have moved, this one stretched and that one shrunk.
There is something feminine about these wet woods that defeat linear time and linear distance. It is the same thing that made this kind of forest so powerful in European mythology: the dark, wet, chthonic space where you might get lost and never return.
Most of the wet Northwest has a womblike, embracing quality, but the Trapper Creek Wilderness is more womblike than most, because the wilderness boundaries are defined by the upper edge of the watershed. No water flows across the wilderness boundary, except at the lowest point where Trapper Creek exits into more exploited lands on its journey down to the Columbia. The wilderness in its entirety is an east-facing watershed, a point of origins, a cradle or womb. Why should one expect to measure distances in the womb?
Like the European mythological forest, too, everything here is full of eyes, ears, and other organs of sense. Everything around you is feeling and reverberating. This sense of being watched and listened is strongest when I am alone, less so when I am with others. Alone, without other witnesses and without a social world, I can notice how much noise I must make to move through the forest, how alien to it I am in every way. This strikes my naked ego as an expression of the forest’s disapproval, as though the forest cared one way or the other.
Before long, I can briefly feel flashes of Republican irritation with all this "dumb nature" that refuses to even notice my uniquely glorious presence. I can even imagine why someone would want to cut all this down, quite apart from the value of the timber -- why someone would want to build a subdivision here, saving only those ancient trees that can be given meaning as manmade landscape, monuments to some ego or another.
In the National Parks of the Sierra Nevada in California, the most prominent giant sequoias have each been fenced off and named with a grand wooden sign, such as "General Grant" or "General Sherman". Of course, these 2000-year-old trees look much as they did when those fine men were in diapers. By bestowing these names, the early explorers of these mountains tried to turn all that intimidating age to a monument to a single ego. This egocentric naming tries to conceal what a forest really is, and how little trees care about what we think of them.
To see what a forest really is, come to the wet, dense old growth of Trapper Creek Wilderness. This is place to see the forest, not the trees.
Recommended:
Yes
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Urbanist
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Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
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Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
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