What it is: a guide. Not a guide to policy or to action, exactly — but a guide to the kind of preparation that makes seeing possible. The seeing that makes action possible. The practice that, once it takes root, keeps growing even when you stop tending it deliberately. The nature educators who take children into old-growth forest aren't teaching ecology. They're tending conditions so that a connection can happen — so that the child can feel, understand, and remember what old means, what belonging to something larger means, what there is to protect. You cannot tell someone that. You can only put them in contact with it, and trust.
This book puts you in contact with the pattern — the structure of enclosure and the structure of the commons, near the people who built and defended and continue to build and defend — so that you can feel it rather than just know it. Questions of politics are always questions of consciousness. These pages are an invitation to shift, if you can take it.
In Washington State, in places I won't name precisely, there are educators who have decided that the most important thing they can do is put children in direct contact with old-growth forest.
What the deer walked through, what the children moved on, what the educator had spent years coming to know — was the same thing. The forest. The state park's edges. The curriculum the educator had to rebuild for five-year-olds. The book calls this the terrain. The terrain is what the wizard reads. It is older than anyone walking on it; it produced them; they did not produce it. It has one fundamental axis: it has been enclosed, or it is held in common. The old-growth forest still stands at the commons end of that axis.
The first was a forest in Washington that we called the Scar.
We lived down the road from logging land. Hundreds of acres, too large to fence off, ringed on three sides by semi-rural neighborhoods and backing onto a county park on the fourth. Our five acres met it at the edge of an old corner — stumps bigger than a sedan, the cuts of the logging platforms still visible in them, eighty years on. We had carved small trails on our own land, used by deer, bear, raccoon, possum, and one of those trails dropped us onto a county road. The county road ran paved for a quarter mile and joined an old logging road. The logging road took you into the planted forest — extremely tall, skinny trees grown close together for straightness, many keeled over on shallow roots, hawks still hunting through them, deer still walking their trails. The forest was already wrong before you reached the cut. And then you got to the cut.
You could feel it before you got there. The light changed. The smell changed. The air went drier and more brittle. Less moss on the trees, more brambles, more mud, less soil. When you broke through, it looked and felt like a scar on the land — twisted, shattered trunks like the bones of a giant, bleached from exposure, in scattered piles. The soil those trees had held in place was long washed away. Insects bred in stagnant pools the streams could no longer reach. The stench of decay, plant and animal. Scat from the animals that couldn't hold it for the traverse, latrined at the edge of the forest as a signal. Vultures always overhead. Sometimes we heard horrible noises from the forest and knew the Scar was being torn open again. The Cooper's hawk I first really saw was hunting there. We did not always have the stomach to walk it.
And there was the grief.
If you have ever lost someone dear to you, you know how grief moves and transforms in the body and never really leaves. Each grief is different but they share a common frequency. The ache. The sharp pain in the chest. The fog around the head that makes it hard to see or hear what people are saying. The lead-heaviness. The tension of a field before a thunderstorm. Sometimes it is the storm, welling up and bursting forth in a cry, or sobs, or rage, or art, or poetry. Some animals are drawn to people grieving and offer comfort, and if you have had this happen to you you know it is unmistakable. If you track, you may find yourself doing just that for the forest. It is unbearable because it was not meant to be borne by one person. If you find yourself holding this grief for the land, find others before it consumes you.
One day we took a chip — the first tiny notch cut from the base of a tree to make room for the saw, the wedge that hits the ground before the saw goes through. Western Redcedar, Thuja plicata. Soft, fragrant, beautiful wood. The chip is a fragile thing, cut across the grain, never meant to be used. About a quarter the size of the writing table I am sitting at now. We knew what we were doing. It was a time in our lives when we walked with more deliberation and certainty than we do now. Each moment has an aura, and when you are part of the moment you know the shard that is yours to take and which to leave. And if you do not know, you know that you do not know — that is the lesson from that ceremony. Knowing can be a very mysterious thing if you let it.
The chip sat above the bar at our restaurant for years. It is in our house now. Inconspicuous, if you do not know what it is. If you look twice you see the cross-grain cut and recognize what it is for. It is there for the people who know, so they can know we know too, so we do not have to say anything. We can simply know together. Very few people have touched it. A sigil, then — carrying what we will not say.