To the Woman at the Base of the Giant Western Red Cedar by Jennifer Fliss
I hope I’m not being intrusive when I ask this, but why were you crying? I know I was a stranger and who would want to air their grievances like so much drying laundry, to a stranger?
I did not ask you then, so I am asking you now. Can you hear me?
That summer day, the sun was cut into shards by the tree canopy, and you had positioned yourself in the largest fractal, like you knew as the day went on, where and when the brightest spot would be.
Suddenly beside me was a man clutching hiking poles and hunched over with a large pack. Dual white zinc lines striped along his cheeks. He said he had seen you there before. He pointed with one of his poles in your direction. Something about the environment. Something about the trees. Something about all the people, he said and shook his head. The man took off down a trail. He was alone and I watched until he disappeared.
You, who cried for the cedars, the fir, the spruce. Me who cried because motherhood was and was not everything I’d expected. There, in the forest, I felt embraced in the swooping arms of cedars at whose base you rested.
Have they accused you too, of being over-sensitive?
My daughter was seven months old. It was our first trip. In my postpartum haze, I needed to leave our house, to dispense with the familiar. Her constant caterwauling like a wild animal. Her hunger for me, a carnivore-hunger. I hadn’t slept in half a year. We decided to travel to the rainforest, the only one in North America. Different altogether from the sultry Amazon.
I was listed as a geriatric pregnancy. In a pack attached to my partner, my daughter was calm there, beside the rushing river, under the tree canopy: old growth and revered like an octogenarian.
You caressed the bark like it was the skin of a loved one. Your skin was not unlike the bark you rested against, craggy, striated lines stretched up to the sky. How old are you? I’m sorry; I know it’s rude to ask. But I am starting to see the change of my skin, my bark, growing yet another ring. I think a lot about the rings of trees. How we can only learn how old they are by cutting them down.
You said something that sounded like: who will care for them when we are gone and I wanted to say, they took care of themselves for a long time before we came along. Things were better then, really.
This rainforest. This North American rainforest. This temperate rainforest. This wet wet place. Somewhere around here is supposedly a place that is the quietest on earth. Have you been there? To the quiet place? I think I’d like to go sometime.
The epiphytes are numerous. You told me what that meant: a plant that grows on another plant. I motioned to my daughter and said about parasitic relationships and you said no, not that way.
Nurse logs, different from epiphytes: A fallen dead tree giving birth to more plants and on and on and at some point, we are all growing on top of each other, the living and the dead.
The trifold from the visitor’s center said nothing about you. Only the flora and the fauna, the Sitka spruce, the mycelium, and the banana slugs. I clutched one as if it would save me. Took an extra and stuffed it in my pocket.
For a moment, I believed I held a manifesto in my hands. But no, it was just a brochure. Just an 8 x 11 pamphlet when unfolded. We clean up hundreds of them each summer, a staffer told me.
The Hoh River behind you hurried and bubbled along like it had somewhere to be. Blue like aquamarine, blue like a crush of hydrangeas, blue like my daughter’s eyes, blue like me.
Did you know the human skin loses its elasticity as we age? When I was young, I’d pinch my grandmother’s skin to see how long it took to snap back. Today I do the same to my own skin and as I trace the gentle lines there, I see that it takes a second longer to snap back than yesterday. Seconds add up.
Crunching along the trail, under my hiking boots, I was breaking millions of tiny bones. I thought of you as we traversed the forest floor and weaved through the switchbacks. You were gone by the time we returned. The carpet of fir needles was unbothered, as if you had never been there at all.
When we left you. I said goodbye. You waved with a mittened hand, though it was summer. I said see you later, because I believed I would.
Will you stay in touch? Will you write back? And will that look like contrails written in the sky just for me? Or will it be written in lichen on trees. In a white-capped garden of Pleurocybella porrigens, the mushrooms known as angel’s wings. Or maybe your message will be in the throated call of a barred owl, or maybe your message will be the trail itself, wending its way through the forest like life.
We, down here, we are the understory.
As we were about to leave, there was a sudden crack. A shouted warning came from behind. It was a snag. A tree that had started falling days, weeks, months ago, was finally falling, slamming to the ground, and reaching its resting place to begin again.
Please write back.
Artist’s Statement
During the pandemic, we had little choice but to get into the outdoors. Therein began a vast exploration of the Pacific Northwest and all its wonders, mysteries, and people. I always write to try to explore humans and our capacity to love and muddle through this weird world in ways that we don't often talk about. But this period of exploration led me to understand the difference between a fir and a cedar, the different kinds of pinecones, and owl calls. I write to heal myself and find understanding in myself, of myself, and the world around me. And, in one sentence: I write because I absolutely love it.
Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is the writer of the story collections As If She Had a Say (2023) and The Predatory Animal Ball (2021.) Her writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.