Plans change. Infrastructure is at the mercy of ambivalent forces: roads are swept away, bridges collapse, things, being subject to entropy, fall apart. So after several such collapses I woke at three to catch the early ferry. There's a ridge line on an island where one can stand facing south by south east and if such a person is lucky dawn will provide answers to questions we ask without the symbolic intermediary of language. It's this ridge line I sought this morning and one particular Gary Oak, which seems to have survived the last glacial scouring, to sit beneath.
These northern latitudes provide ample time to cross through the channels and then ramble through the lodge pole pines, maples, and occasional fir still in the dark hours before first light. This morning I could feel the clouds before I saw them, dense, compressing the air between them and what lay beneath. The darkness was tangible, a thing that perhaps photons would be unable to penetrate, unable to push into the valleys. An evolutionary memory rises on such mornings, irrational as it is, you feel your softness, vulnerable, your sight is poor. You are more exposed in that moment than the first time you lay beneath another. As I walked my headlamp shown back at me with a singular pair of eyes, then two, then three: deer. I stopped, switching off the light, hoping to let my eyes adjust or at the very least let my ears learn the task of sight in darkness but all was still, compressed. Neither the bipedal or quadrapeds stirred. We, two and four legs alike, are prey in the darkness, similarly vulnerable. Disconcerted with this feeling of kinship I found my oak in the dark and sat underneath it's gothic branches.
An owl called from dark to dark unanswered by my unstudied accounting. It was a diminutive dawn. Darkness changed to grey, the sun choosing modesty, so I continued on to the north. As I've said before we never go alone into the forest and today was no different. I wanted to stay on the southeast side of the island tonight underneath the madrones and next to the salal but what I brought with me today couldn't be held. We are entering the months of introspection, too many hours of darkness, the light seldom more than variations of shadows, the sun a haint inhabiting a memory. A memory already haunted. There, out in the forest, a person is a haunted house he himself can not abide within.