Time and the Selva Oscura
Midway through the Andrews Forest residency, my day opens at a trailhead marked with a sign in moss-furred wood: EXPERIMENTAL WATERSHED. The switchbacks start right away, ascending the ridge with coiled energy, as if the trail is impatient to lead me upslope. Trailside terraces spill over with gardens of fairy slipper and firework bursts of sword ferns; shreds of green-speckled Lobaria lichen, fallen from the highest limbs, litter the forest floor like the aftermath of a tickertape parade. Giant Douglas-fir trees buttress the overstory, their colonnade filled in with mid-height hemlocks and the slenderer redcedars. This is old growth in its glory, switchbacks taking me up into midlevel canopy; at a pause in the turnings, I look out through latticed elevations of crusty, lichen-tufted limbs.
Now the trail levels out to contour the shoulder of the ridge, through wickerworks of new-budding branches, over rock-strewn clearings carpeted with last year’s leaf litter, foliage now faded to the color of sun-battered newsprint. This is vine maple, which masses in reedy, bent-over fascicles of green boughs throughout the understory, converging in thick sunstruck tangles wherever the canopy has broken open. Pushing through one such thicket, I come to a tight bend where the trail doubles back before a looming wall: the cut end of a great log. The log’s end is perhaps five feet in diameter, wood weathered to gray, annual rings standing out in subtle relief.
Having no appointment to keep, and ready for a rest, I start counting the rings outward from the heart. They begin conveniently spaced, and I reach one hundred about halfway out to the edge. At this point in its lifespan, however, the tree started laying on wood in thin layers — though even these thinner layers represent enormous quantities of added biomass as the tree bulked to enormous stature. Reaching two hundred, I still have a long way to go to reach the edge. The layers diminish in width, now thinner even than the thumbnail I use to gauge them. In any given year, the growing tree would have been comprised of a gossamer integument, a liquid layer of living cells, a vital habit enrobing eight tons of lumber-grade wood. 299, 300, 301—I might’ve missed a ring here or there, where the fibers of each layer fur and mash together—303, 304, 305 to the edge. 305 years.
Let’s count back the years to1713. (The tree would have germinated long before, of course, as it might have been cut ten or twenty seasons ago; but 1713 is remote enough from our own time to conjure the worlds this tree has witnessed.) As a provision of the Treaty of Utrecht, signed in that year, France ceded the maritime provinces to Great Britain—forest worlds, once tended by Mi’kmaq and Abenaki and Passamaquoddy, turned into forests of masts for the British Navy. In 1713, Colonial militias in the Carolinas aided by their Cherokee allies reduced the Tuscarora and seized much of their territory. The land where this great tree grew — the Cascades range, and all the Pacific coast south to Baja — a realm apart from these, had yet to be seriously claimed by any European colonial power. The US Constitution would not be ratified for three quarters of a century; the Congress that it brought into being would found the US Forest Service, under whose aegis this tree was cut, some two hundred years later.
Perhaps in the future it will seem strange to recall a time when governments and corporations presumed to exercise extractive power over landscapes and organisms whose lifespans were greater than their own.
I’m searching for words to describe how to think about the forest in our grieving, beleaguered time. The word derives from the Latin foris, “out of doors”; for the Romans, a wooded landscape outside the walls of parks. And yet cultivation plays a role in this plurality of forest possibility. Indeed the English forest was a place for royal hunting and forage, a land-use designation rather than a biome. Even the selva of Dante catches this resonance for some; in northern Tuscany, selva has traditionally been used to name tended groves of sweet chestnut; a wilder wood becomes a bosco.¹ The National Forests, of which the Andrews is a parcel, were set aside as timber reserves, complicating this history of cultivation and extraction stretching back to the Magna Carta and beyond.
For many today, the forest serves primarily as a refuge for deep time—a treasury of archaism, the lumber-room of our discarded wildness. We go to the woods to connect with the vast abyss of the past, its shadows and half-heard cries. (Are there words in those cries?) The primordial glamor of this atavistic forest still reigns the imagination. But I’m beginning to wonder if we need the forest not as the zone of lost time, but as the harbinger of that which goes beyond our own moment: the mystery that is the forest after us, without us. Or, more hopefully: the forest as the space of possibility for human and nonhuman thriving in futuro, in forms very different from those that imprison us in modernity today.
Having written this, I realize that this forest in futuro, this eschatological wood, has also been with us all along. It’s the selva oscura of Dante, perhaps, where we are always arriving belatedly, lost at the midpoint, drowning in darkling possibility.
- The language, landscape, and biotic memories of chestnut forests in north Tuscany are discussed by Andrew W. Matthews in “Ghostly Forms and Forest Histories,” which appears in the essential Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. by Anna Tsing et al. (Minnesota 2017).
In April, I spent two weeks in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, on a writing residency with the amazing Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. This is the second in a series of posts (with Cry, They Are Called) gleaned from notes and media I took with me from the Forest.
