THERE BE DRAGONS:

In the Heart of the Bear (Richard Farr, 11/21/24, 3Quarks)

Here, for me anyway, was a strange and arresting new experience of wilderness. I’d started out in full Delusional Romantic mode — a Paddler in a Sea of Fog, full of myself for appreciating my own insignificance in these almost limitless spaces. But in all this vastness there was a kind of claustrophobia to be found. You camp on one of the beaches and the sand is pleasantly soft underfoot. Maybe the sun has come out too and is applying a little warmth and UV to your damp malodorous gear. You look around, breathe deeply, and… you can’t visit the land. Beyond the sand, behind the tent, there’s an almost impenetrable green wall.

Almost: rarely, very rarely, there are short rough paths into the forest that previous visitors have created. One of these, three hundred yards long perhaps, connects two beaches across an isthmus. Trying to follow it makes me feel like a creature out of Tolkein: I have to clamber over branches larger than ordinary trees; I fall into pools of mud; I’m not sure I’m still going the right way; I find myself in mossy deeps where strange fungi loom out of the dark and whisper at me. Then, off to one side, I glimpse that especially eye-popping red cedar.

Wanting to get closer, I leave the path through a rat’s nest of salal and climb onto a trunk that has fallen in the right direction. An elevated highway! But the wood is slick and I manage only a couple of dozen small nervous steps before I see that a drop is opening up on either side: five feet, ten, fifteen, into a shadowy chaos of bark, loam, and leafy understory. I have the sensation that there is no forest floor, that the abyss of dying plant matter might go down forever. Ahead of me, across the trunk, the way is blocked by another trunk and its attendant wreckage. I prod, hesitate, back out and try a second route. Then a third, during which I’m attacked by killer brambles and twist an ankle during my escape. No ‘exploring in the forest’ here. The density is like nothing I’ve ever encountered. There’s no way through.

Robert Falcon Scott was right: “It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilised world.” But after getting back to our narrow beach and failing to find any other paths, I thought: I don’t belong here. This place belongs to the trees, which are lending it to the bears and the wolves. The forest is saying: ‘Now that you’ve seen this, and appreciated what it really is, don’t come back.’

Later, I wondered if that was just a different kind of Romanticism.