A few years ago, in the months when leaves fall from trees, Bill and I drove to Washington. We stayed in Seattle and then Port Angeles and then one day we drove south, and kind of west, from there. We got to Forks in time for a late lunch and we visited the Sasquatch store. We kept going south on 101. It got dark. It started raining. It started really pouring. There was hardly anyone else out there. No moonlight. Just the two lane road, dark and shiny from our own headlights. Just lots of really tall trees and if there was a house it was buried in the trees. I said, this is really pretty. It is so pretty and so cool out here. But I think to make it out here everything in my life would have to be perfect. One little corner of darkness and I would succumb to the whole darkness.
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I had this theory for a while that I couldn’t handle big trees. When I went out to Virginia for college I felt claustrophobic. It’s scary to feel trapped. And I decided it was because the trees were so big. When I started camping I noticed that it never felt safe to sleep in a grove of trees. I had to be on a beach or on the edge of the trees or in a field. I had to be able to look out and see at least some distance. Even if that distance was all water. It made me feel safe.
It’s not that I didn’t grow up with trees. There are actually way more trees in Kansas City than you might think if you’ve never been there. In fact, the first time I drove from Denver to Kansas City in the summer I was overwhelmed by the lushness of it. (Isn’t everything all relative in the end?) Kansas City was so green. The trees on my parents’ street were so tall and their branches reached all the way across the street to touch other trees.
But trees in Kansas are different than the trees in Washington and in Virginia. The trees in Kansas don’t impose. They don’t make you feel boxed-in. They aren’t so dense that you can’t see through them to the other side or that you can’t see the sky.
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It gets cold out there, surfing in the PNW. The thickest wetsuits and booties and hoods make it possible to spend and hour or two in fifty degree water but it’s never warm. And when you get out of the water you’re wet and it’s cold outside also and you have to just stand there on the beach or in the parking lot pulling all of your gear off and it takes forever because your fingers are numb and your booties are basically suctioned to your ankles. You can wrap yourself in a towel or a blanket but it still won’t be warm enough and you’ll shiver in the car all the way home.
So it was very nice of Bill and his friend to offer to go to the store to get dinner while I stayed at the Airbnb which had a hot tub. I remember getting in that hot tub. I remember thinking: this is the best thing I’ve ever felt in my whole life. And when you remember that I had been mostly shivering for the past eight hours it makes sense. My body could finally relax. It was only once I settled in that I really noticed the surrounding trees, dark and dense and impenetrable. Waves crashed so loud it felt like the ocean surrounded me but I couldn’t see it and had no idea where it was directionally. (Later David would say that those waves sounded good and he wished he could go surf them and we could probably walk to the ocean from here.) Steam rose from the hot tub. And I thought, this feels just like a horror movie. This is exactly when they come for me in a horror movie. But honestly, I was so high off homeostasis that I didn’t care.
Anne Foster 