The Secret Forest

“That's not possible!” Jenna exclaimed, as she and Sarah wound their way around thick boulders dotted with lichen and into a mass of gnarled cedar saplings.

“I know how it sounds. But it's not a dream, it's real,” Sarah insisted, her breathing growing labored with the climb and her growing sense of frustration.

Jenna looked at Sarah with concern. She didn't understand how Sarah could have stayed in the aftermath of the wildfire that had ravaged the forest a few years ago, but Jenna had held Sarah while she sobbed, nonetheless. Still, she also took any opportunity to lure Sarah on hikes into terrain Jenna referred to as “less charred.” Sarah hadn't bothered to tell her that the planted cedars they hiked through, arranged neatly in rows and all the same height, hardly constituted a forest. It was no more than a plantation.

After the initial shock and sorrow of the fire had begun to fade, Sarah had delighted in watching the forest heal itself. Seedlings, understory plants, a cornucopia of fungi, all clamored for space in the ash-rich soil. She'd seen more deer in the burned areas than she ever had before the fire. She marveled at nature's gentle adaptations, and felt at peace with the forest and its healing. She took pictures of green shoots poking out of the ashy earth, observed a variety of birds nesting in newly-hollowed-out snags, held memorials for the trees that hadn't made it. Sarah felt herself healing in sync with the forest, connecting to the new version of what nature had birthed. With the resurgence of bitter cherry came black bears, a mother and cub, who balanced on the rubbery stems to harvest the fruit in the same spot daily. Sarah observed them quietly from a distance some evenings, their brownish black coats shimmering in the early twilight.

Then the chainsaws came. The dead black monoliths that had become safe havens for owls and woodpeckers were unceremoniously felled and given funerary transport on the back of logging trucks. Everything that had burned was razed to the ground. Seedlings and mushrooms were stomped and bulldozed. She had written letters, trying to explain that the dead trees were homes, that cutting down trees would make the landscape hot and windy which would actually make it more prone to fires. The responses she got, when she got any at all, used words like “safety” and “flammable”, citing studies bankrolled by logging companies.

Finally, Sarah gave up. She didn't say anything when denuded hillsides became mudslides in the spring. Sure, the dead trees that had been cut were no longer there to fall into the road. But there was no longer a road either – it had crumbled away from the constant rush of mud and water with nothing in the way to stop the flow. That latter part she liked, she admitted. No logging trucks could navigate the precarious strip of asphalt now. Her forest had been plundered and violated, but at least now it was quiet. It was in that quiet that Sarah felt a shift.

It had begun a month ago. A small area that had been burned but not thoroughly ravaged by either fire or man had become her sanctuary, a reminder of what had been and what could be again if the forest were just left to heal in peace. When she closed her eyes to the ailing landscape in the company of the oldest trees she knew, Sarah saw a purple ring behind her eyelids, pulsing and increasing in size for as long as she'd let it. She felt pressure against her arms and legs, like the forest was trying to pull her somewhere, as a humming built in her chest. Eyes closed, enjoying the shade of the large canopies and running her fingers through soft duff that had already been replenished, she felt herself starting to pull away from this man-made world and back to her true self.

As she practiced slipping closer and closer to the purple ring, the divide, she began to experience visions more frequently. Sarah could even summon the purple ring when she wasn't in the forest – she could close her eyes and see things the way they had been before, feel the way they had been before. Everywhere she went, it was like there was a different world layered behind the facade of the one she felt trapped in, a better world. She longed for that place, longed to break through that film, the barrier separating her from truth – especially in moments like this, when she was trying to convince her oldest friend that she hadn't had a psychotic break.

“Sar, you've always been a tree-hugger. I get that this is hard for you. But people are the way they are and you just have to live with that.” Jenna paused at a clearing beside a cliff. Below was an expanse of farms and houses.

“Why do I have to live with it? Why can't people stop wrecking things?” Sarah picked at some sap stuck to the edge of her fingernail.

“Because that's what people do, it's just how we are as a species. We love to destroy things and build other things in their places. Life is just one constant remodel – our houses, our bodies, the world around us.” Jenna shrugged and took a swig from her water bottle. “Hell of a view, eh?”

Sarah's cheeks were flushed, more from the effort of her anger than the climb. “Sure, if you like farms and houses and people things...”

Jenna turned abruptly to Sarah who was sucking from her own bottle, frowning at the hazy valley. “Why do you have to be so negative? Find beauty in the world as it is! Accept it, move on, live your life. It's not perfect but there's a lot of good. Why can't you appreciate what you have?”

Sarah met Jenna's eyes. “Because, I'm sick of settling, Jen. I'm sick of being told to just sit here and take it. The world wouldn't be the way it is if more people decided this way of living, destroying, is unacceptable. I'm the anomaly rather than the people pillaging the land. And the lies... It's not about safety or anything else but greed. The only green they're interested in is money.”

“Honestly, Sar. I wish you'd just let it go.” Jenna reholstered her water bottle in the side pocket of her pack and took a quick photo snap of the vista with her phone.

Sarah felt the humming growing stronger inside her. She was still angry, but she also felt...powerful. She waited until Jenna turned toward her again and met her gaze, then Sarah spoke slowly, evenly, firmly: “You can have your broken world. I choose to live in a better one.”

Sarah closed her eyes tightly in defiance. She focused on the purple ring behind her eyelids, watching it grow larger and larger, until she felt compelled to reach out and pull herself through it. Jenna's protests faded. Sarah opened her eyes. Jenna was gone and so was the trail. A hermit thrush trilled from the branch of a gigantic cedar. A bobcat slunk among a grove of red fir. Sarah scanned the view below and the forest around her. There were no farmhouses, no plantation cedars. All around, as far as she could see, lay only green. She was home.