The entrance of this trail is tightly woven with short trees, shrubs and wildflowers, and it signals to the hiker, *Cast away your personal space, ye who enter*s. I have to duck under branches, bob through thickets of greenbrier and young goldenrod shoots, climb past a massive fallen tree, and at the edge of an opening I must pause—
I'm staring at the center of an orbweaver web and at once I am also looking through it and everything behind looks tessellated and refracted, as if I'm looking through stained glass or a layer of soap water suspended in the web itself. The unfocused background is not uniform: it isn't as if there's just a layer of blurriness applied to everything, but instead there are cracks and fissures where there are areas of more and less focus, pooling around certain plants. Spring avens, bedstraw, multiflora rose. I cut through dense forest to avoid disturbing the spider’s abode.
I found the most remarkable ecosystem at the edge of a lake deep within the forest. In a 10’ area around me, I have identified at least twelve species of tree. It's at the water’s edge however where the most fascinating things are occurring. There are countless species of plants living within this strange, shallow shore on the lake that quickly descends into deep, murky tan water. The richness of diversity here recalls a reef, but instead of coral it is of a wholly Midwestern biota: arum arrowhead, duckweed, mosquito fern, heartwort, yellow pond lily, and strange underwater plants of unknown name. The water teems with insect and animal life, the most striking being the gigantic bullfrog tadpoles and the ribbon-like leeches. There is a deep channel cut into the reef that descends about an extra foot, and this water is murky and deep yellow, rich in tannins and reminding me ominously of anaerobic decay and deep sea brine pools.
At the western shore stands two dead trees, the Sentries, the guardians, the ancient wisdom and the poignant symbol of the circle of life and death. To even call the Sentries dead is to commit a category error. Where does a stage of life go after it is transmuted? Does a tree recognize its transformation into a dried, defoliated trunk, scrubbed of bark, perforated with uncountable pockmarks of the teeming beetles, nestled ant colonies and venturing woodpeckers? As its capillaries cease to pump water from the earth, do they feel themselves becoming lost or does the chain of being maintain its continuity? Can the trailing colonies of moss and shield lichen stuffed into the folds of bark feel their home receding, cracking, pulling away and revealing the resolute heartwood beneath? To stand perfectly still and just breathe in the facade of the Sentry, it would almost appear to be more full of life in its ‘death’ than it ever did when it was leafy. I see how the rapid dehumidification of the wood caused it to crack deeply along the grain—and the adventurous, careful little insects climbing the rough, cilial walls exposed to the environment—so too do the dried black peppercorn slime molds arouse my eyes, so perfectly and randomly scattered, but even so only adhering to certain surfaces and foregoing others—the surface of the heartwood itself is deeply enchanting: an almost ecstatic impressionist masterpiece of stoney gray, chestnut, chromic undertones and almost cobalt overtones, scattered reliefs of faded cork protruding and exposing their sponge-cake texture, sinewy braids of bark clinging vainly to the boundaries, all providing respite for an unknowable collection of microflora and -fauna, bacterial life, and who can even say what else? Only the most grandiose fool would look at this symphony of decay and sustenance and call the Sentry ‘dead’. Its twin is much the same, but also sporting a wonderful coat of virgin-creeper corkscrewing all the way to the tiptop about 25’ above my head. The thick, fibrous root snakes down the trunk, and the dazzling designs of silver, Tyrian purple and rich cyan almost beggar belief.
I was ripped from this visual feast by a violent crash of water: two beavers are circling the weedless interior of the pond, and periodically rearing back in a way as to represent a cashew before hurling their body into the water, battering the surface tension with their fat tails. I imagine they’re trying to stun prey they spot below the surface. When they do this shock maneuver, they can be submerged for more than fifteen seconds, surfacing sometimes 30’ from their entry point. When they are swimming across the surface, I can hear them talking to each other, a whimsical tune of wheezing whistles. They’re not the only vocalists in attendance at the opera tonight. The tenor-baritone chorus is staffed by a large cadre of American bullfrogs, implacable water-dogs, alternating between an array of calls. Their growls are deep and menacing, in no way betraying their tiny stature and harmless jaws—at points they make a double-click noise that I could only liken to that of a camera shutter quickly cycling, but if it were pitched down two octaves—another great sound could only be transliterated as *wi-lo-lo, wi-lo-lo—*but the pinnacle movement of any opera is of course its grand finale, and the bullfrogs put on an incredible show, sounding in all the world like a Suzuki bike revving up through first gear, but multiplied and shifted in timbre a hundred times until one gets an effect not dissimilar to a Shepard tone.
I sit on the grassy bank near my chair for at least an hour, taking in all of the joviality about me. This pond is the very essence of life and interconnection, a grand play of endlessly tiny moving parts, microstructures and larger dynamics generating *ex nihilo*, breaking apart and returning to non-existence, and as they fall away from the present it's easy to imagine that they never were in the first place—who is to say otherwise?—and I wonder for a brief moment whether I existed before right now, or will exist again tomorrow. I will lay here on this grass and the ants will crawl over and under, and eventually in and out of me. My blood will coagulate and become their food, and my feet will dangle in the water for the tadpoles and leeches to nibble on—my organs will waste away and into them a million million bacteria and larvae and beetles, nourishing their growth and propagation for a countless number of cycles—my stripped torso will house the little critters of the forest floor, and my skull will be a new colonial mansion for the voracious and imperial ants—all of me is my body, and if my body becomes broken, melted, cut, scattered, dissolved, absorbed, I will become all, and I will carry on even as I cease to exist. If my body is an overripe fruit, it is here where the flesh will split open and the great feast will commence, and in no time at all, any trace of me will vanish.
The fluidity of the environment perturbates unendingly, lulling me into a stupor. My eyes are held in an ashen yawn, seeing all but observing none, simply a vehicle to witness thus. The water is being tickled by a thousand whirygigs, cavorting like children in bumper cars, pausing for mere tenths of a second (for them hours?) in minor conspiracies, darting under the shade of giant arum arrowheads, whose shadows paradoxically don't deepen the hues of the subsurface life but instead robs it of all color, casting strange monochromatic blankets. Above that, the canopy across the pond languishes in the wind, and yet I can still tell each member apart by it's foliage, by the character of the branches, by the colors at hand—long tender ropes of black walnut overpower the scene, an almost medicinal green, the slightly paler rachides creating undulating zigzags—before this is a shorter, limey hackberry, and its figure stands starkly in the foreground. The longer I stare at it, the less I can tell it from the walnuts. The tree first shifts to a sky blue, and then eventually it is just a pale hologram of the walnut foliage, and then it's gone entirely. My eyes swallowed it fully. I glance away and it returns, only to perform the same color dance again. Looking further out now. All of the trees here do not grow straight, but instead lean in towards the pond, as if the water itself were a gravity well, or that the trees were reaching for it in gratitude, or towards one another in a filial embrace. Every living being here interacts with the water, and if the pond did not exist, neither would any of this—if none of this existed, the pond would have none to observe it. One implies the other.