Navigating a New World — Becoming See

A hand goes up at the front of the line. Fingers count down from five. Breathless, buzzing, the four of us trailing the lead scatter off the trail, crouching, slinking into the trees. Mere feet away, an enormous upturned tree has left a ten foot deep pit in the ground where its roots used to be. I sink into the depression, poking my head above the rim cautiously. There is enough foliage between the trail and me that I am completely hidden. I emerge only when the lead calls out that he has turned around, but can see nothing. Where before there was a group of people ambling through the woods, now there is nothing but birdsong and a hovering sense of expectation.

Later, Grey perches on the top of the fallen tree, nestled among the chaotic root ball. The rest of us sneak slowly up to him as he scans the undergrowth from his lofty height. I curl up under a fern, legs tucked up into my chest as far as they can go. My poncho splays out around me, a gift from Galadriel--dark wool grey camouflage against the misty shadows under the leaves. Keeping an eye on Grey forces me to crane my neck at an awkward angle. In moving, I try not to shift the fern above me.

Grey, uncomfortable in his precarious position as the dirt around the root ball melts away, ends the game early. I am still far away, with a large Douglas-fir placed intentionally between us. I stand and creep towards him and the group as quietly as I can, until I emerge into his direct line of vision. It takes Kellen to notice I'm there--I hear Grey comment that he can't even see me standing up. Victory tastes like pine needles and sweat.

Two days earlier, we started our day in a classroom at Trackers HQ in SE Portland. Chris came to teach navigation. We learned to take a compass bearing, preliminary map reading, and how to count our paces per 100 meters. These skills came with a broader viewpoint on what it means to be lost--considering the slow speed that most people move through the woods, being "lost" might mean being less than ten miles from where you think you are supposed to be. To be "lost" is almost always to still know what continent, region, state, and even general area you are in.

We drive out to Eagle Fern Park to practice our new skills. Pace counting and bearings--nailed it. Once we move up a trail, though, I am quickly (and secretly) confused, amiably following the group and keeping my mouth shut. An exercise where we try to walk 50 paces off trail and then walk directly back to the same place we exited the trail leaves me 23 paces off to the right and picking thorns out of my hands. I'm not lost, per se--I suspect I could find my way back to the parking lot. Eventually.

I try to guess which way the parking lot is and come up with...well, the wrong direction. I do know which way North is, though (both magnetic and true!), so I've got that going for me.

At the end of the week, I face both my successes and my failures. My lack of confidence navigating through the sometimes forbidding green wall blends with my success at hiding within it. To creep through the underbrush, listening for the crack of every stick underfoot, every rustle of clothing, is to become a woodland creature--a part of this world, not a visitor, stranger, or exploiter.

When Grey perches atop the log and I slither towards him a foot at a time, I feel like prey. I know everything I need to know about where I am and how to get to where I want to go. My fingernails are crusted with dirt, my entire torso pressed into the ground. I notice mushrooms growing under a log that I never would have seen walking upright along the path as Man the Conqueror, eyes fixed on whatever objects might impede my steps, struggling to keep track of which way the parking lot is.

This new navigation begins to bleed into the rest of my life. Thursday afternoon, a grasshopper at Bar 33 hops on my elbow, then my head, and hangs out long enough for a photo shoot. On Friday, I take a group of 21 high school students kayaking along the Wilamette. We travel south from West Linn, and for the first time I can name the trees that tower above the river bank. We glide past madrone, Douglas-fir, big leaf maple. We stop for lunch on Rock Island and I notice the bones of a small deer, probably a fawn. The two thigh bones are a pair of perfectly preserved butterfly wings.

On Sunday, I take a different group kayaking at Nehalem Bay. A crow ambushes another over a scrap of food. A ferocious scuffle on the beach interrupts our paddle safety talk. A grey heron wades in the shallows of the bay as we pull the kayaks down to the water. I crouch motionless by the shore, watching. She pokes through the water without a ripple, an unusual geometry of graceful curves intersecting with awkward leg angles.

It might yet be awhile before I can confidently travel through a place using just a compass and a map. Those are a newer technology, a way of representing the world that relies on abstraction and interpretation. Still, the foundation of that type of navigation comes from observation. Awareness. Stillness. It comes from the recognition that I am an integral part of the landscape. I am not a stranger here.