Trespassers

I have always been a borrower of forests.

Currently I borrow a linear segment of Maples, Oaks, and planted Red Pines covering the end moraine behind my house, the ridge of glacial drift—unsorted boulders, gravel, sand, and clay left by the most recent glacier. In spring, I trek through a farmer’s field to get to its base, a slow runner hurdling over ridiculously close rows of soybean and corn until they get too high to justify my intrusion. Post-harvest, the plowed field hardens like the surface of Mars, solid, cracked, and dusty, devoid of life, easily navigable.

I have borrowed a forest of Hemlock and Beech split with a tannin-orange trout stream; an overpopulation of Black Bears (according to Homo Sapiens); Porcupines that wintered in a fallen tree across the trail, that moaned and grunted when I tapped the tree with a broken branch; and the bounding tracks of Mink in deep snow like pair after pair of eyes dropped along the frozen river’s bank.

For most of my life I borrowed a forest of Locust, Sassafras, and Red Oak, fragmented by fields of hay and feed corn. The fields led to a creek in a steep valley, easy to walk to, exhausting to walk away from. We made domed forts there from saplings, with Crow’s Foot carpet.

I have always been a borrower of forests. I have never needed to own land, but will forever require neighboring one who does. This is not out of laziness, or frugality, but because I am and always have been a trespasser, like we sometimes mistakenly view the plants and animals that actually inhabit the forests we claim to possess and love.