prompt entry #3

I am both connected and estranged from the boreal forest.

When I think of intimacy I think of connection, a sense of easy rapport, a comfort born of a long association. To be intimate is to trust. To risk. To know a thing deeply on a level that transcends language. Intimacy can be felt in the bones, at the very center of yourself. To court intimacy is to throw your body and mind in the fray, to offer yourself up unbidden, and to accept what gets flung back in return.

My connection with the boreal forest is a connection born of my body, consummated through movement, punctuated with stillness. I have bashed my shins to pulp hauling a canoe up shallow rapids; have hooked thrashing fish in calm black pools, and filleted them on flat rocks—blood and offal left for the gulls. Like the caribou I have been driven wild-eyed and scrabbling in a frenzy of thrumming mosquitoes, have run heedless and panicked through the blown-down woods in search of some small reprieve. I have cowered in the wet woods as rain lashed down in undulating sheets, as trees bowed and the lake churned, as lightning flashed its forked tongue across the blue-black sky; I have sprawled naked on a flat rock as the sun beat down and the river rolled by, rock-heat and sun-heat coalescing to where I didn’t know if I was flesh or rock or sunshine.

I cannot name the molting birds pushed downriver by our advancing canoe, a caterwauling mass of feathers and futile wing beats. Wolf prints etched in the sand, our first discovery upon waking. What else have we slept through? We are forever churning downriver, marking progress in the tent at night by inches advanced on the map; our human need to schedule and push onward, a marauding army that takes but does not give.

Once, we misjudge a set of rapids; we scout from a cliff-side a hundred yards off, determine the pitch and swell is run-able, the distance so great, in fact, that the whole scene is rendered static, a snapshot. In the end, the depth and distance betray us. The seething river delivers us into the maw, a sickening seesaw of crest and trough, before the canoe lurches and tips. Floundering, we paw our way to shore as our lives drift off downriver. Along the rocky bank, our clothes hanging like chainmail, we gather up the wreckage. It is then we know we are foreign to this place. We are a lunar expedition whose radio is blown, a downy newborn doe whose ears prick at the howling of wolves.