Last week while out on a day-hike I’d glimpsed something primal within myself. Intrigued, I was now heading back to the woods on an overnight camping trip to explore it further. I’d heard about a small lake in the foothills, off the beaten path, a place rarely visited by humans. I wanted to be alone in the forest, completely alone. If no one else was around, maybe I could be an animal again.
I lacked a map of the area, but the directions seemed easy enough. However, the trailhead turned out to be somewhere within a vast hilly maze of winding gravel logging roads, not a single one of them marked.
Finding the lake would require some educated guessing, intuition, and possibly divine intervention.
The landscape alternated between the harsh desolation of clear cut hills and the verdant shade of thick pine forest. I was deep in Weyerhaeuser country, a back door to the untamed wilderness. I drove past yet another gated road. This one had a good vibe, so I hit the brakes and pulled over. Got out and stretched, looked around. Yeah, this had to be the right place. I shrugged on my backpack and started hiking up the overgrown road. Somewhere up ahead should be a washed-out bridge and the trailhead to the lake.
Felt good to be out of the rattling truck, good to be immersed in the gentle hush of the pines. I was dressed light, a T-shirt, shorts, and hiking boots. The boots served a definite purpose, hiking with a full pack, but on a hot summer day any other clothing was superfluous.
Why was I wearing these clothes, anyway? Back in the civilized world clothing was a shield, psychological protection, a way to hide all the hairy, secret parts of myself from other people. But here in the woods there were no other people. And if I was alone, there was no reason to hide anything. No one to hide from. I didn’t need to wear clothes. Not only that, I abruptly realized, I didn’t want to.
With that I stopped and stripped down to my essence. Kept my hiking boots on for practical reasons, but otherwise I was naked to the world. I donned my pack again and continued hiking.
The delightful caress of air against skin was so luxurious that I immediately became aroused. And the more I thought about it, the more aroused I became. How incredible, hiking through the forest naked and aroused! I lengthened my stride and increased my pace, my robust manhood leading the way like the prow of a great ship.
Then a spike of fear. What if I was wrong? What if I wasn’t alone? What if I rounded the next bend and came upon an innocent family of hikers? What looks of horror would seize them when they saw a naked, scruffy-looking man bearing down on them with a throbbing hard-on!
There wasn’t anyone around the next bend. I was truly alone. My fear subsided along with my erection, and I set about the business of locating the washed-out bridge.
A bridge I never found, because I was hiking up the wrong road.
After two hot and brushy hours of exploration I reached this irritating conclusion. I stopped to wipe my sweaty forehead with the back of my sweaty arm. Took a couple of swigs from my water bottle.
The wrong road. So much for good vibes.
Was reaching the lake that important? No. The whole point of this trip was simply to get out into the woods alone somewhere and spend the day as an animal.
The tall luscious forest right where I was beckoned to me. Why not camp here? I left the road near a bowed sapling and worked my way back into the pines. Found a level spot for my tent and ditched my pack. I’d worry about setting up camp later.
I stood there in my hiking boots, taking it all in. The forest was hushed and mysterious, like a cathedral. Cool dank air wafted against my nakedness with an intoxicating scent of moist humus. Scattered shafts of sunlight glowed among the trees, the forest floor thick with pine needles that sagged with every step I took.
My feet complained about being cooped up in leather, so I sat my bare bottom down on a moss-covered log and removed the last bit of interference between my body and the natural world. Taking a few timid steps, I expected all kinds of prickly pointy things to attack my tender soles. To my surprise the ground was amazingly comfortable, like walking barefoot on a vast sponge carpet. My feet hugged the contours of the forest floor. Something primal resonated in my muscles and bones. This was where a human animal belonged.
I scrambled over to a blazing green bed of moss. Sat down on it and caressed the coarse fluffy texture. A wonderful place to sleep. Even better for making love. I laid on my back and marveled at the spoked patterns of pine tree branches far above, silhouetted against blue sky. It was all so amazing….
The dull roar of a distant creek drew me toward it. There was no path, no trail, nothing but a wild jumble of rotting tree-stuff heaped upon the undulating terrain, incidental discards shed by the community of wooden giants that towered overhead. Fallen trees crisscrossed the forest floor. Toppled roots as tall as a grisly bear clutched at the air. I tried to work my way to the creek by walking upright, but that was a slow and precarious balancing act. Often it was easier to get down on all fours and crawl over or under. My hands and knees got dirty.
I spotted a tiny pine seedling on a patch of moss. I dropped to my elbows to marvel at this impossibly small, tiny little thing no larger than my pinky, branched into a fuzzy green “Y.” Yet it trembled with energetic potential, confidently intending to join its elders high overhead.
A few feet away I noticed a flicker of movement, a bright green slug eating a bright green leaf. Slugs had always been these repulsive little nuisances living in the dank decay of the earth, beneath my attention. But now I was down on the ground with one, nose to nose, fascinated. As the front of the slug worked its way back and forth along the edge of the leaf, the vegetation dissolved into its body, an astounding transformation of one form of matter into another. I could almost see the molecules rearranging themselves. The simple act of one organic thing ingesting another had never been so lucidly displayed.
Here was the primal magic of the universe.
I picked up the slug with my thumb and forefinger. It was not the gooey blob of jelly I expected, but firm like a cold sticky piece of meat. And surprisingly powerful, bending back and forth. I placed it in the palm of my hand and it groped around, out of its element on my warm skin. I put it back down on the forest floor.
A wall of brush kept me from reaching the creek, but I didn’t mind. I’d become tired and sleepy, and was more interested in finding a place to lie down and relax. I came across a thick stand of large ferns, dappled with sunlight. I crawled in among them, curled up on a cozy spot beneath the fronds, and took a nap.
When I awoke I eased my head up just enough to peer out between the fronds and survey my surroundings while remaining concealed. I wasn’t alarmed, this was simply the instinctive behavior of any wild animal waking up in the wilderness. It was pleasant among the ferns, and lacking any particular desire to be anywhere else I continued to lay there.
I shifted my legs, brushed a bit of debris from them. My legs, my whole body, was so pale. Unnaturally pale, as though I’d been born premature, before my skin had a chance to darken in the womb or grow a proper coat of fur. Compared to everything else in the forest I was a ghost. I fought a desperate urge to smear the moist black earth and pine needles all over my sickly, maggot-white skin, to blend into the landscape instead of contrasting starkly against it.
The sun disappeared behind the mountain to the west, and a switch flipped in my mind. For the first time since removing my boots I thought about the need to set up camp. A camp with a tent and a sleeping bag and a tiny white-gas stove. A camp where one cooked a hot meal with ingredients from a plastic bag and bedded down in synthetic material. A civilized camp.
The spell was broken. The animal within retreated, and the rational, thought-obsessed ego came roaring back. The forest suddenly seemed dark and dangerous, a chaotic jumble of rotting stumps and logs amid the stolid trunks of the pines. The sunlight was gone, the forest growing cooler by the minute. Nightfall loomed. And there I stood, naked and exposed.
Somewhere out there was my backpack, my gear, my clothing. Somewhere out there was my lifeline to survival in the wilderness. I’d left the pack by a mossy log near a rotting stump, but my god there were hundreds of mossy logs and rotting stumps. I didn’t know where to begin looking, but I had to find my stuff. I had to find it now!
I caught myself. Okay. Time to stop and think. I wasn’t lost. I wasn’t cold. And somewhere between the creek and the road was my pack. There were at least a couple of hours of daylight left, plenty of time to systematically search the entire area if I had to. But the smart thing to do was to put the creek to my back and work my way through the trees till I reached the logging road. At that point I’d be able to find the bowed sapling, and from there it should be easy to track down my gear.
Ten minutes later I spotted my pack, right where I’d left it. I set up camp and ate dinner as the forest sank into darkness.
Slept fitfully that night. After an afternoon with nothing but air against my skin, my sleeping bag was stifling. Too cold without it, but stifling within it. Even the tent was stifling. A plastic cocoon within a plastic cocoon, isolating me from the natural world. I could’ve dragged my sleeping bag outside and slept on the ground, that might’ve helped.
But the forest at night intimidated me. What if a cougar snuck up on me while I slept out in the open? Or a bear?
I tossed and turned and dozed.
In the middle of the night I woke up with a start. There was something in the tent with me! A beast, a hairy bear-like thing, lying with its back against mine, pressing hard against me. But before I could freak out and panic it sank into my body and disappeared.
Then I really woke up. The hairy beast had been a dream. Groggy but relieved, I rolled over and went back to sleep. Deep and sound through the rest of the night.
In the morning I pondered the dream over a steaming cup of green tea. A hairy beast merging with me, the symbolism was obvious. Had I assimilated some kind of primitive animal energy? The Wild Man that Robert Bly writes about? I didn’t feel any different. Except I wasn’t too enthused about wearing clothes anymore.
The distant whine of a chainsaw reminded me of where I really was. Reminded me of the miles of clear cut scars I’d driven through to get here, the overgrown logging road a hundred feet from my tent. These trees weren’t a natural forest growing wild. They’d been cut down and replanted by a corporation. They were a crop.
I felt sorry for the forest, helpless and sad. In ten or twenty or fifty years the chain saws would come slashing back through here again. Was there no place to run? No place to hide? For any living thing, civilized or not? As humans consumed the entire planet, would anything survive? I didn’t want to be there anymore. Quickly broke camp, shouldered my pack and headed back down the road wearing only my boots.
When the road crossed the creek I stopped to watch the water tumbling over the rocks. The creek curved off into the distance toward a pine-covered mountain. Crop or not, this land looked natural and healthy. But what did I know? Looks could be deceiving.
As I stood there a cat sprang out of the brush and onto the road less than ten feet away. A housecat? Out here in the middle of nowhere? Perhaps a stray gone wild. But the markings were too exotic for an ordinary cat. Tufted ears, bobbed tail….
My god, a bobcat!
But smaller, a baby bobcat, a kitten, leaping playfully in the tall grass, oblivious to my presence. The roar of the creek had masked the sound of my approach.
This incredible creature finally noticed it was not alone. It stopped and looked up at me, tilting its head, more curious than alarmed. Then decided to play it safe and hopped back into the cover of the brush.
And if that was a baby bobcat, where was the mother?
The head of an adult feline materialized out of the brush. Only her head, the rest of her body completely camouflaged. She had no intention of putting on a brash display like her cub. Mother Bobcat was all business. She looked at me and I looked at her. Then she vanished.
She didn’t trust me, wanted nothing to do with me. Not that I blamed her. It would be hard to trust a species that stripped your habitat down to the bone, that simply did not care if you lived or died.
I would never hurt you in a million years, I promised her. Never in a million years….
A family of bobcats lived in this forest. What an honor to witness their existence. Some things did survive, would survive. Some things would recover. No matter what.
I didn’t know how to fix the world. Didn’t know how to stop our culture’s madness. All I knew was that I was alive and the bobcats were alive. For now, that was enough.
I continued on my way, walking naked in the forest.
I was on the right road after all.
(end)
