Our Forest

A friend posted a picture online recently, accompanied by a passage from John Muir, the Scottish-American naturalist and author.  It read …and into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.

I have long believed there is no more beautiful place to be in the world than Ontario in the splendour of October—when the green, boreal forest recasts itself in glorious shades of scarlet red, bright yellow, incandescent orange, and rich-wine burgundy.  The sun, lowering in the sky by then, emblazons them, infuses them, causing them to glow in a translucent fire.

My wife and I lived on a lake in the northern forest for a long time—a long time ago.  One of our favourite October pastimes was walking the solitary cottage roads after all the seasonal vacationers had headed home.  Smelling the tangy wood-smoke from our chimney, kicking the wind-strewn piles of fallen leaves, breathing in the nippy harbingers of winter borne on the autumn breezes, we rejoiced in the beauty and serenity of the wilderness world around us, immersed ourselves in the pervading peace of mind it settled on us.

Our forest was a refuge, a release, a reminder that life, once upon a time, was simpler and elemental.

Almost sixty-five years ago, I was part of a student-crew that spent a summer planting trees on the slopes of an Ontario valley, originally the rocky, infertile fields of a pioneer farming family.  A lovely, clean river meandered its way along the valley floor, and we swam in it at the end of every work-day.  We worked in pairs, girls and boys, one with the spade, the other with the bag of saplings, and we traded places every half-hour or so.  I remember it as backbreaking work, dirty work, thirsty work, to be sure.  But I know now it was glorious work, where we were (to steal from the novel by Peter Matthiessen), at play in the fields of the Lord.

One of us would cut a T-shaped slice in the ground with the spade, then pry it up, splitting apart the base of the T.  The other would gently place a sapling, each about six inches high, in the crevice, and press the ground back together around its fragile, intrepid stem, burying its tender roots.  When we finished a row, we’d retrace our path, pouring a tot of water from a bucket on each new plant.

I’ve lost track of how many trees we planted in a morning, or a day, or over the entire summer.  But it had to be a lot.  Thousands.  We’d never heard the phrase paying it forward…it hadn’t even been coined back then, I imagine.  But that’s what we—such callow, carefree youngsters back then—were doing.

I had occasion last fall to drive through that same valley, the first time I’d returned since that long-ago summer.  I pulled over on the side of the road to see if I could spy those same fields where we had laboured—private property now, the slopes far across the river opposite the road where I was stopped.  But to my chagrin, I couldn’t find them at first…..and then the astounding reality struck home.  Those once-barren fields were still there, but the riotous, rainbowed canopy of an autumn forest blanketed them now—a forest—shielding them from my view.

Our forest!  Our trees!

I knew I couldn’t meander through that forest, of course, to touch the trees, to remember them in their infancy, as they’d passed from my hands to the soil that embraced them.  Nor, truth be told, did I really need to.  It was enough to recall those bare fields as they were, and compare them to what they had become after we were there.

As I think back on that long-gone summer, I know I left things behind—sweat, friends, youth.  Lost now in the mists of time.

But, as Muir so eloquently wrote, I found my soul. 

I found my peace of mind.

_{© J. Bradley Burt 2023}