13 minute read
HOPE FOR A FUTURE
By David Irvin
We were almost agape at the late afternoon mountaintop splendor that was Southeast Alaska.
That was my opening line in a short novel I wrote 34 years ago, called “Alaska High.” I didn’t have to look up that sentence, I remembered it from heart, even all these years later.
The book was never published, just like virtually everything I’ve ever created, but was close and personal to me. It was a true account of the ordeal I went through getting rescued from a dire situation and near fatal injuries.
The opener is striking to me because it is simple but from the heart. I still feel the imagery that was so real while writing that, and many other lines that were even more descriptive.
One-third of a century later, I’ve looked back on this writing for both its’ reverence for nature and its’ awe and recognition of the danger of it and realized that I have changed very little.
This was one of the most exciting times of my life, when youth, energy, and a hunger for exploration coursed through my veins. It was also a dark time, unbeknown to anyone but me. I was doing a pretty good job of trying to bury it, but it was still all too fresh in my mind to effectively mask it.
In January 2021, Voices Heard published my story, about how I had been raped, dominated, and controlled for weeks in the fall of 1988 while I was age 21 and 22. The events of Alaska High took place just a few months after the rape.
It is fascinating to explore this piece now, because it can be viewed allegorically, laced with the cynicism, and daring that I adopted because of my sexual assaults. It has become clear to me that the daring I began to practice reached a crescendo that nearly mirrored a more accurate description as “suicide.”
The distracting peace and beauty of our natural world helped me during a challenging time to forget something terrible and in helping me to bury it for what would prove to be decades, it almost buried me along with it . Today, the same calling of Nature has helped me through my healing process and to a new level of adult consciousness and peace that I had never thought possible.
I am a forester in my day job because of the fascination and reverence I have always had for our woods, regardless of where they are. When many other international tourists are picking up guides to the best sites for tours, the first books I gravitate toward are the nature guides, so I can begin to learn about the amazing spectacles I’m about to see in a foreign land. Instead of castle tours or attractions, I’m reading about local tree identification and birds.
My career helps me to be a combination of a forest ecologist, a wildlife habitat manager, a wild-land firefighter, a sustainable harvester of forest products for society, and a teacher and outreach specialist all rolled into one. I am a very fortunate person to have a career that I feel is important and makes a difference in our world, as well as something that I heartily believe in. To me, our forests and natural environment are of critical scientific importance, but they are also of spiritual importance. Never do I feel closer to God than in undeveloped surroundings as the birds sing, tree frogs chirp, breezes waft through tree crowns high above me, and a stream trickles gently past. To me, this is not a great escape, it is, simply put, what it’s all about. It is the essence of life and spirit itself, the pinnacle of my existence, rather than what merely enhances life.
As a small boy growing up in Virginia, before I ever experienced sexual assaults or even knew what that meant, I learned to cope with bullying and a very strict, controlling father.
“Helene started work with our agency the same day I did over 26 years ago. We matured in our careers together and have always been best friends. When I first began to come to terms with my sexual assaults and get involved with Jan Doe NO More (JDNM). Helene was my only friend who knew about it and followed my progress from the beginning.”
I found that I could escape even beyond my backyard, to the woods behind, and be sheltered from everyone and everything. This grew into an obsessive fascination with everything I found around me. A curious mushroom. A strange bird call. A camouflaged turtle creeping along as fast as it could muster! A shed deer antler on the ground, with the points gnawed down by calcium-seeking rodents. I was hooked.
I became the kid who would walk right up to a large black snake that church elders were debating one another furiously about trying to figure out what to do. They would look on in horror as a skinny boy simply picked it up. Not only did I remove it to safety, but managed to squeeze in a quick educational lecture on how it was a black rat snake as opposed to a black racer because of the rougher, keeled scales instead of smooth scales. No one wanted to caress its skin, and everyone seemed content to accept my claim.
The woods even became my refuge during a kidnapping attempt when I was a 17-year-old jogger. Instead of viewing the dark, dense brush, trees, and canopy as scary and a little foreboding, it was where I ran. I could hide in many places, and I knew my way around local stretches of forest like no street creepster would. This quite literally may have saved my life.
Nature is particularly special to us, and I have pondered this a lot lately. It is pure and clean, but also raw and edgy, very much like Survivors. It is our world, presented as it is, without exposition or apologies to anyone. There are no lies, only unfiltered truth.
Everything we see in Nature…is itself a survivor. Every tree, plant, animal. They exist before us by surviving, often overcoming unseen hardships—fire, drought, bark damage by a porcupine, insect attack—and competition with others of their kind. The whole world around us is made up of survivors.
To us, they look beautiful in their picturesque settings with the soft hues of sunlight reaching through the forest canopy, but the reality is that each plant, animal, fungi…is a hardcore survivor.
Nature provides nurturing, but it also provides important lessons. We survivors can learn so much from it. We are not apart from Nature. We are a part of it. The sooner this is accepted, the sooner we can understand our place in this world to a depth that so many never do. Our natural environment can teach us that we are one with it, that we are survivors like the whole world of throbbing, breathing life around us. Knowing this, we can go home from the woods understanding how fundamental and primal it is to be a survivor, and realize more than ever that we are important, we have a place in the world, and we can and should make our mark. These are lessons that I take home from a peaceful tract of woods on a sunny afternoon. Important messages are all around us if only there is someone to listen.
Beyond these philosophical messages, immersion into Nature has been an inadvertent process that is unparalleled to me in both forgetting…and remembering negativity and horror as well, even as the trauma was occurring. When being abused, my mind would often go to my favorite natural places, and imagine the sights and sounds, the sweet smells. I would exist in these thoughts until it was over. This became nearly a form of protective meditation. at the same time. It helped protect me from trauma until I was ready to confront it and heal. And when that time came, it helped me through that, as well.
In a sense, active trauma taught me the art of meditation and sweeping the garbage from the mind, clearing thoughts.
Along with forgetting, was reminiscing. Memories in pleasant environments were key in helping me to bury trauma and replace with happier imagery. The forgetting is the easy part to understand. The forest helped me to bury my trauma in pleasant thoughts that were abstract, and emotion-based. It was a diversion from
Reminisce, divert, replace, forget. Not necessarily always in the same order.
This provided me with a source of positivity and hope at a time above all other times in my life when there was none.
In my case, there came the additional benefit of a lifelong career built in the source of my escape, the natural environment. There was tremendous solace in working for a cause greater than myself alone. It provided purpose, focus, direction. It was the best kind of motivation and distraction. When you work for goals that you personally believe in, it builds an immersive sort of confidence. Anything that builds confidence is very good to protect your mental and emotional self in the short run, and to heal later when your time is right.
The fact that Nature nearly killed me, several times over in 1989 from a long fall off a cliff, was good for building self-respect. You can love something immensely but be humble and accepting that this thing can also easily kill you. 1989 is often referred to around home as the first time I “died”. I very nearly did, and what was reborn was a young man with a new vision, new spiritual faith, and new hope for what could be in the future.
“I was almost agape . . .” Almost? Not almost, I very much was!
While my recent sexual assaults had in an indirect way nearly killed me during the daredevil months that followed, the same event put me on a new path and helped me effectively cover up those times until an unspecified point in the future. That time was 2018. In many respects, this was the second time I died and was reborn, thanks to my discovery of the advocacy and educational nonprofit, Jane Doe No More during the #metoo movement. I finally began connecting with others who shared my trauma on the 30th anniversary of my sexual assaults.
Once I found nature in my life, I felt whole and in touch with my feelings and thoughts I also regained some of my confidence It was important for me to find something that helped me refocus in a healthy way, to help me center. It taught me the benefits of meditation, emotional healing, and rejuvenation before I even realized that’s what I was learning.
After discussing my reverence for nature, it may surprise you that a different aspect of forests draws my special appreciation. When I look at a patch of woods, not necessarily scientifically, but from the heart—I see resilience, beauty and delicacy, rugged survivorship, color and fragrance, death, replenishing and cleansing. For every positive I could name, there is what some might call a “negative”. But it is real and parallels us and our own lives.
Here in Connecticut, an early colony of our nation, it is true that virtually every patch of woods and vegetation is a direct product of our history and past land use. It is a result, at every turn, of decisions made by humans over the past 400 years to use the land…or not use it, in specific ways. The forest that eventually regrew is directly tied to this history on a local level and beyond, right down to its species composition, age, understory components and land features that include old stone walls, cellar holes, and charcoal mounds.
There are lessons that can be learned from this, as opposed to the Utopian view of nature as a paradise independent of our man-made world. What do I get when it’s realized that humans are the inadvertent architects, even when it comes to our natural world?
Hope
Even when clearing, farming, construction, and widespread fires decimate our native old growth forests, as with survivors, they eventually return.
The forests come back, wiping nearly clean the evidence of previous calamities. Invisible except for those who know what to look for. Peace and solace returns. Long extirpated wildlife returns. Trees grow tall and strong. The renewed world erases the exploitative negatives and buries its’ scars. Until, that is, such time as those who are looking for the scars – those who need the scars, like me, come along to better understand themselves and heal from the past.
The forest is made up of survivors, and nature can teach us hope and promise like nothing else in the world. In the human world, disease and war can be destructive, much as disease and invasives can cause damage to our ecosystems, but our environment perseveres.
Next time you are in a tract of forest, look around and consider the past. Notice the scars, the trials—the darker times of insects, fire, or hurricane. Then notice that the peacefulness has returned—the sound of a bird singing, the glimmer of sunlight filtering through the canopy. If you can, begin to feel what I always feel. Hope for a future, renewed conviction that life goes on, that it does always get better. And you’re never alone.
Then, let yourself smile.
About The Author
David S. Irvin is a professional forester by day and a proud and devoted family man. He enjoys hiking and anything outdoors, and hopes to return soon to his favorite hobby, stage acting. David was introduced to Jane Doe No More (JDNM), a nonprofit organization devoted to survivors of sexual violence, in 2018, and began his journey to the past in order to bring forth a brighter future. He hopes to share his awakening with others so that more will be inspired to tell their story and heal in their lives, especially other men.
You can reach David here.
