So Much Forest
Winner: The Robert Day Award for Fiction
Selected by Rebecca Lee
Tanya Pengelly
The best time to enter the forest is when it’s raining, like right now, when the sky overhead is all dark with an ocean of water between the sun and me, when the slam of my van door is muted by dampness, and I give up straight away on keeping dry at all, but I still pull on my boots and yellow raincoat and the huskies are already bedraggled, but that can’t be helped, and anyway, look at their excitement, their longhaired tails wagging, pink tongues lolling with joy, and as we all set off they tug at their leads and zigzag across the little path that leads into dripping trees, across a narrow footbridge green with moss and slippery as hell, watch out, careful there, they tug me across, eager to get into the forest proper, and I follow, steadier now on solid ground, ground which is still dry because the canopy overhead is dense, dry and springy with thousands of years of leaf mould, rich reddish ground that smells of cinnamon and nutmeg and decay, and I almost wish I could get down onto all fours and sniff that ground with as much abandon as the dogs because it smells of the deep history of a childhood where I was plopped down on a blanket in a hundred different outside places and left to crawl and sniff and lick to my heart’s content, and it’s funny how quickly the van and the road are left behind and the world of men retreats, the world of men retreats, how nice that sounds, Harold would have liked that, and I wonder who we’d leave the world to after us once we’d retreated, or if the
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land would be empty after we’d gone and strange creatures we never even imagined would finally, finally, come out of hiding in the cracks in the rocks and trees, and sniff and dance, as excited at everything like the dogs are on the path up ahead now, my dogs, there, I love them, they can smell other dogs and they lift their legs at all the well-used doggy communication posts, adding their scent, adding their messages and hellos, but now they’re slowing down, getting less excited, and I wonder if the trail of other dogs has run out, because surely all dogs have a limited capacity for urine storage and it’s only a matter of time before communication ceases—they can only ever get so far from the beginning of the path—and my dogs are bigger than most, but still they’re cocking their legs pointlessly now, wee dribbles, and that’s it, excitement over, and now they take to walking gently side by side, their shoulders brushing, wet tails entangling, and this is what I was waiting for, the calm of the three of us, the rain gentle but loud, and it’s cold for the first time after the summer, but I love the cold, I much prefer it to anything else, it’s fresh and jam-packed full of potential energy, like drinking glacier water from a mountain stream, and it’s funny that I always liken the cold to that, I’m not sure why, seeing as there must only be a handful of times I’ve ever drunk from a mountain stream, and now that I come to think of it, maybe it was only that one time, decades ago when I was eight or nine and hiking with my pa (so like Harold, really,) and we had stopped to fill our water flasks and oh the romance of it, with the mountain meadow all around and butterflies, and that view, god that view of the blue-treed valley down below us and the haze of heat down there but the chilly wind up with us, I’ll never forget that, that and my pa’s open face as he crouched there by the water with his eyes closed listening for so long I thought he’d probably forgotten I was there with him, the water running between us that whole long time, and it’s funny that it’s a memory from a summer
day that makes me think of winter, but that little stream was so cold it was almost thick, Slush Puppie, and I’d seen the snow it was melting down from up above us, a long, unreachable way away, far too far for my short eight-or-nine-summer-long legs, but boy, oh boy, did I want to go up there, I really wanted to go and put my little foot deep down into that lingering snow and hear the old crust of it crack under my weight, because that’s what had happened in my picture book of The Snow Queen (stained glass, polar bears, sleighs, roses) when the little girl had entered winter following after her friend with the shard of mirror in his heart—I still love that story with a passion unmatched by anything else in my life, even two husbands later—and when pa had opened his eyes, he’d looked at me with a long clear look, the water flowing between us, and then he’d smiled and said . . . he’d said something, but I can’t remember what now, I could remember it word for word for years and years afterwards, but now it’s gone, it’s the first time I’ve realised it’s gone, maybe it’s not gone and it’s just hiding from me for a moment or two, and it’ll come back, but the words aren’t here now, right now when I need them, because this forest today, now, has mountain snow-melt in the air and my breath, and the dogs’ breaths too, are vapour in the air, and I think what pa had said then had been yellow somehow, and it had smelt like daisies in my mind—Harold always laughed at my smelling words—what pa’d said up that mountain was something yellow that smelt like daisies, and it’s alarming, really, that I haven’t really thought about that day with pa for years, not properly anyway, it’s just the shape of it that comes back every October with the first few breaths of cold air and that knowledge that, somewhere up ahead, there’s deep snow lurking, and it’s an exciting feeling in the same way setting off on a road trip (hot tar) is always exciting, or getting tipsy on a long summer night, or . . . lots of other things are exciting probably, but now I’m combining them all into a mush, and
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actually all those different types of excitement are very distinct from one another, because who can really compare them, and maybe life is really a library of subtly different moments, each with a different combination of elements that comes to make a very specific feeling—that feeling, for example, of watching milk nebula in a cup of tea, of stepping on a snail in the dark, or that feeling earlier today when I was waiting for a late student in my office who I didn’t really want to turn up anyway because today isn’t a day for talking, and instead I just so desperately wanted greenery and quiet and space for all my fluttery thoughts to dissipate away into nothing—and once you’ve lived long enough and have enough experiences to draw from, very little seems new or unfamiliar anymore, and everything is a patchwork of the things that have come before, and for some funny reason that reminds me of the vineyard we visited once (Harold in grey Icelandic jumper and jeans, mothballs), which had a room of scents you might find in wine—two rooms actually, one for white wine (walls green), one for red (walls burgundy)—all the scents were sorted alphabetically along the walls, and each one had a wooden stick you could pull out which had been doused in perfume, and I spent hours smelling acacia, almond, apple, banana, basil, bergamot, blackcurrant, black pepper, blackberry, blueberry, brackishness, camphor, cardamom, cedar, cherry, chocolate (milk, white, dark), cinnamon, cloves, coconut, coffee, cotton candy, cut grass, dandelion, dates, dill, dried leaves, eucalyptus, fennel, fern, fig, geranium, ginger, gooseberry, grapefruit, gunpowder, hawthorn, hay, hazelnut, hydrocarbons, incense, ink, iris, jam, jasmine, juniper, kerosene, lavender, lemon, lily, lime, lychee, magnolia, mandarin, mango, marjoram, melon, mint, mushroom, mustard, nutmeg, orange, orange blossom, oregano, papaya, parsley, passion fruit, peach, pear, peony, petrol, pine, pineapple, plum, potpourri, raspberry, redcurrant, resin, rose, rosemary,
saffron, sage, salt, sandalwood, seaweed, slate, smoke, soap, star anise, strawberry, sultana, tar, thyme, toast, tobacco, truffle, undergrowth, vanilla, violet, walnut, wax, wildflowers, wisteria, and it’s funny that the very best thing about all these scents in wine is that each and every single one of them is imaginary, not a one of them really exists, wine is just grapes and sunshine, and yet there they all are, all those smells, and my word, I spent so long in those rooms just smelling and smelling and smelling, and Harold had to drag me away because the last tour of the actual vineyard was leaving and I was getting nostril fatigue anyway, and the guide had noted my interest and told us about all the secret smells they didn’t include because they thought it would put people off spending money in the giftshop, smells like decomposing flesh and faeces, and I remember being annoyed at Harold’s disgust because it seemed as though the guide and I were the only people in the world who understood the fascination of those smells too, and it’s funny that a trip to a vineyard, one I hadn’t really even wanted to go on, so coloured my experience of the world for the rest of my life, and so then, what of now, right now, what of the forest, what of the forest smells tight around me, so dense I swirl through them like London fog as I struggle to get the dogs still enough to unclip their leads, all the spores and mould, all the fresh leaves and ozone and rain, all the water, and certainly a whiff of decomposing flesh and faeces, and a thousand other countless things I don’t know yet, about combining into a symphony of scent . . . something about trees talking through the medium of mushrooms? . . . gosh, when I get home I need to educate myself on all of that, it’s unacceptable that I don’t know what’s going on around me, that I can barely name a tree, even, it was Harold who knew the trees— trees I can identify: oak, pine, giant redwood (easy), sycamore, kauri, weeping willow, banyan, fig, silver birch, various fruit trees (only when fruiting), maple, various nut trees (when nutting)—
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but I can’t name nearly enough of them because how many types of trees are there in the world, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, but maybe I’m running away with myself there, I probably am, but perhaps not if I’m including all the different types of tree in the galaxy, but oh gosh, I hope there are trees on other planets too, a planet without a tree is like a head without any hair, and as nice as a bald person can be, it wouldn’t be all that great if everyone was bald, or perhaps I’m being a little baldist there, but in terms of people being able to identify each other . . . but I suppose we’d all be used to it and it would be no problem at all, or we’d all get our names tattooed to our skulls, except there aren’t nearly enough names, so maybe we’d have numbers, but I expect that would go wrong as well, but really, where is my brain going, come back to this forest on Earth, because the rain is easing off a little, it’s practically stopped for the moment, and all that’s left is the rainwater dripping from the leaves above, which is still heavy, but softer than real rain somehow, I suppose because the water is falling from less far away, it hasn’t gathered up that little punch that real rain droplets in this part of the world are capable of delivering, and I’m smiling now because I’m remembering my sister-in-law sitting on the porch one summer evening, cheap rosé in hand (peach, strawberry, nail polish remover), sitting there guessing that each raindrop fell for an hour from the clouds down to the earth, and I’d snorted laughter into my beer—because given that raindrops fall at an average speed of around 14 mph and assuming a cloud height of around 2,500 feet, an average raindrop would take just over two minutes to reach the ground—Harold had expanded on the facts, nudged me to keep quiet because his sister didn’t like me giggling, oh no, not at all, not at all, when Harold gently pointed out where she’d gone wrong on things, all her wonderful blind spots of logic and knowledge, and on the drive home, Harold and I had pictured that
type of world, where the clouds were so far far far away that it would take a falling raindrop an hour to fall to the ground, and it had filled us with awe, because imagine it, really, imagine all that sky, and sometimes, when the clouds are close and low like today, I think of that higher-cloud world and smile, and I look up now, at the droplets falling down from the trees at me like silver threads all ashimmer, but now it occurs to me that perhaps anything falling for an hour would build up more energy, more punch, and so rain in that higher-cloud world would fall like bullets and that wouldn’t be all that nice at all, in fact, perhaps there are planets like that out there, almost completely lifeless due to an endless bombardment of watery artillery, unless, unless, unless, of course, any rain falling that far would evaporate before it got the ground, and what we’d actually have on our hands is a planet of no rain at all, just a layer of weather miles above our heads, a whole water cycle never touching down, and everything downstairs, as it were, might just be all fine mist, or arid landscape, but either way, I’m becoming more and more fond of our planet, with our own particular distance between clouds and land, which is a good thing because it’s started raining again now, so hard it’s difficult to hear the river nearby, the falls, the wind in the trees, all is Earth-gentle artillery on leaves and earth and, the loudest, on my anorak hood, and the dogs are barking now, loud and joyful, they love the rain, it’s funny, I don’t know if other dogs love rain, but these two beasts surely do, they howl and run and play and later, when it’s over, I’ll dry them off and they’ll curl around each other and sleep close to the wood burner, making the small house smell of damp warm mammals, snoring while sleeping so soundly they don’t wake up to me setting out their food hours later, unless I do it right by their heads, pouring the kibble from high up to make it loud in the steel bowls, but that’s for later, the rain is for now, the dogs’ joy is for now, and I watch them playing, far ahead on the path, on this well-known,
well-worn route for them, until they disappear around a bend and for a moment I’m alone, all alone in the forest, and I stop where I am and stand and think and feel, and Harold said I don’t do this enough, and it’s funny that for someone who lives a slow gentle life of reading and cooking and walking the dogs in some of the best (I think) landscapes on the whole damn continent, my mind is strangely wired, never stops, never really even slows all that much, so that for years I believed Harold was lying to me when I asked what he was thinking about and he said ‘Nothing’, because who can ever think of nothing, well, Harold apparently, and he’s just about convinced me now that’s true, although I still have my doubts, and he said I just need to pay attention to the world around me a little more, really feel what it feels to be myself in the world, and if I do that enough my brain will become a little slower, a little clearer, but honestly, I really do think that’s bullshit, because feeling what it is to be myself, feeling the world around me is just so much, all the time, never-ending, ever-shifting, panic of overload, all the things, all the time, forever and ever, amen, for example, here I am now, just a yellow anorak in the rain in the forest, but all of it is so much, so much forest—beards of moss hanging from the branches of the trees, cracked reddish tree bark, ferns shaped like Sideshow Bob’s hair all over the ground, far as the eye can see, tight little uncurled fronds, mist between the higher canopies, the call of a blackcapped chickadee, chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee, green worlds inside water droplets, centipedes with black bodies and orange legs, a fallen tree with roots akimbo, mushroom steps up trees, a pool of water in a rock by the side of the path full of tiny moving transparent things, chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee, a tingle of cold in my fingertips, my anorak smelling of wax, white flowers bowed by rain, rivulets on tree trunks, heavy water nearby rumbling through the ground, my glasses steaming up around the edges, chickadeedee-dee-dee-dee, my breathing loud, my heartbeat in my ears,
another shiver of chill, how some of the trees are so twisted they look like monsters, a granola bar wrapper faded by time, time, time in the landscape everywhere, the groan of mountains and trees stretching and aching, the memory of walking this path in the snow (all bright, all quiet), the memory of walking this path in the summer (all bright with sun streaming in pillars, the dogs chasing the dapples, loud with birdsong, small mammalian rusting in the undergrowth, other walkers overtaking me, nodding, smiling), chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee, and the mammals are still all around me now, out there, huddling out of the rain, anorak-less, all the shrews and voles and mice and chipmunks and squirrels and weasels and rats and bats and martens and pika and gophers and jackrabbits and beavers and racoons and foxes and deer and cougars and lynx and lions and black bears and elk and gosh, imagine if all of them did have anoraks, chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee, and over there a forest snail, and another, and another, careful guys, you should get off the path, boot prints in the mud, paw prints in the mud, a puddle-portal to another upside-down place of downwards canopies, pinecones black with fungus, RZ spray-painted onto a tree in orange, something big in the trees overhead, an owl or an eagle or a hawk, or even an osprey, I long to see an osprey, but no, it’s some kind of hawk I think, brown and wide-winged, so many different types of hawk around here: red-tailed, sharp-shinned, Cooper’s, red-shouldered, ferruginous, Swainson’s, rough-legged, but I never know the difference, although I’ve learnt all their names, I like the names, and that whopper’s still up there, but taking off now (!), setting the whole top of a tree swinging and sending down a shower of tree-rain, he’s bigger than I guessed, chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee, chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee, little birds a-panicking, and then a soft loud quiet again, quiet again, saplings in clearings thin as my finger, the base of a tree burnt from a campfire, who would ever do that, I wonder, aren’t we all taught as
children not to, with all the cartoons about burning your fingers on matches and don’t be a bad little firefly and burn down the forest, I would never light a fire up against a tree, never, never, but never is a strong word, isn’t it, I might, given the right circumstances, and you hear stories about there being old veterans out in these forests who never quite made it home, and I suppose if I was traumatised and flinched now whenever another human being talked and all the chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee was a racket of gunfire overhead, and I was cold and tired and hungry, then maybe I would light a fire at the bottom of a tree, and if I look through the ferns, I can see a lot of ash there, the fire had burnt for a long time, but the tree, really, is barely scorched at all, it must have been wet, or else the flammability of trees is a myth, carefully constructed by . . . I’m not sure who would construct that myth, that makes no sense, none at all, the wind is up now, loud, loud in the canopy so I can barely hear the falls nearby and wisps of my hair escape my hood and blow around and that reminds me of something, but I’m not sure what, and the chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee is barely audible, tiny in the roar of a million leaves all rubbing against each other, and there now, two huskies popping their heads around the bend in the path to see where I’ve got to—it’s funny that I’ll never understand how all of this translated in Harold’s mind to nothing, there is never nothing, only when we’re dead is there nothing, and I’m still not convinced by that, to be honest, something seems to be more the order of the day, if only from other people’s perspectives, but maybe (hopefully) from our own, and people say they come to the forest to clear their mind, but that simply isn’t possible for me, instead I come here to fill it up with wholesome green things and then, for a time, there’s a little less space for the nonsense of life— don’t think about the fact that the home printer’s not working, don’t think about how I need to unsubscribe from all the sports channels, don’t think about how I can’t reach to clear out the
gutters, don’t think about Harold, don’t think about how I’ll need a whole new set of tyres before long, don’t think about being seven months overdue for the dentist, don’t think about the credit card or paperwork building up on the dining table, or grocery bills or the food going off in the refrigerator, don’t think about my heart aching, aching, bleeding, the gaping loss, finding Harold cold on the porch, the endless pain, stop, stop, out demon thoughts, out!— the dogs have come back for me now and their heavy heads butt my thighs, they’re wet and luminous with fresh air, and I fuss their heads and take a deep breath of them, and let them herd me along the path towards the bend, I let them because I like this bend, it’s one of my favourite places I can drive to from my house, there and back again, in a day, and it’s not the bend itself that I like, of course, that would be odd, as the bend’s nothing special, but it’s the sudden view on the other side of the bend, that’s the ticket, that’s the special, that’s the sudden view which takes me by surprise every time I come here, even when I’ve come upon it suddenly dozens of times and even sketched that view in charcoal a few summers ago—don’t think about how you never got that picture framed, never gave it to Harold—and requested watercolours for my birthday with the thought of capturing that view in colour, although it’s funny that no one bought them for me, instead I got scented candles, calming teas, poetry books, and chocolate and biscuits and, from my sister-in-law, a bottle of beautiful and expensive wine (blackcurrant, cardamom, juniper) that I won’t drink for years and years, or ever at all, and even then will likely only open because I have guests, or because a recipe for beef stew calls for it, and the rest of it will inevitably turn (rot, seaweed, vinegar) and there, and there, and there it is, gosh, golly, pinchyourself-marvellous, a wonder, a postcard place of a valley, unexpectedly there up ahead, unexpectedly deep, and you realise for the first time on the walk how high up you are, you had no
idea, none at all, and there is the whole of the state, or thereabouts, spread out green before you, ruffled like the emerald bedspread I bought for Harold and me, ruffled with sweat and sleeplessness, the rolling landscape dipping away to fine blueness along the horizon in a long haze of evaporating water, and the sheer openness after the depths of the forest, like being splashed in the face with a bucket of ice-cold water, suddenly it’s impossible to be anything other than wide awake, and from here you can see the mountains in the very-distance, and all the sparkling rivers, glitter in the dips, and after that, only after all of that, you look down and see the waterfall right in front of you, right across the way to your right, three storeys high and all white water after a week of endless rain, loud and pounding, so loud you can’t believe you missed it before now, but of course you didn’t miss it, you’ve been hearing it for miles, the water-rumble getting louder so slowly you barely noticed, and now the spray fills the whole chasm, rising up to meet me, dusting my yellow anorak with sparkles, and all the rocks and trees down there are covered in moss from the constant spray (it’s funny, I think about this place every time I use my blue glass bottle to spray the leaves of my houseplants with tap water), and if I were to leave the main route and take the steep little path made by dogs and teenagers and adventurers, I’d be able to make it down to the pools below the waterfall, invisible from up here without leaning far out over nothing, where boulders the size of my van sit slick in deep water, water churned to foam that collects around the edges of the pool like coffee froth, the place littered with tree skeletons and whirlpools and endless dripping moss, always the moss, moss, moss, and, once, years ago, the naked bodies of me and Harold when we swam there at the end of a long dry summer, the memory so sweet it makes my teeth ache, that summer day when the falls were barely dribbling and the whirls were stillish and the water was almost warm and smelt strangely rich (cedar,
dark chocolate, smoke, vanilla) and our bodies smelt of that perfume, the perfume of a hot summer forest, for days afterwards, and it was so good that I kept taking Harold’s hands in mine, holding them up to my nose, breathing deep, sighing, kissing the backs of his hands, and I stand on the path now looking down, remembering, the dogs still and patient and thoughtful, like they knew Harold was in my mind somehow, it’s funny that he’d always made them calm with his presence, even the thought of him, and finally, finally, finally, the dogs don’t object when I turn to go, not like when they’d been puppies and had pulled their leashes endlessly forwards and would have crossed the whole country if they weren’t picked up and turned around to face the other way, but now, today, they recognise my reticence to continue, the need to go home, and I’m imagining it, I’m sure, but I can almost hear them conferring behind me, concerned whispers about mother, and the wind picks up again, sending waves of movement across all the canopies in the landscape scene, bringing me out of the before time, back into the now time, which is real enough to ground me, but not quite real enough to get rid of the past times, which overlay the landscape like watercolours painted on glass, and I turn myself and the dogs around, time to go, turn to go, time to go, too much here, too much, and I’m fading, I can feel myself fading, my thoughts mushing together, the dripping of water, the endless wind, and in here—in my hood, in the forest, in the rain, under deep dark clouds—it’s like being underwater, and, strangely, for all the gloom and cold, I think to our time in Fiji, that week Harold and I spent side by side in hammocks on an island so small the overnight capacity was only twelve people and the place doubled in size when the tide was out, a white-sanded, green-treed pimple on the azure face of the ocean, but why am I thinking of there now, there of all the places, or is it just the feeling of being enfolded in so much water, a submarine feeling, a close, solitary
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feeling, even with Harold there, even then, and now the rain is getting heavier, pounding on the path, and all the walk back to the van lies before us, but the way back is always so much shorter, the miles contracting, concertinaing, and all the walks, all the walks we all did together are rushing around me, and I find myself watching Harold and myself running past in our exercise gear, ambling in jeans, cowering in anoraks, and all the footprints, they were ours all along maybe, every single one of them, the stride length getting shorter as the years wore on, new boots, old boots, sometimes bare feet, I can see the imprints of our toes in the mud, and all the dog prints too, the cascading circles of puppies, to the older dogs now, chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee, and I am nearly ready, not quite, but nearly, and the dogs are heading for home and it’s funny that, for the shortest, briefest, tiniest moment, so much forest recedes and I follow them home, slow and steady, without finally, finally, a thought in my head.
