From the recent rains the leaves looked glossy in the forest, the spiky sala and leaning ferns, and it was easy to imagine all the plant life felt happy. And how these species of flora weren’t much different than what the dinosaurs would have snacked upon or trampled over, just me on a muddy path with the drip-drip-drip of it all settling down. Maybe a footfall you could imagine, me examining some wet scat on the trail, wondering if it’s cougar. Then the trill of a bird that makes it feel like the jungle. Or how the dripping resembles a woodfire crackling.

My new favorite part of the trail is called the Devil’s Backside and feels spooky, how it angles away from the light and trends downward. The trees are older and create a cage-like, tunnel effect above, fingers tented, interlaced.

Lily is being shown around San Francisco properly, by a local: the way I did it, taking a button of mescaline and roaming the city alone by foot all day, landing at the City Lights bookstore and a neighboring bar where the Beats used to go, as if doing that would make me legit. No other memories to speak of, spring of ‘98. Drinking martinis in the Mission maybe or returning to Lombard, the crookedest street.

The fern fronds are finned and could be feathers, stretched over the land everywhere, slanted downward. We cut them back in the spring to encourage more growth, and the way they unfurl with that perfect little spiral shape. Like the whorl on a snail shell, curling inwards, spiraling out. I try to avoid them on the trail but sometimes miss one and the sound is like a lightbulb popping.

Picturing John Muir now in the field with his notebook and pencils, adjusting his glasses, updating an app that identifies birds. All there is to know and see, all there is to feel. Let alone smell.

They renamed the Devil’s Backside trail something boring but I keep the original name. It could be a ridge in a Tolkien map with that distinct script, those magical-sounding names, far-off places. It gets to some deep-seated fantasy part of us, a land of make believe that’s maybe more original than the real world. They are twinning each other. Or there is the internal, spiritual part of us and the external one. The paths throughout the forest feel that way to me, rings of a snail shell curling inwards.

Each time I see fallen autumn leaves on the trail I go back to Bake Oven Knob, the best name for a place I can think of, on the east coast near a water gap, a boulder field with an overlook. A place I went as a kid with my parents and first fell in love with autumn, first picked around for pretty leaves we’d save in a book.

Some of the trees are so coated in moss they look like fur, or like a Jim Henson made-up creature, even comical, with long snouts or goofy-looking noses. They are lumbering along the trail too, either a real person inside or a marionette. And there are boulders carried by glaciers too, with ferns that have sprung up from the rock on just a thin patch of dirt, a family of happy ferns with a good plot.

I liked to bake a fruit torte in the morning on the weekend to fill the house with the warm scent of cinnamon and that’s what I’d do when I got home.

The park was a backyard of sorts, just 10 minutes by car. We landed in a good spot ourselves, our thin patch of dirt.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, pacific northwest, prose, spirituality