Nyeh! (I put way too much thought into that onomatopoeia). We just got hit, right in the middle of what I call "pseudo-spring", with a couple inches of good, packing snow. I decided I needed to take a walk in it and be the first pair of shoeprints to defile the snow in the woods near my house. While I was out there, words and phrases started to get pieced together. After a dark, wet attempt at drawing that left my hands so cold that they kinda burned, I decided I'd record the words on the blog when I got back to an environment where going ungloved was saner. Here are the words. maybe something will happen with them. There's parts that feel kinda like one of the neat horror stories we read in class last year, so maybe they'll evolve into that sort of thing. Who knows?
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I've been accused of skating by on good luck. To hear my friends tell it, I've never had a coin come up tails, but luck is a gross oversimplification. I prefer to think of it as a nigh-clairvoyant gut. It's not like I've never had a bad roll of the dice, but I can always tell at the last second how much to invest.
That's why I knew I had to go deeper into the woods. It wasn't a dark night the city's bright lights had conspired with a pale blanket of clouds to paint the whole sky a faint purple. In the dim light, the snow freshly stuck to every trunk and branch -as well as the thick layer on the ground- almost perfectly matched the sky. Bits and pieces of trees remained uncovered. I could see them as thick black outlines, occasionally subdividing the uniform gray of the sky and ground.
Once inside, the trees seemed alive in a way I've never felt before. I'd been in there during the spring and summer, when the whole forest was alive, sounds of movement all around, hard to place, among the thick foliage. Tonight, only the trees felt alive. I stared up and saw a million white fingers flailing in the wind. With every step, trunks changed shapes, became distant figures, then trees again. A step backward, and he's there, a step forward, just a tree.
It became almost oppressive. I was never far from the edge, but something kept me in the forest, surrounded by a conspiracy of forest spirits. They tempted me with yet another flip of the great cosmic coin. There was something special here, but something elusive, and dangerous. Some fleeting inspiration that would reveal itself with every step, fading with the next.
The tree struck me as an ancient, incomprehensible knowledge. One moment, it was a mere tree, though taller and thicker than the rest. The woods maintained a reverent distance from it. A moment later, it was almost figural, like an idol carved by a long-dead craftsman. In those moments when it seemed alive, two hefty limbs reached out from near its canopy, like the antlers on some demon, or operatic Viking helmet. Beneath those limbs, the shadows became pitch black, somehow darker than the rest of the tree, shadows, within shadows. I felt vaguely, when I looked into those pools of shadow, like I was looking into the eyes of some entity. Below the pools of shadow, completing the look of the wizened idol, snow had clustered in the shape of a beard. Two limbs ran down each side, like outstretched arms. As I gazed, the limb that seemed more like an arm seemed to shift, dependent on the tree's attitude.
I approached hesitantly, not wanting to ruin the illusion. I kept looking at the face, but as I approached, the pattern of snow and wood that my mind recognized as a face changed. A few steps in, I could no longer see a face above the limbs, but what had been an armpit was now the face of a middle-aged man. He disappeared when I came closer, replaced by a much younger man lower down the trunk. When I was only a step or two away, the tree's face was a mere boy at eye-level with me....
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Update May 27, 2012:
Now that late spring (y'know, the part that feels like summer but isn't technically summer yet) is upon us, on one of my many wanders through the woods, I decided to check out that tree with foliage around it. I found it kinda interesting that in the warmer months when all the trees have leaves, you can't even see the spot where I saw the old man's face. If I expand on this, it could be intriguing to work in that element of the mythology: The tree can only be a wise old man when the other trees around him are naked (or gone). During the warm part of the year, he can only be so old and so wise...
