July 28, 2006

• A Walk In The Woods

  I might have posted this before. I don't think so, though. It's a file that's been sitting on the computer desktop for a really long time, and I want to file it properly. But before I do....

  A Walk In The Woods

  There was a time when a walk in the woods was a bad idea. You didn't want to be in the woods unless you had to. If you had to travel, you stuck to the roads, to the busier path. Think of every fairy tale where someone wanders off into the woods, and something really bad happens to them.

  I've stood next to trees that were 700 years old. Seven hundred. It's a number hard to fathom. Then again, if you could talk to a 700 year old tree and ask it what its learned, it would have to say, "What do I know? I've been standing in one place all this time." This is the bristlecone pine speaking, a tree that basically preserves itself with its own sap.

  700 years of snowy winters, dry, hot summers, people coming by and marveling... People thinking that spending five minutes looking at a tree is a long time.

  This is what I get from a walk in the woods. It's a paradox. It's ennobling, and it turns my whole existence into a tiny fleck. A tiny fragment of something that was tiny to begin with.

  I have a joke I tell, though it's really inappropriate and irreverent, and people think I'm trying to be a jerk, when really I'm just being silly. It's like a knock, knock joke, except the other person starts it. Usually they don't know they're starting a joke, which is why it confuses them. They start by saying, "What do you do for a living?" And much like the bristlecone pine, my answer is, "I metabolize."

  And it's one of those coyote jokes. It's a comment on the banality of asking what someone does for a living. It's completely honest, too. I metabolize, and therefore I'm alive. It's word play and fuck-you at the same time. And naturally this is a little too much for most people. It's a measure, too.

  And like the bristlecone, I've endured that question so many times. So many winters and summers, and so many recurrences of "Hi! What do you do for a living?"

  Walking in the woods, no one asks what you do for a living. Everyone you meet - the trees, the birds, the ground cover, the reptiles and riparian runabouts, the waders the watchers the worms and wrigglers.... the geese, the game, the Giardia... even the happy banana slug - they're all too busy living to bother to ask. If you're a predator, they know what you do: You eat them! If you're not a predator, then who cares?

  • 8:42 pm
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