Lost Tales of Kirev

Wooden Sign

I can't remember if this was just before or just after the driveway was paved, the trees, salmonberry bushes and fallen trunks plucked away and replaced by glaring concrete, a circle to fit all of the cars that would never visit.

It was around that time.

A stream in the woods behind the house overflows with memories. When we were younger and more adventurous, Viktor and I would meander down the makeshift trail, pausing to examine puffball mushrooms and climbable glacial rocks. We would clamber down the steep, muddy hillside, cross the two-log bridge that existed long before the house was built, and play hideout in the huge, hollow tree trunk. It was charred, unlike anything else around it, like lightning had struck it personally.

I had just come home from one of many recent appointments with doctors who didn't know what was wrong with me. I assumed at the time that I was a failure. I hadn't been writing, after all. Depression never crossed my mind.

I was lying in bed, crying weakly, when an idea occurred to me. I packed warm clothes, a blanket, and a portable battery, put on some sneakers unsuited for the soupy Washington mud, and left the house through the front door. The back door would be faster, but the front door was louder. Nobody noticed.

I circled the house in the stark sunlight and began the trek. I had done the walk so many times that I didn't process anything until I arrived.

The bridge was rotting, and I didn't trust it to hold me. I cleared away rocks and twigs from the leaf cover just before it and laid out a fluffy green blanket that wasn't mine. I took off my shoes.

I had resolved to wait until I saw a sign. I was fully prepared for it to be hungry coyotes in the night, despite it being only mid-afternoon. A black bear was also possible. They were more curious than shy. My parents noticing my absence, much less finding me in time, seemed far less likely.

I distracted myself with video games, alternating between almost enjoying myself and blaming myself for my laziness and lack of productivity. An hour passed.

Eventually, I resorted to lying on my back and staring at the trees, trying to ignore the rocks that I had missed and were now poking into my ribs, blaming myself. The stream behind me was straight and babbled softly, like an amused child, but with nothing else to listen to, it was deafening. I remembered more ignorant days fording the cold water, picking colorful rocks out of the streambed from the safety of a small shoal on the other side, clambering back up the hill with my treasures weighing down my pockets.

I was staring at a squirrel. It was close, leaning over a branch that reached above me. I imagine it was rather confused by my presence. Surely it had seen me safe behind the windows of the kitchen on countless other occasions.

It seemed concerned, the more I looked at it. It wanted to know why I was there, but it also wanted to know why I was there. I sat up, and it scurried down the tree towards me, getting far too close to be truly wild. It stared at me for a second longer, then darted across the bridge and into the wet brush.

I realized that I had seen my sign.

Everything I had brought with me was cleaned and returned to its proper place. Nobody ever knew I had been gone. I struggled to define what had happened to future therapists, since I'd had no plan, nothing besides looking for answers, and no harm had come of it. That was thanks to the squirrel, of course.

The physical and biological complexity of forests often makes them seem mystical, but that space surpassed the bounds of the explainable. A palm-sized circular rock that Viktor and I left inside the tree stump, out of the light, turned red on one half and white on the other, like a sunrise. No amount of washing could bring back its original gray color. We were both well aware of the fairy circle up the hill on the other side of the stream, a ring of small trees with unusual ferns and unpickable trilliums inside.

I hadn't been expecting a miracle, but I got one anyway. The forest, like all living things, tends to know when you need something desperately. Fungal mycelium networks act similarly to a human brain, and unlike the more typically recognized brains I knew, the forest listened and understood. It didn't have answers, but it did have hope. It told me to keep going.