I entered the woods by way of a footbridge. From a distance, the stone trail-marker on the opposite side looked like a statue or an apparition. It had been a long time since I had left the city, and I had forgotten what it was like to be immersed in the greens and browns of summer, to be guided through the forest on a path.
It was just after sunrise and the leaves and ground were still wet. The trail was thick with spider webs, which I had to clear away from my face.
Except for the spider webs, it was very peaceful; it was, I remembered, very different than how I had felt the previous night in the aisles of a suburban supermarket. I listened to my arms and legs brushing against the leaves; a few times, an animal scurried away unseen. There were birds overhead, chirping and squawking.
There was one way in which the forest reminded me of the supermarket: each place represented a kind of bubble where it was easy to forget about the increasingly extreme problems of the outside world, to pretend that I had returned to a ‘normal’ existence. I had last visited these woods two years ago; so many things had changed during that period, and so many other things had not changed at all. I wondered what the next two years would deliver, and whether I was right to feel optimistic or pessimistic.
I passed a waterfall that ran over and through the layers of shale.
Sunlight filtered through the leaves onto another footbridge.
At the bottom of the ravine, I crossed the river, muddy and swollen with rain.
The path out of the woods looked no different than the path in.
