The first time I got lost in the Elphinstone Forest was 22 years ago, shortly after we had decided to move to Roberts Creek. It was a hot summer day, and I headed out to do some exploring. After driving up one of the forest service roads, I turned onto a narrow, deactivated logging road and decided to see how much farther into the woods it would take me. The more I drove, the narrower and more overgrown it became, until finally I could not go any farther. I backed up to a spot that was wide enough to let me get turned around. As I was doing so, I noticed an old, unused footpath heading into the forest. I decided to leave the car and check it out. Hiking down the path, I was struck by how silent everything was. There was plenty of evidence of life – deer droppings on the path, woodpecker holes in a dead fir tree, and so on. But there was no sound. I kept on walking, enjoying the silence, until the trail rose up to a little knoll. At the top of that knoll the silence was suddenly broken by the noise of a creek. I made my way down to it and stood there letting the sound of the rushing water wash over my senses. The sound seemed to have a purifying effect on my thoughts. I wondered whether this was the creek that flowed down close to the small piece of land we had recently purchased. I crossed the creek, stepping gingerly from stone to stone, scrambled up the other slope and continued on farther into the forest. Again I was struck by the silence, which was so deep that it filled me with an indescribable peace. Marvelling at how exceptional that silence was, it suddenly occurred to me that such silence was not the exception at all. In the deep forest, which stretched for hundreds of miles in all directions, silence was the general condition. It was my own world – the noisy human world – that was the exception. I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I didn’t notice the path had disappeared. When I realized that I was no longer on the path, I looked around to see where it had gone. I tried retracing my steps, but it was no use. The path was nowhere to be found.
My first reaction was to chuckle at having gotten myself into such a predicament. I was not concerned about it because I knew there were forest service roads to the east and to the north. So I headed back in the direction from which I had come, confident that I would pick up the path again; but if I didn’t, I would soon come to one of those roads.
Gradually, the forest became more dense, and I found myself picking through a thick mass of salal bushes. Their clinging reminded me of those cartoons in which the vines come alive and begin winding around the helpless traveller. But for some reason I still did not feel helpless. Even though I didn’t have a compass, I was confident in my sense of direction (since the brightest part of the sky is always towards the south), and I was thankful for the trees, which were sheltering me from the hot summer sun. The forest, to me, has always been a welcoming place. I feel more at home there than in the city. I continued pushing through the salal bushes and enjoying my adventure, until I came to a swale of fallen trees that made my progress more difficult. I began clambering over, under and around the tangles of logs; and as I did, I noticed that the way was getting steeper. Pushing onward, I soon found myself facing a massive wall of rock. To my left, it seemed to go on for a long way, and to my right it dropped down steeply into a log-cluttered ravine. The only way forward was to climb up the massive grey monolith. Looking up, I saw that it was speckled with light green lichen, but had very few ridges on which to get a hand- or foothold.
I was sure that once I found a way over that great sunny monolith, the rest of the way would be easy. So I began climbing. As I got higher up, I could feel the intensity of the sun’s heat beating down on me, and I knew I needed to get to the top as quickly as I could. But the higher I climbed, the fewer footfalls I could find. To my left, a line of deep green salal bushes was growing out of a cleft in the rock. I tried edging my way towards it, but the bushes were beyond my reach and there was nothing in between to grab onto. Driven to desperation and by the heat of the sun, I decided to make a lunge. Fortunately, when I grabbed onto the bushes, they didn’t come loose. As I struggled to hold on and keep from sliding down, I started feeling dizzy and weak; the combined effect of the hot sun and the ordeal of trying to hoist myself up that rock was sapping all my strength. But I couldn’t let go; I was too high up on the vertical rock to try and climb back down. I had no choice but to keep clutching the shallow crevices with my fingers and toes and pray that I wouldn’t slip. It was one of those instances where we are forced to reach down inside ourselves and summon the strength to keep holding on. Somehow, I managed to inch myself farther up until I was safely over the top.
I slumped down, exhausted, my arms throbbing and my fingers aching. For a long time, I just lay there, waiting for my strength to recover and for the dizziness to subside. I was lying in the sun on top of a rocky outcrop in the middle of nowhere with no path; yet, for some strange reason, my mood was still tranquil. The ordeal had shaken my body but not my mood. I closed my eyes to block out the bright sky and behind my eyelids I could see undulating patterns of orange and magenta light. When I raised my arm over my eyes and opened them again, I could see two white butterflies dancing around me. Dazzled by their brightness, I kept watching them until they finally flitted out of the spotlight and became invisible to me.
The way after that was easy. I was enjoying the silence again and feeling grateful to be back in the cool, mossy forest. I kept going in a north-easterly direction, and then, after a hiking a short while, I was elated to discover that my sense of direction had been correct – I had somehow stumbled across the path I had lost! I was proud of myself, elated to be back on the path again and happy that my little adventure would soon be over. As I strode back along the trail, I thought of the many trails through this magnificent forest, and I felt a deep sense of gratitude to the anonymous people who build them. I would later discover that there are hundreds of them, and there are dozens of volunteers who regularly devote their time to building and maintaining them. When this one finally brought me back to the spot where my car was parked, I raised my hands to the sky in a prayerful gesture of thanks. But my joy was immediately jolted by the drone of a seaplane flying nearby. It reminded me that I was once again returning to the world of humans.