Last weekend, my husband and I took a short hike up the first slope of the mountain next to campus, to where a lookout point shows campus like a toy village, to where the valley as a whole structure becomes visible, and the lip of distant mountains, not visible from the valley floor, peaks over the ridge in a snowy line.
This lookout is a crossroads, from which hikers can turn in three directions, to skirt along the cliffs overhanging the school or to trek up either of the two mountains, Jarstadheia or Storåsen. And at the lookout is a beautifully painted memorial bench, for the husband of a former colleague, who passed away before we came to this school.
I have made this trek many times in the last year, far more often than during my first three years here, as I have been endeavoring to get more exercise, to spent more time outside and enjoy the hiking trails that we have right outside our door. Sometimes I bring my journal with me. Sometimes I don’t stop at the bench at all, just catch my breath, then head onward up one of the mountains, and sometimes the ground is so wet around the bench I could not reach it without soaking my feet.
But just below the bench, last weekend, I found something I had somehow never seen before. My husband pointed it out to me, the ground strewn with these small, papery conical husks. “I hadn’t noticed those at all,” I said. I thought they were the ends of pine cones, but I was soon proved wrong. They were the caps of new clusters of pine needles, springing forth in profusion all over these trees. They resembled tiny pinecones before they burst open, but after the cap had burst and peeled away, the delicate green of the soft young needles revealed them for what they really were.
I could not believe what I was seeing. “I had no idea this is how pine needles grow,” I was exclaiming. I am no stranger to forests. I see a lot of things. I sit and study the filaments of moss sometimes, or the ballooning up of mushrooms, but here was something so fundamental I had never seen, and it was something of such beauty, these spiraled clusters that reminded me of some kind of extraterrestrial spaceship engine, I was again humbled by the recognition of how much it is that I don’t know, and how wide and deep the world runs.
Two days later, I hiked on my own up past the bench, up to Storåsen, from which one can see the whole length of our small fjord to where it opens into the wider, busier Dalsfjord, and there across the water the town of Holmedal, only a speckling of white shapes next to the water. I telephoned my husband from the mountaintop, and he came out with a big fluorescent reflective vest. I had brought my own along, and we swung these neon flags around our heads until we could see each other.
In our writing, that’s what we’re doing, I think: pointing out the little things that we have seen, that others perhaps have not, or have not seen in a particular frame of meaning, a connection drawn between young pine needles and something more fundamental. I’ve heard it said that in the past, it would have been possible to read everything that had ever been written. Of course now there would be no way. There is too much, so many voices raising up their ideas and perspectives in a kaleidoscopic range of human ideas. That’s fine. That’s marvelous. We can each just be one more of those.
Best wishes for the coming week,
Jimmy
Words like trees 