The woods

I pulled over with my car to the side of a quiet back road at dusk, needing to make a phone call. The sky had been grey all day, now it was flatter than grey. The grasses matched the mood; their bleached corn -coloured stems lay over the crust of ice that sat in the drainage ditch nearby.

My phone call ended as the call of geese sounded. I stepped out of my vehicle and onto the roadside, as I always enjoy the magic of watching and listening. Even though they are larger in numbers than perhaps in the past, the geese that overwinter here in our daily midst are much a lesson of life and survival. I heard and saw through the dull light as silhouettes of the birds lifted from the fields. They appeared to be about four family groups with twenty members each and while travelling together, they remained at the same time as individual units. They were headed to the lake to spend the night, free of land predators.

As the flocks flew overhead, I turned my attention to the silent trees of a forest that bordered the fields. I thought of how, similar to our inner connection with sounds, we have connections to entities like the forest. Whether green and in daylight, or most often in the dark of night like this night, the mystery of the forest can heighten suspense and therefore has factored into storytelling and fables in cultures around the world. When I think back to the number of children’s fables that incorporate the metaphors that forests offer and be become imaginary settings and backdrops to stories with fictional narratives about characters travelling through the underworld of trees, the titles could fill the pages of a telephone book. So who’s still afraid of the big bad wolf? I remember hearing about him/her as a child and then trying to go to sleep afterwards.

“At the beginning of my life was a forest,” Francis Spufford writes in his memoir, The Child That Books Built. He refers to an actual forest nearby to his childhood home, but also the role of the metaphorical forest in fiction, and begins to see how the proliferation of works using the scenario becomes a forest of books in their own right. Robin Hood and his crew sought the refuge of the woods of Nottingham; hundreds of characters like Little Red Riding Hood inhabit an enchanted forest and if some stories— think Bambi—were not likely to hold attraction to paying viewing audiences, Walt Disney would turn the perception around by adding a village of joyful elves and a happy ending to fables like the Brothers Grim and Hansel and Gretel. Disney’s animated film, Babes in the Woods made in 1932 managed to alter outcomes.

This is my initial take-away from this night. It’s the silence of the fields and forests, sometimes under a blanket of stars, but often under the monochrome density of the senses, that encourages our imagination to contrive far-out imagery.