The Forest and the Way I Feel It By Katie Stimpson

eflon CC




The Forest and the Way I Feel It

A branch falls from somewhere near the top of the redwood, rights itself midair like a cat, pierces the top of my skull, and splits me evenly in half.  
They call these widow-makers. And this one runs clean through me and sticks in the duff like a dart.
I live in the woods now. 
I'm a couple of piles of vivisected remains on either side of an evergreeny javelin from god.  An installation of sorts.

Things are very extreme here. 
But so quiet. 

When we first moved to this spot the landscape was a cindered husk. There were no greens. Embers were still burning under the top layers of soil and with the right wind they'd catch and we would be forced to evacuate, yet again. The mountain behind us looked like a sepia toned photograph of itself - soft grays, browns, tans, smeary charcoal blacks. Of course if you relaxed the back of your neck, let your chin float up and looked toward the sky, then you'd see the untouched green about two thirds up the tree, just waiting there, looking down on its lower self, trying to understand its own integrity. The air was still technically unbreathable then and one day the sun was completely blotted out by ash and smoke. We woke up in the morning and thought we had somehow slept all day and into the night. This isn't what morning looks like. This doesn't feel right. 
I remember when, about 3 months in, hiking down to the natural amphitheater, breathing heavily, wildly out of shape, suppressing a sob, I realized that I was just like this place. I was all burnt up, yet surprisingly alive. I remember telling myself that I just had to wait for the green, just wait for the rain, just let another season pass and you'll see, you'll be ok, you'll be growing. 
Now we clear the debris. A Sisyphean task. Two years later and we're still buried in debris. A debris field, technically, and so in heavy rains another reason to evacuate. 
It hails, it pours, it builds forest floor, it gusts. Sometimes it thunders and we basically dissociate watching for lightning. Winter here is the wettest place I've ever lived and yet the summer burns. When it floods, it still burns. And when it burns we drown in the flame. 

Now I am growing. I was right about that. My father died last year and I miss the bastard terribly. A complicated grief will grow you. I think all the parts of him I love the most have entered me. Like I walked through his ghost and gathered the glory with little magnets in each of my cells. Dad writes this now? Dad expands himself through me and speaks? Dad tells you to love me. Dad tells you to forgive himself. Dad says dad and dad are dadding in this daddy place, all daddied up and dadded.

Now I mostly lie on the daybed, next to the big window. I watch the neighbors coming and going, talking to themselves, walking to the laundry. I'm the one on display but I've never seen them see me. 
My body here doesn't want to be anything too specific, and definitely not its own history.
I've been trailing my finger tip around my rib cage lately. Not with my real hands from the outside of me, but from the inside, with my mind's hands. My mind's finger drags along a smooth rib bone. It feels like something I found in the desert. And it looks like the color of the moon up close. 
But in actuality, it's wet and red and meaty. Something you'd eat for dinner, suck, and dispose of.
Now I lie (faint) on the daybed (fainting couch) like a Hollywood star. My lethargic fist does an excellent job not smashing this giant window to shards. 
And I've been remembering joy lately. Revealing it, really, from just under the debris. 
Like last night I had a private dance party in the living room with all the songs that Hugo gave me 15 years ago. After we had sex in a poppy field in Austria, he drove me to the airport and sent me to Ireland with an mp3 player full of music. And there I biked 40 miles a day, hunted for remnants of my ancestors in old church graveyards, and listened to the 20 or so songs on constant repeat. The Irish coast was the hottest and sunniest it had been in 50 years and us family tree tourists walked around smirking at each other in our thin, sunburnt, pagan skins.
This must be underwater love. 
The way I feel it 
slipping all over me.
This must be underwater love.
The way I feel it.*

A widow-maker is defined as anything that has the potential to kill men.
If a womb were to come forward from the dark and make a suggestion here, it would be a brave thing. 
See, all my organs are charms I've collected on my body bracelet. I've got a full set jangling around in there; pinching or seizing or expelling bile. Some can glisten pink under the right circumstances. 
And it is a brave womb. It's nestled between the golden spirals of my fallopian tubes and my like-clockwork-ovaries. Did you know that it's a portal? And that in its portal-ness it's infinite? And yet in its infinite-ness it has a center. And in that center burns a small, warm fire.
We're warm here, you and I, despite the constant shade.
And when we hear crackling and booming and eventual shattering against the forest floor we always freeze and listen and then say, "There goes a widow-maker." And we check on the cars and the sheds and the cats and we take a look around and we touch our own chests and we notice the roof of the house, intact, and the tops of our skulls, intact (but somehow softer feeling), and we inhale our breaths and we go back to our whatever tasks and we know we're not dead yet. 
And maybe we have a little fleeting thought. We think that there's always something to be afraid of no matter where we live and we remember things we've been afraid of and we feel actual gratitude for this being the thing now because it makes a lot of sense and it aligns with gravity and weather and tree logic. And the science and the ruggedness and the wood witch of it all really captures our whimsy. So it's easy to pretend the house is as strong as our once child innocence and we let ourselves rest knowing it's at least as impermeable and as softly infinite as that.
And one more thing, maybe the neighbors say, "Did you hear that widow-maker come down last night?" or "Everything ok up there?" And half the time you don't even hear the thing they heard but you feel like you're being watched over and that calms something in you and your strong crown softens down to the fontanel and you say, "We're ok, thanks."


*from the song Underwater Love by Smoke City


​

​Katie Stimpson is an expressive artist currently living a hermitic life deep in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has a BFA in Performance with a minor in Writing from Naropa University and has been acting and writing her entire life in numerous companies, communities, institutions, and locations.