Lost in the Woods

The salal is thick and covers the contours of the land. Fallen trees decorated with moss and turkey tail mushrooms are ladders through this curvy bramble, this cemented puzzle of branches and leaves, but their bodies only reach so far before returning me to entanglement. The sky, barely visible through waves of trees, is slowly crumbling into darkness. 

Being lost in the woods in a park surrounded by roads and houses on an island surrounded by water isn’t as dangerous as being lost in true wilderness, but at the time my mind cannot differentiate between the two kinds of Lost. I’d hopped off the trail to avoid a puddle of slushy icy mud and reasoned if I just walked a bit this way and that I’d come to the trail again. With less than a half hour until sunset and temperatures dropping below freezing, all I can think is Walk Faster.

I navigate in stars, wheels, a splayed body of radial arms testing out trails that lead to tangles I must push through. My mind says “That will take too long! Try another way!” My heart creeps up into my throat, pounds in my ears so that I can barely hear the rip slip slide of branches against my down jacket. I know this feeling of panic and I know it won’t help me find the trail. I breathe into my belly and my belly responds with kicks and flutters. She is here with me and I say, “We will be OK.” I hope it to be true. 

I come to an opening in the dense forest. My eye is following the blackness creeping from the ground and up the trees. Lightening? I wonder. In the charred clearing I find a small fuel container, melted plastic bottles, a white shirt (unburned) hanging on the end of a downed trunk. Then I see the camp. The shelter is made of tree limbs and there is something inside, a green suitcase of somesort but being the polite (anxious) person that I am I do not investigate the contents of the dwelling. I don’t want to go anywhere near it. I feel like I’ve stumbled into someone’s living room and although I am pretty sure there is no one around I can’t help but feel like it was my fault I ended up here, as if I was being nosy. Am I being watched, tracked, lured somehow? I think I see a movement in the camp. 

I don’t turn back to see if it is a man, a fluttering cloth, a bird.

I scramble up the hill.

I want to find a trail, any trail, and go home. Just walk in a straight line, I tell myself. Stop doubling back, I chide. Asphalt roads on two sides, trails on the other two, I can break out of this box. Walk. Keep walking.

Kicks in the belly.

I need to keep us safe. 

I push through bushes and climb over nurse trees towards the remnants of sunset. There is a break in the bushes. The trail was less than a hundred feet away from the camp! I walk. My vision blurs in the dusk and I turn around quickly to find shadows hiding in the hollowed out curves of the trail. There is no one following me.

We are OK.

I let my mind wander and it soon outpaces me. My hands gravitate to my belly and the wanderer within. I think of all the women who are forced to walk on trails that were not loops in parks, to be forced off onto paths or through thickets they never imagined they’d face, through woods that were not leading them back to a warm home. Women whose bodies swell with the ocean inside as they cross the sea in leaky rafts and over-burdened fishing boats. I imagine them rubbing their bellies and telling the babies inside that they will be OK, we will be OK, and wanting to believe it is true as the water washes over the deck and pale, drawn faces search the horizon for shore. And once they are on shore they walk, they stumble, they rely on whatever they can find to nourish the life inside. They find camps and perhaps worry about their safety among a bramble of strangers. They search for a trail to lead them away from the camp in offices designated for refugees where they hope to find a country to take them in. Somewhere they can create a new home. Somewhere their baby can be born and thrive. Out of the woods, out of the danger of forced transience.

I walk faster as the forest gives way to a clearing I know means I am just a car ride from Home. I am tired and grateful and tell myself that next time I will pack a headlamp, food, water, one of those foil blankets, because who knows what can happen in the woods when you go off the path. Or stay on it. Nothing is certain. I am grateful for this life I have, this life I am holding within me. I am in awe of those women who hold chaos, grief, and loss with the other few possessions on their back as their bellies swell with life and hope in a bittersweet counterbalance.