The Fallen Fir

It’s the kind of fog that you can feel as you walk through it, all the droplets hanging static, not enough of them to wet your hair, but enough of them that they pelt your face like grains of sand, each waterdrop present and tangible, as though the air itself is made from mist, and yet when you run your hand over your forehead, your skin is still dry, and there are only a few beads of water on the shoulders of your rain jacket.

Once you get beneath the trees, the fog dissipates, and you no longer need to squint. Your boots sink into the soft earth, especially the corners where the water pools between tree roots and the dirt turns to mud, but you avoid these spots, step over them, and you stay on the far side of the trail where the fir needles have fallen.

Something about the forest is different today; the sky is more open, like a tree has fallen, and there is one down, but you can’t quite recall whether it was like that the last time you walked through here. It’s a tall, old Douglas fir, whose trunk is severed a little too cleanly, with just one side of the bark frayed, like something had started gnawing through the crust and gave up trying. Perhaps the tree fell in a storm, and a crew came through and cut it into smaller pieces to keep the trail clear. Perhaps the tree was dying, a hazard, and so they cut it down before its time. But you cannot remember, even, how long it has been there, how long ago it fell, and for that you feel guilty.

And you pass another fallen tree, an old one where the lattice of roots are exposed, stretching vertically like a trellis, spider webs and moss draped along it, and you think to yourself that that is what a fallen tree would look like if it fell during a storm. It would have fallen from the roots–it would have toppled.