The Glade and Everything that Lived There

Kootenay Wildcrafting Co. donates a minimum of 10%
of all profits to the Canadian Ancient Forest Alliance.  Here’s why. 

Remember the Forest: In memory of the Glade.  Free Apothecary Collection.

I used to know a place that knew me better than anywhere else.  The first time we wandered into its warm serenity, we knew that we had found home.  Memories filled the air as thick as pollen.  We were the first people to ever walk there, yet this place’s story was rich and timeless.

It was a small meadow on HooDoo Mountain in the wild parts, about a three-mile trek up old logging roads and steep, dusty, treeless slopes. We found it by accident one rambling afternoon, and for the rest of that summer and every summer after, my sister and I would return with our books and our dogs.

We spent the days playing cribbage, writing songs, and trying to get a suntan.  It's where I read every last one of Vonnegut’s books: the good ones and the awful ones. I taught myself to weave things out of grass there, and I wrote lots of bad poetry. My sister and I just called our special place “The Glade”. That little meadow was the source and the center of the mystical experience that every
proper childhood deserves.

We named every white-barked aspen tree that grew there. The trees’ leaves always filtered the sunlight perfectly, making the thick bear grass look even bluer than it really was.  We invented an entire mythology about why the sun goes to bed when he does, we sang lullabies to the clouds and the wind currents that shaped them. 

We would spend entire days letting the sighing, singing energy whisper through us.  We had a song for every shade of green. It was a time of intimate security, and we were more than mortal in those days; we had seventeen earth-years between us, but we knew then that we were eternal. 

We would always linger until the sun was shooting long golden rays horizontally through the tree trunks, and we'd make it to the road below just in time to see the pink clouds.

We named the roads and paths that led to our destination: TopHat Boulevard, the Great Green Avenue, Bramble Maze.  When the days grew too warm and the rains stopped, we would stuff extra water into our packs for the dogs.  We stashed extra water, books, clothes, and pocket knives under a log at the edge of the meadow. By the end of one summer our treasure chest had grown so large, it would have taken two trips to pack it all down.

But we didn't get the chance. One russet-colored September afternoon, when we raced to the Glade right after school, we found our stash- gone.  My old copy of Sea Wolf, the picnic blanket, all of that hard-earned water: stolen!  It was incomprehensible.  Not the fact that someone had taken a dusty old blanket and a paperback book missing its cover.  What was impossible to believe was that someone, another human, a creature with two feet and two hands, had entered our sanctuary.  Not only had they entered it: they'd explored enough to find our well-hidden cache. 

The very idea that this place could be, was accessible to other people who didn't understand it was dumbfounding.  It went against what we knew to be true: the Glade was sacred, we had made it so, and it was under some sort of cosmic protection. 

When I left the Glade for the last time, it was right after high school graduation.  I made sure to touch the white bark of each tree in the Great Green Avenue as I walked down the hill.  I felt like a stately queen, blessing each beloved subject before taking leave of Court for a long journey.  I sat at the tree line to watch the sun disappear, and see the pink clouds turn blue, and to see the moon take her station as nighttime guardian.  We had songs for the moon, too.  I told the trees that I'd be back.

At the beginning of sophomore year at university, I heard from someone who lived on HooDoo that the west side of the mountain had been logged.  

I had left small pieces of myself tucked away here and there, at the base of a tree or nestled safe in a lush clump of grass. I can't help but wonder whether the loggers who stomped around in filthy boots through my lovely bed, on my lofty green pillows, in my creative sanctuary- I can't help but wonder if they felt anything.  

There’s nothing living left to make the light green or to press the sun’s light into golden, shooting rays.  But maybe, if I don't go to see the dust for myself, if I don't allow the image in my head to be updated, The Glade will go on surviving in some alternate universe.  Maybe that universe lives in me.

 

Kootenay Wildcrafting Co. donates a minimum of 10% of all profits to the Canadian Ancient Forest Alliance.  I donate in memory to The Glade.