October 17: Witness to the Rain
From Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
After hours in the penetrating rain, I am suddenly damp and chilled and the path back to the cabin is a temptation. I could so easily retreat to tea and dry clothes, but I cannot pull myself away. However alluring the thought of warmth, there is no substitute for standing in the rain to waken every senseーsenses that are muted within four walls, where my attention would be on me instead of all that is more than me. Inside looking out, I could not bear the loneliness of being dry in a wet world. Here in the rainforest, I don’t want to just be a bystander to rain, passive and protected; I want to be part of the downpour, to be soaked, along with the dark humus that squishes underfoot. I wish that I could stand like a shaggy cedar with rain seeping into my bark, that water could dissolve the barrier between us. I want to feel what the cedars feel and know what they know.
But I am not a cedar and I am cold. Surely there are places where the warm-blooded among us take refuge. There must be niches here and there where the rain does not reach. I try to think like a squirrel and find them. I poke my head into an undercut bank by the stream, but its back wall runs with rivulets. No shelter there, nor in the hollow of a treefall where I hoped the upturned roots would slow the rain. A spiderweb hangs between two dangling roots. Even this is filled, a silken hammock cradling a spoonful of water. My hopes rise where the vine maples are bent low to form a moss-draped dome. I push aside the Isothecium curtain and stoop to enter the tiny dark room, roofed with layers of moss. It’s quiet and windless, just big enough for one. The light comes through the moss-woven roof like pinprick stars, but so do the drips.
As I walk back to the trail, a giant log blocks the way. It has fallen from the toe slope out into the river, where its branches drag in the rising current. Its top rests on the opposite shore. Going under looks easier than going over, so I drop to my hands and knees. And here I find my dry place. The ground mosses are brown and dry, the soil soft and powdery. The log makes a roof overhead more than a meter wide in the wedge-shaped space where the slope falls away to the stream. I can stretch out my legs, the slope angle perfectly accommodating the length of my back. I let my head rest in a dry nest of Hylocomium moss and sigh in contentment. My breath forms a cloud above me, up where brown tufts of moss still cling to the furrowed bark, embroidered with spiderwebs and wisps of lichen that haven’t seen the sun since this tree became a log.
This log, inches above my face, weighs many tons. All that keeps it from seeking its natural angle of repose on my chest is a hinge of fractured wood at the stump and cracked branches propped on the other side of the stream. It could loose those bonds at any moment. But given the fast temp of raindrops and the slow tempo of teefalls, I feel safe in the moment. The pace of my resting and the pace of its falling run on different clocks.
Time as objective reality has never made much sense to me. It’s what happens that matters. How can minutes and years, devices of our own creation, mean the same thing to gnats and to cedars? Two hundred years is young for the trees whose tops this morning are hung with mist. It’s an eyeblink of time for the river and nothing at all for the rocks. The rocks and the river and these very same trees are likely to be here in another two hundred years, if we take good care. As for me, and that chipmunk, and the cloud of gnats milling in a shaft of sunlightーwe will have moved on.
If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are. So I stretch out, close my eyes, and listen to the rain.