I took a trip into the Cascades up to the edge of the snow. I think the snow line is about 3700’. This trip was most interesting. I experienced a “bad place”.
One of my favorite books is Dersu the Trapper by Vladimir Arseniev.
It’s the story of three of the first exploring and mapping expeditions to the Sihote Alin, northeast of Vladivostok, Russia.
During the first expedition, Arseniev, the leader, met and befriended a native, Dersu Uzala, who joined the project as a guide. Dersu lived his entire life in the Usurian Taiga so he knew the region very well. Arseniev did a wonderful job reporting not only the landscape, but the ethnography of the peoples met by his party. The book is so good that Akira Kurosawa made parts of it into a movie.
At various times on the expeditions Dersu would veto a bivouac spot as unsuitable; “they are bad places”. However, one evening Arseniev selects a bivouac spot for the night. Dersu doesn’t like the place but can’t communicate why. The story reads:
In the passage from day to night there is to me always something mysterious. In the forest that hour is mournful and sad. Around reigns an oppressive silence. Then the ear just catches some barely audible sound, as though a distant sigh. Whence does it come? If seems as though the taiga itself were sighing. I dropped my notebook and gave myself up to the influence of my surroundings. Dersu’s voice brought me out of my pensiveness.
“Bad sleep here,” he was saying, as though to himself.
“Why?” I asked him.
He pointed to a wisp of mist appearing on the hills, drifting across the forest.
“You no understand, Captain. He too just same man.”
I gathered from his words that such wisps of mist had once been men who had lost their way among the hills and died of hunger, and now their souls were wandering restlessly about the taiga in places where living men seldom come. Suddenly he pricked up his ears.
“Hark!” he said softly.
I listened. On the side opposite direction from the Cossacks I picked up strange sounds, as though someone were chinking metal, but very far away. Suddenly a loud noise resounded through the forest. It must be a tree had crashed.
“That him! That him!” muttered Dersu in fear, and I realized that he meant the soul of the man who had died in the forest. Then he sprang to his feet and began to shout something in his own tongue into the forest in an angry voice. I asked him what he was doing.
“My swear him just a little,” he muttered. “Me tell him we sleep here only one night, tomorrow go away.”
This is an interesting anecdote, but not related to me; right?
In my case, I was excited and happy to be back in the woods for a few days. To get here I only had to dig through two snow banks, cut a couple of small downed trees,
and remove one large log from the road.
I was even more excited because the snow had melted further up the hill than I expected. From this location I was close enough to hike to both meadow and lake. I parked just shy of a fallen tree partially buried in a snow bank; from the appearance of the snow beyond, this was as far as I would drive up the hill.
I set up my camp, placed my root beer in a nearby snow bank, and started a cooking fire for my dinner of Bannock pizza. What could be better than that? It was awesome!
As I cut some downed poplar branches for my fire, I started feel a bit uneasy with the place. I shrugged it off through dinner. Then I walked back down the road a bit just to be sure nobody was around. The forest seemed very peaceful. I spotted a raven, probably one of the pair nesting in the meadow below, also scouting the road. The bird gave no alarm so I was certain that I was alone. But the insistent feeling I should move my camp would not leave.
Perhaps it was primed by a recent conversation with my wife. I remembered a few days previous when she related a story about a place on San Juan Island that she just couldn’t go to alone. When she first met it she came back to camp and asked me to accompany her past it to the rest room. She said that place was high on her “bad places” list; for whatever reason it made her very uncomfortable just to be there. Bad places are those that generate feelings of discomfort; in the vernacular, they give off bad vibes.
After returning to camp I brewed a cup of decaf and sat to listen to the sounds of the coming night. Nightfall in the forest is magic, without a guarantee that it is benign. I look upon it more with Loren Eisley’s eyes:
“I loved the darkness. I feared it, yet returned to it. It was the mother out of which I came…It invited me forward. It urged me to crawl on.”
The call of a nearby Barred owl emphasized the depth of the silence. Then, just as Arseniev related, a sighing sound broke away from the distant hissing rumble of the creek. It grew a bit, like an approaching car crunching on gravel, wind stirred the tops of the forest; and far off, I heard a crash, as if from a falling tree. Then quiet.
I finished my coffee and decided that it was rational to find a more open spot. Even though the nearby trees were short, hardly a hands breadth across, they could still do damage if one fell. Perhaps this insistent feeling was a friendly warning to move away from the forest edge.
So I doused my fire with snow and backed down the road about a quarter mile. Here the clearing was 75’ to 100’ wide and in the last light of sunset I could just make out the snow covered top of Mt. St. Helens glowing through the trees. I set out some bread for the ravens, some seed for the juncos, and fixed my bed. The feeling that I needed to leave was greatly reduced; I gave it no further thought.
I sat up until 10:30 watching the tree line for activity. Half moon lit the clearing; deepening the shadows at its edges. I always hope to spy a passing coyote, elk, or deer before going to sleep. But tonight nothing came, all was quiet and peaceful. Only the occasional call of the Barred owl.
After a few hours of sleep I awoke to the effects of a dream. I don’t remember the details but I couldn’t breathe. I was gasping and the feeling of restriction occasioned by my mummy bag was no help at all. I managed to put away the panic and returned to sleep. A short time later it happened again: this time in the dream I was drowning. I awoke choking and coughing; struggling to escape the confines of the bag. I checked my watch it was 3:15 am. I got out of the bag and walked around the clearing just trying to clear my head. Except the far off creek, the night was silent. Darkness had claimed the clearing as the moon had set, but I could see no sinister mists gathering. It was cold, somewhere in the low to mid 30’s. So I pretended to be calm so I could justify a return to the warmth of my bag and maybe even sleep.
The dream repeated one more time. Now I was starting to give it a deeper significance. Perhaps this was my family psychically calling out to me, or maybe I had suddenly acquired a case of sleep apnea, or maybe this is just a “bad place”. Regardless, I vowed to leave the next day. With this in mind, I slept through to 7 am.
The morning was cheery and though tired from the unrestful night, I reveled in the sunlight and bird song. In the light of day, all was well. I decided to explore a nearby old-growth stand.
Some fairly fresh elk tracks lead into the forest and I followed them around listening for wildlife. The primal forest here must have been nearly impassably choked with fallen logs. In the small uncut area fallen trees are five deep in places, the topmost log held ten or twelve feet above the ground. The elk however have the same issues as I, so I followed their trails. I walked past one tree whose diameter was larger than my outstretched arms.
At this altitude wildflowers are just coming into bloom. Here is a trillium, one of the first.
Before I knew it, it was noon, so I returned to camp.
While eating my lunch I recalled the night and I decided I would leave about six pm. That way nobody would be put out to feed me, and I would salvage an entire day in the woods sitting, listening, and carving. Perhaps I would even spin a bit of dogbane, or just amuse the local fauna.
About 3 pm I started to feel light-headed. I figured it was the sun. I was probably down on water so I drank a few cups and set my chair in deep shade. I added another layer to counteract the chills and drank more water, waiting to recover. After an hour and a half I was feeling a bit better so I packed up and hit the road.
I stopped at a scenic overlook to dump the trash I collected and rested. The drive home was slow as I felt a bit less than stellar, but it proved uneventful.
I ate some dinner, showered, and slept the night through. Today I feel fine. There was no psychic communication of a disaster; the sleep apnea is in remission. So I’ve added that location to my “bad places” list. I guess that some of us are just slow learners.