Catching Light
A mixed-race man has just learned that his mother is cancer free. She couldn’t say more because she was tired, and the reception is bad where he’s at, a cabin in the forest, Northern California. Flora research, but it’s a vacation. He’s a botanist. He’s been updating the manual for the Santa Cruz Mountain Range. But right now, it’s all he can do to lower his phone, look out the window as the first light touches the leaves of the sycamore, maple, and coast redwood that surround him, and breathe. Deep, not like it’s his first time, but like he’s forgotten how and is now remembering. He’s going to hike. Now. And why shouldn’t he?
He’s in no state of mind for it. That’s one reason. Even now, walking out the back door, he’s in pajamas. Shorts and a T-shirt. Slippers. He will likely return scraped and itchy. His stomach is empty. It’s early and cold.
His cabin is one of a cluster of them. The man follows a meandering sidewalk through the grounds to a trailhead at the back where a co-worker drinks coffee on a patio, a crossword in his lap. The co-worker waves. The man nods. Neither of them feels the need to communicate further. Here, even something as beautiful as the human voice drowns.
The man steps onto the trail and feels his muscles tighten. The soles of his slippers give against the shape of the terrain. They will hurt later, his feet. He starts at a slow walk, admires a short-stemmed russula just off the path. He sees a tree covered in Dendroalsia abietina. He catches a whiff, that subtle sweetness, of the redwood. Everywhere is poison oak.
Safety. Another reason. Never hike alone. Poison oak won’t cause a rash until a day or two after contact, sometimes three, and a rash is a minor thing, but he could be seriously injured in other ways. His phone gets no signal here.
As he walks, he looks at the plants and fungi that surround him, and then he begins to jog. He moves down the trail at a pace plants can only dream of matching. A dangerous pace when sustained in a forest. A pace he was given legs for. These shoes make me fast, he said after his first pair of Jordans. He was nine, and his mother responded the way she always did, smiling. Let me see. The leaves begin to blur into some perfect green while he looks at his feet, but the man can still feel his mother’s hand on his back, hear the crackle of acorns falling, in the distance, the rush of running water. There’s a turn in the trail up ahead. The man ignores it, veers away into the underbrush.
He wants to feel the leaves against his legs. He steps on a pinecone and winces, suddenly aware of his weight here. Everything in the forest moves in a different time. Each footfall registered differently by what’s around it. The man imagines the kind of ruckus he’s creating, the plants becoming aware of him through vibrations, through heat. He hears them sounding the alarm, the air buzzing in his wake.
A bird zips by weightless overhead. Animals. Snakes. Mountain lions. He’s forgotten his bear spray at the cabin. He is a tall man, but still.
The sun is higher now, high enough to warm the skin, settle in around him. He runs even faster, tries to outpace the earth and the wind, and he does. It’s blinding, the speed. He stretches out his arms as if wings have grown in their place and he’s ready to fly. His body remains on the ground sprinting, but he lifts with the bowing branches of a Pacific madrone and boxelder maple as he runs by them. From up here he can see their leaves aglow. They have made a mastery of catching light, holding it in pools atop the forest canopy. It swirls around him with the same texture as his mother’s voice. Free. He hears her.
Other people. He hears them in the distance too. Their voices drowning among the foliage. What do they think seeing him run through a forest like this, overjoyed and in slippers?
The man has neared the bank of a stream he can’t see. His slippers have lost their soles. A wet stone. A slip. He falls into mud and shallow water, splits his lip on a branch and cuts his left forearm in the gravel. Things slow and solidify. He inspects his arm, remembers to breathe again, then climbs out of the water and lies down near a bush.
The bush is a Pacific bleeding heart. Dicentra formosa. A perennial. Herbaceous with fern-like leaves. Rhizomatic spreading. The flowers, pink, are in a cluster of eight and hang from a fleshy stem that juts out above the plants leaves. It’s in bloom. He can see the elaiosomes on the seeds. He reaches up and rubs his finger gently across a petal of one of the flowers. How can something so beautiful be real? The people are coming closer. They saw him fall. They’re concerned. He hears it in their shouts, but he’s laughing. He’s going to cry. Now. And why shouldn’t he?
Charles Brown (@youfoundcharles) is a mixed-race writer from Arizona who now finds himself among the trees of the Pacific Northwest. His work regularly explores themes of identity and ways to be in the world coming from a mixed, marginalized position. He is a current MFA candidate at the UBC School of Creative Writing. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Echolocation Mag, Contemporary Verse 2, Eckleburg Review, and elsewhere.