To quote Ed Abbey in the first punches of his Desert Solitaire (as much of a book as a beating), every human has a favorite place, a place known to him/her as “the most beautiful place on earth”. Abbey attributes this to there being “no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment”. Our “ideal place”, the “one true home” could be anywhere, depending on the individual: “a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country” or, for “those of a less demanding sensibility […] a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan…”
Ouch!
We all have a favorite spot in mind. Me, apart from the entire Universe which I consider to be like, totally awesome, or Inwood Park, the best Manhattan can really muster, or the stinking hot Amazon, my ideal place has always been, since childhood, a few square yards of silent understory in the cool and dark – and to me, cozy – embrace of a thick patch of hemlock trees outback of my folk’s place in northern Vermont. Nothing grandiose, no giant waterfalls, sweeping vistas or charismatic beasts involved, just a small fragment of biosphere tucked away within one hundred and fifty acres of maple and ash and beech and butternut with small things like toads and spring peepers and jumping mice that bounce about the grove within the intimacy of their ecological niches. There’s a tiny stream that trickles through the Hemlock and winds and loops around their trunks like some Lilliputian version of a great meandering river, creating a series of small, sensual beaches of pink sand and blue pebbles where the toads hang out. Then there’s the moss, the plump green moss, on the dank fallen logs of ancestral trees where you can spot red eft; the celestial petals of the white and violet trillium; the foamflowers; the generous curves of cinnamon ferns hanging over the stream’s steeper banks; not to mention the unwavering vibe of mystery emanating from conifers in general, the inebriating whiff of resin, as primeval as oxygen, as old as granite or the grin on a dinosaur. Finally, there’s the clear water of the stream itself, like liquid silk, running its course, dribbling away, downhill, through space, through time, one day to reach the sea, the abyss. This is rain water, runoff from the green mountains, it irrigates and inseminates this dot on the map, the world to me.