Fall	Of Time, the Woods and the River

Walking up Lovers Lane with Sir Thomas this September day, I suddenly realize how the slow passage of time has altered my woods.

The pines that had been so small more than thirty years ago are now towering spars reaching 30 or 40 feet above my head. Some seedlings, loblolly and white pine mostly, had been planted in a few spots by the Civilian Conservation Corps back in 1933. I was nine years old at that time and thought, like any small boy, that trees of any kind were meant to be climbed: If you could scramble up to the first limb, you could thereby gain a higher and therefore better perspective on the small world you were viewing below.Trees were mighty and enduring things to me as a child. I can recall my first forays into the woods, surrounded by their mute and stolid presence. Being among them, their sounds and smells became a delightful but mysterious experience. The deep softness of the pine needles on the forest floor felt like a yielding carpet of bedstraw to my every step. You could acquire a certain feral stealth by walking on them. But the leaves of deciduous trees gave your whereabouts away. They crackled a warning to every bird and small animal that flew or scurried off at the sound of your telltale footsteps. They revealed you as some intruder in their private domain. Added to the sounds were the smells of the earth and its flora, the latter in varying states of growth and decay. There were sweet smells, dank smells, odd smells, and once in a while a rank smell that made you wonder what evil creature was luring beyond the trees.

All these childhood sensations returned to me as I looked at my own woods today with eyes somewhat dimmed by more than 75 years of living. Twenty years have passed since I first took Viva, my brittany, up this path. Much has changed and, in a sense, nothing has changed. The pines and the oaks still filter the light in streaks on the forest floor, their boughs gently bending to the passing breezes. As I stroll by, the gnomes still peer out at me from the gnarls, bulges and hollows of their dead, oaken trunks, their familiarly wicked faces still staring impassively at this solitary walker and his dog as they tramp the yesterdays of this woodland path. I notice, as I walk, saplings now vying with older, taller trees for their place in the sun. (I knew that struggle once.) I view, too, with growing remorse, those decaying stumps of whole generations of trees now forgotten, truncated witnesses to the passage of time. I see all this and reflect on the nature of things.

It is the woods' wonderful indifference to me that makes my mind tingle with the exciting thought of the unity which guides it through a world of unseen forces of which I , too, am a part. In the scheme of things, its indifference is a source of pleasure and stimulation to me. This piece of the natural world, I muse, cannot know its true origins and ultimate destiny as I cannot know mine. Thus a bond is created that makes me at one with it, and gives me hope of some type of vital regeneration and elemental permanence. Perhaps that is all one can wish for or has a right to expect.

Lost in such thoughts, I bring the ancient Greeks to ponder my woods. They whisper their old wisdom in my ears. They tell me that the natural world can still soothe or disturb us with its strange beauty and inscrutable design. They ask if I can think of its purpose without puzzling over my own. There have been countless forests viewed by mankind over millions of years, they declare, yet the mood a forest inspires remains a mystery. Are we, too, they query, a part of this hidden reality, unchanging and absolute; or are we merely the subjects of a process that continues on after we have been expended? Are the things that inform us, they argue, temporal and evanescent? Or are we bits of a conscious mind adrift in a world of inanimate matter? They put their final question simply: Does our universe make our mind, or does our mind make our universe? I am a consciousness walking through these quiet woods, bearing these whispered thoughts with me as I wander along a woodland path.

I leave the woods and walk down Lovers Lane with Sir Thomas to the edge of the river. The day is bright, and when I reach it, its ripples are dancing in the sunlight. I have seen it almost every day for the forty years I have lived in Green Bank, and have known its many moods and aspects. Heraclitus knew it far better than I, for he knew the unseen nature of all rivers. "All is flux," I can hear him proclaim as the river hurries on to its vast source at the tides' urging. I pause and reflect on the oneness and change in the drift and flow of the river.

And now I hear in my mind the soft, distant voice of another presence. The words of Democritus float on the breezes that skim and ruffle the river's surface. He saw the poetry of a world continually regathering and shifting its forms, colors and shapes. He sung of a universe of changing ephemera where there is no sadness or joy, no goodness or evil. He sung only of necessity:

No single thing abides, but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings; the things thus grow
Until we know and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.

His voice fades as the river moves on. I leave, Sir Thomas pulling me homeward. I arrive at my doorway, refreshed and pleased with my world. I have invested my enduring woods and ceaseless flow of my river with ancient wisdom. Sir Thomas has enjoyed the walk and the primordial smells and sounds of earth and water. It has been another good day.