just some thoughts on paths

on stopping to get where you need to go

My only requirement on a recent 8-mile hike was that I try and stay on the path. It was clearly marked, so this wasn’t a measure of difficulty or failure of trailkeeping. No, I wanted to tame an impulse I have to off-road. There is something inside me that thinks that the flower that blooms along the path I am treading is not as interesting as the one just out of reach in the bushes. I wanted to see what it felt like to stick to a path for one whole day. 

I almost succeeded. Nearing the end, with the sound of a swift, cold-running creek in my ears after an unseasonably hot spring day, I glimpsed a stump spirit about ten yards off the trail, tantalizingly close. These spirits are found throughout the Pacific Northwest—large stumps from the first few waves of timbermen who found and felled all the biggest firs and cedars they could find. Often they have notches in their sides cut by lumberjacks as board supports for a makeshift scaffolding so their axes could have a chance to make it through the trunk. This one had a notch for a mouth, befurred in lichen and mold, and an emo flop of ferns across its forehead. I had to go and pay my respects.

As soon as I left the trail, I knew it was a mistake. The ground was uneven, wet in some places, and the going was not as smooth as I’d anticipated. But I made it, only to be met upon kneeling in front of the stump with the barb of a stinging nettle—one in my right knee, another in my left shin. If you’ve never experienced the nettle’s hypodermic injection, it burns like fire at first, and then tingles and throbs for the next several hours. Supposedly jewelweed or dock can ease the pain, and they are said to grow next to nettle plants, but I can’t identify them, and by the time I remembered that I was back on the trail and heading for the water.

The cold, clear water eased my just reward for having violated my self-imposed rule. Why couldn’t I follow the path? What was wrong with what was right in front of me? Was I so dissatisfied with my own premade plans, so unsure of their value, that I had to keep veering off course, seeking distraction and more intense sensations, ultimately elongating and needlessly complicating my path? 

At a trail junction was a boulder with a bronze plaque in memory of a man who died while building the trail I walked. Below his name was a quote from Emerson: “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” I felt mocked! Here I was trying to stay to a path and meeting the inevitable call of white settlers and homesteaders to break trail in the woods that didn’t belong to them. Of course, many trails kept by state and governments have been laid down overtop the trails walked by the indigenous inhabitants of this land, and so ‘breaking trail’ is often another white fantasy. But as I walked, I considered other meanings of this quote; metaphorically, it means to make your own future, to not model your life on the way everyone else is just because, but to find the way of relating and living that feels most true to yourself and your situation, no matter how improbable, and live so that others might be inspired to follow suit. In the spirit of Emerson’s transcendentalism, it symbolizes going in a different direction when everyone else is going a different way, one which often hastens toward progress and achievement but ends up at alienation, isolation, and destruction.

I thought about this for a long time on the trail. At one point I sat down by a stream and watched a blue butterfly, the sort adored by Nabokov, alight on my hat and feast on the salt of my sweat. In the sun above the creek a midge was illuminated. It beat its wings furiously to rise above the water three, four, five feet, and then it ceased all movement, gliding back down in an effortless freefall until it was just above the water’s surface, at which point it flew off following the current. The midge is too small and the air currents too strong; in order to get where it wants to go, it has to stop all movement and let gravity take its course.

As I was driving home I came to appreciate the nettle’s rebuke; I appreciated the throb less as comeuppance and more like an enforced awareness. It said, this is where you are, this is where you chose to be. I keep returning to find this feeling in the poetry of Vern Rutsala, who lived and taught in Portland for many years, who in his poem “Prospectus for Visitors” invites us to

come, walk
the trails, go out among
that green, follow rivers—
but be ready to think
of all those things you
shelved for years. Force
those doors and find
those caustic packages—
unwrap them here,
poke and shudder at
what you see, believe
it finally and learn
to live the life you have.

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Upcoming

On June 7, the FLOQ open mic is partnering with Tin House Writer’s Workshop to feature the Tin House Trans Writers in Residence, Vera Blossom and Zack Lesmeister as our featured readers. As always, the reading is open to the public, but if you’re interested in joining the free workshop beforehand, you can RSVP here.

smoke and mold has recently signed on to The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Without a doubt, we stand in solidarity with Palestinians the world over as they continue to experience genocide in their homeland. We are in the process of divesting from Wix, Israel’s most valuable private company, with a new website on a different platform, which will be launching soon. In the meantime, I recommend this talk by Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, which aired this morning as part of a new series, Archives & Heritage for Palestine, from Publishers for Palestine. The accompanying Call to Archive Against Genocide for archivists and memory workers is also worth reading and signing, if it applies to you.

Finally, there’s no good moment to ask for funds these days, but I’d be remiss to not include a request for those who are able to contribute to smoke and mold’s spring fundraiser. Our tenth issue—our biggest yet—and our new website will cost money. We’ve always been reader-supported, and for this, I’m very grateful.