Forests I Have Known and Loved

In the national park, near where we’ve owned a home on Lake Superior for a long time, is a place called the White Birch Forest. I’ve taken pictures of it in the past, awed by the hundreds of white birch trees bundled together with just enough space to walk between, maybe to sit and read a book, or pose for family photos. I regarded the White Birch Forest as a miracle, and I’d wonder – did this extraordinary place just happen on its own or did someone plant all the trees believing in their future glory. I never knew. There was no one to ask.

One picture I took was of the stand of trees itself with no person or central feature, you know, how they tell you to compose a picture in thirds? I didn’t do that. I just wanted to capture the sea of trees, the green leaves, the sun sparkling here and there like old aluminum cans hung from branches. And the white bark, the amazing white bark. I gave the photo to a friend seeing it as an illustration for ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’ and I hung one up at our place on the lake.

When I was a very little girl, maybe four or five, my big brother sent me a letter from summer camp written on the back of birch bark. I loved this letter and my brother for gestures like this one – there were several in my growing up – even though, by and large, we never got along very well. He loved me though which was evident in his birch bark letter, the elves’ footprints he pointed out under bushes in our front yard, and the inch-thick peanut butter sandwiches he insisted I eat before going to the movies with my friends.

Several years ago, wanting to share the amazement of the White Birch Forest with my adult daughter, my husband and I drove with her deep into the national park. I was excited winding through the park on the narrow dirt road, like how a person is excited to show someone a remarkable rose or an agate discovered completely by accident. Come see this amazing thing I found!

But the birches were gray. They were gray as if someone had taken a giant crayon to them. Everything I’d remembered about the White Birch Forest had become fiction, imagined brilliance, not real. But yet I had the pictures, I thought, maybe it was the sun being behind a cloud. But it wasn’t. We looked it up. The trees were dying. They only live fifty or sixty years and their time was over. They were fading, drying up, losing their leaves and branches, working on becoming another layer of deadwood in the forest.

The White Birch Forest is gone and so is the birch bark letter. And the brother, for that matter. All history. But I have a picture. I have that much. That will have to do.

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Photo by John Price on Unsplash

Note: This photo is similar to the one I took but it is a photo from Unsplash. Bless them and their wonderful artists.