The woods.

In the fields we may assert our independence, our control of the land. But in the woods we are trespassers in someone else's kingdom; we surrender a bit of our mastery and self will.

THE WOODS, synonymous with shade, contest the sun. While fields and prairies and deserts lie open to the sky, the woods enclose, surround, absorb us on all sides in a dark, secretive, and almost womblike way.

It is the woods we most often think of in connection with wilderness--as a sublime and yet vaguely frightening, sometimes threatening place. We often think in terms of "deep woods": the great primeval jungles and the classic medieval forests about which we have heard weird tales from our earliest days--tales of children being lost there and captured by wicked witches or trolls or dragons. "The woods," in short, have long represented in the human mind all the dark unknowns from our primitive past; all the vast, indifferent forces of a marauding universe; all the dread fears and insecurities buried in mankind's psyche and history that our ancestors have labored since Adam to control.

As a result of old fears and our superstitious need for control, most of those originally repressive uncut woods are gone. The vast tracts of medieval Europe, and the temperate forests that covered half the continental United States, are reduced to scattered remnants. Oh, there are forests left, in the backwoods, that may grab at our imagination and make us yet feel, especially at twilight, that unseen forces wait to pounce on us and pay us back. But in all the settled places of the world, the roles are reversed and it is we who are encroaching ever on the woods, like so many modern predatory wolves. Like native Indians confined to reservations, the woods today persist only in places "good for" nothing else: consigned to corners and forced to retreat to the deep creek banks and rocky hillsides.

We have tried to control them intellectually as well--to define them by so many percentages of oak and maple, so many squirrels-per-acre--yet so many trees comprise a woods that we can never "know" them all. We can't personalize each tree and shrub, any more than we can the grasses we walk through.

Trees are grass on a grander scale. However marginal modern woods may be, they are still, almost by definition, a complex and crowded place: a deep, dense, shaded habitat where pockets of darkness and silence and mystery may still sometimes survive, hidden from the harsh light of day.

The woods may differ somewhat in the particular finery that they put on in the spring, in the numbers of deer or turkeys or raccoons that wander through their shade. But a woods is distinguished not so much by its specifics as by its atmosphere in aggregate: the controlled quality of the light, the sheltered pockets of warmth or shade or darkness, the subtle effusions of scent and moisture, the sudden coolness that one feels when driving on a road that passes through their shade on a summer evening. Not the numerical, technical parameters of our own businesslike world, but the intangible, indefinable hints from ancient, pre-verbal times.

We concede today that our modern analytical minds evolved under the selective predatory pressures of the open plain. But according to that same theory, the forest was still the womb, the cradle from which we went out to begin our development. On the plains and prairies we came into our birthright--into the bright light of the sun and our own consciousness, like the bright moment of our actual birth. But in the woods, as in the womb, the early patterns persist. The woods are still part of an older, deeper consciousness, another mode of existence buried in our minds like some communal memory from all the eons before we were born.

In the fields we may assert our will, our independence, our control of the land. In the woods, however, we are in another land, subject to another law. In the woods we lose our consciousness of empire and the sense of our own importance. We become mere humbled supplicants, respectful petitioners at someone else's throne. We are as trespassers in someone else's kingdom, ants in someone else's grass. For in the woods, as in church, we surrender a bit of our mastery and self will, which is perhaps the origin of faith, and perhaps why churches so often, in so far as possible, mirror woods.

For the woods have always been our sacred groves: the quiet, worshipful places where mystery and wonder may still thrive in the shadows. We have copied their columns and arches, the high clerestory and the filtered light. We are dumbstruck by the dim, hushed cathedral atmosphere of the great trees, where all light comes from above. However restricted the woods may now be, they are still enchanted forests, where a thrush may sing solo in the hush or the aisles may ring with all the chorused voices of the ages.

We may still fear the woods sometimes, as we secretly fear all things dark and half-remembered--all things that enclose, surround, and threaten our identity. We still fear all things that are unknown, uncontrolled, and hence reminiscent of our primeval helplessness and the dependencies of our own infancy. We still fear all things that challenge our mastery, that make us feel inferior, like an ant in the grass. Yet at the same time, most of us still live with a nostalgia for the woods hidden in our hearts: a yearning for the mystery and the silence of the ancient spires, and for the very primeval force that we hounded to the hills in the first place. Its blood runs in our veins, and to lose that is to lose some part of ourselves.