Olympic Epiphany

This is an excerpt from a paper I wrote about a class fieldtrip to the Olympic Peninsula.  We had to write about an epiphany that we had on the trip.

I was an environmental educator in Northwest Oregon for five years, and I taught students, mostly middle school age, about the forests ecosystem of our area.  I had a epiphany due to this trip didn’t actually strike me until I returned home.  In my work as an environmental educator, I have taught many students about forest succession and the different characteristics and functions of the successional stages of Douglas-fir forests, including old-growth.  I also took a forest ecology class at Portland Community College a few years ago that covered many aspects of old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest.  Through these experiences I have read and talked about old-growth forests, but I hadn’t actually spent much time in large areas of old-growth.  I’ve seen a few big trees and plenty of downed logs, but it hit me after the fieldtrip that I hadn’t really experienced being in the old-growth before.            

            Walking through the different types of old-growth, I could really see the different structural features of the forest that I have “known about” for many years. Not only could I see the forest, I could also feel the difference in the old-growth forest.  There is an ineffable feeling about being surrounded by trees that have been alive ten times as long as I have and stand over 30 times taller than I do, taller than many of the tallest buildings I’ve ever seen.  It is staggering to know that the relationships in the forest, the connections between the organisms, the soil, the air and water, have taken centuries to reach the point they are at now. It feels very different from walking through an 80- or 100-year-old forest.  It is also astounding to know that these connections can keep developing for centuries more before a disturbance starts the process over again.

Now as I sit and write this, I can visualize the huge trees and snags with little seedling and saplings in abundance, the fallen logs with enough wood to build several houses, the continuous canopy from head height up and up to the tops of the 250 foot tall giants, the colonnades on nurse logs of trees 50-100 years old.  I can see the light shining through the gaps in the canopy.  I liked to say to my students that an old forest is a messy forest, but now I can see that amongst the mess is a pattern.  We use the word mosaic to describe the piecing together of different looking patches of the forest.  The word fits not only for this reason, but also because there is a beauty and artistry to the arrangement of these pieces.