FOREST UNSEEN

Stay by the hearth, little cricket. You prefer me invisible, no more than a crisp salute far away from your silks and firewood and woolens.   — Rita Dove 

     Kahakapao Trail in upcountry is a nice hike, a 6-mile necklace loop inside a gorgeous forest of rainbow eucalyptus trees and fern glade. Red tin-arrows are tacked along way directing you through the woods; occasional mountain bikers will surprise you friendly asking a pass, and leashed dogs with their owners.  Otherwise, the forest is undisturbed, and you and a couple of your friends are there alone taking it all in. Professor and author David George Haskell wrote "The Forest Unseen," which is borrowed as the title of this blog. The book is about a scientific close observation of the forest but with "occasional" data from poetry when preemptively the beauty of nature can't anymore be expressed (or understood) in words. It must be a type of warbler, a petite yellow and white bird, joining us on our rest stop drinking hot tea from a thermos when a light rain came down over the bog. She must probably be looking for food, or didn't mind us at all being around to stretch out.  

     This mushroom, like flatbread, epiphyte (adhering symbiotic) to the hardwood, see photo, isn't chanterelles (I realized that only after coming home researching what they were). What I had thought they were actually grew on the forest floor and shoot out of the biomass with caps (not flat embodiments) and are singular growths (but their color, bright brown-orange, is almost the same). Across from this spot, about ten yards away, was a man digging wet dirt with some kind of a purposeful design, we didn't know for sure what, and didn't ask. I imagined the lifecycle of this unknown mushroom dependent to its host in terms of nutrition and what it feeds off, and in return what benefit to the tree. It appears its tenderness duly comes from the sweet sap of the mother tree, and its flower-like lateral projection. A maple stand comes to mind. The bounteous, permaculture-focused farmers market of Portland, Ore. comes to mind. Everything green of the Pacific Northwest. The sublime Olympic National Park, the quietest alpine wilderness in the world.

    I had a hearty soup after our hike - vegetables immersed in light coconut milk infused of ginger, kaffir leaves and lime from a food truck/fruit stand in Makawao town. I live on the westside valley of the island and don't come upcountry very much, and this visit brought back mainland reminisces (comparably because of its cooler climate and the unseen wondrousness of a mature rainforest). I remember a line from Haskell's book that goes like this: My shadow lies in the moonlight, around a circle of leaves. And I wonder now... was this poetry revealed.