airstrip

The forest is misty at five in the morning, and the air still and quiet. The wind broke sometime late in the night and the air was now only gently drifting. I was returning from the trail camp’s pit toilet, deciding what to do next in the dim pre-dawn gray. The edges of the trees are all softened in the pale atmosphere. Trail camp is at 1580 feet above the sea and I had expected to be in the clouds more than some of this weekend, but it had not happened until this morning, the last morning. There had been only blue skies and the tireless wind, and some thin shreds of white racing overhead, just out of reach.

But the wind had tired of its constant 30 mph or more racing and gusting in the green tops of the blackened red giants. Now it was something much less, something rarely heard and only faintly felt.

The low roar, the distant rumbling that had been noticeably palpable since the wind had picked up the night before last, it’s not gone. Perhaps it is not wind in the trees’ trunks. It could be waves on the coast, or maybe it’s still windy in the trees where the sound is coming from, where the wind has gone for a rest.

The sun is rising. I can see the crinkles in the tent’s rain fly in the grazing dawn light, and the tiny faint dots on the pages of my notebook without the flashlight.

Soon I will go back out, go for a walk in the misty dawn light and look, again, for the landing strip in the still air with the distant low roar. An airstrip is an improbable thing to find on the top of a ridge, in the middle of a redwood forest in the clouds, far away from everything. The map says it is there, so I will look for it.

jg