5 Reasons You Should Spend More Time in the Forest

On a sunny Saturday, where else do you go but the forest?

That’s the consensus around here. If you’re going to live in British Columbia, you’re obliged to like the outdoors. There’s not much else here. Vancouver has its charms, but they only go so far. It’s what’s outside the city that makes it so appealing.

So you go to the forest. Halfway up the mountain, where winter takes forever to leave. There was snow here last time I came, tendrils of dirty powder flecked with pine needles, clinging to the soil in places the sun didn’t reach. That’s all gone now. Now, the berries are bursting, burned red by the sun that glows hotter to make up for lost time. Here, summer may be brief, but it’s brilliant.

And really, what else should we do? Fresh air is good for us. The mere presence of trees is enough to rebuild the broken bridges of your neurons and synapses. Bright light fills the pits and hollows of your hot little heart. It’s good for you.

You can use the exercise, too. That’s what you tell yourself when your knees protest the climb right from the car park. Past the picture of a bald eagle with outspread wings, demonstrating the government-approved distance to keep from one another. You don’t come here to see people. You came here to get away.

But so does everybody else. And so you find yourself counting your paces, re-creating the eagle’s wingspan behind a sweating family on slow-moving bikes. Every weekend, when the weather allows, the city empties, families and friends and fawning young couples making for the hills where the sun was born. Never, almost never, do you find someone walking the trails alone. If you do, it’s probably me.

Someone’s shouting.

The sound filters through the tall trees with the slanted sunlight, past low bushes with huge leaves and nodding stalks of salmonberries and Saskatoon berries. It’s hard to believe that anyone could be angry under the green canopy that glitters with the light of a generous star. It’s hard to believe in anything but generosity when you see it all so clearly here, the way the sun pours down its warmth to make the berries grow.

But it’s possible. It’s not a friendly shout. Someone is angry, and see how ridiculous they sound, ranting and raging in shadows that have stood for centuries.

Most people take the easiest trail. A short loop that runs up and down through a forest that never saw an axe, glimpsing the distant city through the occasional sun-shot gap where an old tree used to stand. It all seems so silly from up here. The dumb towers and concrete pleasure palaces, the strip malls and superstores. The concrete grotesquerie of commerce.

But we don’t draw hearts the way they actually look. The reality is uglier than our ideas. Without the city, none of us would be here. This forest would be as beautiful and silent as those on the other side of the mountain, the ones that no roads reach.

One trail drops away from the rest. But for a while, as you follow it, you can still hear others. Occasionally, through gaps in the trees, you’ll see them. Moving in and out of shadow and shade like a stereoscopic projection. Are they moving at all? Or is it just the pattern of light and shadow that makes it look that way, giving false life to something silent and still?

5 Reasons to Spend More Time in the Forest

Loss of trees seems to correlate to increased incidences of cardiovascular and lower respiratory tract illness.

A 2013 study showed that when Emerald Ash Borers arrived in a leafy suburban neighborhood, they destroyed the trees that grew there.

Once the trees were gone, the health of the people living in the neighborhood deteriorated. The trees that sprouted along the sidewalk, that people barely noticed as they went about their daily routines, helped to keep them alive.

The Japanese invented the term forest bathing, as a translation of shinrin-yoku. It has the nauseating stink of snake oil and charlatanism about it. But the results are inescapable.

Spending time in the forest boosts our immune system.

Inhaling the phytoncides emitted by plants boosts our white blood cells to help fight disease. There’s no organizing intelligence behind this phenomenon. But it doesn’t happen for no reason.

Just looking at trees is enough to lower our stress levels.

This study found lower heart rates and lower blood pressure in men exposed to a forest landscape. Even a picture of a forest will do you if you can’t have the real thing.

Children who spend time in a forest show reduced symptoms of ADHD.

Unlike drugs, a walk in the woods has no side effects and very little cost. But it’s effective in helping improve the focus of kids with attention deficit disorders.

Hospital patients with a view of green space heal better.

They use fewer painkillers, recover quicker, and have fewer complications than those with no view to look at.

The forest is supposed to be good for us.

But still, we left. And in the concrete warrens at the base of the mountains, we forget the forest even exists. We forget the world we came from, sprouting from it as trees swell toward the sun, thickening with year after year of silent growth.

Inside some windowless warehouse or airless office, it’s easy to forget the world exists. Forget the sun. Forget the trees. Put the stars out of your mind. There’s no money to be made from beauty.

We want to know what works, and we think in terms of walls. The shrieking fear of scarcity that keeps us piling up grains to fill silos while berries in the forest go uneaten. We lose ourselves in the need to win, to make enemies so that we can see ourselves more clearly in their eyes, as though only the fearsome is worthy of respect.

But the forest lives on the action of earthworms and slugs just as it does on eagles and bears. The armored millipedes that crawl among the leaf litter are notes in the same song the trees are singing as they hold up bundles of bright green moss.

Deep in the forest, it’s quiet.

Occasionally, a bike or two whizzes past, riding the ruptured roots like rails as they race through patterned shadow. Breathless thanks are offered like prayers when you step off the trail to let them pass. Other hikers smile and say hello when you meet them.

They never do that in the city. The tall buildings embarrass us. They make us self-conscious and wary, afraid to show friendliness for fear it will be understood as weakness. It probably will.

But everybody’s different under the trees. A calmer, healthier, more joyful version of themselves. Tomorrow, more than likely, they’ll be grilling employees or yelling at suppliers or making faces at the turned back of their boss. But not here. On these quiet trails, the angels win.

All along the trail, painted stones are tucked into the thick roots of trees. Flowers or houses or bright geometric patents catch the eye, the artificial colors exuberant in a world where everything is green or brown or the bright blue of the sky. I’ve seen this before, in other forests tucked into the valley. Somebody took these stones home, washed them, painted them, and brought them back to the mountain to rest among the trees.

There’s no signature. No hashtag. Not all art exists for attention. Beauty calls to beauty, and the light of a gorgeous place hits our hearts in their very best spot. Stray footprints in the hard-baked mud are enough to tell you that somebody was here before you. The painted stones, as generous as the sun, remind you that whoever was here had a heart just like yours.

Year by year, the forest recedes. The car’s tires groan as they slide on the road back into town, and there weren’t so many houses last time you were here. People want to live on the mountain, to watch the weather move over the city as though they are apart from it. We like to know the forest is there, even if we rarely visit. Once it becomes your backyard, it loses much of its magic.

The forest is still there, clinging on to the mountain’s side, battered by snow and storms and a million footfalls of visitors hoping to reconnect with a part of themselves that dies in the city. And somebody is sliding artfully painted stones into the hollows of tree roots for no other reason than to make a stranger smile.

It’s enough, sometimes, to make you think we may not be completely beyond saving.