Between Roots and Canopy

When running for your life, you just go: choosing an itinerary is a luxury. You're hitchhiking for survival but risk being picked up by someone or something that may be worse than who or what you're running from.

I'm a hematologist and a gambler. Unfortunately, I'm a better hematologist than I am with cards. Yet, when I couldn't make things work as a university hematologist, I extended my gambling activities by getting mixed up with the wrong people. I couldn't tell you what I was thinking. Now I'm running for my life.

The hard part was getting to the protection of the forest before they caught up with me, but I made it. I was smart to do this. This forest was famous for its density and, with it, my protection. It had more trees per acre than any other woods on Earth. No one would follow me in. The trees were packed tightly together, making me wonder how each had enough substrate to get what it needed.

They were so close as to block my every advance, any progress hampered by the forest's declaration:

"I am here. I belong. You do not!"

But it saved my life. Getting lost here allowed me to fall off the Earth, which is what I needed. It was not an easy fall, however.

In between the trees was brush growing wild to perfect the obstruction to any progress. But progess I did, along with the scrapes and gashes and the blood.

I'm a diagnosed "mild" hemophiliac. It was the condition that inspired me to go into the field of hematology in the first place. Given the unfortunate circumstances, I'm on the run without my medications. Thus, what would only be irritating scratches for some adds another peril for me that might be just as bad as what I'm running from. But I have no choice. After all, I'll clot — eventually — unless I'm dead.

My bleeding time is longer than average, so I brace against the bigger gashes with a hand, firmly, for several minutes. This loses me my two-armed coordination in trying to get past narrow slits of escape between the trees. Thus, slow going.

This is forest land that is currently protected by law. Old laws, at that. It had been over-forested almost to death until legislation, unheard of by 18th Century standards, decreed it sink or swim on its own.

It swam magnificently, which is something weird to say about a forest.

For generations, the absence of any meddling has allowed it to grow its hair like a mad professor. And now that madness is mine to navigate. And just like a mad scientist, this forest has a mind of its own. I wonder what it thinks of me.

Foliage seems like such a heavy word. This is not an etymological observation, but a metaphorical one. Perhaps this is because I'm waxing a bit existential and am assigning all aspects of the physical universe as they apply to me alone — and my survival. I stop the dictionary musings and look around. I am but an insignificant part of the whole here: I wonder how much an entire forest weighs.

I look up and see the canopy of continuity high above me, a verdant dome sealing off the forest and me from all else that is. Is it a roof or the floor to another realm?

I trip over branched truncal roots, leading to the same place we all will live one day — six feet underground. These roots, however, don't stop at six-feet-under. The dead — the dead of our kind: that's just one population the roots tunnel past, downward, overtaking other citizens of life on our world that have rotted and piled historically in the layers of sediment.

Yet, there is nothing sedimentary about these roots. They actively continue their ambitious journey inward, intertwining with the roots of the other trees until the forest lives and breathes as one. And moves as one. There's a lot of talking going on, I suspect. I wonder if any of the gossip is about me.

I've been running for days. I've had to contort myself to pass through and between the tight spaces the heavy growth of bush, tree, and vine threw in my way. At times I've had to crawl under; at other times, turn sideways; and even other times I've had to climb one tree to get over and past another. I was up and down, forward and backward, and detoured. I was right and left — but right and wrong — so often I didn't know whether I was conquering distance or bad choices.

I shared these environs with others — the ravenous mosquitos, stinging flies, biting ants. Oh, the ants were insufferable! They both bit and stung. I've read Leiningen Versus the Ants, the 1938 short story by Carl Stephenson, about the coffee plantation in Brazil pitting Man against Nature, and I've heard the tales of how a swarm of ants, large enough, could take down a stag.

This is not an etymological observation, but a problemmatical one: haunted by these thoughts, every volitional movement mandated I brush off whatever creepy-crawler or dive-bomber targeted me.

The nights were the worst. My body was parked Jenga-wise upon branches that were high enough to keep me off of the ground, yet entangled enough to prevent my falling. That wasn't the worst of it, because when you're tired or hungry enough, the rational mind yields to the irrational.

The forest is the place where the god Pan ruled. Encompassing everything, Pan is also where the word panic comes from. Now I know why. Pan invokes the fear that comes with everything that is unknown. At night when I'm not distracted by the machinations of my journey, I lie on my branches and can hear the forest. There are noises that can only be heard by a man who's just as afraid of what's inside the forest as what he fears on the outside.

What was I running from? What was I running to?

The nights were long and troubled. The days were long and arduous; and thanks to my hemophilia, bloody.

Then it happened. There appeared a little clearing within the forest. Around it the trees rose in a circle above me, as if to hug me.

It was time for me to rest. I had been busy trying to forge my paths during all of the daylight hours and was fatigued and weakened by my bleeding. Each day was yet another day of being lost and another night of being terrified.

The clearing meant that rest, so it gladdened my heart, because I was more tired than I was hungry. Yet, I knew that would be changing soon.

This clearing was my omen — like it had been cleared just for me, a bubble in the cauldron's poison, a bathysphere far below the canopy, above, that ebbed and flowed in conspiracy. Welcome space. I might just survive this ordeal. But I would need to deal with my hunger soon; and my pursuers thereafter.

They were very bad men, and I did a very bad thing to them.

Are bad things, done to bad men, crimes? Certainly, to them. But for me? To society? If an enemy to your enemy is your friend, is a crime against criminals still a crime?

The forest's little bald spot changed me. For the first time I didn't feel like a stranger here or an invader. A circular area devoid of anything wooden, fibrous, or even green had just laid out a floor of hard dirt for me as a welcome mat. It wasn't exactly the Garden of Eden, but it offered me some respite from the sweat of my brow and the gnashing of teeth.

I took the opportunity to hand-tamponade my wounds that were still oozing. Even a "mild" hemophiliac, without his Factor VIII, makes for an anemic hematologist. Finally "hemostatic," I circumnavigated this spot's periphery and noticed anthills dotting its circumference, as if the ants were afraid to cross some line to brave the forbidden zone. Not me. Instead, I stayed afraid of what lay outside of my safe harbor.

Thick trunks stood in a colonnade. Like foliage, trunk is a word worth its weight — in stolidness. As impenetrable. These trunks, up to the skies and down to the underworld, circled me as if I were behind security bars. This irony, my taking safe haven in a place which, from another view, would be my prison, made me laugh out loud.

If a joke is made deep in the forest and no one hears it, is it funny?

I realized something very important. Such a clearing meant I could sleep in a reclined position, not jammed and held between two tight trees in a twisted, bizarre fetal position like some evil monster spawn. Such had been my nights on my journey here, and I was anxious to spread out in full-length prone or supine liberties. My spine needed to spread out.

The circle of trees, its border shared with the ants, stood as a firewall against the noises of the forest I had feared along my way. The mysterious scurryings, the threatening flutterings, the brushes of things against my arms and legs. No, here it was quiet.

I was staying.

I considered my new turf's stark contrast with the rest of the forest that encircled it. Space contrasting with the lack thereof; air contrasting with solidity. Tonight, this was home.

I had been invited!

I laid myself out on my back. I knew I would drift off soon, but I wanted to keep my eyes open as long as I could. Call it the frightened mindset of a man on the run from other men, nature's hostilities, or an Arcadian minor god. At some point I began sleeping with my eyes open. Like my ears, which never close, my eyes were still taking in data. Seeing without recognizing; hearing without listening.

My hypnogoguic transition mixed my dreams with my rational thoughts. It polluted my executive centers with the chemicals from my limbic system. As such, my universe had me tangibly deal with the intangible, and reconcile the possible coexisting with the impossible.

I saw a shimmying up in the canopy. The separate pieces of treetops fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and some splotches of it began to vibrate, prompting similar oscillations from the splotches contiguous to them.

These trees were talking.

I imagined the canopy chatter to be in falsetto, which struck me that way only because the conversation from the roots below were a mix of tenor near the surface and baritone sinking into voices of deep bass further down.

The full spectrum of the chorale was talking — no! It was singing. It seemed heavenly. I completed my fall into deep sleep and was startled awake by a chanting that seemed mutated from the choir to which I had fallen asleep.

I awoke wild-eyed and alerted to every unknown danger there could be possible for me, from animal, plant, or mineral. I tried the luxury of stretching, but I was sore, my inactivity having painfully frozen my flexibility. I looked at my scrapes and cuts, and although I had done a great job keeping my blood loss down, my body had other plans:

The hematologist in me knew my bloodstream was funneling white blood cells to my sites of trauma, along with all of the other inflammatory signals that dog-whistles for an immune response to rid me of the wimpy bacteria that otherwise live peacefully on intact skin. As a hematologist, I knew the bugle call from inflammatory cytokines summoned an army to come to battle for me.

But the gambler in me knew that, still, my odds weren't good.

The music I heard now seemed ominous, background music for something awful about to happen. I looked about me; I was bleeding again from my superficial and — now infected — wounds.

Superficial? That doesn't really apply to a bleeder like me.

The moon was half-full, not that I could see it. Any light realized were slivers and shafts of illumination passing through the colander holes between the branches above, casting them into the an array of mirror glass shards that fell on the bleeding spots of my arms and legs. These holes between the branches were lensing, projecting a half-moon everywhere the moonlight landed on me.

I looked again at my tree trunk colonnade and thought it looked tighter. Were the trees closer? Was the diameter of my refuge less than how I had remembered it? Was my circle of safety smaller?

The anthills seemed closer, but thankfully all seemed quiet on their surfaces.

This is when I realized I had not been visited in this special spot by any insects, bloodthirsty or worse. While that was just fine with me, still, I wondered just how safe was my safe haven, from a sleep-deprived drunk and — otherworldly — sensibility.

Again, while traipsing through my dreamscapes, replete with the ominous intonations of suspenseful runs of melodies from the trees, I awoke again, catching myself in a drop-from-a-rooftop panic. A god was about, close to me, hiding behind — and occasionally peaking from — one of the trees.

I was sweating. I was bleeding more. I had a fever; I was burning up. Fever is another type of dreamscape altogether.

The vertical trunks, the bars keeping the bad guys out, were now a caged incarceration, keeping me in. I struggled, but I was fixed in place by a circle of trees only as wide as what was needed to keep me captive and inert. I squirmed, to no avail. I couldn't even take a deep breath.

The chanting of the forest started making these solidly planted towers wobble in resonance. And within these phenomena were harmonics, several for each singing tree. The resonances summated and I, myself, began to shake and tremble. In synch with their perturbations — penetrations? — I could hear them with a different part of my brain now.

They were calling the rest of the forest, like inflammatory cytokines summoning an immune system to migrate toward an invading organism. I looked at the festering of my wounds.

"We're not that different, you and me, are we?" I said to my captors.

My clearing — my so-called safe haven — this hematologist recognized as a pocket of phagocytosis. The forest was surrounding, isolating, and engulfing me like my own body would a foreign body. It was dealing with an infection.

I was now held fast by a tight straightjacket of bark, my circle of safety having migrated inward via biochemically driven motions, to immobilize me while the rest of the forest's antibodies went to work:

The anthill surfaces exploded with activity.

I could only hope that the very bad people would find me very soon. In fact, I wished for that.