Planting a Forest of Stories

There are few better ways to escape the occasional monotony of this world than to enter another. To me, this never truly means to escape so much as it means to translate; to look at the world we live in and apply the creative lens to find (or make) things that are fantastic, beautiful, or grand. To do so is to enter another world, and for myself, few acts transport me as well as planting trees.

I should add that I do not mean the kind of planting that involves weeks in a camp, battling the sun, the blackflies, and the very earth itself, all while armed with naught but a long spade, and tasked to put tree-upon-tree into the thankless ground. Instead, I mean the kind that involves hours bent over a desk, battling hand-cramps, eye fatigue, and the very parchment, armed with naught but a pen to sketch tree-upon-tree onto the thankless paper. In other words, to make a map. To turn the world, real or fictional, into a world that is sketched. The act of mapping never begins with "planting," either. After all, trees need soil in which to grow, and water to drink.

Thus begins the act of carving the landscape into the paper. With pen and ruler, I lift the coastlines out of the empty seas of parchment and force rivers weep from the page to find their course. My hand makes the wind blow, and waves are formed, crashing against the shores of the primeval land. I imagine then, how the plates that form this new world must have shifted in the past. How they pushed and ground each other to create this two-dimensional land, until at last they heaved up the mountains. Mountains whose peaks are new and yet weathered with time; wind-worn and jagged, and filled with cracks and gullies carved away by eons of weather. Eons that last but a minute. What is more, each peak is built upon strata—bands of rock that hint at past worlds unmapped. These worlds are integral to this one, but never truly existed upon the page. With the last peak drawn, and shadowed by a paralyzed sun, the landscape takes on its form.

I should pause, a minute, and talk about landscapes and stories. After all, from a certain point of view, landscapes—especially drawn landscapes—are nothing without the stories people tell about them. Mountains and rivers are places of meaning and importance. In the living world, they are the setting of myth and legend. To a people, a mountain might be a god. To a person, it may be the site of an epic adventure, and thus the setting of a story to be passed along to friends and grandchildren. Therefor, the landscape carved into the paper takes on a human life. Regardless of whether it represents a real place, or an imagined country, I cannot help but imagine the stories that could be told with each stroke of the pen.

This is where the "planting" of trees truly comes in. I will not lie; it is a monotonous task. To sketch each tree and stem and shadow across what may be many thousands of square kilometers is tedious at best (or treedious, as I often joke). It does, however, provide the perfect escape—or translation—from the often-mundane tedium of the living world. As I plant each tree, and fill valleys with forests and meadows, I find myself thinking about the stories that people might tell themselves about this two-dimensional land.

What does that peak look like from down here?

Who lives beneath these woods?

What deeds of bravery or songs of sadness have been sung beneath the setting sun on this alpine lake?

It is a peaceful practice, the planting of trees. What is more, the stories that spring from their branches sometimes provide a joyous escape in their own right--whether in years worth of writing, or an afternoon of daydreaming. Not to mention, of course, that the map upon which they grow looks nice on a wall.