The Vortex

There is a place in the woods, behind my parents’ house, that we half-jokingly call The Vortex. My mother and I have some disagreement about where exactly it is. But then, that is the nature of that place. It sneaks up on you if you are careless enough to forget your place.

What we both agree on is that if you try to walk through it, you will inevitably end up lost, sometimes for hours, only to find that you were minutes away from familiar landmarks the entire time. We also agree that something seems to lurk there. Something with watchful eyes.

But more about that later. I don’t want to give you the impression that the entire forest has intentions as malign as The Vortex’s. Far from it. The woods have always been a great solace to me: growing up they were my playhouse, my sanctuary, and my church.

There are several hundred acres of trees around my parent’s rural Michigan home. We only own three of them, but are fortunate enough to have elderly neighbors who give us free reign over the forest (except during hunting season). One of them is Maria. She is the epitome of what I hope to be someday. She is a 91-year-old Lithuanian master gardener who still grows her own vegetables, keeps bees, cans food, and makes her own elderberry wine. She can also be seen every other evening in the summertime, walking our long dirt road and picking up garbage wherever she sees it.

Much of Maria’s property is old horse pasture, although for over fifty years a new growth forest of sugar maples, ash, balsam, white pine, and white birch have made it their own. Here and there, I still find thick wooden fence posts, or bits of metal wire from the fence. I’ve even seen a tree which, as it grew outward, swallowed an old wire into its girth. I admire that tree for continuing to grow.

Directly adjacent to our property is also a stand of tall red pines, maybe two square acres. Maria and her late husband planted them many years ago, someday hoping to harvest them and sell the wood to a telephone company. The pines seem big enough for poles now, but here they remain. Often, I hope that she will forget to call the foresters. But moreso, I hope that her children will forget. For the stand is truly a sight to see. 

The sentinels extend straight up in narrow, planted rows—some of the tallest trees in the forest. From the very moment they sprouted they competed with each other for light, and so they raced, and now only the crowns have branches and needles. All but a few scraggily twigs has been sloughed away by the darkness. The ochre bark remains as well, patterned like the octagons of a dried mud flat. And when the sun sets, the red bark explodes into the most spectacular oranges, setting the woods aflame.

Lower is a bed of dead orange needles, half a foot deep, where mice like to make their nests in the winter-time. I have seen the evidence as I walk through the winter canvas: Tiny perfect footprints leading to a small black hole in the snow at the very base of the tree.

For even in the winter, the woods are not lifeless. A barren cornfield in the winter is like a grave, waiting for new life to emerge from the old. A forest in winter feels more like a slow-moving giant.

Everywhere are the molds of footprints that tell their own stories. They reveal the daily dramas of rabbits, raccoons, mice, coyotes, wild turkey, foxes, and squirrels. Here a herd of deer have bedded down beneath white pines wreathed in wild grape vines as thick as my arm. There they’ve broken the ice on the meandering creek, to lap up the cold running water.

There are other signs, too, if you look and listen. Mouse and mole holes and fox squirrels, ever present, sliding effortlessly around the tree to watch me with alert black eyes, their bushy gray tails twitching warily. The ravens roost in their red pine rookery, cackling and cawing in a way that feels like fog on a cool spring morning: still, mysterious, frightening in a way that makes me want to walk just a little bit closer.

And early in the day I can hear the happy whistle of the Chickadee, my favorite bird. “Whee-whoo…whee-whoo,” and the answering “Chicka-dee-dee-dee!” The Chickadee is one of those tough little species, like the cardinals, junkos, sparrows, and hairy woodpeckers, that stay year round and endure the hard winter. Sometimes they are silent for days, no doubt hunkered down in their safe, warm places. But when the sun reappears from the gloom, their song is always the first I hear.

As much as I love the Chickadees, my favorite living creatures in the wintertime have to be the trees. Even when they have lost their leaves and their trunks are slick and blackened, they feel alive. Ever since I was little, one of my favorite things was to stop, place my palm on the rough bark of a tree, close my eyes, and listen. I have always imagined that I can feel the life there, burning in the heartwood. When I touch a tree trunk, I feel apart of, rather than apart.

I can sense them as I walk, and if I stop crunching through the snow and attend carefully, I can hear them borrowing the wind. For the wind, as it passes through the branches, becomes their breath to speak. All around, even on a still day, is a pleasant chorus of wooden taps, knocks, swishes, and creaks.

The trees in The Vortex have an altogether different sort of cadence. You cannot know what I mean, unless you have been there, but I will attempt to explain. The atmosphere is heavier, stiller, as if every living creature there is holding its breath and is creeping quickly through, rather than taking a leisurely stroll.

When I walk there, there is a feeling of being watched—and a sort of vague premonition builds in my chest. It is the same sensation that triggers me to flee rapidly up dark basement steps. I have never heard much birdsong there, even in the distance. It is as if the whole place has been cocooned in.

The only sound, in fact, is the trees. But their talk is not gentle or soothing here. It is calamitous—twice as loud and somehow violent—cracking the stillness like a trod-on branch as the limbs strike each other and groan slowly back into place.

But the most unnerving characteristic of the trees in The Vortex is that they appear to speak only as I walk by.

I am still not sure if the trees themselves do not want me there or if they themselves are trapped. Not able to escape like the other denizens of the forest, they try to warn me away.

Before it’s too late.