was silent, and I knew which kind of silence this was, and I didn’t like it because the bear was too close and he did not know I was there. Then, I clapped my hands once so loudly the darkness echoed sharply, and I knew from the silence what expression that bear had on his face as he leaned away from me and then barreled down the hill, so close to us that my girlfriend clenched my arm until the nails dug into my skin. The cataclysm-crashing charge of black bears moving in the opposite direction because black bears are the biggest cowards in the East and I love them to death. For twenty years I walked the forest for hours every day, for twenty years I got closer to the forest, for twenty years it shaped me. Eventually, the forest accepted me, and when it accepted me, it told me its secrets. The forest is my mood when I am with it; the forest is alive, and I live with it; so when the bugs break out in a hoedown in the height of the simmering summer, I join them. Sitting on a stump beneath shafts of sunlight that fall like Jacob’s Ladder in a clearing in the forest, among the fiddlesticks and blueberry bushes, I listen to the rhythms of the scratching in the trunks and tap my foot and hang my head in the haze to doze and groove with the arthropods. This derecho has gotten me closer than I have ever been to the forest, closer than I have ever been to my family, closer than I have ever been to myself. AFTER SIX DAYS (or more), I cannot sleep. The forest cannot sleep. Nearly 90
degrees at 10 PM when I get out of bed to go for a walk, I know the forest is tired from so many all-nighters, and the walk is surreal. Moonlit contours, a charcoal painting in bad light, stars floating in the smog, when a gunshot goes off in the distance. Then another gunshot, in a part of the forest where no one lives. Standing on a hill in front of an unoccupied building, I listen to gunshots multiply. Sporadic reports of gunfire echo up and down the ravines, and I strain to hear, heat-thickened blood pounding in my ears. I know the sounds of the forest, but sounds that people make here confuse me, because these mountains do strange things to noise, as if to mix up intruders so that they became disoriented and turned around and walked right back out. Echoes and their source overlap in the deep hollows here, and sometimes I can’t tell which has come first, so I do not know where the gun is. When the gunshots stop, the forest is silent, though I do not recognize this silence. The forest is as confused as I am. I shrug at the forest and walk home. In bed, I lie on my back, naked, staring at the stars, when the gunshots start again at exactly midnight. Multiplying, spreading, filling the forest, I wonder if an impromptu Civil War reenactment is taking place among mountain men whose boredom has finally gotten to them (and I wonder if they need a standard bearer), but then sirens sound in the distance and I know something unusual is afoot. Throwing on a pair of pants, I walk through the woods in the only direction that makes sense. Up and down ravines, through spider webs, past sleeping owls, mashing molehills, sliding down stumps dusted with bug-made sawdust, I walk past ten-foot high barbed wire along the 37
