Breathe

The trees breathe. They exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen, and the water vapor that hangs high among the redwood branches is inhaled and exhaled too. The trees are old, on the campus of my college, and their ancestors have lived through the ages, and among the ravines dinosaurs, and later, grizzly bears, walked not long ago. 

Above the ravines the old trees looked down. And then at age eighteen I walked among them, unsuspecting. Crossing campus was easy if you did not stick to the paved roads. Those were lit; unlit were the paths that student feet had made as they blazed impromptu trails from A to B. During the day it was easy enough to find your way. 

The university had scattered buildings widely at the edge of the woods. To get to a class might mean a walk of a mile or a mile and a half, across country, up or down hill. And so one night I set out from the dorm where I lived on a day-familiar path through the trees.

In the night I came to a place where I could not see my hand in front of my face. I tried. With my feet I could feel the level path, and sense-memory my way through a gap in the grove. But then, there was a pause. As if the trees had been breathing, and now held still. 

So I stopped. And listened: to nothing. Then I moved to the side, just a little bit. I was in the right place again. The breathing resumed. 

In the morning I retraced my steps. It turned out I had been about to collide with a crotch-high spike of remnant redwood stump in the middle of the path. But the breathing of the trees had stopped, and so did I. 

John Leech

Santa Cruz, California.

For “Readers Write: The Woods”, The Sun, deadline January 1, 2021.

https://thesunmagazine.submittable.com/submit/64697/readers-write