The Clearing
The sage forest flickered green in the speckled light. The piney trees and the flat clover leaves. Even the cool water of the shallow pond, the muck at the edges, a deep moss. Only John knew all the shades. Only he saw all the shades. After endless days of visitations and contemplations, he had imagined, but not exactly expected, this seeing. This knowing.
John lay every day of vacation on his slender back near the quiet, still pool, on the high ground where it was dry in the summer. His new favorite but already smelly emerald tee shirt lay over his small chest, three golden triangles decorating the front. He had found and claimed it for his own, right here, those months ago.
Below the shirt lay, holey faded blue-jeans over skinny legs. Finally, dirty bare feet. Sneakers somewhere nearby. He didn’t bother with socks. Occasionally a leech snuck into his shoes when he was happily squishing through the sucking, oozy pond goo and discovering. Once he’d made it all the way home and chucked off his sneakers and taken a step. Only then did he discover the leech on the bottom of his foot. Brown and so gross.
Gross, because only and all things green were his favorite. The slippery salamanders he’d come to hunt long ago were deep chestnut, or mottled midnight black, or shining gray with a cherry-red racing stripe. He had been fond of telling adults - teachers, his parents, that the salamanders were his favorite, the reason he always returned to the forest. A wonderful lure, yes. But they weren’t favored anymore. Now the forest itself, the clearing within, was his favorite.
He stopped squinting at the warm sun through the fir trees as they shuffled in the breeze. He turned his head to the ground. As he exhaled, he rustled the bed of fresh needles under his nose. As he inhaled, he smelled sharp timber-hearts and hot day-dust. Underneath that, rich damp night loam.
John smiled at the giant avocado-skin sword ferns. Rich and shining on the biggest blades. Cinnamon spots speckled the matte undersides. Beneath the aged giants, tiny baby fronds were technicolor lime. Unfurling their tendrils day by day and waiting to become big and deeply verdant.
The hushed clearing was his place. His for weeks, since grade school quit harassing his curiosity and released him to the wild. His, now that he was old enough to adventure on his own. He knew the ferns most particularly. Knew the mature ones and the tiny growing youngers too, tightly coiled and shooting toward the sky. He could have named them as he watched them become, day after day. He stroked one to judge its inviting spiny texture, as he had so many times before.
“I’ll name you,” John said. It sprang back. Then, he saw it bend toward him. Bow. He thought for a moment. The name appeared in his mind. “You’re Linus.”
I am. Thank you.
John perceived his happy sigh. The sense of promise and completion. “Sure.” He smiled and ran a gentle finger over Linus. He felt a shiver in his belly, like he’d swallowed a salamander. Now this has truly become my place. I am the King of Green.
Linus responded to his musing. Yes.
A woodpecker knocked nearby and stopped. Started again. Stopped. John reached out once more with a soft, prodding finger. Linus sprang back. In the stillness, motes and pollen filled the slow, balmy, early-afternoon air and John’s head. He reached out again, grime embedded under small stubby nails, this time to another plant.
“Should I name more of you?”
Maybe
He took back his curious finger. “Why maybe, Linus?”
Because we will each speak to you. If you name us.
“Oh. Well. Is that bad?”
Are you prepared to speak back?
“I don’t know.” Often these near weeks he’d imagined these conversations. Often it was at night in the murk of his room, curled in his bed under superhero sheets. He’d pretended to talk with his growing friends who lived just on the other side of the pane of his window. Just down the path he’d discovered, in the quiet place.
You don’t know? Then, as I said - maybe.
John turned his gaze to the sun, to the circle of blue sky above, beyond the tops of the noble fir trees. The woodpecker again. The rustle of the wind through branches great and small. His thin dark eyebrows met above his slender, pale nose. He looked over.
“I should name at least two of you, so that you can talk to each other. I don’t want you to be lonely.”
We already speak to each other. But since you’ve named me now, I can speak to you as well.
“Oh.” John ran his eyes over the plant. Linus grew from a lumpy, eroded mound of earth and towered well over John as he lay on the forest floor. There were a hundred grassy colors on the fern, depending on where you looked. And when you looked. He had looked at almost every possible moment. At the cold dawn, the ferns, brambles, nettles, all things in the forest, were monochrome. A dim, waiting viridian, just claiming their color from the night. At midday crisp and piney and sharp. Vibrant and ready. Hungry. Healthy and growing. In the gloaming, muted and tinged with ephemeral pink. magical and poised. Precious moments later in the near-dark, fading back into the black night.
After a whole summer, and now, as the King, he ought to understand his place better. He’d assumed he’d known everything. He had learned about plants, forests, rivers, all of it, in science class this year. Fumbling with clumsy child-fingers at microscope knobs, studying droplets of water animated by hairy cellular inhabitants. Now, he knew that he had learned next to nothing about the what made up the world around him.
The woodpecker returned. It flapped down to the pond and splashed.
John stretched up toward an officious frond on one of Linus’s larger neighbors. Established and perhaps at its zenith.
Yes. You could name that one.
A shudder shook his tender frame. He swiped at his black bags before he splayed his hands over his chest.
Then, a glimmer of understanding. Hopeful. Apprehensive at the scope of the responsibility. “If I name them, they’ll talk to me.”
Yes.
“And they’re different, aren’t they? The larger ones.”
Yes. Well, no. And yes.
The nearby bird tilted its pointed head to him, then its long beak, as though it disliked the commotion. It departed abruptly, gray wings fretting at the air.
“Oh.” John closed his eyes. The sun streamed down and blinded him when the trees moved a certain way. Inside his shut eyelids it wasn’t green. It was red and pink.
Soft knowing filled him - the larger ferns were different. As were the trees. Each resident of the forest a different voice. Perhaps not all as friendly as Linus. Unknown to John, but not strangers.
Breeze. Silence. John dozed. Did he dream?
Linus?
Yes?
Are you happy?
Yes.
Good.
Are you, John?
I am. When I’m with you.
In the near distance a loon screamed as the day prepared to disappear. He woke. The sun had moved far off to the west. Filtered now through masses of great oak leaves and swooping cedar branches. He caught the scent of woodfire in the chilling air. He sighed and the trees replied. Linus and his anonymous friends made John happy. He wanted to name more friends. He wanted now to be closer to the contentment of the forest.
Concern drifted through his head. He spoke his trouble directly to Linus. No human commotion to disturb the woodpecker or other eavesdropping animals.
No. Don’t worry, John. The trees aren’t lonely.
I’m glad Linus. They sound like they are.
They don’t sound lonely to me. Only to you.
“Oh.” John turned his head toward the narrow path he’d made to this place. Toward gnarled, stippled trunks of fir and alder and cedar trees - who sounded lonely to John, but weren’t. Perhaps the loneliness was his.
He reached out, wanting to touch another young fern. Linus was silent. John’s fingertip hovered, but he resisted. “Are you sure? I want to know.”
You can. You can if you want. You’re the King of Green, that’s the truth of it. But we will talk to you, each of us. All of us. Are you ready? Can you hear me, John, sometimes when you don’t mean to?
“Yes.” He thought about his wild-place dreams last night. The Cheerios that he’d left mostly uneaten this morning. His mother had offered him rich rewards for finishing them. Video-game time, more books from the library. But no. Breakfast had become so thoroughly uninteresting.
Now a crow. A dark shriek. Loud, aggressive. He looked up. It met John’s emerald eyes with its forever-black. It announced itself once again and then kept its silence.
He judged the light and sighed.
It’s okay, John. I won’t be lonely.
He felt the pine needles crunch under his settling weight. The soft carpet of the forest floor parted to accommodate him.
Away, away and away in the distance a startling whistle pierced the peace - finger and a thumb - a human noise. His mother calling him home. John frowned. A tiny chartreuse caterpillar made his way along the underside of one of Linus’s more robust blades.
He thought he ought to be hungry for dinner. His torn jeans were loose on his slendering frame. But he didn’t want to leave Linus.
You can go. You can always go, John.
“Because I’ll come back.”
Yes. You will.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Linus.”
I know.
“Maybe tomorrow I’ll name more ferns. Maybe tomorrow I will name a tree.”
Maybe? I think you will.
He put on his battered canvas sneakers without bothering to tie them. He stood, then crouched to examine his friend more closely. He reached a small finger forward and pushed.
Another shiver from his friend. From his belly. “Goodnight.”
The sunset wind whispered through the treetops and he knew they were not lonely.
John had not slept well last night. School was to begin tomorrow. He returned today to his kingdom and his subjects seeking quiet and assurance. The house and the people had filled his mind with distractions. His mother reminding him that they were to go shopping for new school clothes. Or was that weeks ago? He could not remember. These human concerns had filled him, erased part of him. In the house, important things, the names, had been lost. Now, in the soft thunk of the rusty needle carpet, they were found again. Now, he felt more than ever that someone, a he, was waiting. Calling. His fleeting friend who whispered to him in the night. In the dreams he could touch. Always with words he could not make out, but feelings he could. Pulling him belly-first to the forest.
He wrapped his arm around the rough, dark bark of a fir tree to leverage himself down to the creek bed on his way to the clearing.
Hello John.
When tree spoke, John’s stomach did not shiver. It trembled. He jumped down to the pebbly wash and looked up, his neck bent all the way back.
“Do you have a name?”
I do. I’ve had many, and I have one from you already. You don’t remember?
John gazed up at the blinding sun-star. He slit his eyes and slanted his head to the side. The larger ones are different. They demanded a different voice. Like older adults you didn’t know. Today he was ready to speak. And to listen. He sifted through his spotted inventory of memories, for the ones of trees and fresh springy pine needles. A robin sang. The name came to him when he reached for it. “William.” He knew the answer to his next question, but he was curious to ask. “Are you my friend?”
That depends on whether you are my friend.
Another rumor in his mind. He knew what had already passed between them and what to say in response, but also didn’t know. He wanted to. To know the order and the answers. John knew the forest well, but not at all. As he knew himself well and not at all.
“Maybe I am your friend, William. I’d like to be. We’ll see.”
William tilted at John. To and fro from his very top, and exhaled.
John turned his feet into the creek and wiggled his toes. Today he had abandoned his shoes farther up the path. He lost himself watching the water play on the wet rocks. Closer and closer he gazed. A globular cluster of tadpoles ready to burst. Dancing, delicate skeeter-eaters skittering here and there.
A squirrel chuckled and chuffed at him. He remembered having a friend and moved on.
In the clearing the surface of the pool rippled flat black. Today there was not an azure sky but gunmetal. It hovered barely visible between and below the mighty firs and the clustered baby oak trees that conspired to hide the lush canopy.
“You’re Linus.” John’s uncertain voice roared in his ears as he spoke, disrupting the peace of the clearing, and he wished for silence. To ask the questions and learn the answers.
I am.
“Linus, today I spoke with William. I named him.”
Yes.
“I’ve named you, but - have you named me as well?”
No John. Naming does not create ownership. But we will still claim you.
“Oh.”
Though John had been waiting for the claiming, holding his breath in anticipation all summer, it was in some ways a despairing thought. No more Cheerios. No more video games. No more superhero sheets. But Linus…and William. And so many friends yet to know. Would the animals speak to him as well? Perhaps the birds, the stones, the sky?
Within Linus’s patient silence, John now came to understand that he was not the King of Green. He had not grasped the true nature of the naming and the claiming of the forest. Distant teaching had misled him. Time and study, listening, had revealed the truth. The thought comforted and lured him.
He took up his most familiar position beside his friend, comfortable on his back, hugged by needles and dirt. He closed his eyes. He clasped hands over his chest and over his t-shirt, three golden triangles on an emerald background, and was claimed.
Amber oak leaves like great hands entombed the dappled forest floor.
John was sleeping deeply and speaking to Linus of many things when another boy, shock of black hair over jade eyes, wandered into the clearing. He stopped, attention captured by the bright pile of cloth on the ground.
The new boy stooped low. The jittery jade tree-frog he’d collected sprung away unnoticed as he plucked up the shirt to judge it more thoroughly. Three golden triangles on an emerald background.
“Cool tee shirt.”
A shining, purple-black crow in the tallest fir tree above shouted his accord.
He held his pale arms up to the sapling-clustered ceiling as he stripped his own and put it on. It was tight. A whisper told him that soon, it would fit him just right.
John lay every day of vacation on his slender back near the quiet, still pool, on the high ground where it was dry in the summer. His new favorite but already smelly emerald tee shirt lay over his small chest, three golden triangles decorating the front. He had found and claimed it for his own, right here, those months ago.
Below the shirt lay, holey faded blue-jeans over skinny legs. Finally, dirty bare feet. Sneakers somewhere nearby. He didn’t bother with socks. Occasionally a leech snuck into his shoes when he was happily squishing through the sucking, oozy pond goo and discovering. Once he’d made it all the way home and chucked off his sneakers and taken a step. Only then did he discover the leech on the bottom of his foot. Brown and so gross.
Gross, because only and all things green were his favorite. The slippery salamanders he’d come to hunt long ago were deep chestnut, or mottled midnight black, or shining gray with a cherry-red racing stripe. He had been fond of telling adults - teachers, his parents, that the salamanders were his favorite, the reason he always returned to the forest. A wonderful lure, yes. But they weren’t favored anymore. Now the forest itself, the clearing within, was his favorite.
He stopped squinting at the warm sun through the fir trees as they shuffled in the breeze. He turned his head to the ground. As he exhaled, he rustled the bed of fresh needles under his nose. As he inhaled, he smelled sharp timber-hearts and hot day-dust. Underneath that, rich damp night loam.
John smiled at the giant avocado-skin sword ferns. Rich and shining on the biggest blades. Cinnamon spots speckled the matte undersides. Beneath the aged giants, tiny baby fronds were technicolor lime. Unfurling their tendrils day by day and waiting to become big and deeply verdant.
The hushed clearing was his place. His for weeks, since grade school quit harassing his curiosity and released him to the wild. His, now that he was old enough to adventure on his own. He knew the ferns most particularly. Knew the mature ones and the tiny growing youngers too, tightly coiled and shooting toward the sky. He could have named them as he watched them become, day after day. He stroked one to judge its inviting spiny texture, as he had so many times before.
“I’ll name you,” John said. It sprang back. Then, he saw it bend toward him. Bow. He thought for a moment. The name appeared in his mind. “You’re Linus.”
I am. Thank you.
John perceived his happy sigh. The sense of promise and completion. “Sure.” He smiled and ran a gentle finger over Linus. He felt a shiver in his belly, like he’d swallowed a salamander. Now this has truly become my place. I am the King of Green.
Linus responded to his musing. Yes.
A woodpecker knocked nearby and stopped. Started again. Stopped. John reached out once more with a soft, prodding finger. Linus sprang back. In the stillness, motes and pollen filled the slow, balmy, early-afternoon air and John’s head. He reached out again, grime embedded under small stubby nails, this time to another plant.
“Should I name more of you?”
Maybe
He took back his curious finger. “Why maybe, Linus?”
Because we will each speak to you. If you name us.
“Oh. Well. Is that bad?”
Are you prepared to speak back?
“I don’t know.” Often these near weeks he’d imagined these conversations. Often it was at night in the murk of his room, curled in his bed under superhero sheets. He’d pretended to talk with his growing friends who lived just on the other side of the pane of his window. Just down the path he’d discovered, in the quiet place.
You don’t know? Then, as I said - maybe.
John turned his gaze to the sun, to the circle of blue sky above, beyond the tops of the noble fir trees. The woodpecker again. The rustle of the wind through branches great and small. His thin dark eyebrows met above his slender, pale nose. He looked over.
“I should name at least two of you, so that you can talk to each other. I don’t want you to be lonely.”
We already speak to each other. But since you’ve named me now, I can speak to you as well.
“Oh.” John ran his eyes over the plant. Linus grew from a lumpy, eroded mound of earth and towered well over John as he lay on the forest floor. There were a hundred grassy colors on the fern, depending on where you looked. And when you looked. He had looked at almost every possible moment. At the cold dawn, the ferns, brambles, nettles, all things in the forest, were monochrome. A dim, waiting viridian, just claiming their color from the night. At midday crisp and piney and sharp. Vibrant and ready. Hungry. Healthy and growing. In the gloaming, muted and tinged with ephemeral pink. magical and poised. Precious moments later in the near-dark, fading back into the black night.
After a whole summer, and now, as the King, he ought to understand his place better. He’d assumed he’d known everything. He had learned about plants, forests, rivers, all of it, in science class this year. Fumbling with clumsy child-fingers at microscope knobs, studying droplets of water animated by hairy cellular inhabitants. Now, he knew that he had learned next to nothing about the what made up the world around him.
The woodpecker returned. It flapped down to the pond and splashed.
John stretched up toward an officious frond on one of Linus’s larger neighbors. Established and perhaps at its zenith.
Yes. You could name that one.
A shudder shook his tender frame. He swiped at his black bags before he splayed his hands over his chest.
Then, a glimmer of understanding. Hopeful. Apprehensive at the scope of the responsibility. “If I name them, they’ll talk to me.”
Yes.
“And they’re different, aren’t they? The larger ones.”
Yes. Well, no. And yes.
The nearby bird tilted its pointed head to him, then its long beak, as though it disliked the commotion. It departed abruptly, gray wings fretting at the air.
“Oh.” John closed his eyes. The sun streamed down and blinded him when the trees moved a certain way. Inside his shut eyelids it wasn’t green. It was red and pink.
Soft knowing filled him - the larger ferns were different. As were the trees. Each resident of the forest a different voice. Perhaps not all as friendly as Linus. Unknown to John, but not strangers.
Breeze. Silence. John dozed. Did he dream?
Linus?
Yes?
Are you happy?
Yes.
Good.
Are you, John?
I am. When I’m with you.
In the near distance a loon screamed as the day prepared to disappear. He woke. The sun had moved far off to the west. Filtered now through masses of great oak leaves and swooping cedar branches. He caught the scent of woodfire in the chilling air. He sighed and the trees replied. Linus and his anonymous friends made John happy. He wanted to name more friends. He wanted now to be closer to the contentment of the forest.
Concern drifted through his head. He spoke his trouble directly to Linus. No human commotion to disturb the woodpecker or other eavesdropping animals.
No. Don’t worry, John. The trees aren’t lonely.
I’m glad Linus. They sound like they are.
They don’t sound lonely to me. Only to you.
“Oh.” John turned his head toward the narrow path he’d made to this place. Toward gnarled, stippled trunks of fir and alder and cedar trees - who sounded lonely to John, but weren’t. Perhaps the loneliness was his.
He reached out, wanting to touch another young fern. Linus was silent. John’s fingertip hovered, but he resisted. “Are you sure? I want to know.”
You can. You can if you want. You’re the King of Green, that’s the truth of it. But we will talk to you, each of us. All of us. Are you ready? Can you hear me, John, sometimes when you don’t mean to?
“Yes.” He thought about his wild-place dreams last night. The Cheerios that he’d left mostly uneaten this morning. His mother had offered him rich rewards for finishing them. Video-game time, more books from the library. But no. Breakfast had become so thoroughly uninteresting.
Now a crow. A dark shriek. Loud, aggressive. He looked up. It met John’s emerald eyes with its forever-black. It announced itself once again and then kept its silence.
He judged the light and sighed.
It’s okay, John. I won’t be lonely.
He felt the pine needles crunch under his settling weight. The soft carpet of the forest floor parted to accommodate him.
Away, away and away in the distance a startling whistle pierced the peace - finger and a thumb - a human noise. His mother calling him home. John frowned. A tiny chartreuse caterpillar made his way along the underside of one of Linus’s more robust blades.
He thought he ought to be hungry for dinner. His torn jeans were loose on his slendering frame. But he didn’t want to leave Linus.
You can go. You can always go, John.
“Because I’ll come back.”
Yes. You will.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Linus.”
I know.
“Maybe tomorrow I’ll name more ferns. Maybe tomorrow I will name a tree.”
Maybe? I think you will.
He put on his battered canvas sneakers without bothering to tie them. He stood, then crouched to examine his friend more closely. He reached a small finger forward and pushed.
Another shiver from his friend. From his belly. “Goodnight.”
The sunset wind whispered through the treetops and he knew they were not lonely.
John had not slept well last night. School was to begin tomorrow. He returned today to his kingdom and his subjects seeking quiet and assurance. The house and the people had filled his mind with distractions. His mother reminding him that they were to go shopping for new school clothes. Or was that weeks ago? He could not remember. These human concerns had filled him, erased part of him. In the house, important things, the names, had been lost. Now, in the soft thunk of the rusty needle carpet, they were found again. Now, he felt more than ever that someone, a he, was waiting. Calling. His fleeting friend who whispered to him in the night. In the dreams he could touch. Always with words he could not make out, but feelings he could. Pulling him belly-first to the forest.
He wrapped his arm around the rough, dark bark of a fir tree to leverage himself down to the creek bed on his way to the clearing.
Hello John.
When tree spoke, John’s stomach did not shiver. It trembled. He jumped down to the pebbly wash and looked up, his neck bent all the way back.
“Do you have a name?”
I do. I’ve had many, and I have one from you already. You don’t remember?
John gazed up at the blinding sun-star. He slit his eyes and slanted his head to the side. The larger ones are different. They demanded a different voice. Like older adults you didn’t know. Today he was ready to speak. And to listen. He sifted through his spotted inventory of memories, for the ones of trees and fresh springy pine needles. A robin sang. The name came to him when he reached for it. “William.” He knew the answer to his next question, but he was curious to ask. “Are you my friend?”
That depends on whether you are my friend.
Another rumor in his mind. He knew what had already passed between them and what to say in response, but also didn’t know. He wanted to. To know the order and the answers. John knew the forest well, but not at all. As he knew himself well and not at all.
“Maybe I am your friend, William. I’d like to be. We’ll see.”
William tilted at John. To and fro from his very top, and exhaled.
John turned his feet into the creek and wiggled his toes. Today he had abandoned his shoes farther up the path. He lost himself watching the water play on the wet rocks. Closer and closer he gazed. A globular cluster of tadpoles ready to burst. Dancing, delicate skeeter-eaters skittering here and there.
A squirrel chuckled and chuffed at him. He remembered having a friend and moved on.
In the clearing the surface of the pool rippled flat black. Today there was not an azure sky but gunmetal. It hovered barely visible between and below the mighty firs and the clustered baby oak trees that conspired to hide the lush canopy.
“You’re Linus.” John’s uncertain voice roared in his ears as he spoke, disrupting the peace of the clearing, and he wished for silence. To ask the questions and learn the answers.
I am.
“Linus, today I spoke with William. I named him.”
Yes.
“I’ve named you, but - have you named me as well?”
No John. Naming does not create ownership. But we will still claim you.
“Oh.”
Though John had been waiting for the claiming, holding his breath in anticipation all summer, it was in some ways a despairing thought. No more Cheerios. No more video games. No more superhero sheets. But Linus…and William. And so many friends yet to know. Would the animals speak to him as well? Perhaps the birds, the stones, the sky?
Within Linus’s patient silence, John now came to understand that he was not the King of Green. He had not grasped the true nature of the naming and the claiming of the forest. Distant teaching had misled him. Time and study, listening, had revealed the truth. The thought comforted and lured him.
He took up his most familiar position beside his friend, comfortable on his back, hugged by needles and dirt. He closed his eyes. He clasped hands over his chest and over his t-shirt, three golden triangles on an emerald background, and was claimed.
Amber oak leaves like great hands entombed the dappled forest floor.
John was sleeping deeply and speaking to Linus of many things when another boy, shock of black hair over jade eyes, wandered into the clearing. He stopped, attention captured by the bright pile of cloth on the ground.
The new boy stooped low. The jittery jade tree-frog he’d collected sprung away unnoticed as he plucked up the shirt to judge it more thoroughly. Three golden triangles on an emerald background.
“Cool tee shirt.”
A shining, purple-black crow in the tallest fir tree above shouted his accord.
He held his pale arms up to the sapling-clustered ceiling as he stripped his own and put it on. It was tight. A whisper told him that soon, it would fit him just right.