It was a long time ago now, over thirty years.

We were on a long walk to a new planting site after a heavy rainfall. As we walked along the road, wet clay clung to our boots raising us a foot or more above the ground until we had to stop and tear it from the soles of our boots because we could longer move. 

I will never return to where I was that day. It was a place like no other. A burnt wood surrounded by old growth forest with a river that flowed nearby, rapid, deep, and alive. 

As I stepped into the forest, the size of the trees, the dense mossy footbed, or the strangle particles floating in the air did not matter as much as the sound. What I heard that day left its impression on my cellular memory. The word for it is sacred. 

Turning back, I see the large plot of land I will fill with seedlings which if they survive will grow into a mono-forest of pine.The planting of that forest will allow the company which hired me to farm the future wood and expand its quota of cutting. 

Turning back to the burnt-out land, I see a dead bush covered with yellow moths - a bright shimmering mass.The image suggests resurrection or hope, but what matters to me now is only that I was there. 

I have few memories as potent as this one – moments in which you are separated from all you understand, and are suspended in a place from which you never fully recover – like the day I was shot, or the moment my father died, or that day in NYC when I decided I no longer mattered, and wanted only to lose myself in the crowd of bodies like those moths on a dead bush in a burnt out land.