by R. D Rhodes
We were soon approaching the oak tree I had climbed. “That’s it there,” I nodded ahead.
“Cool! It’s stunning.” He looked with admiration, though we were still about forty steps away. “So, you said you had that dream, about coming down from a mountain? And people were going down a path, that you thought they chose? Coming from and going back to God, you said, right?”
“Yeah.” I confirmed.
“Well, do you think we are born with personalities then? Like Solzhenitsyn said. Like, you meet people from the same family, brothers and sisters, and from an early age they are so different. I know you don’t have brothers and sisters, but.”
“Yeah, I guess so. They didn’t tell me that, but yeah, I think we do. Our own personalities. Our own souls.”
“Going through endless rebirths?”
I didn’t say anything.
“And how do we stop these rebirths? Can we say “Hay! Stop it, God! No more entertainment. Leave me be?”
I chuckled. “You can ask the tree that too.”
We stopped before the oak, at the big branch that hung down to the ground. I didn’t feel like climbing it again, but Harry did, agilely tiptoeing up the branch then leaping up to the next one, catching on, and swinging himself higher. There were less than about twenty yellow leaves left on the branches and as he maneuvered between them some broke free and drifted to the ground.
He came down and we moved on, passing the mushroom patch where only a couple rotten ones remained. We stopped at the river’s waterfall source, which dropped from the cliff-face. I pointed Harry up the direction we had to go.
“You climbed that! Alone?!”
I nodded.
“RESPECT.” He said, Ali G style.
But it wasn’t so hard, and with me leading and him close behind, we were up at the top in about fifteen minutes. The rainbow had disappeared, and the sun shone down on both glens.
“Looks nice.” Harry said.
“Yeah. You’ll be wanting to move the tent here then, at some point? To keep away your restlessness. We could?” I suggested.
“Nah. It’s okay. I will keep myself busy. But maybe in a month or two, we can see. Doesn’t look like much fresh water though. Is there a stream?”
“I don’t know.” I said, as I entered the dark forest for the second time, the narrow pine avenues blotting out the sky. I spotted the line of yews ahead, and before them, to the left, the tree that I had first spoken to.
“That’s the one.” I told Harry.
We walked up to it and stared at the face-shape in the bark. “It really does look like an old man.” Harry noted.
I didn’t say anything. We stood side by side.
“Hello, again, Aisha.”
“Hello.” I replied, in my head.
Harry was still looking at it, then he looked at me, and walked away.
“This is your friend.” Said the tree.
“Yes.” I said. “He has helped me a lot. He’s a good person.”
“He will find this more difficult than you. He has a lot in his mind, and is a bit more closed. A bit more cynical. But he just needs to work.”
I felt a bit edgy. I wanted to walk around instead of stand there.
“Go on. Go off with your friend. I will always be here. Come back any time.”
“Thank you.” I said. “I love you.”
“We love you too.”
I turned away and headed down the hill. Harry was standing in the middle of the forest plot- amongst the fallen birches, the twisted oaks, the scattered rowans. But it didn’t have the same feeling today, or at least I couldn’t feel it. It didn’t have that same energy.
“It’s really cool here,” Harry said.
“I know. Do you feel anything?” I asked him.
“What like?”
“I dunno. I felt there was an energy here before, but it’s not the same. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe it’s me.” His brows furrowed underneath his beany hat.
“No. Don’t be daft. It’ll just be the weather or something, or the time of day. Did you see the yews?” I changed the subject.
I led him over to the grove that filed down the hill, the huge roots poking up everywhere.
“Wow! They’re stunning! Imagine how old they must be!” he enthused. He clasped onto one of the huge roots.
“How old do you think?” I asked.
“Well, you were saying you felt an energy here. And this is a grove- this place could be on a ley line!”
“I thought about that.”
“But yeah, these are the oldest trees. They don’t really die. You see this, look.” He pointed to the two large trunks on the tree. “They’re multi-stemmed. So they die, and then can grow back and continue living from the new stem. They can live up to like, five thousand years. The druids all worshipped them.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. The Celtic druids, well, all the Celts, worshipped them. Then, when the Christians came, how were they gonna convert them? They wouldn’t leave their trees! So they built all the churches and graveyards around the yews they worshipped. That’s why you always see yews in churchyards…But saying that, the Celts didn’t even believe in death. Before they became Christian, they had no concept of heaven or hell. They thought rebirth was automatic.. the Romans thought they were mental. They charged into battle without an ounce of fear. They even put off paying debts to each other until the next world.”
“That’s cool.” I said. “What else did they believe?”
“Well, we can’t know, because they never wrote anything down. Pretty much everything we know was written by the Christian monks who came to civilize them. Everything was passed down orally, like Homer. But they believed the soul resides in the head. And that everything was energy. And all around them was an invisible realm of gods, spirits, fairies and giants. And talking trees.” he joked. “But seriously though, they would have talked with the trees. If they worshipped them, what else would they be doing?”
He was still enraptured by the grove, touching the barks everywhere, inspecting each tree. I walked away and left him, looking back from a distance. He bent down and kissed one of the roots, and clasping his hands, looked like he was saying a little prayer.
Chapter 61
O ver the next few weeks we kept busy, building a wood-drying shelter with old logs we’d found, and going fishing every few days. Some of the trout and eels we caught we skinned and gutted and immediately cooked on the fire, and some we smoked for later. Harry spent a lot of his time whittling objects from bits of wood, and I’d often come back from meditating in the forest to find him carving an animal statue, or a shelf, or something else.
I could feel my inner voice, a guide within my head and gut, getting stronger every day. And I followed it wherever it led me- through the trees, along the river, and up and down the hills and mountains. I went into long reveries, and often completely lost track of time, four or five hours passing when I thought it had only been one. Those hours were spent often completely without thoughts, just me being in the present moment, with my breath, the sounds of the rustling branches and the wind and the birds, and water if a stream was near or if it was raining. And the feeling of the grass I sat on and the leaves that brushed against me, and the cold and the wet on my skin, and my beating heart and the sensations of the body I occupied. But most of all the breath.
I realized how much it was possible to separate the mind from thoughts. That the thoughts that came into my head were not really me. That the whole personality process was not really me. I was often in a state of bliss. Sometimes Harry came with me and we meditated together, but he was finding it difficult. Said he couldn’t concentrate. But he didn’t seem to mind anyway, and it was the happiest I’d seen him. He said he wished that he had come out to a place like this sooner, and that he never even thought about suicide anymore.
It felt good to have company, but we never got in each other’s way. We seemed to have the balance goi
ng perfectly.
I was patient and calm and happy. From all of my meditations and experiences, both over those weeks and back over the many years of my life, there were three things that I was certain of. Three truths, I would call them. For one, I had absolutely no doubt that there was no such thing as death. Everything was just energy, and not only did the organic bodies of plants and animals and humans become the ground, and stay part of the ecology- but the soul lived on, as I had seen in the hospital, and in my visions and dreams. And the feather I’d been given was further proof.
I also knew, that there was something greater than us all, that we could all aspire to- God, the spirits, the other dimension, the universe, nature- whatever you called it. It could be tapped into and used to heal yourself, and to grow, and to be a better thing and a greater part of the cosmos. A divine being even.
And the third thing I was also positive about, but I knew it would take science a long time to catch up- was that the trees were intelligent. They were conscious beings. The whole planet was intelligent. A living, breathing, self-regulating thing, with many other living breathing, self-regulating, intelligent species on it, besides the humans and the animals.
I worked on myself, day in, day out. I prayed and reflected and meditated, on my childhood, my dad, my development, everything. But I couldn’t help wondering about the future. The leaves all fell off the trees, and only the yews and pines remained green, and it felt like everything was dead or asleep as winter drew around. I wondered how long I could really stay there. I was a fugitive. But there had to be a good chance I could appeal the decision. And find the courage this time, and strength, to try and fight that fucked-up system, and clear my name. I couldn’t stay here forever. I wanted to do so many things with my life. To go to so many places. To try and help other people.
I talked about it all with Harry. As for him, we knew he would probably be fine. He had been released before, with the doctor’s permission, and he would likely be again. But me? I could go back to the hospital, and try to get out in the longer term, but it would kill me inside, and if, and when, I got released, I’d still be a sentenced criminal. A murderer. Unable to work with children. Unable to take a lot of jobs. Unable to travel to certain places. A lot of my life would be over.
I thought about all of this, as one day the rain came, and didn’t stop. For days it poured down torrentially, morning, noon and night- lashing the tent, running the slope, imprisoning us inside. Even going out to pee was a challenge.
Three days of it went by, then four, then five, then six. It was incessant. The air was damp. The ground was damp. Everything inside the tent started to smell of damp, and sweaty socks, and feet, and stinking bodies. Even if we did wash our clothes, we had nowhere to dry them. I couldn’t get the fire going.
Everything became grey, and wet and miserable. The sky a dull squib that dimmed all the light. And then, on the seventh day of the deluge, I got my first tick bite, on my arm. I picked the thing out carefully, only to get another in my thigh just two days later. “For all the beauty in God’s creation, He makes these evil little bastards, that dig into your body and give you a degenerative disease which slowly attacks your joints and your brain.” Harry said, as he checked me to make sure I’d gotten all of it out. And he was right. And malaria, and typhus, and all these other horrible parts of nature. They were the risks you diminished in a house. And oh, how I now craved warm radiators, and a cosy bed, and a hot bath.
By the tenth day I had cabin fever, and I had to get out. So I pulled up my hood and trudged down the saturated ground amongst the bare and sleeping trees, slipping twice in the muck and getting my hands covered in it. I waded on through, and out into the open, under that eternal-seeming overcast, craving some vitamin D.
But the rain did eventually stop. In the days proceeding its absence, the temperature plummeted, and stronger winds blew. The next week they brought snow with them, and my mood finally picked up with the change of scenery.
We’d been there five or six weeks by then, and the land was beautiful and white and ethereal-looking, just like it had been on that first day. I left Harry at the tent carving a piece of wood into a rabbit, and I walked away through the shin-deep snow to meditate under a pine bough.
The snow stopped falling as I sat there, then it started again, blowing in strengthening icy gusts under the fat sky. I finished my meditation and lifted myself to my feet. The grey trees creaked as they bowed back and forth. The bird tweets echoed through the hollow, deposited walls of snow. Then, about thirty yards away, I saw someone. Watching me.
Chapter 62
I t was just a glimpse- to my right amongst the trees- thick, padded, outdoor clothes, a man’s figure, tall. I panicked and looked away, heading quickly in the opposite direction towards the tent. I wanted to run, but it would be too obvious.
“Hey!”
I kept walking.
“HEY!”
I halted, almost froze, and looked back as he got closer and stepped into the trail that my footsteps had broken. Footsteps that led back to the tent. I glanced down the glaring whiteness of the hill, and up it, then back at his sheening waterproof black trousers, high leather boots, and navy-blue Helly Hanson jacket. He had wide, brawny shoulders that swaggered a little. A thick neck and a black bushy beard flowing out of his strong chin. He looked like an artic expeditioner. His face was young, and handsome- about mid or late twenties- and now he was ten yards away. All six foot three of him.
“Some weather, eh!” he boomed in a deep southern English accent I guessed was from Bristol. His hands went into his jacket pockets as he stopped before me. His legs planted wide, his shoulders drew back, “What are you doing out here?” He asked.
I stared back at the brown eyes under the thermal beanie hat. “Just out for a walk,” I tried to sound convincing. “You?”
“I’m camping.” He said.
His eyes searched into me inquisitively. I dug my nails into my palms. “In this?” I asked, keeping my back to my trail and spreading my arms to the woods. The thick snow fell down between us.
“Yeah, why not?” He gave a low, grunting chuckle. Then he nodded firmly, in the direction of the tent. “Is that smoke not yours?”
“What smoke?”
“I was walking along the side of the loch back there, and I saw smoke. Just guessed it was yours?”
A few snowflakes landed on his hat, then melted into it. There was a moment of awkward silence.
He already knows it is, I thought.
And he only had to see the footprints anyway.
I scrutinized his face. His thin nose, thick lips, the bare cheeks above his beard flushed with exercise. His eyes were lively, clever, but looked kind enough. And I was past caring. I was tired of hiding. They would find us sooner or later anyway.
“Yeah. I am actually camping too.” I conceded. I felt myself breathing out my resistance and fear, “With my friend over there. I just wasn’t sure if you were a ranger, you know. If it’s okay for us to camp here.”
His eyes flashed and his face brightened as he smiled benignly. “Course it’s okay! You not heard of the right to roam here? Awesome! Where’s your tent?”
I hesitated as I looked in its direction. Harry would be there now, with his knife, carving away at the wooden rabbit. “It’s just about ten minutes’ walk.” I said. It was more like five.
“Well, you should both come over to mine! I’m only fifteen minutes this way.” he gestured the way from which he’d come.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Five days. You?”
“Erm, a week”.
He smiled again, and offered his gloved right hand. “Alex.”
“Aisha.” I said.
The cold nipped at my nose and cheeks. Wisps of my breath floated up past my eyeline as I trudged through the snow with Alex behind me. Our tent came into view between the trees, and then the smoke, and the fireplace with Harry sitting on one of its stones. He spun around
. His eyes widened at Alex then glanced questioningly at me. The block of wood in his left hand and the knife in his right. He remained sitting. He didn’t move.
“Hey, mate!” Alex called. We drew up close and he looked down at the rabbit ears pointing out the top of the wood. “That’s looking good.”
Harry sat forward. His eyes raised up Alex’s towering figure, saying who the fuck are you? Then his face turned back to me.
I felt nervous and unsure, but I nodded my acceptance. “I met him up the glen.” I said. “He is camping too. This is Alex.”
“Pleased to meet you.” Alex’s deep voice panned. Harry placed his knife down in the heather, and shook his hand. “Harry.” he replied. Their stares melded into each other- Alex’s warmth and interest, and Harry’s suspicion- then Alex let go and stared around our camp, taking in the oak tree, the holly tree, the tent, “Woah. Nice wood shelter! Did you make that?”
“Yeah.” Harry mumbled.
“COOOL!” With about seven long strides he was over at the shelter. “I’ve only got a huge tarpaulin sheet. I have my stuff drying under that. But nothing this complex. You guys are artists!” he called with his back to us.
“Who is he?” Harry mouthed. But Alex turned around and was quickly back with us, standing with his hands on his hips. “Do yous do this a lot? I don’t often meet other campers out here. It’s awesome.”
“Nah, this is pretty much a one-off.” I said.
“Oh. Okay. Well, you should come to mine for tea. I’ll show you my camp!”
Harry looked reluctant.
“Yeah, sure. We can come for a while.” I said.
Chapter 63
W e followed as he led us back along the trail, across the bridge, and up through the forest on the other side of the river. Grey smoke floated up through the trees in front, below it there was a gigantic dark green tarp, suspended up high and flapping in the wind.
“Wow!” Harry gasped.
