SCOPE: An Andrews Forest Residency
1. blow down
Can’t enter the woods directly. Too dense, too many snags. Cultural clutter. Overcrowded mind.
So I sidle in, to where young fir trunks are downed by the dozens, snapped and slung to the ground by wind. At first glance it’s chaos, but soon pattern emerges: a cross-slope, mostly northeast orientation. Some perpendicular trunks as well. Thicker trunks are severed higher, thinner trunks broken lower.
Each snag is a sentinel to a fallen self. And each log is host to subtle fungi, some white and amoebic, some black and gnarly, some apricot and globular. Strewn twigs, little arcs, grace the moss and the sword ferns. (O the resilient ferns—underleaves rough with double rows of tiny, tawny spores.)
I move upslope to see: a lattice. Wood in airy layers. Wreckage suspended, like a promise, just inches over the soil.
2. bric-a-brac
Here and there in the experimental forest: quirky human artifacts. Plastic non sequiturs. Buckets, screens. Pink or orange ribbons. Spray-paint on trees. Tarps spread on the ground in forest groves. Little buildings, gages on streams.
For science, this is the bric-a-brac of inquiry. Though the exact functions of these paraphernalia remain (appealingly) obscure to me, quantification is the general idea, yes? The oddness of these objects—in the context of the forest—bespeaks the riddle-solving quest.
Seeking patterns amid complexity, science practices anomaly. As do artists. As do poets. And the writers of scrawny essays.
Scientists want data. Artists, what do we want? I hesitate to rush towards an answer here. The question requires research.
In the field.
Continue reading John R. Campbell’s “SCOPE” on terrain.org.
