Alexandra Schaefers

It’s 80 degrees as if summer already. I’m on the Lower MacLeay, one of the most popular trails in Forest Park. When I lived in the neighborhood I walked its length almost daily and was familiar with every section. The place where the creek runs along a wide gravely shore just a tad lower than the trail. The place a small green pool forms between narrow banks. The spot flanked by a high rock wall that’s covered in ferns. The stretch with a wide, flat rock in the middle.

Today I feel the same deep familiarity and utter strangeness with this trail as when seeing an ex. There are plenty of landmarks I recognize but they are interrupted with unfamiliar foliage, reconstructed bridges and obscured views. I feel like a tourist by the time I cross Cornell.

As I walk up the hill I feel suddenly and viscerally at home. It’s rush hour. I can hear the constant roar of traffic on the road below but I am filled with peaceful belonging.

I wonder about home. Do we have a preordained place we belong despite any roots we have set down elsewhere? Is our birthplace our only true home that we shirk off in the name of progress? Or do we create home wherever we care enough to get involved, to fall in love with the place and not just our doings?

The latter seems logical. Yet having spent four years in Multnomah Village, another ten working there, having walked all over its streets and parks feeling deep affection for its forested beauty I still feel like a traveler. Do I simply need another 4 years? Maybe I need to buy a house here to be welcome, what with all the “Stop Rezoning” signs around. I believe we can preserve the uniqueness of our neighborhoods while allowing housing for people of all incomes to be built but its a touchy issue for many.

I pass the Cumberland Trail which reminds me of my first love. I know a lot of people don’t think Sasquatch exists but I’m pretty sure I dated him. I never asked, I just assumed that as cameras became more prevalent he shaved, moved into a basement studio in the West Hills of Portland and got a job in a medical office. He’s a sensitive soul, maladapted for city life but he loved to wander in the woods as much as I so we got a long for a bit.

We met on this trail and would take the Cumberland from his old street into the park for our walks.

I hike to the Upper MacLeay then sit on a bench admiring the gentle way the Oregon grape plants on the slope move in the breeze. I listen to an Orange-crowned Warbler, juncos, jays, and Pacific Wrens all making their distinct songs the way each plant along the tail has its own distinct shapes of leaves.

When I think back to my most innocent self, home is where there are bluebells, daffodils, rhodies and hydrangea bushes, Doug fir, White Oak and Big Leaf Maple. There are the songs of robins, Red-winged Blackbirds, Bob White Quail, jays, flickers, nuthatches and chickadees. But this feeling of belonging makes me want to fit somewhere on a molecular level.

I consider the Chinook, the Cowlitz, the Atfalati who were violently forced from this land. Even though their molecules, and the molecules of the place, are one in the same. It seems disrespectful to dwell on these lofty questions, to want stolen land to be my fated place. So being the descendant of settlers I’ll have to settle for the old adage home is where the heart is.

Sasquatch was not good with money and often predicted future homelessness for himself. Every so often I check the internet to make sure he’s still alive. He doesn’t share his data the way the rest of us do. The first time all I found was a marathon finish time buried in the local paper. Since he loves to run, it was enough.

This is my first time at Riverview Natural Area. It is like a neglected patch of woods behind someone’s house—growing over with ivy, crisscrossed with ill-planned trails. I expect to see a few tree-houses and forts but they’re absent. At least the city took the time to number the trails and mark them with laminated paper stapled to stakes.

I feel like a neglected patch of woods myself, overgrown with the desire to not feel my own reality after heartlessly severing a six-year friendship because it housed an on-and-off romance that kept me from getting on with life.

It’s nice to be out under the trees even if everything seems unremarkable in the light of my mood. I cross a log so wide I just sit on it and swing my legs over. I stand up to find a big, wet spot of fresh bird poop on my camel-colored corduroy skirt. This would normally be funny. A bird-lover is eventually going to meet with bird excrement, it’s required. But it’s squishy and I feel oddly embarrassed about walking the trails and riding my bike home with a poop spot on my skirt, as if people will know and assume it’s my own.

I pour most of my water bottle out while trying to rub the debris out of the soft ribbing in my skirt then keep walking, unconcerned that I might now look like I peed on myself.

The trail starts to head steeply downward toward Macadam and I consider that I just rode my bike up this same slope through the cemetery, that I had to rest a few times along the way and that I may not be happy arriving at the bottom to have to climb all the way back up again.

I turn around, resigned to an unremarkable walk getting acquainted with a new place. Getting up to date on my requisite encounters with bird poop. Doing the best I can to to reckon with the edges of emptiness around a pain in my heart that will slowly fade in the recognition that the hardest way isn’t always the most noble.

The scent of Magnolia blossoms draws me along the trail into their grove. The blossoms form colored clouds around their trunks and layer against each other and the green adding a murky aliveness to the quivering air as oxygen molecules shift to make room for the bursting buds and rain droplets.

One crow forages alone at the edge of a large grassy slope punctuating the intense green. When I look down the trail I see flashes of other crows slipping between the trees. The cloud cover deepens their black feathers so they drip through the woods like oil.

I sit on a bench reaching into the lace of bird song for the familiars: scrub jays, yellow warblers, dark-eyed juncos, spotted towhees, crows. A woman walks past so engrossed in her phone her steps seem suspended. I do not exist in her attention even peripherally and for a moment I feel how a forest creature might hiding in its own stillness watching the brash world of humans pass.

The rain drops become larger as I write in my sketchbook so I get on the trail again and head for the picnic shelter.

A spotted towhee darts across the trail from one brushy cover to another. It is so funny to watch birds run even in situations where flight would be unwieldy. I feel as though my whole life is the same sort of comic but necessary dash so I stop to photograph the rusty hues of dead salal leaves and draw a few buds from the spray of spring twigs along the trail.

A loud truck rumbles down Burnside and I feel aquatic in this dense atmosphere, snuggled on all sides by the viscosity of ions exchanging—green things sending ripples of freshness across the air as they turn light and water into fiber.

I came here to admire magnolia blossoms. What do I remember about them anyway? How delicate and soft the petals were even on blossoms larger than my hands.

I get to the shelter but it’s almost time to go.

I want every moment to be this good and decide there’s no reason today can’t be the day everything changes. All I have to do is stop minding my frustrations—to let them fuss like small children while I dwell in beauty unimpressed with their complaints.

A junco flies in and hops around the rivets of the shelter support. Another lands on the trash and peers into its dark opening. He sees nothing of interest and flies off.