A Favorite Spot

        On a walk close to where I live, I stop at a particular turn of the trail, one of my favorite spots.

        It's a strange place to be a favorite spot. The path through a deep, fairy-tale forest ends abruptly at an old logging road, ending just as abruptly the fairy-tale sense of lost-in-the-wilderness, with a civilization-as-devastation sense of invasion. I move from solitude to a sense of encroachment, even though my solitude is uninterrupted; from quiet to noise, even though it is as quiet on the road as it was in the forest. There is no view, just a dense tangle of young trees in front of the deeper forest of older trees. There is nothing to catch my breath with its beauty, no huge, centuries-old tree, no distant snow-capped mountain, no bed of wildflowers. But I love this spot.

        Here is the only cottonwood tree, as far as I know, in this forest, and I have walked through miles of this forest. It is spindly and ragged with a thin trunk and indifferent branches, but I love it for its unusualness. I didn't recognize it as a cottonwood because it doesn't produce cotton, the fluff that floats through the air every summer where cottonwoods line the road. But I hadn't known that cottonwoods come in male and female and that the male cottonwoods don't produce fluff.

         The cottonwood marks the entrance of the path into the woods for me on my return. I can easily pass the turn-off and walk a mile or more down the road except for the cottonwood raising its different-leaf head into the air, patiently waiting for me to lift my deep-in-thought head and recognize it at the corner of the path. Its leaves hang loosely on its branches, not quite as dangly as aspen leaves but not as tight as, say, alder or oak leaves. In autumn they scatter over the ground in spades, shaped like the suit on playing cards and colored deep yellow with brown veins, each as different as snowflakes, one more yellow at the bottom and brown on the tip, one more brown with yellow veins, one with wide brown veins, one with narrow yellow veins, each a variation of Escher fish-to-birds fades. On the wet ground they glisten with deep, gorgeous color. In the house their bright autumn colors fade immediately into blunt, dull beige.

         The other trees here are the ordinary denizens of this forest, but it is the great variety I can identify, without moving a foot to either side, that endears this spot to me. Douglas fir, white fir, incense cedar, Ponderosa pine, sugar pine, willow, canyon live oak, madrone, Oregon ash, and, of course, the cottonwood – here they all are. The only thing missing is the black oak, which I know is just beyond sight in the woods I've walked through. There's no Port Orford cedar here, either, but that tree grows only in particular places, not far from here, but not on this particular hillside.

            But why should I talk about what's not here? What is here is what elevates my spirit. The five different kinds of evergreens growing in one small space remind me that the Siskiyous have the largest variety of evergreens of any place on earth. They are so dense in this spot I have to attune my eye to detail to distinguish between them: a Ponderosa pine growing through the branches of a cedar, a sugar pine just beyond it and two little flat-needled white firs in front of it. The Douglas fir is distinguishable for its upright branches. The canyon live oak makes a shiny-grey canopy among the conifers The deciduous trees already stick bare branches into all that dense green.

           Here, if I stop and look – really look, separating one tree from another with my eye – I am enriched by what we so easily these days call diversity. Standing here, looking, I feel the truth of today's cliché about the need for diversity. So much richness in this one small spot on the earth – and so much more that I don't even know is there, the insects and fungi and smaller plants. It is enough to fill the heart with gratitude.