RAINFOREST

I’m a prairie girl besotted by BC’s old-growth forests. My husband and I just returned from a few days on Vancouver Island, where we walked the rainforest trail near Ucluelet, following along a wooden slatted path raised above the ground and wondering at the mystical beauty. My dreams are now full of cedars and hemlocks and firs, bark wrinkled with the deep furrows of many centuries, branches sleeved in velvet moss and draped with tangled vines, trunks encircled with climbing, sun-seeking creepers. Stepping in and out of the dappled shadows amongst the towering giants humbled me. The forest floor was crisscrossed with fallen trunks, overgrown with ferns and mistletoe, veiled in green–everything a moist haze of living green so luminous it shone as though giving off light itself. Sounds were muffled and subtle–the plink of a raindrop on a waxy leaf, the far-off cough of a raven, wind whispering mischievously in the treetops far above. And oh! that earthy, mulchy scent pervading everything–a mixture of cedar chest and flower garden.  It was magical. I need to return soon.