On Trails by Robert Moor Page B

that you are going somewhere , and are not aimlessly wandering in a circle.” A circular trail, then, is a cruel trick, a breach of logic, almost a kind of black magic.
    A few years ago, my partner and I moved from a small apartment in New York City to a small cabin in British Columbia. Behind our property stands a tall cedar forest, and behind that lie the cold green waters of the Georgia Strait. The cabin often startles visitors when they first see it. Our next-door neighbor, Johnny, a classical guitarist, built it in a fit of modernist whimsy; it looks like two railroad cars stacked one atop the other. The ground floor is made of polished concrete, and the windows are almost the size of the walls. The insulation is scant, the electricity is always cutting out, the garden is plagued with deer, and the nearest supermarket is a twenty-five-minute drive away, but it’s quiet and the air is clean and there are plenty of walking trails nearby.
    At the end of our dirt road, where it joins a bend in the main thoroughfare like a needle in the crook of an arm, there is a little trail leading off into the woods. Johnny informed us that it led to a place the locals call the Grassy Knoll: a soft green tuft atop a rock outcropping over the strait. It’s a lovely perch, they say, to watch the sun set over the mountains of Vancouver Island. However, Johnny strongly advised us against staying that long, for fear we might get lost. “Even I get turned around in there,” he said, “and I’ve lived here for twenty years.” Another neighbor, Corey, told us that he’d once gotten lost while walking in the forest with his infant daughter. When the sun began to set, he felt the first electric touch of panic, an early sign of what psychologists call “woods shock,” or what used to be called simply “bewilderment.” He kept his wits and got out, but as he recounted the story one night around a campfire, I could see the feeling seep up, blackly, behind his eyes.
    Remi and I were not worried. It was just a little provincial park, after all, only five hundred acres. If lost, one need only walk three miles in any direction to hit either the coast or a road. Setting off at about three o’clock, we walked down to the end of our street and ducked through the dark curtain of branches.
    On the other side, the light clouded to the opacity of sea glass. We looked around, blinking, at a temple of riotous decay, evergreen, shade-blue. On the coasts of British Columbia, the prodigious rainfall, sunny summers, and rich soil thrust the trees upward; the taller ones shed their lower branches like the vestigia of a rocket ship. But eventually that which nourishes, topples. The trees fall to the ground quietly, with a huff, and there turn to moist brown crumbs. Everything, everywhere, is furred with moss and bearded with lichen. Slip on a wet root and you will fall, weirdly slowly, through the gray-green air, and the ground will rise up to receive you in its soft heft.
    The trail wasn’t built by the park service—some local do-gooders had apparently cleared it—which meant that it was less legible than it might otherwise be. The only trail markings were the occasional ribbon tied to a branch where the trail skirted a swamp. The paths tended to split and splice. Johnny had given us directions for finding the knoll: turn right at the first T-shaped fork in the path and keep left until you reach the shore. It seemed simple enough.
    When we reached the first fork in the trail, Remi propped a stick up against a tree so we would have a point of reference in case we got lost. We turned right and followed the trail around in a wide arc, chatting happily, until we found ourselves standing at a fork in the path. There, off to the side, was the stick Remi had propped up against the tree. We had gone in a circle. Befuddled, we turned around and set off in the opposite direction this time, and, minutes later,