Scrubby Birch and Balsam

No place is a place until it has found its poet – Wallace Stegner

Some places belong to us before we know what they are building.

We all source from somewhere.

Mine is the woods of scrubby birch and balsam in northeast Minnesota. No ranger station. No trailhead sign. Just wet grass most of the year, and paths a kid wore in by walking them enough times to see what waited over the next rise.

I recently went back. Walking those tree lines as a grown man, I felt like the dorky, nerdy kid I used to be, scrambling up the rises to look over the other side. This time I understood what the kid could not. His wonder was building something. It was building the man who would spend his shattered adult life on trail, trying to heal.

These are not the redwoods. Not the signature palms of the southeast. Not the towering pines of the Pacific Northwest. These scrubby birch and balsam reflect the whole idea of Hike and Heal.

These are mine.

For Too Long I Made the Place and the People the Same Thing

We all source from families too.

For too long, I made the place and the people one and the same. The woods and the family fused in my head. So when the people went wrong, I exiled myself from the ground along with them. I stayed away and called the distance peace.

But the people are the people. The place is the place. Confusing the two kept me gone.

When the chance came to return, I did not want to. Talking myself out of it would have been easy. I went anyway. Obligation got me into the truck. Something older took over once I started moving. By the time I reached the tree line, dread had become something simpler.

I wanted to go see.

The Ground Doesn't Ask What You Produced

I walked the paths with Megan, and the trees came back one at a time.

Not as scenery. So many specific trees carried a piece of me from those years. Walking among them, I started rewriting the story I have told myself about who I am and where I came from.

The people I thought I was going back to reconnect with gave me little. That is the truth. The place gave me something I did not expect. A renewed excitement. A sense that I mattered, that owed nothing to anyone's approval.

I brought Megan into it. She had only heard these woods in stories. This time she stood in them. She got the sights, sounds, and the air of the place that made me.

The relationship I keep with my own ground changes what I bring into every other relationship. Exile that ground, and I have less of myself to hand anyone. Return to it, and something in me becomes available again.

The Embers

I am still turning this over.

The mind is loud, and sometimes it talks in the wrong direction. It calls the return an obligation, the drive a dread, the whole thing a waste. The body is quieter. It remembers the ground it was formed on.

My body leads. My mind follows.

Maybe there is ground like that in your life too, a place you accidentally abandoned because of who you associated with it.

I did not fix anything up there. The people are what they were. I went back to a stand of scrubby birch and balsam, let the woman I am marrying stand inside it, and drove home lighter than I came.

The trees are still there. I walked back into them.

See you on the trail,

Michael