Forgive Us Our Trespasses

Calling it a vision quest would be insulting, but it’s the closest thing I have to a formal definition of my revelation. At 11:22 a.m. on November 1st, 2020, Neal and I sat down on the rocks near the trailhead and set our individual intentions for the mental journey we were about to embark on. Jordan Pond at Acadia National Park glued time and space together for six hours and allowed us two souls to face our realities in the outside world. 

We sat on the smooth boulders beside the pond and meditated for a few moments. Scanning the horizon, we could see a thick line of muddled green conifers, a few patches of tan and golden birches, and the mounds of earth affectionately named “The Bubbles” across the way. Everything was cast in a dull light, blending any contrasts, as the sky above us held static with dove-gray clouds. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in… and out. Neal and I spoke our intentions aloud to each other: “to find some answers” and “to find Stargirl,” respectively. And with that, we took our communion from the Earth, her body layered in peanut butter and her blood drizzled as honey. 

To a tight-knit community of folks at Multnomah Education Service District Outdoor School, I am known as Stargirl—a name I chose for myself, referencing one of my favorite childhood characters from the author Jerry Spinelli. At Outdoor School, sixth-graders from schools around Multnomah County, Oregon, gather at a campground for a week to learn about plants, animals, water, and soil on field studies taught by high schoolers. At Outdoor School, everyone names themselves. When you choose your own name with intent, you are choosing a new set of expectations for a “new” version of yourself; in this way, Outdoor School was my baptism. But since the pandemic started, there couldn’t be eager campers crowding around a dead fish they found or linking arms to swing each other around during campfire songs or sitting ten to a table and sharing food family-style; there was no Outdoor School, and no Stargirl. For all of my sins of the past year, I’ve had no atonement. I needed to ground myself in the truth I wanted to live, and consecrate my own natural church, so I went to the Trail. 

As we walked, a few concepts came to light: first, it felt like we had been on this Trail our whole lives. It felt like purgatory; we were certainly not in the land of the living as we used to know it, but we were not in the land of the dead. Second, I began to understand the concept of time as it related to the Trail. With each new landmark or even just a slight change in the terrain of the Trail, I saw myself crossing from one sphere of time and place to the next. Third, when I voiced this revelation to Neal, he added some insight of his own. “Emma,” he said, pausing us in the middle of the Trail and tilting his head back to gaze up at the sky. “We’re in a Dome.” Jordan Pond, we realized, was encased in a Dome of mist, and the Trail was the edge of the Dome. We were two ragtag souls in a snow globe, walking aimlessly forever because there was nowhere else to go. To our right was the Pond, slate gray and lapping at the rocky shoreline. Trees and rockslides edged the Pond, with two flat areas that spilled out into wetlands and smaller streams where the beavers dwell. To our left were more trees and the side of the mountain. 

We crossed that second bridge, and Neal gasped: “I’ve been here before.” He quickly scanned for a subtle path leading off the Trail, into the woods. Just thirty meters or so from the Trail, shrouded by moss and lichen-covered trees, stood a very special individual. This was the Tree, later identified as a northern white cedar. From its foundation in the ground, the trunk rises with a lean to the left, then bends right over itself with its trunk curved down like the back of a horse, and then shoots up to regain growth perpendicular to the ground, smaller branches jutting off as the trunk rises. In the dusk of the needled canopy, we found ourselves alone, and quiet, and inquisitive. We smoothed our fingers over her worn back, soft as leather, and traced our fingers over scattered letters knifed in her skin, branded by past wanderers. “So many people have found this Tree to be special,” Neal muttered. We took turns sitting on the Tree and hugging her, conversing with and around her. Like never before, I could feel her, a seemingly inanimate life form, acknowledge my presence—validate it, even. She felt like an aunt I’d never met, but one that I would grow up to be the spitting image of. We thanked her for her time and continued on.

As it turns out, the Trail did have an end point. We reached the trailhead again at about four o’clock or so and made our way to the van out of instinct. But something felt unfinished; even though we had “completed” the hike, we were just getting to the peak of our afternoon trip in Acadia. 

“Emma,” Neal said, taking a sip of water from our bottle. “We need to go back out there.” 

“The Trail hasn’t ended yet,” I coughed, choking as the cold liquid tensed my throat. With that, we dug through his bins to find some headlamps and another beanie, bundled up once more, and then set off for loop two, more excited than the first time around. 

The Trail welcomed us back from our brief intermission, then led us through conversations and critical analyses and rhetorical debates that presented themselves in the landscape and in our joint mind. However, we found that the Dome was susceptible to daylight savings and the rotation of the Earth along its axis, and the light began to fade. Shadows began to blend in with their surroundings, and the Trail beneath our feet seemed to reflect an earthy darkness of its own, layers of mycelium feeding on nitrogen and microscopic insects churning the rich, dense soil. When it got too dark to see the steps ahead of us, we turned on our mechanical wonders to guide us and walked without talking much. 

I fumbled with this amalgamation of metals and glass—the concept of a smartphone meant nothing in the Dome—turning its flashlight off. The moon had peeked its face out from the mass above us, spreading its iridescence thin over the Pond and Bridge where we stood. Weeks later, the conversation feels almost futile, but of course it meant everything in the moment. I cannot remember the words we spoke, but I can remember this: the feeling of our foreheads pressed together as we talked, the sound of waves growing louder as the wind picked up and toyed with my hair, the dewy cold on my cheeks, and the churning black hole where my friend’s face ought to be. As we began to tremble with our somber, raindrops fell onto our shoulders, sweeping in the wind to soak our legs, backs, and chests. 

We shook ourselves out of that trance and stumbled onto the Trail again, to have a fourth, fifth, and sixth revelation about the landscape: the Trail will end when we need it to, the Dome has begun to push us out, and, most hauntingly, the Dome has its limits. With our flashlights guiding the way, I brought mine to scan the woods to our left every now and then. Those woods were not in the Dome. Depth was lost in the stands of trees, flicking out its omniscient might in the snap of a twig, the creek of a limb, or the chitter of what I could only hope to be a squirrel. While Neal and I liked to think we created our own little temple to worship in, we came to see that it was a temporary dwelling, one that we were not in control of. 

We came to an opening in the treeline to our right, a doorway of cedars leading us to a rocky beach with a view of the Pond. Neal and I took the cue and walked through it, shutting our flashlights off once more in order to fully immerse ourselves in the scene. The rocks beneath my feet were rounded, differing in size and aspect, making standing on them an activity of its own. The rain had weakened, now feeling like an extension of the mist that hung above us, and was encroaching downwards. The darkness took shape, as the treeline across the Pond rose and fell in mountains of black treetops, softened through the mist and distance. The sky above and Pond below shared the same hue that spilled into the blackness on the horizon, the murkiness and ambiguous coloring reminding me of the cups of water my siblings and I used to rinse paint brushes in as children. The moon had hidden herself, but a beam of incandescent light beckoned to us from the hill across the way. A vehicle’s headlights drove up the incline, following the road that leads out of the park. “They’re not in the Dome,” I said, and Neal agreed. “I wonder where they’re going.” We talked about being able to put ourselves in their car, see the Pond below and the road ahead from their point of view. We watched the headlights disappear into the woods, curving around the hill, and were shut in the dark again. Neal and I toed across the bumpy shore to land on the Trail again and continued on as the rain picked back up. 

Eventually we circled round to the trailhead again before scampering up the hill to sit in the broken-down van and listen to the rain pelt our encasement. We figured that was the Dome telling us to leave. And when we drove up that road, pulsing in second gear with the windshield wipers squeaking, we crossed the border of the Dome and became just two people driving up a hill in a van during a rainstorm.  

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John Muir’s transcendental piece “A Wind-Storm in the Forests” comes to mind upon reflection of my excursion into the woods. He describes each individual species with such care and affection, taking note to capitalize the first letter of their common name like a proper noun: “the Needle Pine, Mountain Pine, Two-leaved Pine, and Hemlock Spruce—are never thinned out… on account of their admirable toughness and closeness of their growth…. The kingly Sugar Pine, towering aloft… while the Silver Firs in most places keep their ranks well together in united strength.”¹ When Neal and I ventured into the Dome, I began to feel what Muir may have felt: the ability to know certain things by name, or at least acknowledge their living presence. The Pond, the Trail, the Bridge, the Tree—these are all beings that we interacted with in the Dome, whether by walking on them, sitting with them, or speaking with them. Creating the Dome and grounding ourselves to the landscape allowed me to form deeper, more spiritual relationships with life than I had originally held. While I didn’t necessarily fulfill a vision quest, I certainly found religion in nature; the Dome and everything inside it was sacred, holy, divine. I grew up Protestant, so the verbiage and structure of my spirituality stems from that introduction. Having this sort of personal connection to something outside the body is crucial to one’s well-being. Research has shown that more religious or otherwise spiritual people are less affected by depression.² Though it’s hard to believe sometimes, there is more to life than our bustling urban centers; nature remains steadfast, patently waiting for its tree-climbers to return after their 3.5 million-year excursion on the ground. 

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1. John Muir, “A Wind-Storm in the Forests,” The Norton Book of Nature Writing, edited by
   Robert Finch and John Elder, W.W. Norton & Company, 2002, 252.
2. Raphael Bonelli, et al., “Religious and Spiritual Factors in Depression: Review and Integration
   of the Research,” Depression Research and Treatment (2012), 10.1155/2012/962860.