Poems by Dan Thompson

The Clearing in the Wood

by Dan Thompson

From Canary Fall 2024

Dan grew up near the banks of the Connecticut River under a very active part of the Atlantic Flyway. Still under the Flyway, he now lives near the banks of the Hudson River, adjacent to a legally protected natural area where he is closely surrounded by raccoons, hawks, skunks, woodchucks, deer, and many other wild things.

When I was a young boy, I loved being in wooded areas. I grew up in rural New England, and from the age of six or seven spent a lot of time playing games, alone or with my younger brother, in the small pinewood that lay just beyond my family’s backyard perimeter fence – so much so that nothing felt more natural to me than to be surrounded by trees.

One summer day when I was eleven years old, while walking through a different pinewood in my hometown, I had a singular experience that cannot be chalked up to either fear or ignorance of woodlands – for by that point I had already spent several years playing in wooded areas, some of which were much larger than the one beyond our backyard.

This other pinewood – dense, dark, and difficult to enter – was not as attractive as the one behind our house. Its trees and brush grew very thickly, right up to the edge of the narrow paved road that bounded that side of the wood – the vegetation creating a natural wall that pressed against the road for about five hundred feet, beyond which was a very large empty lot.

This dark wood was nearly impenetrable from the roadside – except for at one spot: Not far from the near end of the pine wall was a naturally camouflaged entrance to a path that I had already used a couple of times during a previous summer to briefly explore that corner of the “dark forest.”

On this day, however, I walked up the road – the dark wood on my right – past the tunnel entrance, until I reached the far corner of the wood, and then turned onto the empty lot. As I walked away from the road, I noticed that the trees on this side of the wood – the side that faced the lot – were generally less thick than those that faced the road; and the further from the road I walked, the less impenetrable the wood. I soon found a clear path between the trees, and decided to see whatever there was to be seen.

To my great surprise and pleasure, I immediately discovered that this part of the wood was far nicer than the part that I had already explored. The pathway I was on was an easy walk – so much so that I soon became somewhat preoccupied as I hustled happily along – the carpet of pine needles completely silencing my footfalls.

And then I came around a bend that topped a gentle rise – my thoughts elsewhere, my eyes focused on the ground in front of my feet – and was stopped cold.

Alarmed, I jerked my head upward, eyes peeled, because I had just heard someone in very close proximity make a sound of surprise, and I expected to see someone only a few feet away – someone who hadn’t expected me.

But there was no one to be seen.

What was to be seen, directly in front of me, and in the midst of an otherwise uniformly wooded area, was a nearly perfectly round clearing, roughly thirty feet across. Around the perimeter were four or five pines – one of them, off to my left, grew upward at a pronounced angle – that were somewhat larger than their nearby neighbors. The clearing was big enough that there was a large open space in the canopy, through which the sun was shining, lighting-up the dead, rusty-brown pine needles on the ground into a fiery orange color – a shaft of sunlight hitting the tree that was leaning away from the circle. It was a striking tableau, as if it were the real-life model for a painted scene, and I was very surprised to see such an inexplicable and attractive spot within what I had always thought of, until that day’s expedition, as an unexceptional and even unattractive pinewood.

However, this entirely unexpected vision was what I saw after my progress had been so abruptly halted. What had stopped me was my immediate and dead-certain feeling that I had just interrupted someone who had been right there ... somewhere. And then, while still in a state of shocked surprise, I heard a quick chuckle of mischievous laughter.

But there was no one to be seen – except for me.

I strongly felt that I was being watched. At first, I was certain that the watching was being done from somewhere near the base of the tilted tree – I couldn’t have explained why I felt that way – but then this “presence” became somehow more diffuse, or even plural.

I just stood there, absolutely spooked – peering around the clearing and beyond, my heart thumping in my chest until it gradually settled down. Nonetheless, I was still so convinced that someone was hiding behind a tree and playing a trick on me that I continued to look around for a bit longer, in spite of the fact that it was clear that none of the trees in the immediate vicinity were big enough or close enough to each other to hide anyone who might be nearby. And then I noticed that the presence had simply evaporated.

Although the whatever-it-was had disappeared, what remained was the arresting visual beauty of the clearing, with its lighted orange floor and the gentle shadows around the perimeter – and this continued to hold me for yet a bit longer because there was something magical about it. And then I had a realization – something that I now think of as a distinctly adult sentiment that I would probably not have expressed in this way at the time: If I crossed over to the other side, I would destroy the moment.

But then the moment destroyed itself – as moments do – and although it was still a pleasant spot, the plain reality was simply that I was standing by myself at the edge of an open area in the middle of the woods.

On the other side were two paths, maybe fifteen or twenty feet away from each other. I crossed the clearing and took the right-hand path, guessing – correctly, as it turned out – that it would lead me to the tunnel entrance at the side of the road; but then I turned around to take one last look back, and was profoundly shocked to realize that I had indeed been to the clearing before, but had approached it from the opposite direction – on the path I was now on. During the earlier expedition (or two) that had brought me to this place, I had not crossed the clearing, but had moved instead to the right, along the perimeter, and then continued on the trail that had been, from my pre-crossing perspective, the left-hand path – a decision that had served to confine to the ugly part of the wood those previous treks. From where I now stood, the clearing was not at all visually striking – nor did it even look particularly round or circular.

Furthermore, as if the simple change of perspective weren’t enough damage done to the vision, a cloud had moved into position overhead during the few seconds between my crossing over and my looking back, strongly punctuating the end of the enchantment, and dealing me a heavy-handed lesson on the value of light and perspective – and also, perhaps, that of the unexpected.

Looking back today at my eleven-year-old self, I’m prepared to admit – in spite of my then-familiarity with wooded areas – that the laughter I heard may well have been only a peculiar birdcall; and the sound of surprise and the “watching presence” nothing more than the reactions of squirrels or other creatures of the wood, invisible to my clumsy human eyes. Nevertheless ...

This was all a long time ago. During the many years since, I have been fortunate enough to be able to do a good deal of traveling, one result of which has been that I have had the chance to see many of the world’s greatest cathedrals from the inside. However, none of those mightily impressive structures have ever moved me in the way that that natural chapel, lit up in the dark wood, did on that distant day when I was a kid. Nor has anything ever grabbed me by the heart and stopped me in my tracks in the same way that the whatever-it-was did ... before I crossed over, choosing the right-hand path, on my way out of childhood.