The dive

It is always good to have an excuse to immerse myself in the forest, under the trees, and isolate myself from the unbearable cynicism of our political system, now that the elections amplify it. The excuse is that the dead leaves run up and down my street, like groups of small people demonstrating because of the cold of the bare hackberry trees in the square. This means that soon I will have to light a fire in the hearth, and I will need twigs to light it.

Going to get the car I run into my neighbor, who is an old man. “There are no mushrooms,” he warns me. “Have you already been?”, I reply. “My son. I have to be careful, because if I fall…” “But you carry your mobile, right?” “I don’t want a phone. Look. I’ve had seven heart attacks and a tumor, and now I have a pacemaker. If they see that I’m late, let them look for me”.

When I arrive at Pedralta, I find that dying in the forest from a bad fall or the charge of a wild beast, from a sudden death that would leave me no time for pain, only for the impact, would not be a bad end. November is a good month, with this humble light that passes on its knees beneath the trees and clothes the forest in a layer of cold, bright glass. Every leaf I step on breaks as if it were glass. It is intimate even to explain it. The light has eaten the noises, only a robin remains that I do not see and communicates with me in a Morse code that it lets out through its beak as if the forest had a little hole through which it is losing air. From every leaf falls the shadow of a leaf onto the dry leaf at the foot of the cork oak, from every branch a shadow settles onto a twig on the ground, from every pine cone on the pine falls a shadow onto a pine cone on the ground.

The light gives each leaf a different and precise green, and weaves everything with living shadow. Each tree is as if the earth were raising a finger. Each bush is a volcano in a slow eruption, spitting out branch and leaf imperceptibly. Tall, personified heathers are the most delicate plant in the forest, now with the tiny, bell-shaped lilac flower. Strawberry trees with hanging cherries, gorse and brambles, a sea of leaf scales, the cork oaks with arms open, like castaways…

I pick up little logs from the ground and fill my bag with twigs and roots, gray and polished like the bones of an ossuary. At the foot of a pine tree, I find a deposit of dry pinecones, opened like skulls, with the tips of their wooden petals coated in resin, ideal for burning. I don't know if I will get lost today, I don't rule it out; it is a pleasure when you get lost in the woods and you are far from trails and paths and suddenly you cannot move because the dry heather and the brambles have kidnapped you, and you have to fight them, claw your way through them, and negotiate with them, and you don't know how, but you will end up returning home.