Po, Lost in the Woods
Soon after she came to Anchorage, the wanderer everyone called Po decided one evening to camp. In cities she usually slept in her van, but this was a fine summer evening, and her van was stuffy on fine summer evenings. And Anchorage had woods. So she pulled up on the wooded side of a sparsely-housed street, got out her tarp and sleeping bag, and struck off southwards into the trees.
It was a thickly wooded area along the greenbelt that girdled the city — mixed birch and black spruce, mainly, with a scattering of cottonwood along the creek that paralleled the paved bike trail to the south. The woods at this time of year were made denser by lowbush cranberry, horsetail, fireweed too shaded to flower, tall stands of cow parsnip with umbels of tiny cream-colored flowers.
The homeless who camped in these woods stayed deep, hiding from the bike trail and the grassy lawn of the adjacent park, to delay the sweep that municipal authorities would inevitably bring down on them. But the spot she’d picked out was under an old cottonwood between the creek and bike trail. The tree was closely flanked by a three-trunked birch, with plenty of brush and cow parsnip to hide her from the bike trail and footbridge. After she laid out her bed, she slid down the bank. She held her hand over the water for a good half hour, communing with Maarit — love’s eye seeing her clearly, hand outstretched on the other side of the waters that had taken her — before climbing into her sleeping bag to listen to the whispers of leaves in the breeze, the creek’s liquid voice. It was just after solstice, far in the north, and the sun lingered late.
She was beginning to drift when she was startled awake by whispers that did not come from water or wind. She raised herself on her elbow to take a look around, but there was no one. She lay back down, squirming to avoid a root that wanted to jut into her shoulder, and was about to close her eyes again when she saw them. Two of them, no taller than the shrub whose leafy branches they’d parted to spy on her. She stared at them a long moment, and they stared back. She blinked, and they were still there. Then they let go the branches, and were gone.
Had she really seen them? Or was it just her muzziness from being nearly asleep? Except she didn’t feel muzzy — hadn’t, when she was looking at them.
Maahinen, the word came to her — Maarit, years ago, telling her Finnish folklore. Earth-dwellers. But these were the lands of the Dena’ina — did they have a name for the little people too? Not knowing, maahinen stuck for now — it seemed suitable for beings who, while small, looked nothing like elves or gnomes or fairies, at least not the children’s book depictions she’d seen of them — pointy ears, warty noses, Tinkerbell wings.
Earth-dwellers, earth-beings. Maahinen. Why not? She laughed to herself. Just her imagination, they must be. She lay on her back and gazed up into the many arms of the old grandma cottonwood, leaves dark against the twilight sky, and fell asleep.
* * *
Late twilight followed by early dawn — the sun was long up when she woke to the clicks and whirrs of a passing bike’s gears. The short nights and long days of northern summer were still an amazement to her. She got up, squatted behind some brush for a pee, stuffed her sleeping bag in its stuffsack, folded her tarp, ran her hand in thanks down the coarse furrowed bark of the cottonwood that had sheltered her, and set out for her van.
Crossing the bike trail, “Good morning,” she said to a couple of passing joggers, but they ignored her. She shrugged and went on, thinking of coffee.
And on. She wasn’t sure how long before she realized she’d been a long while stepping over roots, around branches, and getting nowhere. And the sun was in the wrong place. She didn’t know these woods well, but she did know east from west, north from south — it was in her bones. How’d she get turned around? She faced north again, and walked, but the street where she’d left her van still didn’t appear.
She couldn’t be lost, could she? How? These woods weren’t that big. North was the street where she’d parked, south was Chester Creek, west was the park with its mown lawn and gazebos and picnic tables, and east was C Street, a busy road — but she couldn’t find any of them. She saw a blue something behind a tangle of brush — a tarp — and reached the small homeless camp it belonged to, but the two people in camp ignored her greeting. “Hello?” she said again, “I seem to be lost.” They didn’t answer. Didn’t they hear her?
Later, her hand held over the waters of the lagoon, she told Maarit the story. The forest covered you, Maarit said — if say was the right word for how her words came through the waters, for how Po’s words reached her. You remember what I told you. You remember, or you wouldn’t have found your way out by yourself.
Yes, she had remembered. Metsänpeitto, another Finnish word Maarit had taught her, forest cover, explaining how the metsänhaltija, the forest guardian, would hide a cow or horse or a lone human walking in the forest, would fly her to the Other world, where everything was backwards and upside down. Crazy. A farmer searching for his lost cow might sit on a rock to rest, smoking, and later find his cow dead of starvation, the ash of his pipe on its flank. People would get lost for days, unseen by those looking for them, unheard by anyone they called out to.
But Maarit had also told her how to get unlost. So she took off her sweatshirt, turned it inside out, and even put it on backwards, the hood hanging over her chest. She took off her shoes and put them on again, right shoe on left foot, left shoe on right. For good measure she bent down to look backwards between her legs, but her hood flapped down in front of her face. As she began to lift it out of the way she saw, just past her left elbow —
A maahinen. One of the two she’d seen the night before, and forgotten. She looked like a small upside down brown-skinned human with red shirt, blue jeans, and green hair — no, black hair, with a headdress or hat of Canadian dogwood, all green leaves and four-petaled white flowers.
“Speaker-to-water,” the maahinen said, “can we talk?”
“Well…yes, of course,” Po said. Briefly between her legs she caught a glimpse of two upside-down trees before she straightened up and turned to the maahinen.
But the maahinen was gone.
And Po could hear the creek again. And there, right-side up, was the old grandma cottonwood, and the three-trunked paper birch, and the footbridge, and a guy in a yellow tank top and red track shorts jogging up the bike trail. “Hey,” she called out. He turned his head and saw her. “Hey…?” he said, running in place.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you were someone I knew.” He smiled and continued his run.
What she was sorry for, in truth, was that she’d broken the forest cover before she could hear what the maahinen had to say. Speaker-to-water, she’d named her.
Po stepped up to the cottonwood, ran her hand again over its rough bark, this time in regret. If only she’d not seen the trees through her legs….
Once, after Maarit drowned, Po had thought she’d never again hear what she had to say.
Perhaps the forest would cover her again one day.
Afterword
Metsänpeitto, “forest cover,” refers to a Finnish folk belief that the spirit of the forest (metsänhaltija, “forest guardian”) can hide humans or domestic animals like cows, horses, goats so that they become lost and are invisible to people who are looking for them. Forest cover can also be caused by a maahinen (plural maahiset) — an earth-being — which is a small supernatural being especially associated with forests, similar to elves and gnomes of other peoples’ folklore. Putting clothes on the wrong way or bending down to look backwards through one’s legs are among the ways that lost people can break forest cover. Learn more from the Wikipedia article Metsänpeitto which I’m in the process of improving.
Many cultures have similar beliefs about spirits that protect the forest. According to the Dena’ina Athabaskan people of southcentral Alaska, it’s important to behave with great respect when camping under a tree, especially a cottonwood, or the ch’vala denayi, “tree people” may cause a person harm.