A splash over the bridge’s living root railing launches me up out of my asana. I am barefoot and naked. The beads of river water play among my pores, so I flow forward filled with apprehension and longing. The ancient stepping-stones are partially submerged in dark soil, leaves, fungus, bacillus, and cilia. The ball of my foot feels the chill of the smooth rock. My next foot feels the spongy release of humus on either side of my arch. I grip the railing and tiny aerial roots twine my wrist. Bark teases my palms. I begin to trot, hopping from stone to stone. The bridge contains me like a basket, and its sway says, “Move on.” So I do, through the threshold.

It is dark in the jungle, in the ocular sense of shadow under the arboreal canopy, but also in the tactile mythic sense of daemons, the source of inspiration, and perhaps also demons, the fiendish succubi. I walk forward and the path curves. I hear a low hum of air conversing with the cellular musk of a million plants. I am in a rain forest. Cacao fruit flashes red. Banana fronds reveal swaths of yellow. Coconuts jiggle like big green billiard balls. Star fruit shimmer. I reach out and run my finger down a broad leaf in front of me. It feels sticky on one side and furry on the other. I wonder if it likes to be stroked. I see an iridescent yellow coil in the groove where the leaf meets its stem. My hand and torso instinctively recoil. It is a yellow eyelash pit viper, sleeping its day away. I shake a bead of sweat from my forehead.

A bright red Heliconia, ginger’s sister and banana’s cousin, lights the path ahead so I continue forward. A hummingbird whizzes away from the orange-tipped blossom up into the canopy, so fast it leaves a wake of air. My eyes try to follow it but instead alight on a nest, hanging as peaceful as a hammock between branches of an almond tree. Abruptly a toucan swoops dawn, clutches the nest with its talons. The hummingbird zips away as the toucan’s huge red and green beak rips out tendrils of woven twigs that fall around me like dry rain. When it breaks open a hole, the bird reaches deep inside the nest and pulls out a chick. Swallows it. Then another. Swallows it. And then another. Howler monkeys rumble and toss almond shells onto my path in a drumbeat of disapproval. I now sweat so profusely I can’t separate my skin from the humid air or my smell from the scent of sloth scat.

I am afraid of demons in the form of venomous reptiles, alligators with razor teeth, or army ants that could swarm me and devour me in the lust of battle, especially now that light is waning in this barely day-lit dome. I catch a movement in my peripheral vision. I turn but nothing is there. Something brushes my other side. Nothing there. Inside me two surges arise with the same power as the river: laughter and tears. I know who the apparition is: my daemon, and I don’t want to leave her just yet. There seems to be no room for her in the cacophony of everyday human life. I want to meet my source. I need to meet her. I cross my hands across my stomach to hold in a sphere of emotions pulsing like a fleshy organ, hot with blood on the inside. I drop to my knees, forgetting ants and snakes and reptiles. I am no longer inside my body but participating in a soothing, washing tumble of coconuts, cacao, bananas, pale green star fruit. I’m rolling in fruit of the jungle, fruit of my body, inside and out. I laugh wildly.

When my mind’s eye clears of the flood of sweet color and my core’s heat subsides, I see one plant on the ground next to me: the demon-flower, basket of the devil. The tubular blossom looks like pale sick animal flesh. The leaf-lid slowly rises, revealing the maw. I hear the buzz of its prey and watch a tiny hairy fly pause in front of me. I see the miraculous thousand eyes in the one eye that scans my face. What will compel it: the diluted sweat of me or sumptuous nectar in the basket? It makes a choice and aims for the death trap. I suddenly care for the fly. No, I mutter and reach out my hand to save the insect. Too late. The bug slips into the demon-flower pool and its fate is sealed.

I cry for the fly as I crawl on my belly back towards the circle of light that marks the opening to the river and the bridge. Back in my land of strife, my own devil’s basket, how will I translate these voiceless phonemes of my encounter? The river, the fruit, the toucan, the howlers, the yellow eyelash, the demon-flower, the fly? The only way I know. I hear with my ears. I see with my eyes. I feel with my skin. And I am story.

I cross the tree that is a path. It is raining again and root tendrils pass me as they grow the living bridge.

There comes a point on a long hike when both beginning and end seem far away in both time and distance, when walking in the wilderness becomes what you do. ~ Chris Townsend

SANTA FE/TAOS WOMEN’S WILDERNESS BACKPACKING TRIP

Distance: 100 miles * Moderate to Strenuous * Maximum 8 women backpackers

$500

IMAGINE/PREPARE/EXPERIENCE/DISCOVER/BECOME

IMAGINE walking 100 miles through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains between two of Northern New Mexico’s premier outdoor adventure destinations, Santa Fe and Taos. Follow winding trails, cross pristine creeks, make eye contact with wildlife, and camp under the Milky Way.

PREPARE for your adventure. You will be provided with a training schedule, gear list, maps, personal communication with leaders, and an e-book of Backpacker’s Ultra Food, full of how-to backpacking food planning.

EXPERIENCE a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory journey as co-leaders Theresa Ferraro and Cinny Green provide all their dedication, expertise, and talents to create an exceptional walk through wilderness.

DISCOVER quiet, creativity, strength, community as well as the source of personal and planetary wellbeing.

BECOME an intrepid woman. Join this special group of women on a true wilderness journey through New Mexico’s vast and beautiful Santa Fe and Carson National Forests.

With each step, you become more solid, As you become more solid, you are more free. ~Thich Nhat Hanh

JOIN EXPERIENCED LEADERS

Theresa Ferraro is a National Park Service Ranger, biologist and professional herbalist. Theresa has spent the better part of thirty years dedicated to natural resource education and research in National Parks, Forests and Wildlife Refuges throughout the United States.   She is an experienced backpacker who has trekked in Alaska, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, California, and Virginia. As a National Park Ranger Theresa is deeply knowledgeable about the flora, fauna, and prehistoric cultures of Northern New Mexico. Theresa is certified in Wilderness First Aid and is a licensed Doctor of Oriental Medicine.

Cinny Green is an experienced long-distance backpacker who has trekked in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Scotland. She is a trained Sierra Club hike leader and author of Trail Writer’s Guide and Backpacker’s Ultra Food; Ultra light, Ultra Delicious, Ultra Nutritious One-Pot Backpacking Meals. She regularly leads individuals and groups on trail-writing hikes that unveil the connection between creativity and wild nature. www.trailwriters.com.   Cinny has received American Heart Association certified CPR training.

Preliminary screening will include:

Personal interview/Health history/Training agreement/Mandatory liability waiver

Contact

Cinny Green: cinny@cinnygreen.com

Theresa Ferraro: tmferraro@hotmail.com

$250 non-refundable deposit

Due March 15, 2012

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.

~ Linda Hogan ~

(Rounding the Human Corners)

You can purchase this book at Amazon

“Nature. Have you wandered a forest, trekked a desert or boated a lake, driven through scenery that left you breathless? Would you love to take that experience and make it live in words? Not just a description of the view, but how it made you feel. How those with you reacted. What of your other senses? Wind in your face, cold mist on your skin? The moan or sigh of a breeze through pine needles. The juice of a wild strawberry flowing over your tongue. Trail Writer’s Guide will be exactly that, your guide to writing your experience.”

If you’d like to learn to trail write, contact me for a day of hiking in the wild!
http://trailwriters.com/trail-writers-guide/storynaturespirit-workshops/

“Cinny Green’s literary awareness allows her to bless the book with quotations that readers will underline and remember. Dedicated and wannabe hikers will be equally captivated, and for the latter a hiker’s and a trail writer’s glossary will provide speedy adjustment to a new language.”

The New Mexico Wilderness Alliance (NMWA) and my good friend, environmental activist Carol Johnson, invited me on this flight above the mesa west of Taos. I in turn called local photographer Ana June to join us and document the round trip passage. We departed from Santa Fe at 8 am, followed the Rio Grande Gorge north, and returned along the west slope of the Sangre de Cristos. Our Lighthawk pilot, Merry Schroeder, flew us so lightly above the Earth that I truly felt like I was a hawk on the wing.

I soon realized we would be flying over my former home on the high desert mesa west of Taos, located just south of the proposed NCA but also embraced by public lands. Like so many colonists of the American West, I had moved there to escape the dis-ease of civilization only to encounter a discomfiting mystery embodied in this abused land. The west mesa palpably throbs with the failures of humans to tame it: such as the crumbing Mormon dam under Tres Orejas, doors banging open in abandoned half-built homes, roads that end in sand dunes. It’s a hard dry place yet you regret begging for rain because, when it finally comes, it bears down on human thumbprints like a sky-born tsunami, consuming roads, walls, roofs, gardens…and then it’s gone, leaving you longing for both less and more.

Of course there are elements that burst the heart: Jicarita Peak, Taos Mountain, Wheeler Peak, and Latir Peak bless the mesa from the west; Ute Mountain calls from the distant north; brave purple spiderworts break through parched soil; at night a universal chorus of lights spins through the Milky Way;  coyote families giggle under a full moon; wafting scents of pinyon sap, juniper berries, and sage cleanse, cleanse the air.

From aloft, even the morning sun is so bright that the land lacks contrast and contour. East of the river, the unprotected landscape is a lattice of dusty roads, isolated homes, and ravaging mines, all there by the grace of money and dreams construed elsewhere. West of the Rio Grande the high desert mesa still seems pristine from 10,000′ feet above the ground. It clearly has been and always will be best suited for wandering and gathering, not taming.

On the ground, pinyon provides firewood and nuts. Mormon tea will soothe your throat, and prickly pear offers nourishing fruit. Elk and rattlesnakes are wise enough to make it only a seasonal home, leaving behind mere traces of scat or skin. Obsidian chips and potsherds sprinkle these traditional hunting grounds. Rock art maps show the ways in … and out. Let’s do the same: wander in and wander out, leaving only a trace.

Preserving this area as an NCA respects this history of appropriate use and wanderers and gatherers may follow their traditions of hiking, hunting, fishing, rafting, and grazing sheep and cattle. Most importantly, preservation prohibits more roads, mineral extraction, and development. It honors the wonders of ecological fragility, the tenderness of desert, and trusts the miracle of First Nature to emerge again and again despite droughts, deluges, development, and misplaced dreams.

To join our efforts to preserve the Rio Grande del Norte National Conservation Area, support the current campaign of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance.