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2022 The Northern Route – Gotland Archipelago

Robin — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 13:30:12 +0000

8 October: I was in Stockholm for three days then rented a car and drove south to catch a ferry to Visby on Gotland Island, where I am now. Except for the day in the forest and canoe while in Helsinki it begins to look like Nature has receded in my itinerary considerably since the trip along Norway’s west coast. I blame myself for not paying enough attention during the months before I committed to this itinerary. That time was dominated by house buying and selling and then moving to Texas and already now having decided it was the wrong move and preparing to buy and sell again and return to California, and all of that after a two-year trip delay due to Covid. So, I was distracted and I’m sure I thought that just being in these countries would in itself be a rich experience. Turns out that was largely right but there’s no question that if I’d insisted on more time in natural settings, I’d have been happier. I enjoyed Stockholm for its abundance of old architecture, which I admire immensely, and one day I took a boat excursion to view the archipelago, the constellation of islands and peninsulas flaring east of the city for many miles and many of them inhabited. The contrast of those suburbs to the conventional ones I passed leaving the city is tremendous and if I were to move to Stockholm there’s no question which I’d choose to live in. But I was in the midst of crowds just about everywhere and between that and absent Nature, I missed some of what these countries had to offer.

Photo by Michal Lawrenin on Unsplash

Thoughts From My Journal – Stillwater II

Dr. Brestrup — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 13:30:04 +0000

11-17: Yesterday Twig and I walked what’s called the Canyon Trail (at StillWater Cove) along the creek eastward to its terminus at private property. (The distinction between a canyon and a valley is, even in dictionaries, very loose, which allows plenty of room for privately tinged definitions. I tend to think of canyons as rougher kinds of land and generally larger or deeper than valleys, so Grand Canyon fits very well whereas Grand Valley wouldn’t do. Yosemite Valley could easily have been Yosemite Canyon owing to its depth and vertical walls, but its softness [smooth granite, abundance of tall trees] makes valley fitting; habituation to the name surely plays a part as well. As often with language, I also trust my senses, particularly ear and eye, and some “elongate depressions of the earth” just feel/look/sound like a canyon or valley. This “Canyon” feels far more like a valley to me, but in deference to tradition I will grudgingly accept canyon.) I estimate the vertical drop from rim to creek as close to 200’ and most of the redwood at 100’ or so tall; it’s also a rather narrow canyon although it opens some as it moves away from its mouth into the sea, its sides clothed in downed trees, bushes, a few lower story trees, and dense fern. Our first day here the atmosphere was thick fog but yesterday had turned to bright sun. In both cases it was dark with shade along the trail and throughout. As second growth the trees are about the same height with little to obstruct the view through the forest except boles as the canyon widens. Its feel is of both mystery and foreboding, and its aura dramatically beautiful—I cannot imagine any way the space of this place could be more so, nothing could embellish, no improvement possible. I imagine the land, the trees and the ferns, happy in their life here with much comingling of roots with each other and with fungi, moist even during dry times, soil rich with fallen matter and indigenous creatures of all sorts, mostly unseen. It’s quiet, no more sound than a couple of woodpeckers and creek gurgling as it flows toward reunion with ocean mother a half mile downstream. For a century or more the canyon seems to have been left undisturbed; I hope it remains that way for as long as it can be. Its happiness depends on it.
No, I have no problem calling it a happy landscape. I’ve been in unhappy ones and the difference is unmistakable.

Photo from Unsplash

Thoughts From My Journal – Stillwater Cove

Dr. Brestrup — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 13:30:49 +0000

11-15: I walk the trail out of the campground [on the Pacific coast now at Still Water Cove a hundred miles north of San Francisco] and can make a left when I reach the valley bottom and find myself in a small cove a quarter mile to the west. A right takes me along a creek into redwood forest and fern-covered slopes to the top. I always want to speak of the beauty of such places but realize there’s a quality that precedes and encompasses beauty—what I can only call presence. In this case it’s an especially powerful presence owing to its comprehensive and coherent unity, the creek running with water from recent rains and lined with great second growth redwood and fir and the ubiquitous fern. In one remarkable spot there’s what looks like the ancient stump of a truly giant redwood out of which a half dozen or more hundred-foot progeny reach skyward. Part of presence is autonomy: This is an area that takes care of itself, that knows what’s needed and what belongs and that restored itself after the logging from the 19th or early 20th century. With all of this, how can there not also be great beauty of the sort that stops me in my tracks when I enter the trail and then proceed slowly downward to the creek. If there were sun it would still be darkly shaded and with today’s heavy fog it feels somewhere between foreboding and enticingly mysterious in its green-gray obscurity. The kind of place that evokes meditation and gratitude.

Photo by Matthew Jackson on Unsplash