Just like mountains make their own weather, forests concoct their own atmosphere… from vibrant cacophonies to spooky silences… the air resplendent with myriad aromas… the earth absorbing what’s above and exuding what’s below… in a sense forests seem to imbibe behaviours akin to animals more than plants, with their canvas of mortality much bigger than any fauna, or even flora, making their passage through time seem measured, ironing over all the tumult inside…

For all the stasis on the surface, there is a bloodbath going on beneath the terra firma… especially among the trees, who unlike other plants, span centuries instead of seasons… species look to exert dominance, hoarding sunlight, caching water, forging fungal alliances… like the cryosphere, the wheels of time in a forest grind at a pace excruciatingly slow for those with a relatively transient existence, yet like that fable, slow and steady trundles over the line when it comes to the marathon of life, long after the opponent has ceased to exist, and returned to the elements…

What piqued the rumination was a small patch of forest, a grove rather, that stood out from the rest of the canopy that dotted the sloping meadows as we walked into the higher reaches of the Supin River valley enroute to Bali Pass, one of those landscapes where forests and meadows overlap as the former begins to relent to the elements and pass the baton… a short spell of monsoon showers had washed the scenery clean… and while the rest of the landscape was a sprightly shade of green, this small thicket stood in stark contrast, brooding and silent…

There was a sense of intrigue, an eeriness to it that drew one towards its folds, and after lunch I duly set off to enquire… turned out ‘twas a small rockfall that the woods had embosomed… who knows how many painstaking decades, or even centuries that would have taken… the perimeter was all conifers but when it came to overpowering the boulders, ‘twas the deciduous who’d taken the punt, twisting and turning into all sorts of gnarly shapes to firmly park their roots…

This looked like an arboreal war, coniferous versus deciduous… weaving a way around the rocks, one could not help but wonder about the constant skirmishing that was happening under the ground, as these species, and even individual trees, squabbled over water and nutrients… while slow and hardly detectable by the human disposition, the pace at which all of this was happening might still exceed that of our judicial systems… a silent chuckle at the satirical epiphany in the wilderness, standing upon a stone that refused to roll and hence ended up gathering moss…

The fungi and the microbes are the real kingmakers here, one muses… most likely branching out for miles and miles underground, they are the intermediaries, brokering exchanges of bare necessities, eliciting commissions in return, a symbiosis playing out quietly in the background, an accumulation over eons… wood wide web maintaining the continuum over countless cycles of life and death…

Of avian activity there was surprisingly not much, maybe the time of the day or just that they were deeper inside… with all the zigzagging and trampling of loose twigs that had to be undertaken to traverse through, stalking the odd call wasn’t easy… I did stumble upon a blue whistling-thrush that was standing on one leg, a behaviour I hadn’t seen with this bird before, and a Himalayan woodpecker strutting along the moss, picking up grub…

But what was most intriguing was the distinct ambience that the grove had… while the meadows were sparkling after the rain, the trees were doling out melancholy… silent, dark… as if the decades spent fretting over survival had taken their toll… for behind their stoic masks, trees are an agglomeration of silent storms brewing within…

The sun was depositing itself into the horizon as a flock of sheep rolled in, ready to decimate the flowery meadows that were bursting around the seams of the woods, breaking the pervading silence of the mountains with their short jabs of jingling bells… which brought about an end to my reverie, and one duly wound their way back to the camp, beckoned by the promise of a warm cup of tea and snacks…

Musing on forests, Devsu Thatch, Uttarakhand