He walked.
He paused by a rotting log to look at tiny mushrooms, delicate as pushpins, with white tops like droplets of milk. He passed a hollow tree, then doubled back to look inside. It was a dark, homey-looking space full of wood chips and seed hulls. It smelled like sawdust. He knelt by a tiny stream flowing down the mountain. A maple leaf, yellow as sweet corn, spun down the current and out of view. He wondered how far it had traveled from its tree. How far would it go?
He arrived at his campsite and found a place to sit and study the view.
Dancer really had given him a gift.
He looked out over the mountains and tried to empty himself of fear and anger.
The Appalachian Mountains. Green knew a few things about them. He knew they were old, perhaps the oldest in the world. Over a billion years old.
Older than land plants.
Older than vertebrate life.
They were old when the dinosaurs awoke and grew to shake the ground. If the mountains thought with a human mind, they would think of warm blood as a very new technology.
But, of course, they didn’t. They didn’t think with human thoughts or mechanisms. They weren’t so limited. What they knew and what they were was not separated by anything so crude as brain cells, as consciousness flashing across nerves like heat lightning.
The acorn was in his hand again.
Green tried to hate the acorn, the way it drew his attention like a solitary headstone on a bare hill. He couldn’t. His hate slid off the smooth brown thing. It was a commonplace object. It was the churning storm that ground away all the comfortable landmarks of his old life.
He set the acorn on a nearby stone, forcing himself to swallow the fear that it would roll away. He withdrew his hand. It sat. Seemingly inert. Looking very much in its proper place.
Hot panic hit him, but he held it up in the cool mountain air and watched it fade like an ember plucked from the fire.
One evening, weeks earlier, he had set that same acorn on his white stone kitchen counter and watched it pick apart the threads of all his choices. On his counter, that little nut looked very out of place.
He pictured the acorn surrounded by his old condo, the way it clashed with everything in ways that eclipsed simple aesthetics.
Andthisacorn,thisacorn was not just a token of some distant forest, some impersonal metaphor for a more primal world. No, this acorn was very personal. This acorn arrived packaged in a memory that felt like a fresh injury anytime he acknowledged its existence.
Everything about that acorn felt like an intruder. Yet, it was an intruder that knew his name and spoke a message that wouldn’t be ignored or dismissed. It was an intruder that said,I’m not in the wrong place. You are.
In the days after his not-death and encounter with the giant crow,Green wanted to drink too much. He wanted to toss the acorn out his fifth-floor window, to embrace some comforting excuse about an overworked mind, pop some sleeping pills, and surrender fully to twelve hours of dreamless rest. He wanted to pester the new young couple across the hall, demand to be let into Mr. Reynard’s old home so he could sit in the place his friend had taught him that sorrows are best met in the light of camaraderie.
Except he knew it wouldn’t work. Not the drinking. Not the sleep. Not living for the past. It wouldn’t work because, however painful the memory, he hadn’t imagined it. He hadn’t imagined the crow. He wasn’t imagining the acorn sitting on his countertop, sucking the oxygen from his rooms with its simple existence.
The intruder was already inside. And it was, without any doubt, too late. Everything had changed. It had all changed. Green felt like a man dressed for deep winter, stepping out the door of a snowbound cabin and finding himself on an equatorial island. He wasn’t dressed for this weather and the colossal dissonance of it all was smothering.
There are times, Green knew even then, when you just have to sit in your discomfort. Times when there is nothing to do but experience the rushing river of your own feelings and see what time and the flowing waters carve from the stone of your present self.
So, Green sat and looked at the acorn in his efficient, modern kitchen and knew that everything was changing, with or without his consent. The acorn wasn’t going anywhere, but something had to give.
Over the next few weeks, he became a very poor employee. He engaged in a deliberate study of his own thoughts, coaxing old desires from dark corners, brushing the dust off past fascinations and childhood joys. He unearthed an ill-defined, but enthusiastic, preoccupation with moss and ferns and campfire sparks floating up through the twilight.
As the days passed, he could feel the weight of a theoretical new life taking its first breaths, just out of sight. Something was out there.Something fundamental. Something that chuffed and sniffed with a bear’s heavy lungs and paced in the dim elsewhere beyond the city lights. Something better. Something that made Green’s white-tile life seem like the thinnest rice paper barrier, daring him to press a hand through and peer at a place alive and real and not engineered for human convenience. A place that asked you for more than your obedience and less than your soul.
He returned to himself, to the mountains, and looked down at the acorn. There, tilted and resting on its cap on a mossy stone, it did not look out of place. The acorn was right where it was supposed to be. Now, the question was, could Green find a way to belong there too? Except none of this was what he expected. This wasn’t just moss and stone and campfire evenings. He was a cryptonaturalist now, a word, an identity, that was utterly new and came with a host of questions and consequences. In the city he had felt at sea, but at least nobody had been relying on him to solve a mystery or prevent untimely deaths.
Still, he knew, there was no going back.
Present Green and past Green exchanged a nod over a narrow ravine of chaotic weeks, narrow, but too wide to leap and too deadly deep.
He drank from his canteen and plucked up the acorn, returning it to his pocket. He watched golden light hold a conversation with autumn mountainsides. He invited an uncomplicated silence into his mind and hoped that the landscape would pour in with it.
When he stood again, his legs were asleep and he had to shake away the pins and needles.
