Every summer of my life, my family has taken a camping trip together. In fact, it began in the generation above my own when my grandmother asked the eldest of her daughters to take the others away for the weekend. The tradition stuck and grew with every new spouse and child. Each year, we hiked through the forest and out to the beach on the Washington coast. As a child, the hike seemed endless. It twisted through ferns and brush, amidst evergreen trees dripping with lichen that we called witches’ hair. We tramped over tree roots and along log bridges, until we reached the final stretch, a staircase down to the beach. It seemed to be made of 100 stairs and culminated in a large stretch of washed up logs that we scrambled over to the sand. As a small child, this was the hardest part. My cousins and I held our arms out to balance with our backpacks. We teetered and tottered over each log. We peered between the branches, inspecting dark holes and wondering just how far down they went. We were sure it was many feet. Some of the logs closest to the staircase had been there so long, they were weathered only in the spots the sun and rain could reach; One color on the top, another on their underside. Bugs scittered from crevice to crevice. Sometimes, if you looked close enough, you could find bones tucked among the twigs and wood chips. Remains from an animal’s dinner or remnants from the recent high tide. The logs held a sense of wildness, an inability to be contained. They grew in depth each year, log after log washing ashore and joining the fray. We got to know them. We knew which logs had old railroad spikes protruding from their sides, which had scrapes and bites. We guessed at which had been there the longest and just how long that was. They were beautiful, so vast they seemed immovable, almost otherworldly.
On our last camping trip to the coast, we sat around the fire one morning watching the fog burn off. There were more people on the beach now than in my earlier years. An article in Sunset magazine had popularized the beach and now, it sat littered with garbage. Plastic water jugs and abandoned REI camping equipment filled the sand. People sandwiched in at campsites so close you could hear your neighbor’s conversation over the waves at night. That morning, a ranger approached our camp and let us know that there was a fire just down the beach. Someone had lit a campfire for s’mores on top of the logs at the trail’s entrance. It grew out of hand and the rangers had come to stop it from turning into a forest fire. When we hiked out the next day, the logs were gone.
In this issue’s final poem, poet Max Heinegg writes, “In a season the garden will devour itself / and regenerate, but once this fragile fire goes, / it’s gone, in less than a season to the sky.”
The juxtaposition of wildness and fragility runs throughout this issue. Moments of growth and expansion and stunning beauty are consistently confronted by temporality. By the way that once something has expanded outward toward its very limit, once it has pushed itself to the bounds of its vulnerability, it almost inevitably must collapse in on itself again.
We hope this issue awes you in the way it has awed us. We hope it encourages you to consider the way that wildness is both beautiful and fragile – on our planet and in our experiences alike. We hope it reminds you to wallow in the beautiful highs and necessary lows. We hope it reminds you to enjoy everything while it lasts.
With warmth and awe,
Hannah Newman & Jesse Ewing-Frable
Editors-in-Chief
Sweet Tree Review