I have left other thoughts behind, standing in the forest alone. I am simply there, like everything else in the woods; and though I should be moving, I stop for a minute in my place. This is where I am: between this trail and this other trail, near the stream, near the re-entrant. If there were a control there, I would have seen it long ago. Instead I look for the feature. Re-entrants can be tricky for me, because I’m still learning to read contours. If it’s very subtle, I might not see it. But the land makes sense: it goes down in elevation and there’s the stream, cutting the hills in half, a blue seam in the ripple of contours that fan out on both sides above it. I stand in the seam, look to my right, and see the re-entrant: a scoop of earth gracefully removed from the hill. How did the re-entrant form? I wonder. “Apart from a few geologists, only orienteers regularly use the English word “re-entrant” to describe a landform…a reentrant is a small valley, the center of which would collect water and funnel it downhill (if it were raining hard).”
I am lucky to be alone in the woods today.
anniemac attack: in the woods 