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the memory card of my digital camera tells the story of stratification; the autumn-gold maple canopy falls away almost as soon as we scale a steep rock face. i recently finished a book on bryology, and my camera soon fills with the fibrils of pale reindeer lichen homemaking on conifer branches, now abundant above the golden treeline. i make you wait with me at a clearing overlooking the valley. there’s a thick patch of grayed reindeer lichen, dried and filamentous. it looks like an out-of-season snowfall, and we wonder if we could find any tardigrades if we rehydrated the branches under the microscope like we did back in high school. we peel a clementine and the pith stains the underside of our nails orange. i take a picture of three species of lichen living entangled on a small, dry branch, and even though this is not the summit, we stay here for a while.
we’ve climbed far enough to see a few of the eight ordinal lakes artificially settled between slopes. the lakes didn’t exist before a dam was built through the river, and the lowest points of the valleys sank beneath a sharp blue surface. the shape of the lakes gently stretches into the shores and into one another. on one of the far shores, i see the village where we sat at a picnic bench and ate lunch earlier in the day. it’s new for me to see the limits of a lake; twenty years lived between two of the great lakes.
we aren’t alone; we pass groups of hikers, and groups of hikers pass us, conversations floating through. the path we follow is stone smoothed by years of footsteps following each other to the summit, clear of leaves and moss. the fantasy of natural solitude is just that: a fantasy. existence is a communal action between deer and rainwater and moss and the footsteps of the hikers and the erosion of soils. we are not the first to be on this path; we are not the last.
lichen are mutualistic symbionts; filaments of fungi interspersed with growths of photosynthesizing algae and cyanobacteria. to be a lichen is to exist outside the singular. the mutualistic relationship between the bodies of the fungi and the bodies of the photosymbiont is incredibly resilient; lichens can be found in almost every single environment on the planet.
i take a picture of you lying on the stone of the summit, uplifted two million years ago. threads of reindeer lichen are left below. the only lichen here grows like rust and like verdant coats of paint on the rock, and i take a picture of the horizon’s reflection in a small pool of collected rainwater near the edge of an outcrop.
you picked me up before daybreak and wish me happy birthday. i meticulously make my bed, sharpening the corners in the event my recurring travel anxieties become reality and i do not return; i do not want to be remembered for having an untidy room when they come to collect my belongings. i know you’re a safe driver though. we make it back later that night, safe and sound.
we made this trip only a few days too late to see the reds and golds and oranges. the surrounding peaks, hazy and almost endless, are a soft brown. underneath the scattering of leaves and whips of wind and tangled conversations, i imagine the mountains singing in ancient resonance, much too alive to be silent.
Dee Dolce is a student at University at Buffalo, studying biology and English. Through poetry, prose, and personal essay, their work focuses on the poetics of water, ecologies as an archive and lens through which relationality can be explored, and autoethnographic experiences of ecological fieldwork. They are often found with friends, wandering through local waterways.