I have a map for the local forest (FFC), which I downloaded several years ago. The FFC is a managed forest and nursery, it hosts a number of tree species common to the region, as well as species common to eastern forests. It’s open to the public and is a considerable community resource. A “Friends” component assists with community access, trail maintenance, and community liaisoning/networking. That map has been extremely useful, over the years — but it is no longer available online (or it’s been moved and renamed). A satellite version with brightly marked, colour coded trails is now available for download instead, and the satellite version is what you’d see in the forest itself — placed along various trails, usually at entrance points and intersections.
I prefer the map I downloaded because it shows all the trails as a topo map, not as a satellite map. However you hike or move through outdoor spaces, you’ll know what I mean. It shows the trails that may have been animal paths but were converted because they make sense. The access trails that would be useful for forest maintenance and emergencies. The trails that become truncated or, until recently, were a bit overgrown and very few people accessed them. The trails that wind around and through the other trails. And the trails-not-trails that aren’t on any map — the map I have suggests these because it shows various landscape features that one could follow, and what they parallel or lead toward/from/out-of and in-to.
Over this last year, there has been an increased use of the forest. Trails that were primarily unused (as they’re not outlined in colour on the satellite map) have become known. I’ll assume that there’s an increased number of people following the tracks of other people, or following people, generally. It’s more difficult to assume this in summer and fall, but in winter the tracks that people make are visibly evident. In addition, the trails themselves have been cleaned up— probably part of a management plan— and access isn’t as hidden by overgrowth. These mostly-unused trails are visible on the satellite map in the form of clear lines (aerial view) through forest canopy, but most eyes, I think, likely gravitate to what’s clearly delineated and made official: the red, yellow, orange lines and markers that visually emphasize a route to follow: “folks go here”.
These are observations, not complaints.
The map makes sense only within this forest. I can look at it and ‘see’ the overall space laid out spatially in my head and navigate, while there, or use it as a prompt when I think about various trails and locations within the forest. There are other forests around here that I am still trying to wrap my head around: the trails intersecting and winding without seeming structure. The beauty of the trails in the other forests are that they are, simply, desire paths made by dirt bikes and cyclists — made for challenge, not linearity: to make difficult/fun a certain kind of movement through the forest. The consistent use of these desire paths have padded down the terrain and established trails. Eventually, someone gave the paths numbers (which are not grid-sequential), and then someone made a map. For me, it’s easier to ‘see’ in my head the grid; the squiggly, curving, overlapping lines of the other map are delightful, but more difficult for me to see and travel along without rechecking the map itself. But, with exposure and over time, the eyes, the brain, the body adjust to the networking of trails, in whatever form.
The other week, I trundled my way through the community forest, along a once not-so-used path (it’s still not used as much as others). As I passed the remnants of a deer blind, my dog and I noticed rather large raccoon tracks on the trail. There were other tracks criss-crossing, too— porcupine, snowshoe hare, squirrel, fox, maybe coyote (old tracks) — but the raccoon stuck to the trail, so we followed both trail and tracks. They passed by Nico Vassilakis and Crag Hill’s visual poems, which I’d installed the day before.
The visual poems are hung between the rungs of a mostly functional deer blind. The blind is situated about 30 metres off-trail in, frankly, a brilliant location, should one hunt or just want to observe the forest or, across the trail, the emergent swamp (emergent based on season/weather). The deer blind hasn’t been used for years, but is well built. Its upper pieces (a small sitting bench) has fallen down, but the ladder and flat platform are solid. It’s the 7th blind I’ve found throughout the forest, most in various states of disrepair (for the function) or decomposition (for the material).
The blind is not immediately noticeable, partially because some of it it is obscured by the branches of a young tree from one angle as one navigates the trail, and partially because a variety of tree species, deadfall, ground cedar, twigs, grass bits, lightfall, etc. create visual gaps and solids between it and the trail. In winter, it’s just as easy to look right through the rungs and not see the blind for the forest and its species. Or to see it, but incorporate it into extended and cascading visual contexts and their movements. Seeing, here, constitutes a form of hedging in terms of the eyes seeing, and the brain processing, variables; you’d catch the poems, perhaps, out of the corner of your eye as you move alongside or in passing. Unless you stop and look into the woods (likely because something else has caught your eyes or ears, or perhaps an impending sense of), you probably won’t notice them. Noticing is different from seeing. Kids are the most likely to both notice and see the poems; both poems are at a good height for kids and placed in a contraption meant for climbing.
Vassilakis’ piece is printed on 9×12 vinyl and placed on 9X12 plexiglass in portrait orientation between two rungs of the blind’s ladder. It’s not central; it’s right justified, if you want to think of a page, and abuts the right support of the ladder. The piece is vibrant with colours, composed symmetrically with seemingly repetitive visual information and shapes that are offset by our own asymmetries and behaviors— how the eyes moves, how a thing might be “read”. What is symmetry when one is looking ‘at’ or ‘through’ something? What happens to one’s range of vision and the mind’s taking in/interpreting? Language is material and spatial; seeing colour and shapes and associating meaning is a product of physiological interpretation.
Hill’s piece is situated between the rungs of the ladder immediately below Vassilakis’. It is printed on 15.5×11 vinyl, in landscape format, and placed on 17×13 plexiglass. The plexi acts as a frame and filter. The rungs themselves are also frames: a visual stuttering of what is alongside, before, after, behind, in front of, and from the point of trail and the point of ladder.
Hill’s work is also vibrant; the piece as a whole is illuminated by continuous and truncated colours from purple to pink, offset by the shade of black. It makes for a sort of light show, and as in all things, can be looked at and through, there’s depth and variation between the shape of the lines, their colours, and the oscillation between line continuity and discontinuity ‘within’ the total absorption that the black shade offers. But your eyes and mind should try to get around the poem, past it and its multiplied framing. Vassilakis’ stands out, Hill’s takes in, among the wholes that the eyes see, or think to see. In this season, or in this moment or that.
The poems are likely to outlast the blind.
rout/e 