First, the colors begin to fade. In the daylight, this was a dazzling fall forest of paper birch, maple, and fir; now, it's all indefinite grays and browns, with white birch trunks thrusting their delicate clusters of leaves towards the intense blue sky. I know what the colors around me should be, and my eyes strain to see them, but they're not there anymore.
The forest seems to get wilder as it gets darker. Small, startled rustles near the ground as I pass betray the presence of tiny unseen creatures. A pair of butterflies dances in front of me. I've seen them earlier in the day; they are a pale, washed-out yellow, but in this light they look like ghost butterflies or tree spirits or something. A third one joins them, and a fourth. Five. Six. Eight? They're everywhere in the woods! Why do they come out at dusk like this?
I can't see much fine detail anymore. My eyes flick up the trail, back down, side to side; peripheral vision supplies what little detail it can. I see big things instead -- the trail is a long, slender depression in the forest floor, studded with rocks, undulating around big birch trees. The leaves in it are matted down from footsteps, and are lighter than the surrounding forest. Paradoxically, if I don't look too hard at it, I can tell exactly where it is.
I move more quickly down the trail than I think should be possible. It's amazing how the body adapts to changing conditions: my feet sense what's under them and react accordingly; my poles, poking the ground in front of me, tell me what's good to step on; motion gives me parallax and lets me guess the height of the next few steps. I think about the blind people I hike with sometimes, and I wonder if this is giving me a more experiential sense of what they have to do.
CRASH!... Something heavy in the underbrush, off to the right, not twenty yards away. It's huge. Bear? Moose? Terror roots me to the spot -- ah, that's primal. Authentic. Fear of big things that go bump in the night; I stand frozen. Then reason reasserts itself: bear, moose, or whatever, it's probably not interested in me. And I can make it aware of my presence -- I whistle a little tune, which sounds pathetic in the big silence of the woods. I'm here, I don't want to startle you.
With uneasy curiosity, I watch the place where the trees were moving. Fingers still tingling from the panic reaction, I lean forward on my poles, straining to see motion, a furry hide, anything. Nothing. I hear nothing, either, save my heart pounding in my ears.
Then a rustle in the trees, and a large bird (owl? raven?) flies out of the brush. I only see it briefly. But that bird couldn't have been big enough to make the first noise. There's still no sign of a large animal, so I give up and continue down the trail.
This trail seems to go on forever. I don't remember it being this long near the bottom of the mountain. I still have no sense of how far away the end is, but I know that it approaches the river just before it ends. I heard the river earlier, from far away, but now I don't hear it at all. This bothers me. The woods are very open here -- could I have accidentally taken some unmarked branch in the trail? Or gone off on some well-worn deer path or erosion gully? It's not likely; things that appear to be side trails are usually blocked off with fallen tree trunks: "Not here, don't go here." But the fear remains.
So I look for landmarks. For a while, the forest is featureless, and I see nothing I remember. I'm starting to become genuinely worried. Then, on the right, a large angular boulder looms out of the woods; it looks familiar. I stop in front of it and run my hand along its surface, feeling its rough texture, closing my fingers on likely handholds, probing the deep sharp-edged cracks with my fingertips. Yes, I know this rock. I smile. I don't climb it in this light, but just continue down the trail, reassured.
It's getting darker and darker, with no river and no end in sight. Overhead, the stars are starting to come out. A ghost butterfly flutters in front of my face. I'm still walking swiftly and surely -- my body is used to this, after a long day of hiking, and maybe it's better just to let it do its thing than think about where the next steps are. How safe is this, I wonder, without a headlamp?
Finally, something in my brain stem miscalculates, and I stumble. I come down hard on my left foot, and a shock of pain flares and subsides again. It's time. I stop for a minute, shake out my left foot, then walk slowly down to a place where I can set down the pack and dig out the headlamp.
I switch it on. Colors return to the world -- the trail is now tan and pink leaves lying on black mud, and green fir branches reappear in the forest beside me. But, sadly, the world is also narrowed to the cone of light between my forehead and the trail before me. The big, wild woods recede into unseen blackness around me, always just beyond wherever I look. With the light, I separate myself from the forest; I'm an intruder instead of a participant. I feel like I've lost something.
The headlamp beam is just barely visible in the cool, humid air. My breath condenses and drifts up into the beam, in ephemeral little puffs of cloud. I can only see what's in the circle of light a few yards ahead. Or, if I choose, I can instead look at what's right below my feet. I can't do both.
Time passes. I walk endlessly through a narrow tunnel of light, weaving left and right, with darkness at my back.
I think I hear the river now. As I keep walking and walking, the rushing sound draws nearer. Stone steps, going down -- yes, I remember these. A short uphill, a sharp turn to the right, and there's the river on my left! I'm almost there!
At the point where the trail draws closest to the river, I stop and switch off the headlamp. The woods are pitch black, the sky a deep royal blue with stars scattered amongst the birch branches. The roaring river pounds over the rocks and rapids; it started in the springs and snowfields four thousand feet above, and picked up energy all the way down to here, where it rages down the mountainside towards the valley. It feels so much wilder than it did earlier today, in daylight, when I was here just a few hours ago.
Satisfied, I switch the headlamp back on, and confidently walk the remaining few hundred yards down to the parking lot.