This is part of a series of vignettes by Jeffrey Derek Dosdall. It is based on real experiences.
Green sprang up all around me. Green grass; green moss on trees with tender, new, green leaves; green underbrush with expansive leaves that looked like they belonged in a jungle. But this wasn’t a jungle. It was a mountain trail about two miles east of my house in Centerville, Utah.
It was a cool, cloudy, humid spring morning. The leaves were still shiny, wetted by a recent rainstorm. The gray light painted a different world than what I normally saw. Above the inversion, the air here was clean and fresh with oxygen.
I had been climbing nonstop for the past mile. My breathing was heavy. The incline gradually stopped, and the trail turned left, back towards the ravine and the river below. I was in a grove of scrubby oaks and maples. Little yellow flowers sprang up everywhere on the forest floor.
I caught a whiff of fir trees. Something suddenly changed. The deciduous trees gave way to evergreens. The conifers leaned towards the trail, making a tunnel of dark green and brown. A tunnel that led off to Narnia, I thought. Fallen needles covered the ground and scented the air. Now I could hear the stream. The trail led a little farther down, and the temperature dropped. I was in the shady ravine, and the nearby snow-fed stream served as a coolant system.
The trees became bigger until I found myself surrounded by behemoths that I and four others could hug. They rose straight into the air like giant telephone poles, blocking the gray sky. The trail crossed a trickle of water. It made a tiny, babbling sound as it rushed over mossy pebbles. It turned the nearby dirt to dark mud, and mint-green, round, shiny leaves sprang up from the fertile ground. Fallen sticks made a sort of bridge, but the distance was so short that I just hopped to the other side.
The stream sounded closer now. I noticed a fallen tree that looked good for sitting. Next to it, rocks surrounded a pile of ash. Ironically, this was Hell’s Hole. Who came up with that name? Well, if hell was like this, I might not mind going there.
Jeffrey Derek Dosdall is a junior at BYU Provo and a member of the BYU Earth Stewardship Club. He is majoring in biodiversity and conservation and minoring in music. He plays the trumpet and writes science fiction/fantasy novels. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
