Soup No. 5 in the Black Gum Forest

I was once a tropical invader in a temperate forest in North America. I wanted to be conscious of how a "stranger" in a place could slowly slip into new terrain and get to know it.

A tropical body resonates in any forest, or that is what I thought. In rainforest fashion then, I instinctively looked for a loose twig to hack my way through the forest. But I found out there was no need to since the trails were already etched out. I looked around the mountains and the trees and I cringed, confronted by the conspiring and overwhelming anonymity of much life in that part of the world. I could not recognize a single leaf, tree or bird. Even the mosquito looked like an impostor of the one I know in Asia. At the sight of a harmless garter snake, I jumped and then froze, remembering that most snakes back home were poisonous. There were no monkeys, no fruit bats, no warty pigs that in tropical forests let us know we were the minority species in the area. All of those with me in pursuit of the trail lived in the area so they understood and read the lessons of the leaves and the historical highpoints in the lifetime of major temperate denizens like elm, juniper, chestnut and oak trees. The clues of natural history according to the expert in the group, seemed evident in "pillows and cradles" of trees, in lichen-ridden tree stumps, in snow-flaked bark, in snapped treetops, in lightning grazes on tree trunks, in charcoal bits. He said even big and small stones pointed to the history of land as pasture, farm or logging. I immersed myself in perceptual grazing, suffused with temperate lights, textures and aromas. But this alphabet was so new and elusive to this body that has been delivered and nurtured in the tropical bed.

So I took the first steps into this new terrain as a household guest would, carefully but with such ravenous spirit to engage the elements. I wallowed in the sight of some of my all-time favorites – wildflowers – like hawkweed and yarrow, as a houseguest would dote on the host’s children to gain favor. I poked my nose just a little below lethal distance from the Indian pipe fungi seemingly gathered around a bonfire celebrating some psychoactive ritual. I caressed and smelled mountain laurels in bloom. I spotted two orange salamanders and followed them till they hid in crevices beyond my reach. But soon enough, I blushed, realizing I was kissing up to the mountains thinking that by doing that, the mountains would perhaps reveal to me the codes that would enable me to read them!

A slight struggle in my breath signaled what I can recognize – rugged slope! It is strange how curved space can make a body remember and guide it through the mountain trail as it sweeps the boot-grazed moss-and-peat carpet. It helped me feel what was intensely close: the sun, the sky and the wind. The sensual gear soon shifted – recalibration! I now could see a whole world of familiar paths and colonies. There was the seemingly invisible path of a spider as it crossed its web, the colony of ants in its mounds, the luminous fern that gathered themselves on the sides of the trail all bent in one direction, making me remember the giant ferns of Southeast Asia. When the wind started blowing, I recognized the same percussion patterns I keyed into back home in Asia.

Descending later from the Black Gum Forest, I almost resigned myself to the fact that the denizens of these temperate forests would elude my grasp for a long while. But a fellow hiker, unaware of my encounters with anonymity, picked up a tiny green leaf sprouting from the forest floor. She split it, handed it over to me and uttered "wintergreen" and moved on. My instinct was to smell it. It was undoubtedly the plant that is the base for a common and very strong Chinese liniment. The same unique evanescent smell transported me to Chinatown kitchens my mother used to take me to as a child – the sights and smells of gaping kettles boiling with the ingredients stored in Chinese cupboards and my imagination: ground rhinoceros bones, tiger testicles, snake venom and whale shark fins to make the ultimate aphrodisiac called Soup No. 5. I pressed my wintergreen and extracted a tiny drop and let the smell go. I think I had finally made contact with the Black Gum Forest. I also think I smelled those lethal Indian pipe fungi too closely.