THE TWENTY-FIFTH CATALOG OF PAST RENTALS by Sid Gershgoren

No. 162: Bialowieza, Poland. March 3, 1821. [6 days; $575] You have come here at last, all twenty-five years of you, to live in the Bialowieza forest, in Eastern Poland, the last virgin forest in Europe, the remains of what once was an immense kingdom of trees covering most of Europe from northern Italy to Scandinavia.
Then, in that vast kingdom, people lived the life of the forest, worshipped the gods of the forest, and breathed the air of the forest. Now, cities and farms have obliterated its memory; and the people, too, who live in these places where once the forest peoples lived now think and feel di¬erently.
What attracted you to this place (you are not even Polish or Russian) was something negative-a disgust with the cities and with your own childhood, growing up on a farm in northern France. There, the trees are new, perhaps at most a hundred years old, and when you enter these "pieces of wood" as your father contemptuously called them, you emerge a short time later, again into rolling hills and farmland. Looking south, you can imagine this landscape of forest going on for hundreds of miles, indeed all the way to the Mediterranean.
And though you have spots of fond memory of the farm and village in which you grew up, there is another side to you which craves the older world, which you sensed, even as a boy, when you walked through these thinned out woods and open fields planted with everything except trees and acorns.
For hours you have been approaching this remnant of the vast, ancient forest. There it is, ahead of you-you know it well. A feeling of welcome comes over you, the forest welcoming you and you welcoming the forest inside you. You know this is your home, the place where a large part of your heart belongs, not all of it, but a large part of it. You feel relieved, even as you approach it from miles away, relieved even more with each step you take toward it, your home, your mother, your ancestors, your long history.


Dear Past Rentals,
Yes, what was that forest like, the one that covered almost all of Europe a thousand years ago? It's almost all gone, that original growth. And I hope you o¬er a trip to America back when the forest was still there. They said that when Columbus landed in the New World, the forests were so thick that a squirrel could have gone from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without touching land. And now look at it, or them, all the forests, cut down, hardly any original growth left, and in such a short time, too.
I'm glad somebody wanted to see what it was really like, though I think he was eventually going to realize that it really was gone and he would, only in his imagination, be able to recreate what that world was really like, though I don't know, having been with him for only six days. Maybe his imagination merged with the forest and made it larger. I hope so.
I've been tramping through forests for twenty-five years and have come to know them, lots of them. I've made it my life's work and my life. I've seen Alaskan forests, mid-latitude hardwood forests, scrub forests, tropical forests, timberline growth, washed out land where forests used to be, fossilized trees, trees a hundred million years old-I've seen almost all of them. And they're all beautiful and all a great and wonderful mystery.
But I've missed the old growth. Of course, you can still go to British Columbia and Alaska and the fast disappearing forests of the Amazon and Ecuador and to Siberia and what they call there the taiga and see it as it was or as it is. But you have to travel a long way, and you shouldn't have to do that. The forest should be next door, the way it was in l840 in western Oregon or even in northern California at that time. Trees that stood for centuries, bears and mountain lions and wildcats and skunks and beaver and birds you couldn't believe existed in such numbers. They were there.
I'm not a loner. I like people, like their sweat and their swearing and their mistakes and their faults and successes. I've tried living the life of a hermit, first in Alaska out on the Kenai twenty-five years ago and later inwards from Knight Inlet where the Bella Coola live and have lived for thousands of years. But I needed people, as much as I love the forest and the quiet and the wind and the rain and the storms and the wood fires in the cabin. No, a clearing is a good thing, but too big a clearing is not, and that's what we've got today, too big a clearing, too much of a manufactured wilderness where all the important things are done at a distance-from people, from animals, from storms and warm weather, from trees, from forests, for the body.
This guy was returning to some earlier time. He was putting himself into the spirit of those trees and the shade and the sunlight and the wind that had visited them for a long time. He was going to be content. I hope he found what he was looking for, even if it might have taken a large chunk of imagination to do it in such a small forest, to imagine one that was so much bigger then.
I guess it won't come as a surprise to you what I'm going to tell you next. On Wednesday I'm leaving for that forest. I know I won't find much-I'm not expecting much either. But since I've been there through your catalog entry, I think I'll go there myself this time. I've got a lot of imagination stored in me now.

Kent Feldspar Anderson
Age 57. Freelance environmental planner
Eugene, Oregon

excerpt from The Twenty-fifth Catalog of Past Rentals (2005, 396 pages)