After the gales, I walked a familiar route. It is not a long walk, but it is one that repays attention. Like a birdwatcher returning to their patch, I go to see what has altered and what has not, for change announces itself most clearly where one knows the ground.
On the last remaining stretch of the Chemin du Beau Hêtre, between the Drève de Lorraine and Avenue Brassine, a young beech lay across the path. It had been sick for some time and its fate was now settled. Off to one side, half-glimpsed through the trees edging the track, a number of silver birch had gone down together. Their roots are shallow, their allegiance to the soil tenuous. The wind had found them with scant purchase.
There is something unsettling about fallen trees. Their vertical authority has been revoked. They lie in attitudes of collapse, occupying space in ways we do not expect. Looking at them, an old and improbable memory surfaced. Siberia. The morning of the 30th June 1908, when a vast force passed over the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River and laid some eighty million trees flat, all pointing away from a centre that no one could see.
For years it was dressed in stories of visitors and machines not of this world. The present explanation is plainer, and perhaps more troubling. A fragment of comet or stone, arriving unannounced, exploded in the air and never touched the ground.
The scale is not the same, yet the lesson remains. A forest is not a fixed arrangement. It is a surface on which events briefly write themselves, before being erased by light, growth, and time.