By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
“Have you ever walked in the Enchanted Forest? It’s a delight!”
Cross Maryland Avenue where the bristling, busy scaffolding of the electric station scribbles its gray lines against the sky. Stop to peer down at the creek flowing under the road, glinting at the bottom of a long drop, brown and shallow, overhung with trees, jammed with fallen branches. Walk up the grass toward the school. The trees rise in thick, dark ranks, making a sharp line against the sloping lawn. A duck waddles out of your way, her drab flank adorned with a single iridescent feather like an heirloom of blue glass.
No, I told my friend, I’d never been there. I thought I’d walked everywhere I could in this town, circled every place I could reach from my front door. It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that I really became a walker, during lockdown, when I’d go on long rambles just for something to do. I rapidly tired of treading the same ground over and over, and began to charge off in different directions, plunging down side streets in search of variety. But somehow I never came to the forest at Keister Elementary School, though it wasn’t an enchanted forest at the time, just an overgrown knot of trees, the old trails clogged and impassable. I never realized there was a forest here.
A hawk flies over the treetops with a sharp, mewing call. Starry purple thistles and pink knobs of pokeweed shimmer gently at the edge of the wood. When you step in under the trees, the air turns emerald. It’s close and hot in here on a summer day, but there’s relief from the sun. A sign points up the leaf-fringed, light-dappled trail toward the Fairy Forest: El Bosque de Hadas.
When you think you’ve walked every inch of the Friendly City, it seems there’s always another corner, a hidden angle, the hills shifting in kaleidoscopic fashion, unfolding unexpected colored planes, fresh squares of light and darkness, surprising vistas, secret nooks and hollows.
The forest is full of sound. When you enter its shadows, you’re immersed in its soundscape, which makes it feel like a completely different world. Cicadas shrill their single buzzing maniacal note. Birds chime in: raucous jays, liquid-throated cardinals, whistling finches, robins yelping like little dogs. There’s something you can’t identify—an insect, a bird, a frog?—that sounds like a rusty doorknob being turned over and over. Deep among the trees, where much of this noisy life is hidden, it seems as if the wood itself is singing.
The forest features a prettily carved “hobbit door” entrance, inspired by the writer J. R. R. Tolkien, who had a passion for enchantment. Enchantment, he used to say, is different from magic. Magic is an illusion, like a coin trick that makes a quarter seem to disappear when it’s really concealed inside a palm. Enchantment creates the dream of another world, one we can enter, coming face to face with wonder. Tolkien considered enchantment a fundamentally healing experience, which revives our relationship with the simplest things, providing “a clear view.” Jaded adults need this a lot more than children do. “We should look at green again,” he wrote, “and be startled anew.”
After several twists and turns, you enter the clearing of the Stump School, where the little people have been at work. Twisted branches make a fort. Stumps stand in rows before a chalkboard. A complex weaving of lavender, pink, and periwinkle thread hangs unfinished on a loom. The place has a strangely inhabited air, though no one’s around at this hour. It’s as if the shy denizens of this grove have just tiptoed away—perhaps to curdle somebody’s milk or tie knots in a horse’s mane. You almost expect to hear a chuckle from the undergrowth.
I think the Enchanted Forest must feel like another world to the children who come here. Although it’s not a big wood—a grown walker will quickly loop through its network of paths—its shady darkness makes a striking contrast with the clear, open lawns of the play areas and the brightly lit world of school. How fun it must be to have school outside, perched on chunks of wood like elves in a storybook! I can imagine that these children, if they return to the Enchanted Forest after a space of years, will laugh with surprise at how small it really is, as a person can be startled, on a visit home, by the absurdly cramped dimensions of a childhood bedroom.
A lone cabbage white flits among the ivy like an animated shred of paper. A series of steps overrun with vines leads mysteriously down into foliage. Cypresses, roughly chopped back, stand with their reddish bark exposed. And a giant mulberry tree—weary-looking, apparently half dead, trailing appendages like strange long fingers—gives you a wise, arresting glance from its single wrinkled eye. This must be the guardian of the forest.
For grown folks, too, this little wood may hold a residual spark of charm—what my friend called delight. (Note: Because the Enchanted Forest is located on school property, the general public is asked to enjoy it before 8:00 a.m. or after 4:00 p.m.) As I concluded my visit, emerging from the trees onto the grass that leads down to the road, I thought of Tolkien’s walking song—a poem about traveling on foot through unknown lands, setting off in untried directions into the veiled, ever-beckoning depths of a landscape.
Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
