Ferns & Forest

Today we walked along the edge of Lake Te Anau to the Fiordland National Park, the largest national park in New Zealand. The walk to the park is a nature preserve in itself, fringed with flax, red tussock, and a bushy, stiff fern, all three natives of New Zealand. The lake laps away at the shore, interrupted by the trunks of trees that cross the boundary, sinking their roots below the surface of the lake and spreading their leaves above it. All around the dark hills of the New Zealand highlands cool the horizon with their strong presence.

After about a half hour’s walk we arrive at the head of the Kepler Track, one of the many trails that wind their way here and there throughout the Fiordlands. We take the right side of the Track, intending only an afternoon tramp at the beginning of what is, for most trampers, a four-day adventure into the dense forest of Fiordlands. At first the trail follows close to the rocky shore, the sound of the waves incessant and echoing through the forest. The trees grow tall and wide leaving little light on the wood’s floor. A single thick blanket of moss covers the ground around the track, creeping up the base of the goliath trees and dampening the sound of footfalls.

Sara takes a turn down to the shoreline. We step ankle-deep into the cold clear water; it is magnificently clear. We can see the piebald stones under the surface thirty feet out from the coast, even though waves are breaking all the time. There is no soil or sand to muddy the waters. It is a giant basin of liquid blue crystal.

I leave Sara to her reading and continue along the Kepler Track. Not long after I do, the forest changes. The trail rises a bit up the slope, away from the water, and into a second canopy of rainforest. Now, still in the deep shade of the taller beech and manuka, ferns cover the ground. Mostly a single species, these ferns obscure the dark forest floor from view, except for the thirty-six inches of trail on which I walk. Some of the ferns are quite old: they have grown, like rainforest palm trees, to be ten or twelve feet high, their trunks comprised of the stumps of former fronds, their latest rings of leaves crowning the top.

Water creeps down little streams, its surface covered by the possessive figures of ferns and lilies. Unlike the vast expanse of visible water in Lake Te Anau, this water is furtive and sneaky. It creeps between gnarled bunches of roots and finds nooks and crannies in the thin soil. But it is making its way to the collecting pool of the lake, moving away from the roots that suck it up as it slides past. It will leave its sediment behind and join the lucid depth of the lake.

Insects thrum, birds chirp and warble, but these sounds are interruptions in a lush silence that stews in the rich dark green of the forest. I stand in a vast dark space between the groundcover of ferns and the high roofed pillars of the trees, a visitor in an organic cathedral to God’s creative wisdom. I am impressed.

~emrys