“This reminds me of the trees back home,” said the man. He was elderly, probably in his eighties, and spoke with an accent that showed he and his wife were not from this part of Alaska. In fact, as he informed me, they had come all the way from New Zealand to visit my park, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.
As an interpretive ranger, I often took visitors on the one-mile Forest Trail, weaving them through a slice of temperate rainforest paradise. I would share with them a piece of my home, and they would take with them memories of having met a real Alaskan park ranger who lived in a velvet-green fairy land.
This afternoon the weather was chilly and drizzly, bleak even by Southeast Alaskan summer standards, and not many folks wanted to hike. Of the few who did, most were families with children, and they peeled off to play as we passed the shore. By the time we reached the rainforest, only one elderly couple accompanied me, this man and woman from New Zealand.
Many of the western hemlocks and Sitka spruce on the Forest Trail are so large that you can’t wrap your arms all the way around them. Despite their size, these trees aren’t old-growth, though not, as in some parts of the nearby Tongass National Forest, due to logging.
The land here had been compressed under ice and morainal debris only a couple hundred years before I arrived. As the massive glacier retreated, it left behind a bay, the shores of which repopulated with plant life.
After a catastrophic event, like a wall of ice scraping the land down to bedrock, how does life take root, literally? It’s a process called plant succession, set in stages, a process I explained on that trail, starting amid the bare rocks of shore with a tale of melting ice and finishing in the thick forest, a pulsing mass of life—tiny heart and star-shaped flowers sprouting from each possible patch of earth, ferns and berry bushes competing for every ray of sunlight that could penetrate through the lush canopy, the limbs of trees over a hundred feet tall heavy with the weight of their own microbiomes of algae and mosses and the occasional napping porcupine.
There is more biomass in a temperate rainforest than in any other, even a tropical rainforest. That fact seemed evident on stormy days like this one, the added moisture and darkness making the woods even more verdant and full of mystery.
That afternoon, the elderly man began to talk. He told me that the forest reminded him of his native New Zealand. The massive trees resembled ancient and sacred ones that he loved. Walking in my forest woke something within him, and words poured from his lips.
As it was just me and this man and his wife alone in the forest, I stopped telling them about the founding of the park and the types of lichen we were seeing. I listened.
The couple was from Christchurch, on the South Island of New Zealand. He asked if I remembered the earthquake that had happened there some years prior, in 2011. I had heard of it but knew few details.
He described feeling the quake in their home, how the dishes had fallen from the shelves in their kitchen, how he and his wife had run outside. After the earthquake they walked through the city, the roads too damaged to drive. Amid the devastation, they encountered a group of strangers also walking, also dazed and directionless.
He told these people that he had just discovered that his wife’s brother had died during the earthquake. He seemed to need to speak his grief aloud to strangers, just as he did years later with me on the Forest Trail.
These strangers embraced the couple as they cried. Then they all stood in a circle and prayed in the rubble of their city.
On the Forest Trail, we reached a pond. We sat on a bench together and stared at the still water, shining like a black pearl, as the man wept. He spoke of the moment when he lost someone he loved but also gained an appreciation for the inherent kindness of human beings.
I didn’t bother telling him that this pond was the place where I went to reflect or grieve or heal, the message I had given at this point of the tour to so many other visitors. He understood on his own.
I’m not sure I believe that locations are imbued with spiritual energy, though I respect that many people do. What I can say is that there are places so full of life or beauty or possibility that they are more than the sum of their parts—they exist as living metaphors, symbols for things that it can be difficult to articulate but that we feel emanating from them nonetheless.
The Forest Trail is such a place. A microcosm of Glacier Bay itself, it represents rebirth, growth, healing. A bounty born from the crucible of absolute devastation. Something this man knew about.
National parks are full of such places. Some people find their own meaning in them, but some need a little push, physically or emotionally or both, and giving that guidance is one of the greatest honors of being a park ranger.
Some years after my hike with the couple from Christchurch, I visited New Zealand. I went there to hike, to see rare birds, to find where the hobbits lived. I also made a pilgrimage to Christchurch to view the aftermath of the earthquake.
Most of the town had been or was being rebuilt; half the city seemed to be a construction zone. But I found a church left just as it was after the quake, collapsed, the stones that had once given it form now a chaotic pile. The chain link fence around the church was littered with memorials, messages for the lost, notes about never forgetting.
I felt the power of the place, and I knelt down and touched a broken stone, thinking of the man who had carried his grief all the way around the world to my park.
Sometimes you must travel a long way to discover that you cannot leave your scars behind.
Sometimes it takes coming to a place of healing to accept what you cannot change, to allow yourself to begin to heal and start anew, just as the bay did after the ice, just as life did on the Forest Trail, just as the elderly man and his wife after their earthquake.
Memories are an essential part of healing, and this is true for a nation as well as an individual. Many of America’s national parks hold memories of triumph and pain, like historic sites, national battlefields, or memorials. Other parks, like Glacier Bay, heal via the power of their natural beauty and resiliency. Places like these help us heal as a nation.
My time working in America’s national parks taught me that they are places where we can seek solace and grieve as much as they are places where we can celebrate and recreate.