Notes from the forest outside of Paris

On this last trip, I wanted to spend more time exploring what France felt like outside of cities. One weekend, my friend and I took a train to Fountainbleu Forest, the second largest national forest in France.  Our hike took us through nearly every season in four hours: we started in the misty woods, passing by European beech trees, and bracken ferns that had turned auburn in the winter. By the afternoon, the fog had burned off and the sun created slivers of intense sunlight through the clearings in the trees, and my friend and I stood, shirts up, trying to absorb more sunlight than we had seen in weeks. A few weeks later, I rented a cabin for two nights near Parc Naturel Régional du Gâtinais Français (right next to Fountainbleu, and both spots just around an hour away from Paris). From my cabin window, I saw the forest’s first winter snow, hiked until the snowflakes crowded my eyelashes, and then drank tea on the porch taking in the evening silence, incredulous at the possibility of that kind of silence so relatively close to the city. 

In the U.S., I try to start hikes and cabin retreats by first researching the indigenous history of the land I’m on, but in France, it felt so different to connect with land in a place with such a different indigenous history. I knew that thousands of years ago Celtic people lived here. But when I tried researching more about the land online, I came across very little about how the Celts stewarded this land. Instead, I found an infuriating article in the Smithsonian claiming that Fountainbleu was where hiking was “invented,” implying this land had no history before the 1700s.

The rest of the piece read like a bingo card of classic neocolonial nature writing tropes:

–Overly glorifying the white male “founder” of the park – Claude-François Denecourt – who used forest hikes here to cure his depression, then devoted his life to preserving the area.

-Consumerizing and fetishizing nature by acknowledging that Denecourt “turned the forest into a moneymaker” and that it “seduced the traveler with the promise of exploration, adventure and serenity.”

-Celebrating that Denecourt arrogantly named “more than 600 trees, 700 rock formations and assorted lookouts,” throughout the forest mostly after white monarchs and leaders.

-Claiming Europeans “invented” hiking and that its paths “were the world’s first marked rambling trails” – as if indigenous folks around the world haven’t marked trails literally for thousands of years.

Everything Europeans did to people of color around the world, they first did to themselves. Before they erased the indigenous traditions of my ancestors in Latin America, they first erased their own traditions, their own myths, their own ancestral connections to land in Europe. They turned their own forests from places of spiritual refuge to “moneymakers,” condemned the land spirits inhabiting the trees and rocks and mountains, and instead named nature after themselves, turned trees and mountains and forests into opportunities to glorify hierarchy and power and prestige.

It was remarkable reading white writers write about European land the same way they have written about colonized land in the U.S: with no mention of indigeneity, only acknowledging this land for what it meant post-industrialization, as France began colonizing the rest of the world.It’s writing like this — legitimized through institutions like the Smithsonian — that made me first want to create Reclaiming Nature Writing, to have more spaces where we can write about nature without replicating these same arrogant and harmful patterns of nature writing that have existed for so long. I’m so looking forward to a space where we can tell stories about any piece of land, anywhere in the world, by first learning what stories that land has already been telling, who has been there before, what intimacies already exist there. Walking around the woods outside Paris, the energy of those stories felt so palpable in that forest, even if we haven’t been listening to them for centuries.

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