If the rainforest were heavier, it would look like this …

Rialto Beach

… because its rain would have found the depths of its gravity. The gravity boundary, where the molecular weight of water separates the heavy forest from the one climbing the air, looks like this …

Rialto Beach

Note the tree with wings, climbing the air without roots. Her roots are wherever she finds them. So are her branches.

Rialto Beach

Here are some of the air ladders, the vertical rivers, that make the rainforest the water world it is:

Ozette

Once you get deep into these silent rivers, the view changes. You walk between rivers, without touching their shores.Hoh

How does this work? Well, these ladders of carbon climbing water tension into the sun leave spaces of air. You walk through those pieces of sky. In this context, they are the shadows of rivers. You’re not alone, though. Here are some club mosses and liquorice ferns whooping it up 20 metres off the ground…

Hoh

…in the river eddies.

Eddies like this:

Ozette

Just in the lighter forest, not that thick river one. Still, the rivers are lighter than the sea. If rain forests all laid on their sides, maybe they would look like this …

Sol Duc/Quillayeute River Confluence

… and rain forest lakes would be their roots.

Ozette River Leaving Ozette Lake

…and the sea …

Rialto

… would be their branches, their sun …

Second Beach

… and their moon.

Quillayeute River

This moon.

Rialto Beach

So it is in the gravity forest. It has other suns, though. Streams, for instance, that hold the sun in the darkness of the forest floor, the best place for a gravity engine:

Ozette

Pools that old logs make:

Ozette

Pools that leaves make…
…with green waves washing up against them in foams of light:

Ozette

Kind of like this, really, but lighter …

Second Beach

There are all kinds of pools, in which water mixes with light on chains of carbon as they climb the tension of water up into the sky …

Ozette, Second Beach and Hoh Rain Forest

The sky, of course, is everywhere between them. They are all sky creatures. So are humans.

So are elk, who live deep in gravity’s pools.

Hoh

Here in Cascadia, these gravity forests are made by the mountains.

La Push

Across the mountains, these gravity towers make a different gravity forest…

Peshastin Pinnacles

… where old seabeds are worn away by the wind and the gravity forest, lifted high by the roots of the mountains, comes up to your knees.

Bella Vista

It’s still the gravity forest. It is still the shape the mountains take when they make themselves into air. It still has beautiful pools.

The Commonage

Less moon and more sun.

Thompson Gorge

Still at sea, though.

Dawn, over the Commonage.

Still knotting water and gravity together.

Still the Big Bang opening. Still the earth, flowering.

Second Beach

Still rivers …

Bella Vista.

Still the earth.

Bella Vista

Still the sun.

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