elissa e. minor / editors' choice prize in essays - 1st place

Finding Your Way in These Woods

No matter what anyone says, it's much worse to be unloved than it is to be lost in the woods. –Charlie Brown

You'll know to duck off the road when you see the towering spruce snag on your left. Part the overgrown thimbleberry and manzanita: see that? What was once a trail. Watch your step. Ancient roots under your feet. Scamper downhill; follow the bend where these woods meet the national wildlife refuge. Skate the edge of the refuge, over the old-growth nurse log that someone cut in the center with a chainsaw, a stair-step over to get back on the trail.

See the trilliums at the base of that Western hemlock? Don't pick them.

Curve the bend until the boom of the ocean hits you all at once. Follow that sound. When there's a choice in the trail, always turn towards the thundering sea.

There: to the left. Towards the water. That's Fern Gully Loop. Can you even believe how beautiful it is? Can you even believe you found it?

*

After his fiftieth birthday, my father started to get lost around town. It was sporadic enough at first that we didn't think much of it. My mom reported that he came home later after work with excuses as to how he had trouble finding the way. But it wasn't until my brother and I were in the car with him that we got nervous. We were on our way home from our grandparents’ house two miles away, a route we'd all driven so many times it came as easy as breathing, in that way only a well-worn route can.

But Dad turned right when he should have turned left. North when he should have turned south. Missed turns altogether. Blew a stop sign. Blamed it on his headache. (Always, always, in those days: that headache.)

We talked about it in hushed tones behind closed doors, and decided he must be overworked. The tumor had been growing unchecked in his brain for years, but we didn't know that yet.

*

My dad's navigational skills were once so acute that I never saw him consult a map. It was like he was the map. I spent my childhood in the backseat with him at the wheel, ferrying us to places all over the American West as if he knew them by heart the second he laid eyes on them.

When I learned to drive, I didn't anticipate the biggest challenge would be finding my way. I assumed an internal compass would switch on, that as soon as I got behind the wheel of a car, I'd recognize the complex geography of my surroundings. Instead, whenever I had to drive somewhere, I logged on to Mapquest and printed out turn-by-turn directions to keep on my passenger seat. The maps that accompanied them were so confusing they were recycled before I even got in the car.

Goddamned maps.

A two-dimensional graphic representation of an actual, three-dimensional world. Why was I the only one who knew how impossible it was to collapse the planet's sphere, to show with accuracy and precision how to get from one place to another? When I studied a map, I couldn't reconcile the marks on the page with my real, lived experience as a person who takes up space on this iron-nickel cored planet.

As my anxiety built, the world outside the map would become incrementally unrecognizable. The map made a labyrinth of the entire world. I could have walked it the rest of my life and still never would have arrived at my destination.

If only I had Ariadne's thread.

*

The myth goes like this: King Minos of Crete needed a convenient place to stash the Minotaur—a half-bull/half-man monster that only existed because his wife fucked a bull (whoops). He hired Daedalus to design an elaborate labyrinth meant to keep the Minotaur inside; the complex maze-like structure held the beast at its center. Angry over the death of his son at the hands of Athenians, King Minos decreed that every nine years, Athens must send fourteen youths to be dropped into the labyrinth as retribution (and as a snack for the Minotaur).

So it went every nine years. Seven young men and seven young women devoured by the beast the king's wife had born. Until our hero, Theseus arrived on the scene. He volunteered and conspired with King Minos' daughter, the princess Ariadne, to slay the beast.

Ariadne gave him a ball of thread. As he walked through the labyrinth, towards its lethal center, he ran the line of thread behind him. After he slayed the Minotaur, he needed only to follow that thread to find his way back out of the maze, emerging triumphant.

Thus ended the cycle of human sacrifice to the Minotaur.

Thus was born one of the earliest recorded GPS devices.

*

If you look for it, a creek bed of crimson clay rises from the spruce needle duff on the east side of the trail. We call it Red Rock Falls, but you can call it whatever you like. This is your walk and today these are your woods. From there, the trail does a steep zig-zag downhill. Eyes on your boots here—the mud is slick and covered with forest debris. At the bottom, pause and look up: all those trees and snags that stagger their way down the trail. Don't they look like they are wearing green sweaters, all that moss clinging to their trunks and branches? Welcome to the Village of Moss People.

Imagine you are water seeking the sea: continue down the hill, towards the resounding thrum-and-crash of the waves.

The moss people will guide you the rest of the way. Don't lose sight of them. You're close. Soon, soon. The ferns will double in size. Horsetails taller than you are. Foxgloves like fairy-tale beanstalks. And then, and then: you will be at the beach, in a hidden beach cove inaccessible except by the way you've just come.

*

My dad encouraged each of us to become accountants (the boys more so than me). He reasoned there was steady money to be made and jobs would always be plentiful.

By the end of high school I knew numbers were not the path for me. I passed my math classes but only with angst and tears. I learned some math concepts and equations, but my problem was retaining them beyond a day or even an hour. Decades later, an adult diagnosis of dyscalculia would explain the problem.

A learning disorder often called "math dyslexia," those of us with dyscalculia have a hard time understanding math concepts and assigning meaning to numbers. The best way to describe it to people is that, well, numbers just fall out of my head. Give me a number and ask me for it back a short time later, and I'll give you an entirely different number. Not because I think my number is the right one, but because I have spent a lifetime spouting nonsensical numbers with unearned confidence.

But I was a girl, so nobody thought to question why I struggled with math. I didn't even think to question it. The same way I never questioned why maps looked like ancient indecipherable hieroglyphics. In all of the families I knew, the dads did the bulk of the driving. Maps were made by men who had climbed over mountains and valleys, men with special tools, men with names like Mercator and Anaximander. Men who could point true North with their eyes closed.

Turns out, some of us with dyscalculia struggle the most to visualize spatial relationships, read maps, and find our way in general. And all genders struggle with dyscalculia at the same rates.

*

What the MRI revealed: a diffuse, tentacled tumor, burrowed into Dad’s frontal lobe like an octopus clinging to the side of a rocky tide pool.

The frontal lobe is crucial to spatial navigation. Not only does it help with planning, decision-making, and tracking outcomes, but within the frontal lobe is the smaller prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain vital for planning routes, gathering context cues, and re-planning while navigating. And next to that, the orbitofrontal cortex synthesizes information gathered from a person's environment with that person's own values and cultural beliefs. This creates what is essentially a map of possible decisions while navigating the world.

Dad's tumor was growing right in the middle of his own personal map. Maybe if the MRI had looked even deeper, closer, we'd see that underneath the clinging octopus, his frontal lobe was overlaid with the projections of thousands of maps—every route he had taken his entire lifetime—being scrambled, one tentacle at a time.

The day he was diagnosed, the doctor took his driver’s license. It was a legal requirement meant to keep us all safe, and I was grateful for it. But punching a hole in someone's license is a lot easier than hiding the car keys from someone you love, someone who used to sing you to sleep. Dad cajoled, yelled, and manipulated us with the hopes of getting his car keys back. His favorite rant was a variation on the motif stop treating me like a child.

This was only the first of many things the tumor forced us to take from him.

*

If I had a nickel for every time someone assumed GPS has made my map problem obsolete. These are clearly people who, when the system shows them a blue dot and an arrow and says proceed to the route even though you are ON a fucking route just not THE fucking route until pretty soon that bitch in your phone is saying it again and again: Proceed to the route. Proceed to the route. Proceed to the route.

If I knew the route, I wouldn't need the GPS now, would I?

I'm sorry. Was I getting agitated?

That goddamned blue dot.

A colleague once tried to explain to me his theory about using GPS: some people, he said (meaning: people like me) can only see themselves in relation to the street view. But if I just zoomed out (here he made a wide panning motion with his hands), I'd have the ability to see the entire map from a bird's eye perspective. It's the difference, he lectured, of attitude. The difference between "I am the blue dot" and "I will follow the blue dot."

I am not the blue dot, nor can I follow the blue dot.

A 2024 study published by the Royal Society of Open Science made headlines with its conclusion: those born male perform better at spatial and navigational tasks than those born female. It appeared to add to the accepted evidence that in prehistoric times, men had to traverse massive distances in pursuit of large game, while women stayed close to home to pick berries.

This meant men had an inherent biology more suitable to navigation than women did. Modern men owe a debt of thanks to evolution for this one.

At first glance, it seemed I had my answer: I can't do it because I'm a woman. Which felt like a good excuse to stop trying.

*

Don't bother with a compass. You don't need it in the forest. Experienced hikers are always able to find their way if they pay attention.

Except these woods are (I'm pausing to find the right word and can't decide between capricious/lawless/bewitched/rebellious/defiant/dark/dark/dark—insert your choice here.)

Zoom out and look at the trees as a group. If they tend to have more branches on one side, those trees likely face south, where sunlight flows more readily throughout the day in this part of the hemisphere. I won't sugarcoat it, though: in these woods, very little sunlight gets through the upper canopy even at the sun’s peak, and sometimes even less on the lower canopy.

Moss, too, can be read like a compass: circle a tree and look for the side covered with the heaviest moss. That side of the tree likely faces south; mosses have a thing for darker, more humid environments. But what is darker and more humid than these woods? The moss surrounds the trees on all sides. Where even are their trunks? Hidden under entire sweater-and-pants sets knitted from the finest Oregon Beak Moss (Kindbergia oregana), or even Menzies' Tree Moss (Leucolepis acanthoneura).Touch them: that soft green tickle under your fingers.

Let's try something else. Pay close attention to the Himalayan blackberries, that big bramble of them on the edge of the old logging road. Where are the berries ripening? The fruit that faces south tends to ripen faster. But here in the rainforest, trees so dense every ray of light feels miraculous, the berries don't even know which way is up.

There is only one really foolproof method to find your way in these woods: listen for water. And when you find it, when you hear a trickle under the pine duff and fallen branches, follow that underground creek until it bursts forth into a red clay bed lined with trilliums (don't pick them). The creek might meander, but the water always, always, always ends up in the sea.

That's west, for those of you with dyscalculia.

*

In their book Patterns that Connect, Edmund Carpenter and Carl Schuster posit that while labyrinths in some Indigenous cultures are a somber path to the home of a sacred ancestor, the path might actually lead to the ancestor themself. Carpenter and Schuster suggest that by viewing the labyrinth as “a sacred symbol, a beneficial ancestor, a deity,” the makers  “may be preserving its original meaning: the ultimate ancestor, here evoked by two continuous lines joining its twelve primary joints."

The authors also discuss the common motif of a labyrinth that is built to house a trickster. The East Indian demon Ravana, for instance, holds dominion over all labyrinths. Meanwhile, the trickster Djonaha lives in the center of a labyrinth according to Sumatran Bataks.

I get caught up in my thoughts, late at night when even the dogs are snoring.

Was my dad's tumor the trickster in the center of his labyrinth? Or is my dad himself the sacred ancestor at the center of mine?

*

Speaking of tricksters. I intentionally withheld information earlier. It's true that the 2024 study revealed men as better at map-reading than women. But if you look into the analysis of that study, the outcome isn't so simple. A better headline in the BBC reads: "Research finds men are better at reading maps, but there’s a catch." The study's head researcher, Justin Rhodes, credits neuroplasticity, not gender, for men's slightly better map skills. Playing with building blocks, legos, or even toy cars over those rugs covered with printed roads helps to stretch our brain's ability to understand spatial relationships. Skiing, hiking, and other outdoor pursuits further our brain's ability to grow new synapses that help map the world around us.

"That's where the misogyny comes in," Rhodes says. "Males are just encouraged more, because of our cultures, to do more of those kinds of things, and so they're slightly better at it . . . All the data suggests that's the case.”

So I'm bad with maps because of my dyscalculia, and my dad was not necessarily the navigational expert I remember him to be.

Family road trips, revised: I wrote earlier that "My dad's navigational skills were once so acute I never saw him consult a map. It was like he was the map." But I should have written this more accurate version: It wasn't so much that my dad was the map, but more that my mom was always riding shotgun, a Rand McNally expertly unfolded on her lap, with a green pen in her hand and its cap in her mouth.

She let him take the glory when we arrived in new, exciting places. Places that she herself had chosen, that she herself had found.

*

If I were to make a map of your reading of this essay, this is where the bright red dot would be, this is where I write "You Are Here."

You've found the center of the essay. Welcome.

I didn't know it was the center. I didn't mean for it to be the center. I just kept writing around it in concentric circles, like a spooked horse trying not to look at the snake in the middle of the arena. I hoped I might not have to go there at all.

There are so many things I don't want to tell you.

Like this.

Before we got smart and took his credit cards, Dad ordered himself an electric bicycle. We tried to live with it. Even his doctor told us there was only so much we could do to protect him, and at least this way, he wasn't putting others at danger.

A week later I found him wandering the aisles of the local grocery store, dazed, blood coursing from his temple and down his chin. He didn't seem to recognize me.

See? I didn't want to have to write that.

I've been circling other moments. Moments when he was lost. Moments when he was cruel. Moments when he sobbed. Moments when he thought I was his sister or his mother.

The long hospital stay when he was agitated, so far from reality that both wrists were affixed to the sides of the bed with restraints. He begged me with bared teeth to find scissors, or to cut me out with your teeth if you need to. Called me names. Couldn't I see he was a prisoner?

Couldn't I see what they were doing to him? When I looked into his eyes, I didn't see him at all. I just saw a feral animal trapped in a maze.

The beast in the center of the labyrinth.

I'll do my best to give you a thread to follow on the way out of this mess. I hope you make it out alive. But that's the whole point, isn't it? None of us do. Not even our hero Theseus. Even he lost favor with the people of Athens after he killed the Minotaur, was tossed off a cliff by the King of Scyros.

*

To hike Foxglove Run—the FGR, as we like to call it—park near the water treatment gate and follow the grassy road that stretches out in front of you. Scan the tops of the young alder trees: we saw a pygmy owl there once, looking for a songbird to disembowel. This is where we go to run the dogs several times a week, an overgrown stretch of old logging road edged with clusters of eight-foot foxgloves, their purple belled petals big enough to put my entire fist inside.

(Before I give you the directions, you'll need to indulge me in a story: On an early spring day, as we hiked in on that grassy road, a man on a mountain bike came rushing towards us. He slowed as he passed and said, "It just dead-ends back there. I checked." He said it like he was saving the poor two women on foot the time and effort of having the check ourselves.)

Ignore him. Follow the trail over three horizontal alders that still leaf out each spring, past the culvert that sends the creek running underneath you. Listen carefully. Here's the important bit: when the road appears to dead-end, when you have gone as far as you can go, close your eyes and breathe in.

Smell it? The musk of Roosevelt elk, the sweet tang of spruce? Follow that scent. It'll take you to four monstrous ferns; part them like curtains to reveal an elk path up and into the woods. At the fork in the trail, veer west, up the mountain and down the other side. You are almost to the most enchanted natural spot in the entire universe: a rushing creek with mini waterfalls and islands of vegetation. Downstream, toward the ocean, the ancient stump of Sitka giant straddles the entire creek like a bridge, its roots stretching into the earth on either side of the water. Tuck your head down and under the stump, where the water churns four-feet-deep and sounds like a washing machine.

See that patch of trilliums on the slope? Don't pick them.

Then remember: the grassy path was a dead-end. The nice man checked for you already.

*

The true marker of spring here on the North Coast is the arrival of the pelicans. Hundreds upon hundreds of them fly in over the course of a few days, always gathering on the same spot on Netarts Spit that they did the year before. How do whole flocks of migratory species find their way again and again, often over half the earth's hemisphere, to land on the same riverbank or beach where they hung out last time they were here?

The answer is magnetite. Each pelican's beak is outfitted with a small amount of the strongly magnetic iron oxide mineral. The magnetite aids in navigation, like a tiny sat nav unit that feeds the birds data about its position relative to Earth's magnetic poles. It also helps the pelicans with water navigate in order to catch fish.

If you've ever walked the beaches on this shore, you'll remember the streaks of black in the sand.

That's magnetite.

I like to imagine the pull these birds feel, year over year, an actual visceral call from the sand I traverse almost daily.

Only recently have scientists discovered that humans, too, carry tiny crystals of magnetite tucked away in the ethmoid bone, a structure that sits behind the nose and equidistant between both eyes. At first, researchers brushed it off as something vestigial, more akin to the human appendix than anything else. But recently, scientists have warmed up to the idea that the magnetite crystals might act as minuscule compasses that detect and orient towards magnetic fields. Another theory holds that the magnetite in our noses might play a role in magnetoreception, the ability to sense magnetic fields.

Maybe my dad was right when he used the glib phrase, "Elissa, just follow your nose."

But about that ethmoid bone. The one between your eyes? It contains within it two box-shaped structures called the ethmoidal labyrinths. These labyrinths are with you all day, every day, as you go about your tasks: playing video games, hiking, sautéing broccoli, kissing someone you love. There, nestled between the nasal cavity and against both eye sockets, a hair's breadth away from the magnetic crystals meant to lead you home.

*

What is a human brain if not a labyrinth—a complicated, irregular network of passages in which it is difficult to find one's way?

And within that labyrinth, like Russian nesting dolls, is a smaller labyrinth: the labyrinth of memory. When lost within, no labyrinth is harder to escape. Yesterday becomes today, Tuesday becomes February, your mother becomes the young stranger at the shopping market you met in 1994. The route that you'd driven for decades turns unrecognizable: twisty, hilly roads, lined on either side by conifers and suburban homes, all dead-end. Even Daedalus and Icarus, with their smarts and wax wings, would be too mired to fly free.

What's more terrifying than waking up one day to find no roads lead to home?

I watched my father slip further and further into the labyrinth of memory until it felt like the labyrinth was going to pull me in, too. In some ways, it did: in the decade after he died, I struggled to form and keep new memories. Like numbers, they fell from my brain. I've tried—and failed—to get those years back.

When we buried my dad, I noticed Steve, his lifelong best friend, leaning over the hole in the earth where they had just lowered the coffin. He held a black device in his right hand. When I walked over to him, he looked up at me in his grey suit and smiled. I could see the sadness behind the smile, ringed around his eyes, like my own. He had just used a hand-held GPS device to mark the coordinates of his best friend's final resting spot.

"This way I will always know where he is in relation to me," he said. He tilted the device in my direction, and I read: 45° N, 122° W.

They were numbers, so they meant nothing and fell out of my head in seconds. But they also meant everything. They meant my dad will never be lost again. God, he would have loved that.

*

Finding your way in these woods requires an attention to life and death. Make note each season of what rots, what sprouts, how close to dusk the elk come out. You can count on shelf fungus for landmarks—those live for decades and look the same year-found. But don't be fooled trying to use swamp cabbage to navigate. They are the first to bloom in the spring, yes, but that could be anywhere from February to May. And their yellow flowers are gone within weeks.

Everything you encounter here is part of the elaborate memory of this forest. Even you.

When you hiked down Foxglove Run, what I didn't tell you was that in the South of Scotland, they call foxgloves "deadman's bells" because they contain enough toxic cardiac glycosides within their tall stalks and purple blooms to kill a person. Close your eyes and visualize it: Foxglove Run becomes a two-mile stretch of human-sized flowers taller than I am, their petals peeling a silent dirge for the man I lost to the labyrinth of his own memory. Keep visualizing, hear your boots beat a steady pace along the trail. Let the foxgloves stand for the precious dead in your own life, the people you have loved and lost, the things you have Forgotten.

What's that flash of white, there, in your hand? Did you pick that trillium just before the bend?

God, I know. They're stunning. The Audrey Hepburn of flowers.

But. It will take several years for that flower to bloom again. Trilliums have a root-stalk network that spreads almost glacially under the soil, and the seeds they produce move even slower. From seed to initial bloom can be upwards of a decade. They'll bloom every year after that—unless you pick them, in which case, you'll just have to be patient and wait.

Sometimes in a dream, my dad will reappear in the modern version of my life. The grandkids he knew only as babies are grown, and the hair on my temples is as grey as the hair on his temples when he died. He'll show up in my kitchen next to my wife, all these years later, as if he's never been dead at all, as if he's just been dormant, as if he was just another trillium blossom a passerby picked on the trail. As if he's been patiently waiting at 45° N, 122° and is finally ready to flower again.

---

Elissa Minor is the author of two books: Another Eve: Shame and Desire on the Oregon Coast (coming fall ‘26 from Oregon State University Press) and The Prisoner Pear: Stories From the Lake (Ohio State University Press), a New York Times Editor's Choice pick. They are the recipient of the Juxtaprose Nonfiction Prize, the Peregrine Prize for Fiction, the National Society of Arts and Letters Cam Cavanaugh Literature Award, and an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. Elissa writes and teaches on the Oregon Coast.