Dynamic
Somebody had taken a bunch of the fallen trees and built a little makeshift lean-to shelter near the trail. It's the kind of thing you should do if you're lost and stranded in the woods to survive the night, but we were only about a mile from the road at this point, and the obvious trail out was right there. So I don't know what that's about.
More significant is this tree that had fallen and was lying across the trail. This tree wasn't here when we passed this way the first time. Sometime in the hour or so between when we went out and when we came back, this tree fell. We hadn't heard it.
There's the common question about whether the falling tree made a sound, and from a physics (and metaphysics) standpoint, that's a more complicate issue than you might think. It goes to the idea of what one defines as sound. Is sound the waves of compressed air that emanate from something like a falling tree hitting the ground? If so, then yes, this tree definitely made a sound. Or is sound the effect these waves of compressed air have on the ear drums of an organism? Because the waves of compressed air emanating off this tree likely didn't interact with any human ear drums, and it's possible there were no ear drums belonging to any organism anywhere around here at all. If "sound" is the effect, and tree's collapse had no effect, then maybe there was no sound.
Or perhaps I should just contemplate the philosophy of the MTV cartoon television show Beavis and Butthead, which once in the 1990s featured the namesake couple watching the video for Feed the Tree, a one-hit wonder song from a group called Belly. Beavis said, "Heh heh heh. If a tree falls in a forest ... and no one hears it ... does it still suck?"
That's all I'm posting from this trail.
Dynamic
Somebody had taken a bunch of the fallen trees and built a little makeshift lean-to shelter near the trail. It's the kind of thing you should do if you're lost and stranded in the woods to survive the night, but we were only about a mile from the road at this point, and the obvious trail out was right there. So I don't know what that's about.
More significant is this tree that had fallen and was lying across the trail. This tree wasn't here when we passed this way the first time. Sometime in the hour or so between when we went out and when we came back, this tree fell. We hadn't heard it.
There's the common question about whether the falling tree made a sound, and from a physics (and metaphysics) standpoint, that's a more complicate issue than you might think. It goes to the idea of what one defines as sound. Is sound the waves of compressed air that emanate from something like a falling tree hitting the ground? If so, then yes, this tree definitely made a sound. Or is sound the effect these waves of compressed air have on the ear drums of an organism? Because the waves of compressed air emanating off this tree likely didn't interact with any human ear drums, and it's possible there were no ear drums belonging to any organism anywhere around here at all. If "sound" is the effect, and tree's collapse had no effect, then maybe there was no sound.
Or perhaps I should just contemplate the philosophy of the MTV cartoon television show Beavis and Butthead, which once in the 1990s featured the namesake couple watching the video for Feed the Tree, a one-hit wonder song from a group called Belly. Beavis said, "Heh heh heh. If a tree falls in a forest ... and no one hears it ... does it still suck?"
That's all I'm posting from this trail.