The Wild Woods
Originally published in Faune Journal

There are fifteen red gates through which to enter the wild wood. Inside, there is another world, the remnant of a lost place and time. But exactly what world and which place and time, it’s hard to say. Inside, I have encountered a landscape both verdant and barren, mythological and tangible, at once expansive and intimate. Here is a realm of rolling hills and salt-sea breezes, of ancient graves and magic springs, of weeping willows and resurrected oaks, of horse-drawn carriages, wandering minstrels, and mischievous red foxes. Here you will find the crumbling remains of wind-felled monsters, the abandoned architecture of feral children, and ghostly flocks of deer that haunt the world within the red gates. Here, in the wild woods beside the sea, I have encountered all of this and more.

It makes sense, of course: a fairytale city deserves a fairytale forest growing along its mysterious periphery—the kind of wild place where a lost traveller might very well discover a hermit’s thatch-roofed cottage, or stumble upon a magical spring, or meet a cloaked rider on horseback. For Copenhagen, this wild place is Jægersborg Dyrehave (or, more simply, Dyrehaven, which means ‘the deer park’), a vast nature preserve located twelve kilometers north of the capital’s city center. It’s healthy—necessary even—that the citizens of a city as prosperous and progressive as Copenhagen should have a ‘back garden’ like Dyrehaven, a gnarly patch of true wilderness where modern urbanites can stretch their legs and explore the woods alongside rutting stags and saddled mares. 

Unlike other grand, public parks in Europe, Dyrehaven is a sanctuary of countryside left, more or less, to its own, natural devices. Though once the exclusive dominion of kings, this is no Versailles. Instead, here in the Deer Park, trees grow for centuries until Baltic winds or lightning or their own weight eventually brings them toppling down. And there, on the ground, is where they stay—collapsed like exhausted giants, their bodies spanning forest creeks, happy children climbing on their backs, mushrooms blooming from their withered skin—left in place to decay in the open air, slowly, quietly, and without shame. Left alone as it is, the Deer Park is, therefore, a kind of spatial shapeshifter, ever-changing with the pendulum of Scandinavian seasons, the whims of weather, and the passage of time. Always growing. Always dying. Enriched as it is by roughly three millennia of natural and human history, stretching backward from the Danish Golden Age (c. 1800-1850) to the Nordic Bronze Age (c. 1700-500 BC), Dyrehaven exudes an immortal quality—a spirit both natural and supernatural—that has always enchanted its visitors, from princes to poets, from pirates to pilgrims.

First opened to the public in 1746, Dyrehaven had previously been the private game reserve and hunting grounds of the Danish royal family for three quarters of a century. Before that, in the 1580s, legend says that a pious woman named Kirsten Piil discovered a spring at the southern edge of the property whose waters could heal the sick, especially around Midsummer. In the 15th century, tenant farmers worked to tame the land and make it fruitful. And during the park’s shadowy prehistory, ancient Norsemen lived and died here, leaving behind dozens of Bronze Age burial sites and carved stones.

Today, Dyrehaven is best known for its 2,000 head of free-roaming deer, its extensive network of hiking and cycling trails, and for Bakken (the world’s oldest amusement park) which was founded at the south edge of the park in 1583, near the site of Kirsten Piil’s magic spring. Every year 7.5 million visitors pass through Dyrehaven’s fifteen red gates and enter the wild woods, each of them looking to escape something or to discover something or, with a little luck, to accomplish both. 

Everyday of every season, Copenhageners come here to escape the concrete world. To escape their digital routine. They come here to wander, to get lost. To encounter the virtues of unhunted beasts. They come for the quiet.

These are the same reasons that I go back through the red gates and into the woods, time and again, season after season: to glimpse a bit of a lost, primeval world, to chance an encounter with the unexpected, and to regain the kind of spiritual balance that only comes through time spent in unspoiled nature. The vastness of Dyrehaven has the power to remind me just how very small I am. The prehistoric stones point to the brevity of life. The nobility of the red deer colors my naive understanding of freedom.

There was a time when all the world was wild, when no one had to seek out the chaotic splendor of true nature, because it was humanity’s constant companion. But now, in this new world of ours, we must step out and pursue wilderness. We must choose it, if, for no other reason, because we can’t know for sure who or what we might discover out there—what strangeness, what history, what magic, what enlightenment.

And so, this is why we still enter the wild woods:
Into the realm of deer, where holy water springs,
And Autumn light breaks into splinters of gold on the leafy earth below.

Originally published in Faune Magazine.