Rafał

I Cannot Look at the Lack of Forest (2018)
We were standing in the garden, doing small maintenance tasks. Rafał was telling his story. He’s from Koszalin, where he started a family and worked hard to earn his dream: a house in the middle of the forest. He’s withdrawn and unsure in inter-actions. He wears a tough-guy mask, but he’s a sensitive person — one of the first with whom I had deep conversations about nature and art. Rafał moved to Mylof twenty years ago. He loved the old spruces in front of his house, the water, the dam, and the Brda River. The Forest People taught him to love his surroundings and to benefit from them. Together with his family, he lived in his dream place on Earth.

During the night of the storm, he didn’t know what was happening. He only remembers that when he stepped outside to smoke a cigarette, he saw countless insects climbing up the walls of the buildings — hundreds of tiny beings migrating across the old plaster. Rafał recalls the moment when he and his wife froze, staring at this unusual sight. They didn’t know they were witnessing a battle for survival.

When morning came and only the stumps of the trees remained, Rafał and his wife could not believe they were looking at a forest cemetery. They looked at a forest that suddenly no longer existed. He cannot reconcile himself with it. Since then, he has driven every day through places that once were dear to him and now are unrecognisable—dangerous, dark, sad. Once the trees — as if signs — pointed the way home. Today, every turn looks the same. We are travelling across a burnt field, searching for the way home. And for Rafał, there is no real home anymore; his home was the forest.

I simply cannot look at the Lack of Forest — Rafał confesses. I begin to understand the toil of experiencing a catastrophe. The storm lasted a moment. But what about those from whom it took something? For Rafał, the forest was not a point on a map, not an abstract idea or a form of property — it was part of his identity. After its loss, he found nothing that could bring relief. Relief came only from the forest.

In 2024, nearly six years after our first conversation, I met with Rafał again. He tells me he had a breakdown. Shortly after our talk, he quit his job for health reasons — he had to change professions and his entire life. When he rebuilt his health, found a new job, and caught his breath, he decided to move away from the Lack of Forest. He could no longer bear the tension caused by the wound in the landscape.

He and his family moved to the village of Pawłówko, untouched by the storm. The ability to walk into a forest is a basic daily need for Rafał. Without it, the quality of his life deteriorates significantly. The forest, which he calls his closest companion, anchors him more deeply than social ties. The forest is his home.

Two or three months earlier, I asked if they remembered how old the spruce trees that had fallen in front of our door were. One of the older residents told me that when they moved in fifty years ago, his uncle said that they had been planted in 1910, when the forester’s lodge was built. They remembered it exactly. That wind was pure power, I tell you. Two of us had to hold the window so it wouldn’t blow out. We couldn’t even hear the thunder, we could only see long flashes of lightning. They lit up the sky as if you had turned on floodlights on a football pitch. And with each flash, you could see that another two or three of those huge spruce trees were missing. When it was over, we got busy rescuing our flats and the stairwell because they were flooded. Each and every resident fought against the water. Finally, it got light, somewhere around four or five in the morning — I remember that fog was rising above this battleground, and you couldn’t see a thing. Only when it cleared… Tragedy emerged. There was simply nothing, nothing, not a single tree. Not a single tree from those that grew near our blocks of flats. Everything was lying in a heap, one on top of the other: high-voltage wires, broken poles. Everything turned into nothing.

Rafał, Mylof, 2018

People who lived in the forests said that a few hours before the storm, they saw the animals gathering on fields, in the middle of open land. […] And then some-one said that the animals sensed danger, and they were trying to hide somehow. Even the crickets were seeking shelter high up under the gutters. We didn’t know what it meant; we thought, “They’re here, alright”—maybe for the light, maybe for something else.

Rafał, Pawłówko, 2025