I went for a walk in the forest on Saturday. Not a remarkable walk. Just the sort of potter around that is an everyday occurrence for most dog owners. Just to the south of Brussels is the large expanse of the Sonian Forest (Forêt de Soignes/Zoniënwoud), an ancient woodland that most people experience as a monotonous wall of trees passed in a car on the motorway, or from a seat in a train.
When I first came to Belgium, quite a few years ago, I used to go on long bike rides through the forest, entering from Ter Kamerenbos, the grand English-style park at the end of Avenue Louise, and emerging in the grounds of the Afrikamuseum in Tervuren, before looping back past a former abbey turned arts centre and getting a metro home from Hermann-Debroux. The forest became an important counterbalance to the city, a calming pause from the work of building my life in Belgium. A ride through the forest, perhaps spotting deer in the distance, breathing fresher air, was an escape from my tiny rented room in a shared apartment.
I eventually moved on from that flat, ending up in the city centre, in an apartment with the only redeeming feature being its sunset views over the Brussels skyline. Being further from the park and the forest created some sort of inertial block on my forest bike rides. Subsequent moves never brought me closer to the forest again, and I eventually left Brussels altogether.
So this walk in the park was also a return to the forest and a return to the calming balance of being in nature. I turned the outing into a small adventure, taking a train to Brussels, then changing onto another train to Groenendaal. The station at Groenendaal was apparently built to provide the middle classes of Brussels with an escape to the forest and the nearby, now closed, hippodrome. It is unusually grand in design, though looking quite dilapidated now. The entrance to the corner of the forest that I planned to visit was directly opposite the station, so my shoes were crunching on the gravel of the path almost immediately. I had chosen a walk around the ‘King’s Ponds’, a set of originally five ponds from an old monastery, restored by King Leopold II. Only one pond remains, the other four having silted up.
While I was hardly venturing into Yosemite (though I was technically in a national park), I couldn’t help but smile at the calm joy of simply being in the forest, away from the day to day.
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