Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  Through the Woods: A Journey Through America’s Forests

  Copyright © 1998 by Gary Ferguson

  All rights reserved.

  Foreword 2015 Edition Copyright © 2015 by Gary Ferguson

  First Torrey House Press Edition, February 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

  Published by Torrey House Press, LLC

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  www.torreyhouse.com

  E-Book ISBN: 978-1-937226-52-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957807

  Author photo by Mary Clare

  Interior design by Russel Davis | Gray Dog Press

  Cover design by Rick Whipple | Sky Island Studio

  Thanks, Moby

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  IT’S BEEN ALMOST TWENTY YEARS since I walked out the front door of my home in southwest Montana on a June morning, crawled behind the wheel of my old Chevy van, and set out on a seven thousand mile odyssey across the United States. The tiny fridge behind the driver’s seat was stuffed with bowls of chili and blocks of cheese, a loaf of bread and a bag of apples and a six-pack of beer. Beside me on the floor, in a blue wire basket, were two journals and a tape recorder, a Rand McNally road atlas, and a stack of guidebooks to the plants, animals, and birds of the Eastern and Midwestern United States. Finally, on the tray of the engine cover was a handwritten list—names of men and women in New England and the southern Appalachians and the North Woods of the upper Midwest, many of them good friends of good friends, whom I’d been told were living lives firmly linked to the forest. The job I’d signed on for was among the most appealing projects of my entire writing career: a slow, sweet meander down the forested backroads and trails of America, gathering stories of this nation’s long, lovely relationship with the woods.

  Celebrated novelist Lawrence Durrell once suggested that we are “children of our landscape”—that the lands we live with “dictate behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.” And in America, we’ve been very responsive indeed. While the look of the lands surrounding us have varied greatly, from the edge of the sea to the spill of the prairie, from the sprawl of deserts to the feet of mountains, no landscape has been more influential to how we see ourselves than the vast, brilliant quilts of the North American forests. The opening acts of our magnificent love affair with nature—which began before we were even a country—were destined to unfold under the arms of oak and beech and white pine, sassafras and ash, hickory and butternut and birch.

  Most of the people you’ll meet in these pages—people whose lives were, as Lawrence Durrell suggested, clearly shaped by their landscape—are still, twenty years later, very much engaged with the woods. They describe their home forests as gifts, enormously reliable, offering pleasure in every season, in good times and bad. But at the same time, most would also tell you that their home forests are changing. Some have seen enormous development pressure—a flurry of building that has left fewer trees and fewer creatures, creating landscapes fragmented by roads and subdivisions and shopping centers. In other places, especially in Appalachia, the hugely destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining has obliterated the forests and streams of the high places, outraging and breaking the hearts of many who live there.

  Beyond all that, however, the effects of climate change have accelerated in these woodlands, and are now tugging at every strand of the forest. In southern New England, for example, the regal sugar maple and the winsome yellow birch are sickening and dying in the face of warmer temperatures and increasingly extreme weather. One day, not so very long from now, they may die out. As that happens, and as less colorful tree species move in from the south, it’s possible to imagine a future where the region’s brilliant fall foliage displays will fade to a pale shadow of what they’ve been for centuries.

  Meanwhile, warming temperatures in the southern Appalachians are leading to a steady loss of the splendid Carolina hemlock and balsam fir. At the same time, many of the trout I saw flashing in the streams of Tennessee and North Carolina while researching this book, are disappearing due to warming water temperatures. So too are soundscapes changing, as more and more songbirds are pushed north by the warming, drying climate. And on it goes.

  Yet even with such monumental changes, it’s important to understand that we do still have the choice of steering toward a healthier future for these brilliant woodlands and the people and creatures who live there. To some degree, our chances of success will depend on figuring out technologies for living more sustainably on the earth. And in this area, we’re making rapid progress. There are breakthrough developments going on in solar energy right now, from so-called “trough mirrors,” which greatly concentrate the sun’s energy, to the use of “salt batteries,” which allow for electrical production even when the sun isn’t shining. Even older technologies such as wind turbines are becoming ever more efficient, to the point of incorporating high-tech storage batteries to solve the longstanding problem of fluctuating electrical supply. And off the coast of Maine, after years of research and design work, power is being generated by ocean waves.

  But there’s something else worth considering in all this, something more fundamental to the kind of public enthusiasm that drives such projects in the first place. That enthusiasm takes its breath not merely from a love of technology, not even from a sense of wanting to leave the planet intact for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. It comes from our ability to cultivate a deep kinship with the earth in the here and now.

  As I write this, more than two thousand celebrations are happening around the country to mark the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, which established the highest form of land protection ever afforded the American landscape. “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt,” President Lyndon Johnson noted after signing the Act into law, then “we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning.” Since its inception in 1964, the wilderness preservation system has grown more than ten-fold, to over 109 million acres, protecting critical lands from California to Alaska, Florida to New Jersey, every one of those acres granted the simple right to unfold to its full potential, unshackled by human inventions or appetites.

  The kind of passion that’s made the Wilderness Act such a success is at the root of the energy we’ll need to address the extraordinary challenge of climate change. Thus far, we’ve been fairly good at preserving small portions of the earth as they were “in the beginning,” as Lyndon Johnson put it. Now we need to grow that generativity into a willingness to sustain the beauty, community, and mystery of the planet as a whole. We must do so for economic reasons, of course. For the welfare of future generations, to be sure. But we must also do it for the deep pleasure that many of the people in this book have known for decades: the kind that comes from the thoughtful, intimate caretaking of this place we call home.

  It’s my hope that these pages will allow you to taste the pleasures that come from falling in love again with the natural world. And further, that the amazing men and women you’ll meet here will carry you to the heart of that place where we no longer think of ourselves as being too late
, too unprepared, too overwhelmed to meet the challenges of our times. To that place where we can choose to put down such thoughts, cast off such disappointments—where we can take a deep breath, plant our feet in the present moment, and begin again.

  Gary Ferguson

  September 2014

  Introduction

  AS NEAR AS I REMEMBER I left the ordinary when I was seven, in late summer, out with my parents off some potholed county road in northern Indiana on a hazy Sunday afternoon when the mayapples were hung and the milkweed was in full flower. My folks had packed lunch and driven my brother and me out some ten or fifteen miles from town, one thing in mind: to let us climb trees. There I was, standing in the crook of a maple, twelve feet off the ground, hugging the trunk, curtains of big green leaves wound up in the wind and dancing all over the place, making noises like a fast creek running through the sky. And my father, looking up at me from ground level through the scratched lenses of his gray-plastic glasses, muscled arms outstretched to catch me if I fell.

  Thoughts of the woods have been with me ever since. They come in daydreams: sycamores and sugar maples with arms locked on the hilltops near Lake Wawasee; in the bottoms down below, crowds of pawpaw and white oak and hickory. They rise as pieces of past vacations spent rolling down some two-lane—first in a Studebaker, then in a Chevy—the back windows open, staring into timber: sprawls of tamarack and jack pine in Michigan, unbroken but for log taverns with halos of blue light from the Hamm’s beer signs in the tops of the windows. In Tennessee, dizzy rolls of red oak, chestnut, and shagbark hickory falling away from the top of the Cumberland Plateau.

  We first went west in 1966, to Colorado, and I met the Rocky Mountains with my chin on the back of the seat, staring wide-eyed through the windshield. But there too it was the great sweeps of conifers—Douglas-fir, Engelmann spruce, lodgepole pine—that lent mystery to the mountains, that brought a feeling of possibility to those drifts of stone. Even now, the lion’s share of my childhood memories is shot full of leaves.

  Which is why it was such a sad surprise when in my mid-thirties I looked over my shoulder to find that the trees had shrunk from my life, that they’d gone from being nothing short of ladders to the sky to being something merely pleasant; stories, where once there was myth. Of course fascinations don’t really burn up in flash fires so much as they drown by degrees—old dreams like old boats, sopping water, growing heavier with every season, harder to steer. And yet if I had to pick the heart of those troubled times, it was probably when I went home to Indiana after my mother’s death in 1988, hoping for one more ramble through some of the unkempt places I’d known as a child. But all I could see were the losses. Old wetlands, once thick with the smell of creation, shrouded in veils of pussy willow and spicebush, had been drained away, packed in dirt, filled with condominiums. Fence rows near Cromwell were plowed under, taking with them the fox and the raccoon, the songbirds that once hid in their thickets. Gone to the woodlots that had slept away the winters beside those yellow, stubbled fields of corn.

  It was years later that I was wandering through the stacks of a library in Boulder, Colorado, when I stumbled across a passage about an all but forgotten American named Joe Knowles. On a rainy August day in 1913, this part-time artist, then in his mid-forties, stripped down to a G-string, shook hands with a group of bewildered reporters on the shore of King and Bartlett Lake in western Maine, then trudged off into the woods without a single piece of equipment to live as a wild man for sixty days. The idea, Knowles claimed, came from a dream in which he was lost in the woods, alone and naked, with little hope of getting out. “Not much of a dream,” he confessed, “but a damn real one.”

  Joe Knowles emerged from the forest two months later a full-blown hero. Two hundred thousand people in Maine and Massachusetts turned out to see him—20,000 on the Boston Common alone. A book of his adventures sold more than 300,000 copies, and he toured vaudeville with top billing, preaching the virtues of life beyond the bustle and soot of the twentieth century. The next summer Knowles managed a similar feat—again to the cheers of the nation—this time in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwest Oregon. For whatever reason Joe chose to act out his “damn real dream,” he tapped into a belief, once commonplace, whose time had come again. It said that if our dance with nature had been such a big part of what we most valued about our character, then losing our wild places might mean losing that which held the best hope for the future. It was like gas to a spark. The land-preservation movement exploded. Youth groups sprang up everywhere—the Sons of Daniel Boone, the Boy Pioneers, the Boy Scouts, the Woodcraft Indians—each dedicated to maintaining the influence of the wilderness in children’s lives. In the years between 1910 and 1940, The Boy Scout Handbook outsold every book in America except the Bible. Frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner—the guy who said that in America, democracy was a forest product—was suddenly a genius. The woods were alive again in the American psyche.

  Most historians say that Joe Knowles was a charlatan, that he never really did what he claimed to have done. They may be right. Still, he was the one who reminded me that our willingness to conquer nature has as often as not been tethered to a longing to save it—that there have in fact been generous times, times when we’ve waltzed with the woods like Cinderella on champagne. While early Christians were full of fears about wild places, the sons and daughters who steered America through its formative years courted those places, seeding a national commons of fable and myth and spirit-tales based on mountains and rivers and forests.

  As unlikely an inspiration as Joe Knowles might be, he’s the one who left me hungry to go back out and roam the last wild places, places like Maine and Appalachia and the North Woods, looking for the people who still had pieces of the old American imagination in their pockets, people who never forgot how to warm their lives with the woods.

  Chapter One

  THE MORNING SUN IS RIPPING holes in the fog, leaving scattered herds of gray ghosts running for cover in the grassy knolls off Frenchman Bay. Now and then one climbs the heights and glides across the campus, gives us a damp, chilling hug as it passes, then disappears into the quiet streets of Bar Harbor.

  I’m on my knees again. The second day of it, hovering over a washtub filled with bundles of white-spruce roots. Simple work, really. Pluck a root out of the water, uncoil it, strip away the bark by pulling the length of it through a tight, narrow split in a wooden stake driven into the ground; then recoil it and place it into another tub of water. If the root’s too thick—bigger, say, than a pencil—you cut it in half lengthwise with a utility knife. I’m still a little nervous about that part, worried that I’ll slip and sever it, and the fact is, it takes a heck of a lot of effort to dig these things out of the ground. The tannin in the water has turned my fingers the color of copper, puckered my skin into the hands of an old man. But I’ve soaked up this wonderful scent, this smell like pepper and pine.

  I remember sitting at home in Montana two weeks ago, thinking of how great it would be to start this summer of trees with some kind of ritual. Some occasion, a starting gun that years from now I could look back on and say it all began on this day or that, with those people, in the heat or the wind or the thunder. It dawns on me now that this is it.

  My teacher is a Penobscot Indian named Barry Dana, a solid, good-looking man in his early thirties, tanned and fit, someone you’d expect to find modeling clothes for Land’s End. But here he is on his knees working these enormous sheets of birch bark, using a bone awl from the shin of a moose to punch lines of vertical holes along the outer edges. Once that’s done, he lays the sheets side by side, the edges slightly overlapped, and places a thin batten of mountain maple over the seam. Then come my white-spruce roots, which serve as thread for sewing the panels together, sheet after sheet, until they turn into dazzling runs of bark some twelve feet long. As each length is finished, I leave my root buckets, and Barry, his wife, Lori, and I maneuver the panels onto a squat, dome-shaped frame of white-ash p
oles, then make them fast with ties from the inner bark of basswood. A Penobscot wigwam. Since the outer surface of birch bark is more prone to weathering, the sheets are placed on the frame with the papery side facing in, which makes the inside room quiet and homey, a womb of oyster-white, scored with thin black lines and blisters shaped like crescent moons. A fire at night dances on the walls, drawing them in and then releasing them. Rhythmic, like breathing.

  Really I came here to the coast of Maine for just a brief visit—a little talk with Barry, maybe some lunch, but then he invited me to spend some time actually working on his wigwam, and that changed everything. There’s something about the cadence of this shaping wood by hand, a patient, unhurried rhythm that over time leaves even quiet people like Barry suddenly generous with their thoughts. Yesterday we were stripping basswood bark for framing ties when he laid out this dream he has for a group of Penobscot teenagers. “Some summer,” he says, “I’ll take a bunch of kids and we’ll build an entire village of these things.” He tells it like it’s fact. “We’ll make birch canoes, too. Then we’ll set out from that village on a long trip up some historic river trail. It’ll be incredible.” I keep thinking about those kids slipping into their canoes—canoes they released from trees. The startled look on their faces when they push on the paddles and the thing skitters forward like some kind of water strider, as if it were being pulled by an invisible hand.

  Something else Barry talks about is his love for running. He says the Penobscots used to have an elite group of gifted running men who carried messages in times of war—men so fast and nimble they could run down deer in a thick woods. They enjoyed few of the common pleasures that other people took for granted. No sex, for one thing. Strictly controlled diets. Sleeping as a group in one big wigwam, an elder standing by with a switch in his hand, watching so each man kept his legs crooked to the proper position throughout the night. They called them the “Pure Men.”