Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  South of Highway 2 begin the granite swells of the White Mountains—clearly, of all the high country in New England, the most dazzling route to the sky. No forest in America has been host to more of both the yearning and the careless abuse that describe our relationship with wild places than this one. From a pioneer point of view it started in the late 1700s with a cast of gnarly, unflinching settlers hacking clearings out of the woods to graze a few milk cows, to grow the grains and summer squash that would steam on maplewood plates next to servings of moose and passenger pigeon. With no sawmills nearby, building materials had to be fashioned with an adz and a broad ax; likewise, since there were no grain mills, Indian corn, wheat, rye, and barley were turned to grist by hand, as often as not pulverized in wooden mortars.

  The basics were incredibly hard to come by; tough old Eleazar Rosebrooks, for one, thought nothing of hauling a bushel of salt eighty miles to his home near present-day Colebrook. Even if you did manage to actually carve out a productive farm here, there was the devil to pay when it came to rounding up enough seasonal help to work it. The best solution was to build a cider mill out in the barn. That way you could bribe your workers with rations of applejack.

  But of course this was the frontier, after all, and on all frontiers, mulish perseverance was as common as chickweed in a ditch row. What made the White Mountains unique was the way they breathed inspiration into another, completely different aspect of the national personality: an amazing sixty-year obsession with putting God back into nature, and nature into God.

  Fundamentalists today like to banter about how Christianity had such a firm hold on young America. But what they don’t say is that the Holy Book of the times was the woods and the mountains—more useful, thought most people, and every bit as unfailing as the Bible. By the early 1800s you would’ve been hard-pressed to find any brand of religion, thoroughly reformed or steadfastly orthodox, that wasn’t smitten with the notion that nature was irrefutable proof of the Divine; even for the most literate, scholarly theologians, the boundaries between the notion of God having created nature and God being nature had all but dissolved.

  From 1790 to 1820, long before the nature-loving Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophies began rooting in the psyches of New Englanders, you could warm a pew in almost any church from Long Island Sound to Boston to northern New Hampshire and as likely as not, you’d hear the preacher talking about “sermons in the stones,” about the genius of forest and tides and stars, of the need and wisdom of seeking God in the songs of woodland birds. It wasn’t sportsmen, but clergymen from Boston and New York who made up the lion’s share of early travelers in the deep woods of New Hampshire and Maine, some of them returning time and again, ever on the lookout for ways to build better links between nature and the soul.

  Given all that, it’s not surprising that Americans would serve themselves extra doses of the Divine not like Europeans did, through the breathy paintings of a Grunewald or a Botticelli, or the sculptures of Ghiberti, but in the works of landscape painters. For years there was the most pious gaggle of landscape artists imaginable tramping the New England countryside, especially the White Mountains, talking in hushed tones about what they called the “Scripture of Art,” offering their fledgling students lessons that were every bit as anchored in catechism as in technique.

  Men like Thomas Cole routinely wandered the rocky ravines of these mountains looking for the perfect scene; on finding it he’d take out his flute and play soft rifts of music—his way of speaking to the landscape, he explained—and only then would he settle in to sketch. Which is how he created pieces like the magnificent View of the White Mountains. Out of a ragged, tattered stump rises a young elm firmly binding heaven to this sprawling run of comely highlands. (In Christianity, stumps were a symbol for mortality, but in later America they were used to represent the destructive forces of civilization.) It was just one of hundreds of painterly appearances for the elm, which was fast on its way to becoming the tree of choice for denoting the promise of freedom in the New World. In the middle distance of Cole’s painting are two small figures walking a broad path into the shadows, ultimately bound for a brilliantly lit slice of wild valley. The valley, then, cradles the feet of Mount Washington, topped by a soft halo of clouds. We are still in Eden, Cole said. “And the wilderness is yet a fitting place to speak of God.” Other great artists—Bierstadt, Church, Durand, Frankenstein, Oakes—would also come to this place. And that most famous of all American art movements, the Hudson River School, would be known first as the “School of the White Mountains.”

  Evening is well along when I finally park the van off a weed-choked two-track road south of U.S. 2 and rid myself of the last of the coffee from the Going Home Cafe. The air is thick with the smell of pine; nearby, two long-eared owls hoot at one another from out of the blackness. It’s a clear night, and high above me is the figure of Hercules, spinning in a dozen points of white starlight, his bow ever poised to fire on the neck of Draco the Dragon. Farther south the archer is similarly engaged in an attack on Scorpius, and near him, the good doctor Ophiuchus continues his wrestling match with the serpent. When one embraces Greek mythology, the entire summer sky becomes a cosmic battlefield. And yet there are other tales that lend a welcome benevolence to the stars, that in fact tie them to the earth in such a way that the cosmos seems less a collection of parts or personalities than a single whole. The Egyptians said the goddess Nut blessed the earth each night by releasing celestial milk for the nourishment of trees and plants—hence the name “Milky Way.” Algonquian myth speaks of colossal New England pines serving as ladders into the heavens, where heroes could pull themselves into the loveliest, most peaceful of all the worlds.

  My last recollections of the evening are the sounds of the long-eared owls still gossiping with one another in the woods and the occasional snap of a twig beneath the foot of a whitetail deer. I drift off to sleep half hoping for visits by some of the ghosts of these White Mountains—maybe Thomas Cole, or the nature-loving Reverend Thomas Starr King—half hoping they’ll invite me up to spend the night in the howling winds on Mount Chocorua, or farther west, listening, as they often did, to the sound of God rumbling in the belly of Tuckerman’s Ravine.

  After fifteen years and some three hundred thousand miles traveling in this van, the routine is clear, unambiguous. Fire up the Coleman stove to heat water for coffee and oatmeal (or plug the coffeepot into the cigarette lighter if I’m in a hurry), grab a lawn chair and set it up in some strategic place to catch the first rays of the morning sun. If Abby the traveling cat is along, which she often is, before I even get free of the sheets my glasses are on and I’m scanning the floor for half-eaten mice lying next to the bed, because in truth there’s no nastier way to start the morning than by stepping on a half-eaten mouse in your bare feet. (Heaven forbid if I wake up and realize I’ve forgotten to stuff towels in all the mouse escape routes before going to bed—the gap under the refrigerator, the crack at the edge of the storage door beneath the bed. Because that means I probably have a live mouse holed up somewhere, and that part of the morning will be spent trying to find it and shoo it out when Abby isn’t looking.)

  The breakfast dishes, which on most mornings are all of a Sierra cup and a spoon, are washed and rinsed with the remaining hot water, then dried and packed in their appointed nooks in the cabinet above the refrigerator. The bed gets made, the fridge turned on, and the passenger seat—which also serves as the nighttime reading seat—is swiveled and locked back in its normal position, facing forward. Cooler and lawn chairs are loaded, the stove slid into the center cabinet, the remaining coffee placed in the cup holder on the driver’s door. I can do it in my sleep.

  Living out of this van is one of those things in life where the doing is every bit as good as the fantasizing about it. I never outgrew it. Camping out in woods, cruising through little towns in a vehicle small enough to parallel park, is the blue-collar American version of the European Grand Tour. The only thing that’s real
ly changed over fifteen years is the number of miles I’m willing to go on any given day. I used to get a strange kind of satisfaction in just driving—seven hundred, eight hundred miles a day if I had to get somewhere, the last two hundred with the radio spilling out a bizarre assortment of talk shows, working through cups of burned coffee from a parade of bleary-eyed clerks at the all-night gas stations. But these days there are times when even a hundred miles are too much. Middle-age has brought with it a longing for more conversation with strangers, more back-road slices of pie, more calling it quits early to sit in the sun with a book and a bottle of wine.

  But there’s something else, too. Converting this vehicle from a panel truck into a rolling house and office was the last real project I did with my father. We froze our butts off at it, January in Indiana, working a couple of hours and then running into the house to thaw out our fingers. Up until that point I’d been neck-deep in one harebrained adventure scheme or another—sailing for the Bahamas in a rickety boat, hopping freight trains—never paying all that much attention to my father’s world, much of which turned on the amazing ability he had to make things with his hands. While working on the van, I discovered that somewhere along the way—probably when I was a kid standing next to him in the basement, building a hair hydrometer or a model furnace or some other hoo-haw for the science fair—I must have soaked up something after all. It was good to uncover it with him right there, standing at my side.

  Eighteen months after we drove the last screw into these cabinets on a cold October morning at a job site in Plymouth, Indiana, he volunteered to walk out on a high metal roof to see if it was free of frost and safe to work on, slipped and fell sixty feet. We buried him at the edge of the cemetery near a grove of oak trees; Indian summer ended early that year, and I remember the ground was already strewn with thousands of leaves, rattling in the cool breeze, trapped in the tall blades of grass and wanting to fly.

  I’ve decided to pass on a trip down State Highway 16 through the heart of the White Mountains and go east instead, to Franconia, to the old farmstead of Robert Frost. Just fifty acres of pasture and trees, but arguably the most meaningful place Frost ever lived. It was the farm with the dazzling view from the front porch of the Franconia Mountains—the farm he decided he just had to have, and so one spring day he went up to the owner, who was out raking his yard, and suggested to Herbert Willis that he move next door instead. And so Willis did.

  I like Robert Frost for lots of reasons besides his poems, not the least of which was the way he looked as an old man: face chiseled like White Mountain granite, frocks of white hair forever stuck in the spin cycle. I like the fact that while he received some forty honorary degrees, he never got a diploma. He joked about that a lot, claiming he was a man educated by degrees. I like that Frost was on some days lazy and on others industrious, sometimes jaundiced, cynical, and at other times front man for Pollyanna. An old friend of the poet described him as being hesitant to do things just because they were supposed to be done. He wasn’t willing, said the friend, to become a decent board instead of remaining a growing tree. But maybe what I like most about Robert Frost is that he knew enough to come to a certain patch of New Hampshire farm and woodlot to save himself—to “fix” himself, as he put it. And what could be more wise, either in his time or ours, than knowing where to go to get fixed?

  Along the way I pass the Appalachian Trailhead parking lot, which looks like the side yard at the Baptist Church on revival Sunday, though the jumble is far less Buick and LeBaron than Subaru and Cherokee. From this spot on the Moose River there’s an almost endless tangle of trails taking off through the birch and ash and spruce and maple, climbing south, toward the heart of the high country. Randolph Path and Sylvan Way, Short Line, Air Line, and Valley Way. Howker Ridge and Watson Path, Amphibrach and Cliffway—gateways to a world of gentle forest glens and boxcar-sized boulders, waterfalls and ravines, and of course to that world-famous toss of alpine summits, each one shorn and shredded by some of the stiffest winds in America.

  The sun is well up by the time I cross the Israel River, named for Israel Glines, a traveler who happened to camp here sometime in the mid-1700s. Nothing against Israel. And nothing against his brother John either, who stumbled across a watercourse ten miles to the west at about the same time, Johns River. But I’ve always appreciated landscape names that give some hint about the look of the place, maybe about what goes on there. Androscoggin River, from the Abenaki—“fish-curing site.” Or the Mahoosuc mountain range, thought to have been derived from another Abenaki word, meaning “dwelling-place of the hungry animals.” Before Israel Glines came along the native people knew this stream as Siwoog-i-nock—“a place we return to in springtime.” Even the name “White Mountains” alludes to the snow that lies on the summits for much of the year.

  When I finally reach the Frost place it seems overcome with summer. Out front poppy blooms crowd the slanted mailbox post, swaying back and forth on their long stems, dizzy-looking, as if they’re about to collapse in the heat. Before I even set foot on the place I decide the front porch is perfect, the kind of porch where you could go out to the glider with a glass of lemonade at two in the afternoon and not wake up again until dinnertime. Neighbors told of spotting Frost out here on warm afternoons, his bare feet sticking through the loose tangle of morning-glory vines that ran from the rail to the roof. Either there, or out walking in the woods—“farming,” he called it. “Dumped down in paradise we are, and happy.” At the small barn behind the main house a young man in shorts is sitting in the shade reading a novel, taking money now and then from the trickle of visitors, getting up every twenty minutes to restart a video about the life of Robert Frost.

  For the most part, the house is just what you’d expect for a rural New Englander. Yankee-spare, uncluttered, functional. But past the living room and up a narrow rise of oak stair treads, each one ground to cups by an endless parade of visitors, there’s a collection of nooks that seem steeped more in pleasure than in practicality. To the east of the stairway landing is a simple dormered room wrapped in paisley-patterned wallpaper, washed in light from a casement window overlooking the poet’s three favorite White Mountain peaks: Lafayette, Lincoln, and Liberty. Frost’s writing desk sits in the spillway, just as it did some eighty years ago, the surface faded and slightly warped, traces of his fondness for keeping the window open even in the face of blowing summer rains.

  On the other side of the narrow, honey-colored landing are more windows, these facing west, offering views into a cluster of trees crowded against the far side of a tiny yard. They include a massive white pine and a yellow birch, standing like old guards at the gate of what was for Frost a cherished run of mixed hardwoods—a place of fringed orchids and rose pogonias and ovenbirds, and old beech trunks with initials carved in them to mark the corners of the property lines—so called “witness trees”—all of it to be savored and turned to verse.

  Suddenly I’m itching for a closer look. I head back down the stairs, past the closed room where the current poet-in-residence is hiding out, readying himself to do a reading for visitors out in the barn later in the day. In the living room is a couple in their sixties, the woman reading interpretive brochures to her husband, who scans the room through the bottom of his bifocals, not saying anything at all. The woman seems concerned when I leave, staring after me as I walk off the front porch and around the house, worried maybe that I might be heading off to some event she hasn’t heard about; later, entering the woods on the Poetry Trail, I happen to glance back and notice they’re following, confused looks on their faces.

  It doesn’t take ten steps for the harsh August heat to yield to the forest, for the world to move from a parched lawn into a sweet tangle of foamflowers and cowslips, violets and interrupted ferns. The humidity is incredibly high today, and the air hangs on my skin like wet wool. It was of this and other nearby woods that Robert Frost often told of hearing the call of a dark, wild voice—a voice he was forever tempted to
answer but never did, passing it up time and again for various deadlines and commitments. For the same miles that most of us think we have to go before we sleep.

  Yet, in the 1940s, Frost put on his rambling shoes and headed off up a small forest stream on a poetic journey into the unknown, gathering images for a piece called simply, “Directive.” It’s in that poem he seems most willing to step outside the polar views Americans had long held about their wildwoods, either insisting they be flooded with hope, as Emerson did, or seeing them as some kind of savage foe. In “Directive,” Frost took on an older, probably wiser view of the forest, not unlike those spun out by ancient fairy tales, wherein the woods were uncertain places with thorns as well as flowers, places where people routinely ended up getting terribly lost and then finding themselves again. Frost seemed to be saying that while there was deliverance to be gained from the woods, getting it meant we first had to accept that nature would spin life in ways and for reasons completely beyond our understanding. If we chose to keep using the forest as canvas for rendering the human condition, then at some point we needed to muster the courage to paint the shadows, to say “Yes” to things like age and sickness and death. The poem ends without fanfare at the head of the stream, the narrator taking a cold drink of water from a broken cup. No rosy moral. No tidy endings to warm the storyteller on the long walk home.