Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  I’m several hundred yards into the woods, reading a copy of a Frost poem posted along the side of the trail, when I hear heavy breathing. It’s the couple from the house. The woman is flushed, and her husband is having a miserable time with his glasses, which keep sliding down the sweat on his nose. It turns out they’re from Ithaca, taking the long way home after visiting a spanking-new grandson in Connecticut.

  “Our daughter told us about this place,” the woman says, sweeping her eyes upward to take in more of the woods. “She teaches poetry, and oh, she loves Robert Frost.”

  “What do you think of it?” I ask her.

  “Oh, it’s beautiful…it’s just…well, I had this notion of Frost being a happy-go-lucky sort, not a care. But I was reading some of his poems out loud in the car on the way here—see, Jack likes me to read while he drives—and I don’t know, it seems he was kind of troubled.” And then she looks up at the trees again, like she expects to find the answers up there in the arms of the maples.

  I wonder about the trees.

  Why do we wish to bear

  Forever the noise of these

  More than another noise

  So close to our dwelling place?

  We suffer them by the day

  Till we lose all measures of pace,

  And fixity in our joys,

  And acquire a listening air.

  They are that that talks of going

  But never gets away;

  And that talks no less for knowing,

  As it grows wiser and older,

  That now it means to stay.

  My feet tug at the floor

  And my head sways to my shoulder

  Sometimes when I watch trees sway,

  From the window or the door.

  I shall set forth for somewhere,

  I shall make the reckless choice

  Some day when they are in voice

  And tossing so as to scare

  The white clouds over them on.

  I shall have less to say,

  But I shall be gone.

  I realize there are a lot fewer trees in northern Vermont than the beauty strips along the highways would suggest. Even so, it’s still a state where it’s easy to stick your head out the window at sixty and hear long runs of birch and spruce and maple singing the old songs of the hills. It’s the trees that swell the uplands of Vermont far beyond their actual size, a sleight of hand where green light and shadow wax the summits and saddles until the whole world seems to be taking cues from the roll and rhythm of the heights.

  I don’t quite understand how, after the ravages of heavy timbering through the early 1900s, Vermonters managed to broker what looks to me like an above-average truce with the land—to see their woods as heritage, the way New Englanders used to talk about them. The few people I know here seem nearly unable to rake the yard, feed the cat, buy the groceries, without an occasional look over their shoulder up to these sweeps of nature, quietly acknowledging that at least a little of what keeps their lives in bloom rises in these woods, these cedar bogs and fence rows and sugarloaf hills.

  I push on farther than I should, all the way to northern Massachusetts, finally pulling in late in the afternoon to a campground at Clarksburg State Park. Alyssa is the ranger here, and though she’s barely twenty-one she looks plumb worn out. Tufts of black hair have strayed from under her hat and lie tousled against the frames of her glasses; there are beads of sweat glistening on her forehead and above her lip. She tells me she’s just finished refereeing a bunch of grade-schoolers who were cussing up a blue streak near Site 59, freaking out a lone woman camper in her sixties. “Sometimes it’s just baby-sitting,” she says of her job. Especially on the weekends. “People tend to think of this as a pretty safe place. Let the kids roam. No need to get up from the fire except to grab another beer.” It’s a blue, blue-collar campground, she explains, most times filled with people who can’t afford to travel far from home. Alyssa loves seeing the place full. “It’s good they want to come. You won’t believe this, but I went out on a date with this guy a couple of weeks ago; he’d never even been to the woods. Next week I’m taking him out for his first picnic! Now that’s sad.”

  Alyssa informs me that at the end of a narrow, half-mile-long path through the hardwoods, is a large pond, and a beach. On hearing that I pay my camping fee, wish her luck, jump into the van to wiggle into my swimsuit and sandals. Coming from Montana, I’m used to entering swimming holes with breath held and every muscle above the thighs held tight, as if preparing to be hit with a two-by-four. But here the water is tepid, and I can swim out far from the shore and float and dive and generally lolligag around until my skin puckers. Which is just what I do.

  It’s near dark when I head back across the beach toward the woods. Along the way, a man leans patiently over two boys, maybe eight and ten, the younger one upset at having discovered a leech clinging to his leg. “Just pick it off, Matt,” he tells the boy. “But Dad, don’t they suck your blood?” Matt’s brother wants to know, his eyes wide with alarm. “Well, after a while,” the man admits. “But I’ll tell you, you’ll look high and low before you find a better fish bait than that.” Amazingly, that pleases Matt to no end, and after watching for a few more seconds, he calmly peels the leech off and tosses it into the woods. I hurry my step, duck behind the first good-sized white pine I come to, pull down my trunks for a full-blown inspection.

  Chapter Five

  TO LEAVE NEW ENGLAND WITHOUT taking in the white pines would be like going to France and eating out of vending machines. White pines were everything. Straight, clear wood, and tall enough to grant the favorite wish of every shipbuilder in the world: to make masts again from single trees. The pines called to English explorers like sirens to sailors, like the smell of baking bread pulls at the hungry. England had become a woodless nightmare. People scavenged the commons of branches and kindling like hungry mice vacuuming crumbs from the bottom of a bread tin. In some parts of the country firewood prices were doubling every nine or ten months; the poor were left to beg for bread and cheese, to warm themselves by burning dried grass and cow dung, weeds and tattered mats of straw. When there was nothing left to eat and nothing to offer the flames, many died of pneumonia, or if they were especially lucky, in their sleep, from exposure. Women struggled to cook on fires made of twigs no bigger than pencils, and at night, families huddled together in bed like cats in a cold barn. Most of what trees were growing at the time were securely locked up in the royal forests, and whoever pilfered them did so at risk of being severely beaten.

  It’s easy to see how the woods could have vanished. All those timbers needed to shore up coal mines and make sluices and waterwheels for the mills that ground the grain and stamped the tin, that made the paper and pushed the bellows on the blast furnaces. Trees for barrels to ship flour and sugar and salt pork, bark for tanning leather on saddles and harnesses, potash for making everything from glass to gunpowder to soap. Saplings as hoops for the hop growers, and the woods themselves as the garden that grew the physician’s herbs. Two thousand oak trees, big ones, to make a single warship. Sixteen cords of wood for a ton of iron, or about twenty-two thousand cords a year for a single average-sized factory. Fifty cubic feet of trees to fire a couple thousand bricks, forty times that for one ton of salt.

  And always this or that royal family, either jealously guarding the woodlands (Richard II made it illegal for those in the lower classes to even own snares or hounds, as hunting was a “sport for the gentle”), or squandering its coffers, selling off the woods at a pittance for quick cash. If there really was a Robin Hood bedeviling the government, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, he’d have had to be awfully good at hiding out, since by his time, Sherwood Forest was barely five miles by five miles. (Not to say he couldn’t have done worse. In a lot of formerly wild places in England the “merry men” would’ve been reduced to cowering in hedgerows.)

  Given all this, it comes as no surprise that explorers and settler
s alike would walk through these forests drunk on the mere sight of them. “Here is a good living for those that love good fires!” one exclaimed. “A poor servant may afford to give more wood for timber and fire than many noblemen can afford to do.” From Maine south to Florida and west to the Mississippi Valley—in all, more than a million square miles of forest.

  It isn’t that America didn’t head off in much the same direction. But almost from the beginning, there were balancing factors that kept the desire for preservation galloping close behind the willingness to plunder. Some of it simply grew out of the deep horrors of the wood shortages in England. Many of the colonies, especially those south of the Merrimac River, reserved large tracts of forest as commons and forged strict laws against overcutting. Plymouth Colony had a timber-conservation law on the books by 1626, and less than thirty years later so did several small towns in the northern woods of what would become the state of Maine. William Penn suggested that one acre of trees be preserved for every five acres cleared.

  Another, equally powerful balancing factor had to do with America having been planted at a time when nature was seen as a Divine gift—a sure nod from God about the spiritual and physical greatness waiting for us all. Long before we were ever a country, it was a common opinion that squandering woods was displeasing to the Creator, “Who abhorreth all willful waste and spoils of His good creatures.” Still more of the urge to preserve came from that fanciful stew pot of dreams and visions spawned by nothing more than living day-to-day with the woods. And that was the most enticing of all.

  Christians had stormed across Great Britain hundreds of years earlier armed with heavy metal-axes to chop down the sacred groves of the pagans, swords to skewer those reluctant to convert. Yet after centuries of such abuse the church had relatively little conversion to show for it. So in the year 601, Pope Gregory raised a white flag. In a letter to the Abbot Mellitus he told his charges that instead of trying to abolish the old pagan nature sites, the faithful should instead work to consecrate them. And that was what finally allowed Christianity to root. Statues of saints and the Virgin sprouted under the branches of the remaining old spirit oaks, beside the sacred rivers and lakes. Enchanted wells came into favor again, their water blessed and used in baptisms—a practice that so closely mirrored the Celtic ritual of sprinkling newborns with well water that nobody even blinked.

  In America, on the other hand, Christianity arrived thoroughly entrenched, and ended up itself being converted—not by other faiths, but by the impact of living with our backs to the wilderness. It isn’t as crazy as it might sound. The mythology of virtually every non-desert culture in the world, after all, has used forests as the symbol of choice to denote the supernatural. Woods are, and always have been, soul food for the psyche. Intoxicated by their surroundings, the newcomers to North America, starting with the French, traded woodland images with nearby Indians just as they traded beads for beaver pelts. The immigrants borrowed from hundreds of creation stories, as well as from a mix of mysterious-sounding native spirits, then used them to weave hybrid tales of their own. Native peoples, on the other hand, ended up seasoning their own stories with bits and pieces of Christianity, with European notions about romantic love, and in the case of the northern New England tribes, borrowing entire plots from a series of tales called the “Little Jack Stories,” which were first popular in Ireland and France, then changing the heroes into Indians.

  In the early nineteenth century poet Rodman Drake penned a wildly popular story called “The Culprit Fay.” Like other poets before him he decided to build the tale around the Iroquois belief of Pukwudges—“little vanishers,” or “little men of the mountains”—wrapping it in a mix of American forest, Arthurian legend, and ancient Celtic mysticism. In Rodman’s poem the little people napped in the trees in cobweb hammocks and hid from the sun under the blooms of four-o’clocks. The minutes of the day were kept by the wood tick. And when it came time for battle, the hero donned an acorn helmet and a shield made from the shell of a ladybug.

  A reviewer with the American Monthly Magazine, probably being a little generous, called Drake’s work one of the most exquisite productions in the English language, rivaled by no poem that had ever appeared on this side of the Atlantic. Drake, he said, had the great good sense to draw his inspiration from the most honorable source a poet could lean on, American nature, studying her up and down until he came to know her “as she lived and breathed in the primal freshness.” The result, said the critic, was a fairy tale we could call our own, with imagery that applied to nowhere else under the sun. (There’s actually some nifty mystery surrounding this poem. The earliest known spelling of the Iroquois word for these little people was Puck-wud-jees. The “Puck” part of that, which is common to the Algonquian dialect, is in English usually associated with Shakespeare, who used it to denote—what else?—a mischievous spirit, or sprite. It would be amazing to find that Shakespeare picked up the word from early English explorers—they were, after all, interacting with Algonquian tribes thirty years before he died—only to have it resurface again in poems born to his fellow countrymen who came to America.)

  In 1845, Drake’s poem, along with others by poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, appeared in a collection called Forest Legendary. Long overdue, said reviewers. After all, they argued, it was the forest that was the most American topic of all. Once again, then, there came this notion that it was the art most firmly tied to wild landscape that best spoke to who we were as a people, as a country, which is why the greatest nature and scenery poets in our history—Whitman, Whittier, Bryant, or Emerson—were invariably the same guys who also wrote the most stirring, passionate odes to patriotism.

  I’m finding it heartening that so much of western Massachusetts and Connecticut, some of which was still timber-poor even fifty years ago, is again flush with forest—roughly the same number of trees as at the end of the 1700s. And while much of what we have now is a poor man’s woods, small trees of the species that even a hungry timber industry tends to scoff at, ravaged by poor management and weakening agents like acid rain, to a people whose lives are spent flying down freeways and hustling through malls and parking garages, even a poor woods can seem awfully good.

  Near Cummington, while strolling the grounds of the house where nature-poet William Cullen Bryant was born, I meet a retired teacher in her seventies who tells me that when she was young she could still walk a mile and a half from her home to Lilly Lake across open fields, never having to vary her step to skirt a tree; now that same land is covered in young forest—hemlock, striped maple, beech, yellow birch. “It’s beautiful again,” she says. “What happened in the eighteen hundreds was that the Ohio Valley lands opened up, and since the soil there was better, people here pulled up stakes and went west. That’s when the forest started coming back. The best signs those farms were here at all are the big trees you see. White ash along old driveways. Sugar maples set out next to the house, for maple syrup, or sometimes out in the pasture, as shade for cattle.”

  Later, while out walking in a nearby woods, I happen to find one of these gargantuan maples, standing at the edge of a shallow bowl laced with beech—probably an old cellar hole. Wrapping my arms around it I can cover no more than a third of its girth; partway through the embrace it occurs to me that whoever used to live here might like it that a hundred and fifty years later, someone happened by and hugged their maple tree.

  I remember that when I was living in the Midwest, some people, mainly farmers, talked as though the return of the woods was a sign of failure, sort of an insult to all the work done by their ancestors to clear and cultivate the land. Personally, I could never see reforestation as a slap at heritage (certainly it was a lesser one than Grandpa’s old wood-lot being leveled for a Kmart), but who knows? Maybe those farmers had some old memory resting deep in their bones, genetic fallout from the horrors of the European past. The 1400s for example, when dysentery and typhus and smallpox and plague and measles kept killing people unti
l half the population of northern Europe was either dead or on its way, and great masses of settlers abandoned their farms to make the long trek home to die. And in a very few years, all those places they’d worked so hard to clear and cultivate were under woods again. As if they’d never been.

  For my visit to the white pines I’ve chosen one of the last best second-growth stands in Connecticut—Gold’s Stand, which lies unseen and uncelebrated off a tiny road east of West Cornwall. At one time I probably would have opted for the Cathedral Pines, but much of that stand was lost six years ago, sheered off by hurricane winds. At least a dozen people have told me about it, all of them sounding truly sad about the loss, most recently a couple of prep-school kids I picked up hitchhiking to a summer job. “Every kid went there on field trips,” one explained. “It was cool. The bus would pull in—everyone’d be goofing off. Then we’d walk into those trees and everybody was like…whispering. All of us staring up with our mouths open.”

  On the fringe of the Gold Stand are hemlock and beech and maple, and in full leaf they form a curtain that hides the heart of the biggest growth, so that when I do finally enter the elder trees it happens all at once, which is kind of shocking. In those few steps there’s a shift from the usual woodland America—a tight cluster of mixed hardwood leaves and branches and ground covers dusting my feet—to the woodlands of old: open chambers framed by massive, sky-scraping trunks, each one rising from a clean floor washed in a flood of spent needles.

  I find myself seesawing back and forth between seeing this place as a glass half full and one half empty. On one hand, it’s awfully fine to lie on my back in the duff and stare up a hundred feet of trunk, imagining specters in green-needled dresses swaying to the summer winds. The bad news is that it’s kind of scary to be in a state that can grow trees like lambs grow wool, and have to rummage through the back forty behind the West Cornwall fire station to find a mere couple dozen acres of second growth. Even this stand was nearly lost a number of times: barely saved by dumb luck in the 1870s, when the local railroad decided to start burning coal in its boilers instead of wood; then again seventy years later, narrowly snatched from lumbermen for the sum of five thousand dollars by a remarkably forward-thinking Connecticut General Assembly.