by Lillian Ross
5. Go downstairs, to Wave Hill Learning Center, where members of Mr. Lugano’s class from P.S. 105—Victor Andujar, Pierre Arroyo, Sewdat Budhoo, José Delvalle, Sunil Mangaru, Mary Altieri, Ashanti Butler, Michelle Laureano, Alma Franco, Elvira Kraja, Tiffiney Petrisch, Fikreta Povataj, Kelly Riffle, Plushette Sullivan, Cortina Watson, et al.—make virtually no sounds. Uta Gore, instructor in Wave Hill education program, does the talking. Note meaningful datum: children take for granted Uta Gore’s veracity, acknowledge that she knows much about Hudson River. She knows, in particular, that striped bass live in ocean but spawn in river; that when striped bass are spawning there is lots of splashing; that right now New York State bans the possession and sale of striped bass, but some people are undeterred. (Mike Parker, efficiency-minded P.S. 105–er, asks, “Why don’t they just put up a sign that says, ‘Trespassers Will Be Shot’?”) As Uta Gore passes around vials containing striped-bass eggs, larvae, a small fry specimen, record observation in notebook: “Today’s young people are our hope for future. Hmm.”
6. Examine fine-looking aquarium in Learning Center, with particular attention to several resident striped bass, who Uta Gore says are “spoiled rotten.” (She feeds them chopped oysters, chopped Boston scrod, chopped flounder; was feeding them goldfish, but they “lost interest.”)
7. Gather for future reference specimens of Uta Gore’s polysyllabics: “detritus,” “herbicides,” “estuary,” “oxygenated,” “optimize,” “therapeutic,” “turbidity.”
8. Join group next door, in audiovisual room. Watch documentary videotape “Hatchery on the Hudson,” produced by Con Edison, which extolls virtues of the Hudson River Striped Bass Hatchery, in Verplanck, New York, sponsored by Con Ed and four other utility companies. Time videotape with stopwatch: ten minutes.
9. If you start to feel a little sleepy, perk up when Dr. Kenneth Marcellus, senior project biologist for Con Ed, enters room carrying brown grocery bag labelled “Hudson River,” and says, “Good morning. I brought with me the Hudson River, but we’re not going to touch the Hudson River just yet. We’re going to wonder about it.” Listen as he explains how striped bass from Verplanck hatchery get “tagged” with binary-encoded one-twenty-fifth-inch wires implanted in their cheeks. Note what happens when Dr. Marcellus at last opens brown bag—it contains many white beans. Watch as he adds handful of pink beans, then shakes bag. Note that pink beans signify tagged fish, white beans signify wild fish. Maybe note some other stuff.
10. When moment of adoption ceremony arrives—each adoptive parent to receive certificate specifying striped bass’s tag number, birthplace, birth date, date and site of release, age and length at time of release—consult stopwatch again. Measure time lapse between beginning of adoption ceremony and instant at which member of class asks, “When do we get our bass?” Result: twenty-six seconds. Note that when Julissa Cabrera asks “When do we get our bass?” Uta Gore fires back “You’re not getting the bass. Your bass is in the river. It’s free. Right now it’s in the river consuming enormous amounts of tasty morsels. It’s getting to be humongous. Don’t you want it to grow to become humongous?”
11. At feeding time, observe whether it’s children or grownups who eat bag lunches, of ham hero sandwiches, box juices, and whether it’s children or grownups who migrate upstairs for lunch provided by Con Ed—chicken salad vinaigrette, rice dish with prosciutto and fresh shrimp, broccoli and radicchio, white wine, coffee, brownies.
12. During lunch, look out window, check atmospheric conditions (severely deteriorated). If offer of ride to midtown with Dr. Marcellus materializes, grab it (in tasteful manner). Walk in gingerly fashion to Dr. M.’s car. Conduct nature experiment, brushing snow off Dr. M.’s car.
13. While listening to Dr. M.’s tires spin, catalogue volume of freebies distributed upon exit from Wave Hill: page-long news release titled “Wave Hill”; three-page document titled “Wave Hill: A Brief History”; photocopies of four newspaper articles about striped bass and the Hudson River Striped Bass Hatchery; photocopies of two Con Ed in-house magazine articles about the hatchery; 1980 press release describing provisions of Hudson River Cooling Tower Settlement Agreement; photocopies of six newspaper articles about Wave Hill; reprint of magazine article about exhibit at Wave Hill from Garden Design; ditto from Garden; two reprints of magazine article about Wave Hill from American Horticulturist; reprint of magazine article from Ovation, about Arturo Toscanini’s connection with Wave Hill; two copies of Wave Hill members’ calendar for winter, 1987; two subscription applications for Wave Hill horticulture-lecture series; two subscription applications for Wave Hill concert series; map and guide to Riverdale Park; map and guide to Wave Hill woods; pamphlet describing Wave Hill education programs; boxed portfolio of Hudson River photographs by Wendy Holmes, published in 1973 (a pleasure to look at and ideal for carrying back through blizzard, providing much-needed ballast); inter-office memo to guy named Herb.
1987
IN VIRGIN FOREST — John McPhee
IN virgin forest, the ground is uneven, dimpled with pits and adjacent mounds. Perfect trees rise, yes, with boles clear to fifty and sixty feet; but imperfect trees are there, too—bent twigs, centuries after the bending—not to mention the dead standing timber, not to mention four thousand board feet rotting as one trunk among the mayapples and the violets: a toppled hull fruited with orange-and-cream fungi, which devour the wood, metabolize it, cause it literally to disappear. In virgin forest, the classic symbol of virginity is a fallen uprooted trunk decaying in a bed of herbs.
In our latitude, the primeval forest would include grapes, their free-floating vines descending like bridge cables. Wild grapes are incapable of climbing trees. They are lifted by trees as the trees grow, and their bunches hang from the top of the canopy. In our latitude, there is a great scarcity of virgin forest. Cut the grapevines, make a few stumps, let your cattle in to graze, and it’s all over till the end of time. Nonetheless, we were in such a place only a few days ago, and did not have to travel far to see it. Never cut, never turned, it was a piece of American deciduous forest in continuous evolution dating to the tundras of mesolithic time. Some of the trees were ninety feet tall, with redtails nesting in them, and when the hawks took off and rose above the canopy they could see the World Trade Center.
We had made our way to Franklin Township, New Jersey, which includes New Brunswick and is one of the less virgin milieus in America. This is where the megalopolis came in so fast it trapped animals between motels. It missed, though, half a mile of primeval woods. The property, a little east of East Millstone, was settled in 1701 by Mynheer Cornelius VanLiew and remained in one family for two hundred and fifty-four years. They cleared and farmed most of their land but consciously decided to leave sixty-five acres untouched. The Revolution came and went, the Civil and the World Wars, but not until the nineteen-fifties did the family seek the counsel of a sawyer. The big trees were ruled by white oaks, dating to the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their value was expressible in carats. Being no less frank than Dutch, the family let its intentions be known. As often will happen in conservation crises, this brought forth a paradox of interested parties: rod-and-gun groups, the Nature Conservancy, the Adirondack Mountain Club, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. A tract of virgin forest is so rare that money was raised in thirty-eight states and seven foreign countries. But not enough. The trees were worth a good deal more. In the end, the forest was saved by, of all people, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, whose president remarked in 1955, as he handed over the property to Rutgers University, “What happens in the woodlands is close to the carpenter’s heart.”
Named for a Brotherhood president, the tract is called Hutcheson Memorial Forest. A brief trail makes a loop near one end. The deed limits Rutgers to that, and Rutgers is not arguing. The university’s role is to protect the periphery and to study the woods. When something attacks, Rutgers makes notes. A disease that kills American beeches is on its way f
rom Maine. “The forest deed says basically you don’t do anything about it,” a biologist named Edmund Stiles explained to us. “You watch what happens.” In 1981, gypsy moths tore off the canopy, and sunlight sprayed the floor. The understory thickened as shrubs and saplings responded with a flush of growth. “The canopy is now closing over again,” Stiles said. “This summer, there will be a lot of death.” In 1950, a hurricane left huge gaps in the canopy. “Once every three hundred years you can expect a hurricane that will knock down damned near everything,” Stiles went on. “There’s a real patchwork nature in an old forest, in the way it is always undergoing replacement.” He stopped to admire a small white ash standing alone beneath open sky. “That’s going to take the canopy,” he said. “It’s going to go all the way. It has been released. It will fill the gap.”
Forty-two years old and of middle height—wearing boots, bluejeans, a brown wool shirt—Stiles had a handsome set of muttonchops and a tumble of thick brown hair that flowed over his forehead toward inquiring blue eyes. He had been working in Hutcheson Forest for thirteen years, he told us, and had recently become director. His doctoral dissertation, at the University of Washington, was on bird communities in alder forests. More recently, he had studied the foraging strategies of insects and the symbiotic relationships of berries and migratory birds. In other words, he was a zoologist and a botanist, too. From secretive gray foxes to the last dead stick—that was what the untouched forest was about. The big oaks (red, white, and black), the shagbark hickories, sugar maples, beeches, ashes, and dogwoods—among thousands of plant and animal species—were only the trees.
As we talked, and moved about, tasting the odd spicebush leaf or a tendril of smilax, Stiles divided his attention and seemed not to miss a sound. “Spicebush and dogwood fruits are very high in lipids,” he said. “They are taken on by birds getting ready for long migratory flights. Those are wood thrushes calling. A forest has to be at least a hundred years old to get a wood thrush. Actually, it takes about four centuries to grow a forest of this kind. The gap phenomenon is typical of old forest. There’s a white-eyed vireo. Blue-winged warbler. There are cycles of openness and closedness in the canopies. Trees take advantage. Fill in the gaps. These are white-oak seedlings from a mast year. There’s a nice red-bellied woodpecker.” He was like Toscanini, just offstage, listening idly to his orchestra as it tuned itself up. He said he had developed a theory that out-of-season splotches of leaf color are messages to frugivorous birds—the scattered early orange among sassafras leaves, the springtime red of the leaves of the wild strawberry, the red of the Virginia creeper when everything else is green. When fruit is ready, the special colors turn on. He heard a great crested flycatcher. He bent down to a jack-in-the-pulpit, saying that it bears bird-disseminated fruit and is pollinated by a small black fly.
German foresters who came to visit Hutcheson Forest had been surprised by the untidiness of the place, startled by the jumble of life and death. “These Germans are unfamiliar with stuff just lying around, with the truly virginal aspect of the forest,” Stiles said. Apparently, the Germans, like almost everyone else, had a misconception of forest primeval—a picture of Wotan striding through the noonday twilight, of Ludwig D. Boone shouting for Lebensraum among giant columns of uniform trees. “You don’t find redwoods,” Stiles remarked summarily. “You don’t find Evangeline’s forest. You find a more realistic forest.”
You find a huge white ash that has grown up at an angle of forty-five degrees, and in a managed forest would have long ago been tagged for destruction. You find remarkably deep humus. You find a great rusty stump, maybe six feet high, and jagged where the trunk now beside it snapped off. More often, you find whole root structures tipped into the air and looking like radial engines. As you will nowhere else, you find the topography of pits and mounds. In its random lumpiness, it could be a model of glacial terrain. When a tree goes over and its roots come ripping from the ground, they bring with them a considerable mass of soil. When the tree has disappeared, the dirt remains as a mound, which turns kelly green with moss. Beside it is the pit that the roots came from. When no other trace remains of the tree, you can see by the pit and the mound the direction in which the tree fell, and guess its approximate size. If cattle graze in pit-and-mound topography, they trample and destroy it. The pits and mounds of centuries are evidence of virgin forest.
There is supporting evidence in human records and in tree rings. People from Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory have cored some trees in Hutcheson Forest and dated them, for example, to 1699, 1678. Neighboring land was settled, and cleared for farming, in 1701. Lamont-Doherty has an ongoing project called the Eastern Network Dendrochronology Series, which has sought and catalogued virgin stands at least two hundred and fifty years old. The list is short and scattered, and the tracts are small, with the notable exceptions of Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, in North Carolina (thirty-eight hundred virgin acres), the cove hardwoods of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and a large stand of hemlocks and beeches in Allegheny National Forest, in western Pennsylvania. There are three hundred virgin acres on the Wabash River in Illinois, and, in eastern Ohio, a woods of white oaks some of which were seedlings when the Pilgrims reached New England. The Ohio white oaks, like the white oaks of Hutcheson Forest, are from three to four feet in diameter. Old white oaks are found in few places, because they had a tendency to become bowsprits, barrel staves, and queen-post trusses. Virgin hemlocks are comparatively common. Maine is not rich in virgin timber—some red spruce on Mt. Katahdin, some red spruce above Tunk Lake. There is a river gorge in Connecticut where trees have never been cut. Some red spruce and hemlock in the Adirondacks date to the late fifteen-hundreds, and the hemlocks of the Allegheny forest are nearly two centuries older than that. In the Shawangunk Mountains, about seventy beeline miles northwest of our office on Forty-third Street, is the oldest known stand of pitch pine (360 years), also some white pine (370), chestnut oak (330), and eastern hemlock (500). They are up on a quartzite ridge line, though, and are very slow-growing small trees. Remnant old-growth stands tend to be in mountains, in rocky, craggy places, not in flatlands. Hutcheson Forest, in the Newark Basin—in what was once a prime piedmont area—is thus exceptionally rare. In the region of New York City, there is nothing like it, no other clearly documented patch. In fact, it is the largest mixed-oak virgin forest left in the eastern United States.
Running through the forest is Spooky Brook, spawning ground of the white sucker. Rutgers would like to control the headwaters, fearing something known as herbicide drift. Continuing population drift is no less a threat, as development fills in lingering farms. The woods are closed to visitors, except for scheduled Sunday tours. Rutgers already owns some hundred and fifty acres contiguous to the forest, and hopes, with the help of the Nature Conservancy, to get two hundred more. Manipulative research is carried out on the peripheral land, while observational research goes on in the forest, which has been described by Richard Forman, a professor at Harvard, as “probably the single most studied primeval woods on the continent.” People have gone in there and emerged with more than a hundred advanced degrees, including thirty-six Ph.D.s. So many articles, papers, theses, and other research publications have come out of Hutcheson Forest that countless trees have been clear-cut elsewhere just in order to print them.
1987
TASTE OF TEXAS — William Finnegan
DARN right we race armadillos. Got a certificate right here to prove it. Jalapeño Sam Lewis showed us how. Handed us a bristly, wriggling, pointy-faced, armor-plated little dude and said, “Go for it.” The track was a strip of AstroTurf rolled out behind the Puck Building, in SoHo, and there were thirteen entries, all but ours being handled by Texans. Our armadillo got off to a slow start. “Blow on him,” Sam coached. “Blow on him where his tail meets his body, and he’ll run like crazy.” We confined ourself to verbal encouragement, and soon our armadillo responded. One of the other racers veered off, turned back, and wen
t under the AstroTurf. That gave us a chance to gain ground. Some of the other racers were spooked, frankly, with this hump in the turf darting around, but not our guy. He ended up finishing second. Jalapeño Sam, who is the president of the World Armadillo Breeding and Racing Association, and runs, he told us, “a Hertz rent-a-diller service” at races in Texas, presented us with our certificate, which features an armadillo wearing sneakers.
We noticed that the armadillo that had won the race had half its tail wrapped in silver duct tape. We asked Jalapeño Sam what had happened to it.
Jalapeño Sam did not reply. Instead, he turned to a young woman standing nearby. “Where do you live, little lady?” he asked.
“Nowhere,” she said. “West Texas.”
“That’s about ten miles from where I live!” Sam exclaimed.
We headed on into the Puck Building, where the Taste of Texas food show was in progress. Thirty-six Texas companies were displaying their wares, and Jim Hightower, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner, was assuring the crowd, “If you taste it, you’ll buy a trainload of it.”
That’s basically what Tom TenBrink said, too, when we stopped in front of his booth. TenBrink was scooping Mariano’s Frozen Margarita Mix out of a plastic bucket and urging Margaritas on passersby. “You gotta put it in their mouth,” he told us. “You put it in their mouth, you make ’em walk backward.” Mariano’s Frozen Margarita Mix, which, according to TenBrink, is already big in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, is an alarmingly simple invention: you pour a bottle of tequila into a bucket of mix, stir it, and put it in the freezer, and the next morning you’re looking at several dozen frozen Margaritas. “Our best customer is a female, married or not, between the ages of twenty-four and forty, who entertains a lot,” TenBrink said. “She immediately appreciates it.” We reckoned there were many such customers in New York, and said so. “That’s why we’re here,” he said. Then we got down to business: we tried the Margarita. It was cold, sweet, strong, and though it didn’t look exactly like other Margaritas we’ve seen—it was a rather disturbing deep chemical green—it tasted like the genuine article. We walked backward.