I’m not sure why I felt compelled to take people out into these doomed forests again—doomed because they would be logged within the next year, altered suddenly from nearly old growth to nearly clear cut. I told myself, as I had when I led hikes last spring, that it was a way to make something good out of a bad situation. And I think I was right.
Because we had to scout a good route, Scott and I walked the lovely old forest tracts twice. The scouting took place a week before the advertised hike, on a cool, sunny day. It happened to be at the exact point of supreme color in this year’s unusually beautiful autumn. That afternoon we walked slowly. We often stopped, stood still, and let stillness settle, since walking through the thick carpet of new-fallen leaves was loud. But more often we were halted by the beauty itself, ceasing our chatter, stretching our chins up to the sky. Our eyes followed the delicate gesturing patterns of flying leaves and soaked in the brilliance of glowing red, yellow, orange all through the canopy.
Feeling the weight of my body held up by these old beings, their widespread roots woven through the ground unseen beneath me, I felt nurtured. I heard the deep duff as I walked, aware of gravity as my body moved, alternately graceful and hesitant, carefully stepping over decomposing branches and trunks. What luck, I thought, to be in a forest that has been allowed to become itself, that has been undisturbed by humans for at least one hundred years. There were places where I could see no signs at all of previous logging– no stumps, no stump sprouts, no scars from skidding roads.
The scouting hike was a good thing. And after the planned hike (which was also a good thing), I realized that the good kept going. Each person who had walked with us on Sunday had been touched by the place and kept a piece of it with them to carry forward. So it had been what I’d hoped: a memorial in celebration of the old trees’ last autumn. By next year, changes imposed by machines and men will render the place unrecognizable and destroy the integrity of its ecological fabric. But this week, fifteen fortunate folks had witnessed that community of tightly entangled organisms from the inside: above and around and below us, countless lives thriving, surviving, decomposing, growing together.
And another hike had grown from the planning of that one. I’d reached out to a poetry professor I knew, and she transported a couple of students to meet me in a different, equally doomed, forest parcel the following Wednesday afternoon. This knob was one of my favorite tracts in the logging project, discovered during one of the many outings last spring when Scott and I explored seventeen of the thirty tracts. My time with the students was my fourth experience of that forest with its gentle slopes sheltered by old trees of varying shapes, sizes, and species. The highest point is flattish and slightly rounded. As we stood there together, we could see through bare tree branches to the rolling line of neighboring ridges, continuous and sinuous, as we turned ourselves slowly, completely around.
The map of the parcel identifies a small section of “designated old growth,” which will not be cut. I showed the students how the foresters marked its edge by painting three white stripes on the largest trunks along its border—a line defined by people, of course, not a border the forest recognizes. Nonetheless, it was comforting to see that small slope of life that would be left alone.
I explained to the students that the blue paint marks on trunks around us meant those trees would be taken. They wondered aloud at what would happen to the old growth patch when it became an island exposed by the loss of its neighbors. One of the students said, “I’ve read that the trees are connected underground in ways that help them take care of each other.” I said that new science takes a long time to unseat old science, and policy lags even farther behind.
Old growth areas in eastern forests don’t meet people’s expectations for how old growth should look. There are no towering Sequoias (as in Northern California), no giant Spruce or Fir (as in the Pacific Northwest), no impossible heights to the canopy as in a tropical rainforest. Instead, forests in our temperate zone are harder to gauge in human terms. Left to themselves for a hundred years or more, as most parcels in this logging plan have been, they are hard to classify. Those who manage them calculate their value by the number and size of their biggest trees, by the presence or absence of certain preferred species. But the value of forests to the world can’t be quantified by classifying tree species or understood by way of our limited knowledge of them. By nature, forests are always changing, mostly at a pace much slower than people can witness. Trees sometimes fall, others grow up in their place, but meanwhile countless organisms—seen and unseen—are part of the story, too.
What makes these 100+-year-old forests I’ve been visiting so precious?
That’s not easy to answer. It can’t be described by the age of the oldest trees or seen through a cursory look at the landscape. Instead, it arises from a combination of factors, something about the integration of the place: the depth and character of the duff; variation in spacing, height, age of the most obvious trees; diversity of life inhabiting it as discovered by way of subtle signs and clues carefully sought after, for instance. What I’ve discovered is that these places generate a feeling in me. They feel held together somehow. After being inside forests for decades—places of all kinds that people call forests, that is— and because of the time I’ve spent this past year visiting the project’s identified logging tracts, I’m learning to recognize this. Old forests are great teachers.
Visiting these doomed forests forces me to grapple with the idea that they will be gone soon. Bringing people with me is something I can do. And it is something that helps me accept what I can’t do: save these places from being dismantled by the power of humans and their narratives of management, productivity, percentages of habitat. These hikes are helping me let go.
I can let go because I can remember the sound of the wind sifting through leaves hanging on and leaves falling; I can remember their colors weaving through wide branches and tall trunks, the ease of their descending dance. I saw people’s faces brighten as we stood looking up at all this, felt comfort among strangers in the home of beings much older than us, beings we know so little about. As I shouldered the weight of our inadequacy, I sensed around me a kind of wisdom humans will never possess. I found a deep breath of peace in that humility.
