Ever since I was a boy, misshapen, gnarly old trees - white pines especially - have excited a resonant frequency inside me. There's just something about them - something that speaks to me. “I am the Wood,” they seem to say – not with boastfulness, not with bravado, nor stern authoritarianism – just a simple statement of the obvious, in the quiet tone of a How-do-you-do. With all those dead branches radiating from their rough furrowed trunks they were the best climbing trees, and I built more than one lean-to using one of those branches as a ridge pole. It’s no surprise to me that trees – especially these so-called “wolf trees” - were worshipped by the Druids.
Maybe that’s because they don’t conform to our stereotypes of what a tree should look like. You won’t find many in city parks, or lining commercial boulevards. Ask a five-year old to draw a picture of a tree, and you’ll get a variation of a brown vertical line topped by a green sphere. That’s a proper tree.
These aren’t proper trees. They pay no heed to our expectations, and grow with a feral abandon into whatever shape suits them. Their Prime Directive: “Live Long and Prosper.” They grow with arms stretched up towards the sun, and if a storm should remove their crown, at least one of these arms will take its place. Sometimes an arm will do this anyway, effectively becoming a second head. They make their own rules. They are to be seen, to be noticed – to be admired. To me, they are the sages of the forest. They aren’t eternal – but from our limited perspective, they might as well be.
There's one I’ve affectionately named “Grandfather” standing vigil at the southwestern corner of my 7-acre woodlot on the MA/NH border. Many decades ago – long before I was ever aware of his existence – a horizontally-spreading branch had for whatever reason made a 90-deg turn upwards. When I first discovered him in 1978, the year my wife and I purchased this little bit of wilderness, it was already Old. I felt an immediate affinity for the old fellow, a quiet reverence, a sense that I was in the presence of an Elder, a forest spirit who had endured many more winters than I ever have or will. And he was mine – at least according to our laws concerning the transfer of property. In my own eyes, I was merely its guardian, a caretaker - an attendant to this ancient being.
Several years later, the marriage ended, but I stayed, and carved a handful of foot trails from my back door out into the bush – most converging on Grandfather's corner. I’d often climb up onto that great horizontal limb and sit in quiet meditation with my back against the trunk. Eventually I dragged a folding lawn chair out there where I’d sit at his feet, composing poetry or just listening to the woods. The corner had become a holy place, a shrine, a house of worship more meaningful to me than any Catholic mission church had ever been.
Over time, most of those trails vanished, swallowed by the ever-evolving ecosystem, so I spent part of my 1st year of retirement opening some of them up, starting with the one leading directly to the Chapel. I cleared out years' worth of windfall, pulled up or cut down by hand dozens of saplings that had sprung up in the interim. In time I re-opened a few more, and cut new ones - but a few winters later, an ice storm felled so many trees that even with a chain saw it would have taken me most of a summer to clear them out. Living alone as I do, I will not own a chain saw; and even if I did, I just don't have that kind of energy any more.
I write this on President’s Day, 2024 – February 19, a Monday. After several weeks of mediocre weather, this was a Hallmark calendar kind of day - crystalline blue sky with nary a wisp of cloud in sight – the kind of day that makes sitting inside seem an inexcusable waste of precious time – the kind of day made for a trek into the woods. It was cold enough to justify gloves and my heaviest winter coat, and to leave my glasses behind (my eyes weep profusely in the cold); but warm enough to venture outside hatless and enjoy the sun streaming down through the gaps in the canopy. And I was of a mind to see if I could find any remnants of those old trails. So that’s what I did. I downed an edible, washed the breakfast dishes, and headed out.
The recent powderfall has lubricated the icy substrate beneath, making for treacherous footing, and my balance, adequate at best, isn't even that anymore. I somewhat gingerly worked my way to the crest of the ridge on which my house sits and headed due south. There was an ineffable something about that view: the morning sun in my eyes, the long, blue shadows of the pines, the sense of impending discovery, all rousing something within me – primal echoes from boyhood, when I was experiencing these things for the first time, perhaps – an anticipatory thrill of pending discovery, but not in the swashbuckling sense. More like that of finally settling down with a book you’ve always wanted to read again.
A wintertime tramp through wild, ungroomed forest is unlike its summertime counterpart for more than the obvious reasons. The untamed green of summer isn’t just overhead in the canopy, but all around, in the jungle of shade-tolerant undergrowth. In some places, the world you can see extends no more than a dozen or so feet around you. The forest can see you, but you can’t see it.
But in the winter, the undergrowth is asleep, and its nakedness opens a vista invisible otherwise. My tract appears to be a cluster of small hillocks with a general downhill trend to the southeast. And in the absence of foliage, you can see the big picture - you get a tantalizing glimpse of just how this Place is shaped - a glimpse of something you can almost, but not quite, comprehend - that feeling of an "Aha" being just out of reach if you could only... well, if you could Only. I’d love to see a topographical map of my spread showing the 1-meter contour intervals. But the best commercially available maps I’ve seen don’t go any finer than 10-m resolution. That’s the height of a small two-story house, like mine.
It was tough going for an old man. I moved a lot slower and more deliberately than a younger one would have - and had. And although occasional features looked familiar - a particular lay of the land, an exposed ledge, an old wolf tree - it had been long enough since my last visit that there had been many changes, and I could no longer be sure where I was despite the expanded view and these isolated flashes of recognition. Memory and entropy in collusion. I naturally chose the easiest directions to navigate the obstacles - which seemed to be leading me southwest - towards Grandfather.
I recognized a cleared passage alongside a stone wall as a section of trail I'd cut directly to the Chapel. It opened up into a space I'd cleared, now dusted with fresh snow crisscrossed by tracks from deer, squirrels, and rabbits. Past the stump of a sapling I'd removed... then a log to be stepped over... a laurel thicket to be skirted... and there, dead ahead, stood Grandfather...
Holy shit.
The clearing I’d so painstakingly cleaned up is now impassably choked with windfall, much of which has come from Grandfather himself. The great horizontal member is still there, but its vertical traversal has been truncated to about 10 feet, and the tree’s main trunk now ends 30 feet above the ground. I looked up its length for any sign of green - and found it on only on an anemic spire that split off from the main trunk maybe 100 years ago. The uppermost reaches are shedding their bark, revealing dead, gray wood beneath. Grandfather is dying.
I'm so sorry, Old Boy. We've aged since our last encounter, and I’m past the point where I’d even consider removing all this debris. Much of the windfall is from nearby growth, youngsters not robust enough to withstand all that he has. But much was shed by him - snapped off at the tops as Death creeps down inevitably towards its roots.
And yet it will probably outlive me. Somehow that's comforting. Yeah, I see the looming death of this woodland elder as an allegory for my own mortality. But maybe when I'm gone, when I’ve returned to the soil, maybe my spirit could meet up with his, so we can limp together to whereever such spirits go. Maybe this wouldn't be a bad place to have ‘Becca sprinkle a few of my ashes.
I pressed on, but it was becoming clear that I’d overestimated my ability to deal with the uncertain footing, and turned my diligence up a notch while making my way towards more open terrain. An old skidder track next door leads back to the road a few houses down from my own; so I followed it, choosing my steps with care while still savoring the experience of connecting again with the Earth. I knew the trail to be one of several emanating from a clearing the logging operation had used as a staging area – just not which one. Nor did I care.
Because I was tramping – OK, clambering – through the woods again. Alone - but among friends.
The trail snaked among the hillocks past a couple of frozen pools that in not too many weeks will be alive with the wood frogs’ mating frenzy. Their raucous quacking can be heard from hundreds of yards away, and is one of the surest signs that winter is over. After jogging westward a bit, the trail resumed its northward path alongside a rocky outcrop I recognized, then climbed a little knoll to the clearing.
From there the trail runs wide and smooth for a few hundred feet, ending at the road. It had been my original plan to return home this way, but I wasn’t eager to end the voyage; so instead I hunted for and found the remnants of yet another trail I’d blazed several years earlier, one leading to this spot from a gap in the stone wall marking the western boundary of my spread. The ribbons of red foresters’ tape I’d used to mark the trees were long gone – but keeping the sun to my 3:00 brought me to the stone wall in short order.
Too short, for my liking, but I felt it had been a nourishing ramble all the same. And I felt a bit younger as well, and enormously pleased with myself. Some days I feel my age more than others, and Grandfather is certainly showing his - but the sap still flows in our veins, we still cast shadows, and there are still discoveries to be made - the tickle of surprise, the salsa of everyday life.
Once this ice melts, I'm heading back out there. I haven't seen the heron marsh in ages.....
