plates with you when you leave it by the side of the road.â
She laughed and gave me what seemed to be a lingering, and even inviting, smile. It seemed like I was seeing that a lot lately. Either I was getting better-looking in my old age, or just plain lecherous. After lunch I would take a walk in the woods and pray to St. Francis to give me strength.
Which I did. Take a walk, I mean. Grabbing my binoculars, I cut through the poplars and brambles for a couple of hundred yards toward the Varneysâ until I hit the old logging road that went up the hill to the beech ridge. The road dated back to when they had last cut these woods, which probably was thirty years before. In ten more years, it would disappear completely. I found this very encouragingâthat nature had this unrelenting side to it, a tortoise in a race with the hare of paving and cutting. Leave a hayfield uncut for five years and itâs well on its way to wildness. Thirty years and itâs woods once again.
Thatâs what had happened with these woods, many years ago. Clair Varney said his grandfather had told him how you could come up to this ridge back then and look out in every direction and see nothing but pasture and fields. It had been heartbreaking labor to clear that forest, cutting the trees and pulling the stumps, one by one, year after year, with horses and oxen. The rocks, which grew like a crop unto themselves, were piled in long walls that now snaked through the trees like the vestiges of some long-lost Mayan city.
And in many ways, it was lost, their civilization. The woods had reclaimed the land. The families had left the hardscrabble farms for jobs in mills and factories to the south. It all seemed so futile, but then again, those farmers hadnât cleared that land to build a civilization. They had cut those woods to feed their children. It had been a matter of survival, nothing more, and where disease hadnât sliced through families like a broadsword, the mission, through the mercy of their stern taskmaster of a God, had been accomplished.
But even now, as the trees grew taller in the farmersâ fields, the exodus continued. Missy Hewett would not come home. There was nothing in these hills for her. No job. No husband. Not even a baby.
As I walked down the damp trail, I stopped every once in a while to train the binoculars on the flitting shape of a bird. I was in the deeper woods now, out of the tangle of second growth, and the birds were mostly chickadees and nuthatches, bobbing through the trees like bands of tiny Gypsies. I spotted a couple of warblers but they were high in the beech trees, camouflaged in the yellow-green leaves, and I couldnât come close to an identification. I watched them until my arms grew tired and then I walked on.
The path led to the top of the ridge, maybe a mile above the road. My routine had been to follow it until it crested the ridge and then to look for the hulk of an old car on my left. The car was little more than a rusted shell of metal, sprinkled with bullet holes, courtesy of several generations of hunters. It looked like it dated to the 1930s, when it probably was driven or dragged into the back of a field and left like a sunken ship on some ocean floor.
I spotted the car and turned off the path and into the woods. There was no real trail here, but I had walked this way so many times that each tree and deadfall was a landmark. After ten minutes, I turned back to my right, up the ridge and then down, following the contour of the land toward home. I stepped over limbs and around trees, my boots silent on the wet leaves and mosses. At one deadfall, I stepped on a branch and it cracked loudly. I winced and then, some distance behind me, heard another crack and a rustle. A deer? I turned slowly and watched, but there was no movement in the trees. I waited, breath held back.
Nothing. If it had been a deer, Iâd missed it.
It surprised me that deer would be up this high
She laughed and gave me what seemed to be a lingering, and even inviting, smile. It seemed like I was seeing that a lot lately. Either I was getting better-looking in my old age, or just plain lecherous. After lunch I would take a walk in the woods and pray to St. Francis to give me strength.
Which I did. Take a walk, I mean. Grabbing my binoculars, I cut through the poplars and brambles for a couple of hundred yards toward the Varneysâ until I hit the old logging road that went up the hill to the beech ridge. The road dated back to when they had last cut these woods, which probably was thirty years before. In ten more years, it would disappear completely. I found this very encouragingâthat nature had this unrelenting side to it, a tortoise in a race with the hare of paving and cutting. Leave a hayfield uncut for five years and itâs well on its way to wildness. Thirty years and itâs woods once again.
Thatâs what had happened with these woods, many years ago. Clair Varney said his grandfather had told him how you could come up to this ridge back then and look out in every direction and see nothing but pasture and fields. It had been heartbreaking labor to clear that forest, cutting the trees and pulling the stumps, one by one, year after year, with horses and oxen. The rocks, which grew like a crop unto themselves, were piled in long walls that now snaked through the trees like the vestiges of some long-lost Mayan city.
And in many ways, it was lost, their civilization. The woods had reclaimed the land. The families had left the hardscrabble farms for jobs in mills and factories to the south. It all seemed so futile, but then again, those farmers hadnât cleared that land to build a civilization. They had cut those woods to feed their children. It had been a matter of survival, nothing more, and where disease hadnât sliced through families like a broadsword, the mission, through the mercy of their stern taskmaster of a God, had been accomplished.
But even now, as the trees grew taller in the farmersâ fields, the exodus continued. Missy Hewett would not come home. There was nothing in these hills for her. No job. No husband. Not even a baby.
As I walked down the damp trail, I stopped every once in a while to train the binoculars on the flitting shape of a bird. I was in the deeper woods now, out of the tangle of second growth, and the birds were mostly chickadees and nuthatches, bobbing through the trees like bands of tiny Gypsies. I spotted a couple of warblers but they were high in the beech trees, camouflaged in the yellow-green leaves, and I couldnât come close to an identification. I watched them until my arms grew tired and then I walked on.
The path led to the top of the ridge, maybe a mile above the road. My routine had been to follow it until it crested the ridge and then to look for the hulk of an old car on my left. The car was little more than a rusted shell of metal, sprinkled with bullet holes, courtesy of several generations of hunters. It looked like it dated to the 1930s, when it probably was driven or dragged into the back of a field and left like a sunken ship on some ocean floor.
I spotted the car and turned off the path and into the woods. There was no real trail here, but I had walked this way so many times that each tree and deadfall was a landmark. After ten minutes, I turned back to my right, up the ridge and then down, following the contour of the land toward home. I stepped over limbs and around trees, my boots silent on the wet leaves and mosses. At one deadfall, I stepped on a branch and it cracked loudly. I winced and then, some distance behind me, heard another crack and a rustle. A deer? I turned slowly and watched, but there was no movement in the trees. I waited, breath held back.
Nothing. If it had been a deer, Iâd missed it.
It surprised me that deer would be up this high
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