[This is a piece I wrote last summer while on vacation in Vermont]
We started out on our adventure trudging up the hill behind Peter’s house. We were following a snow mobile trail where the grass was waist high and wet from all the rain. Behind Peter and in front of Jane I was mostly concentrating on my steps. We left the open trail and the grass and entered the darkness of the big trees. I was excited and though I’d walked through the tall grass before I was relieved to know where I was stepping again. We were all very chatty going up. Catching up on news at first then wandering into more philosophical territory as we reached the place they call The Cathedral, among trees that were the longest living on the property. Sugar Maples with many limbs lost looked more like old men than trees. They held the roof over this place of worship with the still substantial branches they had left and were aided by the many younger but taller White Pines around them. We continued up through the woods until we got to the top of the hill where the path we were on opened up like a doorway onto a great big meadow that covered the rest of the hilltop.
We followed a trail that I could not see but Peter seemed to know through more waist high grass. I was back to concentrating on my steps as the grass swiped my belly and obscured my feet. I like knowing where my feet are and not feeling like they’re in another dimension. I called to them with my brain; Are you as wet as I think you are? The meadow dipped down before going back up and in the lower area the ground was marshier, the grass thinned out enough to see that we were in fact walking in several inches of water. Soon enough we were heading up the other side where I could no longer feel the sloshing of water in my shoes or see my feet again. This quieted us all down. The trudging through tall grass which is a lot harder than it sounds and the discomfort of wet feet and legs killed the conversation that had already thinned out. We were just there. Walking. We reached the highest part of the meadow and stopped beside some huge beautiful leafy trees basking in all the free sun. From there we could see a few houses and barns and Peter began naming them and the people who lived in them.
On a far hill I noticed a stand of tall pines that were surrounded by open land. They looked funny there, like a fussy goatee that had been reduced to a neat square that was too small to really do anything. Peter said it was a stand of trees that had been planted a long time ago and never thinned out properly and now they were too tall and thin to survive. The sun could now sneak in the sides and you could see younger trees that were growing up in the center. From where we stood it just looked like a round bushy shadow inside the vertical bars of the pines.
Now we were headed back and I felt a bit of panic set in. The walk would be over soon. As we headed back we took an old road called the Hinman Road that dates back to the late 1700s. I was taken up with the aromas of history and a moss covered stone wall following along on our right. We came to an area that had been cleared of the larger trees and what was left was tall and naked. Bare trunks stretched up to 100 feet or more before sprouting branches and leaves. They looked beautiful and strange that way. I turned to look on the other side of the road and the same age and size trees were there, but accompanied and partly obscured by 3 to 5 feet of undergrowth. We kept walking and there was more evidence of recent clearing. Some equipment sitting around, fresh gashes in the trunks of standing trees where logging had left scars and plenty of pieces of trees that had been left for some reason.
I pulled out my camera and started taking pictures. Large felled trees and piles of wood. I was recording what happens and felt like a war photographer taking images of casualties. What it looks like when you cut down trees. The part we don’t want to see or talk about. We were solemn and quiet. If you are in the business of it you might laugh and say where do you think the paper you are writing on comes from? The chair you are sitting in? Sitting here on the lake now recounting the mornings adventure I look at the tall cedars all around me and think they are lucky, like me. Lucky to live free and prosper in an impoverished world.
Like a teenager first discovering photography I shot through two rolls in two minutes. Jane and Peter waited as I slowed our walk down to a crawl. We were silent by then and my shutter was polluting the peace but I couldn’t stop. I felt I was doing something and maybe I was. Maybe I will make something with the photos I shot. A big painting of the forest would be an achievement. But maybe I was just putting something between myself and the devastation so I wouldn’t have to hear what they were saying. By the time I ran out of film I was ready to listen. I walked reverently through what was left of a very old forest, much of which had been cleared centuries ago. I started to settle in, finally, and felt like maybe I would get to do what I came here to do when Peter ducked under a very low branch and I followed him out of the woods and into his backyard.
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