Ferguson - Through The Woods : a Journey Through Americas Forests

Through the Woods: A Journey Through Americas Forests

Copyright 1998 by Gary Ferguson

All rights reserved.

Foreword 2015 Edition Copyright 2015 by Gary Ferguson

First Torrey House Press Edition, February 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Published by Torrey House Press, LLC

Salt Lake City, Utah

www.torreyhouse.com

E-Book ISBN: 978-1-937226-52-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957807

Author photo by Mary Clare

Interior design by Russel Davis | Gray Dog Press

Cover design by Rick Whipple | Sky Island Studio

Thanks, Moby

Table of Contents

Contents

I TS BEEN ALMOST TWENTY YEARS since I walked out the front door of my home in southwest Montana on a June morning, crawled behind the wheel of my old Chevy van, and set out on a seven thousand mile odyssey across the United States. The tiny fridge behind the drivers seat was stuffed with bowls of chili and blocks of cheese, a loaf of bread and a bag of apples and a six-pack of beer. Beside me on the floor, in a blue wire basket, were two journals and a tape recorder, a Rand McNally road atlas, and a stack of guidebooks to the plants, animals, and birds of the Eastern and Midwestern United States. Finally, on the tray of the engine cover was a handwritten listnames of men and women in New England and the southern Appalachians and the North Woods of the upper Midwest, many of them good friends of good friends, whom Id been told were living lives firmly linked to the forest. The job Id signed on for was among the most appealing projects of my entire writing career: a slow, sweet meander down the forested backroads and trails of America, gathering stories of this nations long, lovely relationship with the woods.

Celebrated novelist Lawrence Durrell once suggested that we are children of our landscapethat the lands we live with dictate behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it. And in America, weve been very responsive indeed. While the look of the lands surrounding us have varied greatly, from the edge of the sea to the spill of the prairie, from the sprawl of deserts to the feet of mountains, no landscape has been more influential to how we see ourselves than the vast, brilliant quilts of the North American forests. The opening acts of our magnificent love affair with naturewhich began before we were even a countrywere destined to unfold under the arms of oak and beech and white pine, sassafras and ash, hickory and butternut and birch.

Most of the people youll meet in these pagespeople whose lives were, as Lawrence Durrell suggested, clearly shaped by their landscapeare still, twenty years later, very much engaged with the woods. They describe their home forests as gifts, enormously reliable, offering pleasure in every season, in good times and bad. But at the same time, most would also tell you that their home forests are changing. Some have seen enormous development pressurea flurry of building that has left fewer trees and fewer creatures, creating landscapes fragmented by roads and subdivisions and shopping centers. In other places, especially in Appalachia, the hugely destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining has obliterated the forests and streams of the high places, outraging and breaking the hearts of many who live there.

Beyond all that, however, the effects of climate change have accelerated in these woodlands, and are now tugging at every strand of the forest. In southern New England, for example, the regal sugar maple and the winsome yellow birch are sickening and dying in the face of warmer temperatures and increasingly extreme weather. One day, not so very long from now, they may die out. As that happens, and as less colorful tree species move in from the south, its possible to imagine a future where the regions brilliant fall foliage displays will fade to a pale shadow of what theyve been for centuries.

Meanwhile, warming temperatures in the southern Appalachians are leading to a steady loss of the splendid Carolina hemlock and balsam fir. At the same time, many of the trout I saw flashing in the streams of Tennessee and North Carolina while researching this book, are disappearing due to warming water temperatures. So too are soundscapes changing, as more and more songbirds are pushed north by the warming, drying climate. And on it goes.

Yet even with such monumental changes, its important to understand that we do still have the choice of steering toward a healthier future for these brilliant woodlands and the people and creatures who live there. To some degree, our chances of success will depend on figuring out technologies for living more sustainably on the earth. And in this area, were making rapid progress. There are breakthrough developments going on in solar energy right now, from so-called trough mirrors, which greatly concentrate the suns energy, to the use of salt batteries, which allow for electrical production even when the sun isnt shining. Even older technologies such as wind turbines are becoming ever more efficient, to the point of incorporating high-tech storage batteries to solve the longstanding problem of fluctuating electrical supply. And off the coast of Maine, after years of research and design work, power is being generated by ocean waves.

But theres something else worth considering in all this, something more fundamental to the kind of public enthusiasm that drives such projects in the first place. That enthusiasm takes its breath not merely from a love of technology, not even from a sense of wanting to leave the planet intact for our grandchildrens grandchildren. It comes from our ability to cultivate a deep kinship with the earth in the here and now.

As I write this, more than two thousand celebrations are happening around the country to mark the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, which established the highest form of land protection ever afforded the American landscape. If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, President Lyndon Johnson noted after signing the Act into law, then we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning. Since its inception in 1964, the wilderness preservation system has grown more than ten-fold, to over 109 million acres, protecting critical lands from California to Alaska, Florida to New Jersey, every one of those acres granted the simple right to unfold to its full potential, unshackled by human inventions or appetites.

The kind of passion thats made the Wilderness Act such a success is at the root of the energy well need to address the extraordinary challenge of climate change. Thus far, weve been fairly good at preserving small portions of the earth as they were in the beginning, as Lyndon Johnson put it. Now we need to grow that generativity into a willingness to sustain the beauty, community, and mystery of the planet as a whole. We must do so for economic reasons, of course. For the welfare of future generations, to be sure. But we must also do it for the deep pleasure that many of the people in this book have known for decades: the kind that comes from the thoughtful, intimate caretaking of this place we call home.