Once, several winters ago, during a solo hike in the Great Smokies, I was moved to stop, shed my pack, and silently sit, cross-legged, on a long-dead stump, much as we have done each week in this course. So deep in the Park as I was, there is a total absence of familiar sound, sight, and smell— this world was palpably, terrifyingly foreign. I, like many, came to Middlebury in pursuit of this sensation, the vert in Vermont; I came here to get well and truly lost; with a grandiose philosophical flourish to lose sight and gain perception. Thoreau had two years, two months, and two days to find himself at Walden; I, too, would have my four winters of liberal arts in the wilderness. In short, I came to follow Muir along the clearest way into the Universe.
But as my exploratory experiment over these four weeks has demonstrated, our woods aren’t really as accessible, healthy, contiguous, or all-encompassing as we take them to be. I walked two miles north of town on Sunday and found nothing, and I was frustrated again on Tuesday, not by total failure but by disillusionment. On a map, the Battell Woods through which I hiked are the just same shade of green as the Green Mountain National Forest; but it just isn’t so. These are young woods, sparse woods; woods choked out by invasives and lacking the jutting, jagged, rugged terrain; the clear-flowing stream and crashing falls; and above all— literally and figuratively— the lofty hemlocks and grand old white pines that made the National Forest such a potent driver of the imagination.
I’m certain of the good— psychological, ecological, and economic— of both true woodlands and so-called “urban forests.” The Battell Woods occupy an awkward intermediary niche. They are not close enough to campus to be accessed by the carless student body. Equally, they are not “wild” enough to be “wilderness.” The stream that runs through the Battell tract is interrupted at intervals by Seminary Road, which must seriously impair any ecosystem services the forest might provide. I can’t imagine maneuvering cumbersome logging equipment over this contorted, undulating terrain, but the youth of the trees proves that someone has, and not all that long ago.
A gaping powerline cut bisects the Mean Preserve on the northeast side of the road. It’s a wildlife habitat nightmare, which does little more good than to remind one how aesthetically unpleasant a clear-cutting is. Incidentally, it has given me a chance to observe just what we mean by “even-aged stands”: trees on the peripheries are ancient and towering, while the others— recent arrivals in the heart of the clearing— are densely packed and uniformly 7 feet tall: no champion has arisen just yet. I couldn’t help but feel a little sad that some of the pines wiped out to make way for the powerline apparently hadn’t left the clearing but had been stripped, treated, and resurrected in perverted mockery of life, standing amongst their once-peers as telephone poles.
