Author: Angus Warren

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.

I realized this morning, as I plotted out my route, that a theme has been developing as a subtext to my journal entries: I went West the first week and encountered trees within 100 paces of my door; I ventured South a week later and was soon shrouded in a dense stand of conifers. With two essays and two cardinal directions ahead of me, I declared it my mission to scatter myself to the four corners of Middlebury in search of unexplored territory. This morning, with my divine purpose fixed, I set out to the North.

But my quest today was in vain. As I travelled along Weybridge Street, town gave way to suburb, suburb to farm fields, and on and on as far as the eye could see. I’ve travelled that road enough by car to know that, were I to carry on, I’d cross more fields, a train track, a major state thoroughfare, and arrive eventually in the unwieldy sprawl of Burlington. I climbed two hills past the Weybridge town line, clutching to forlorn hope, but I soon despaired of encountering any forest— surely this is not the “proverbial peace and quiet,” that tantalizing rustic lifestyle of the Green Mountain State? I pass lonely islands of trees along the roadside. My journey becomes little more than an exercise in tree identification— there’s a solitary shagbark hickory; and there, a stand of cherries; a neat row of planted beeches; three ancient oaks. But this is no forest: the lush Greens impend, an ungraspable, hazy phantom on the horizon of a tattered natural landscape, while the omnipresent must of cattle dung and the buzz of transformers overhead are poignant reminders of how profoundly unwild this place is.

Our Commons here has been grazed. The literature tells us that we’ve doubled the number of houses in recent decades and that practically every inch of viable land is occupied. Lake Dunmore, not too long ago a wilderness paradise, is girded by a near-complete ring of developed land. Where can we go next? The frontier is closed! We worry about habitat for endangered species— we wring our hands about global warming— but what of our own habitat? We have been sumptuous in our overuse. In squeezing more and more people into our tiny Northern Kingdom, we’re squeezing out the lifeblood of the state. One can’t help but wonder, considering the suppression the National Parks have suffered this week, how our scant resources can possibly hold up. What’s clear, though, is that we must conserve, and we must use conservatively.

Eventually, I retraced my steps toward the TAM, not wanting to waste a whole morning without ever entering a forest. The Class of ’97 Trail took me through a marvelous, but tiny, pine and hemlock grove. The tenacious needles cast a pleasant, refreshing verdure over the trail, which is otherwise whelmed in grey. I re-encountered an old friend, musclewood (Carpinus carolinia), one of my favorite species and one I haven’t seen in ages. I also remarked one tree that had apparently succumbed to pileated woodpecker damage, along with numerous deadfalls, evidence of a ‘microburst,’ which must have hit this stand a few seasons ago.

In a bizarre inversion of history, my “Pioneer West” lies to the East. Across town in the State Forest we caught a glimpse of pure, apparently unadulterated forest, wherein one might escape the cars, cables, and concrete. But for that, I must wait for another day. For now, I wend my way around the farm fields, passing from the glaring desolation of the fractured woodlands back to the manicured greenery of campus.

–Angus Warren

Less than a week and only a little over a mile and a half separate me from my previous study site, and yet, I can scarcely imagine a world more remote. I have spent plenty of time in New England forests, as a hiker, a writer, an aspiring scientist: it’s funny, then, how one can know so much about a thing and yet not know the thing itself. Today, I marvel at this boggy, prehistoric, alien realm, the coincidental product of subtle changes in geography— elevation, rainfall, the mere soil itself.

A few yards deeper and the forest shifts again. My boots sink into a tightly packed mat of decaying aspen (Populus spp.) leaves, brownish black and musky. It’s a little surprising that the floor should be so inundated with this single leaf, as practically all the trees in this tract—excepting the handful of birch (primarily Betula papyrifera and lenta) and aspen saplings composing the understory— are white pines (Pinus strobus). In fact, in the whole of the plot I can see, the sole mature hardwood is a titanic red oak (Quercus rubra; dbh approx. 110 cm), its bare, contorted branches stark and obvious amidst the sea of perfectly erect and right-angled pines.

Seldom have I seen so variate a landscape in so confined an area: I press on, and the blanket of aspen leaves gives way to a shag pile rug of sphagnum moss punctuated with ferns; that in turn devolves into an intricate latticed counterpane of intertwined pine needles (the canopy, incidentally, remains stubbornly pine throughout). Doubtless these compositional discrepancies are the product of unequal disturbance so near the intensely manicured grasslands of the College.

My first impression— that of a desolate system on the precipice of the human world— has proven invalid. As I turn to leave, a flash of red emerges from the grey haze of the understory: a pileated woodpecker lights on a branch and sets about his business. Seconds later, he is joined a few limbs over by a downy pecker. The perpetual tap of beak-on-bark has been the soundtrack of my day, and I’ve noted sapsucker holes all morning, but now I see their colleagues in action— my watch in the woods has been rewarded with a most fitting finale.

Today, Sunday, is my birthday, so I began the day with a treat: a cup of coffee and an hour looking through the initial chapters of my favorite book, Moby-Dick. I have therefore been in a literary mood, and as I set out on my walk in the woods, I was still considering Melville’s observation that “meditation and water are wedded forever.”

Only there isn’t any sea near Middlebury to reproduce in me the “mystical vibration” Melville derived from vast expanses of water: Champlain is little more than a glorified puddle. True, oceanic bodies deprives us of all sight, color, and sound. I sought landlessness in the winter woods— a desolate landscape of sensory underload. Yet it was not as easy as I expected to find a patch of uninterrupted forest. Indeed, the woodlots immediately surrounding the College are distressingly fragmented. But when I found my shaded bower, without any vantage back of the human realm beyond it, I couldn’t smell through the biting wind; hear over the back-and-forth creaking of the frozen pines enveloping me; nor even focus my eyes on any one thing, as gnarled, brown dead snags, beige tangles of undergrowth and saplings, and deteriorating orange carpet of oak leaves blended into greyscale oblivion.

For 100 seconds, I sat perfectly still, my eyes shut tight: no lingering taste, no smell; two conversant chickadees marking the passing time; the unnerving pop and crackle of those wind-tossed pines; and— frustratingly— the low drone of motors on College Street. Soon, my ears burned, my cheeks flushed, and my ungloved hand struggled to put pen to paper. This mere minute-and-a-half without the luxury of movement enfeebled me. What’s worse, I was protected from the wind. The uppermost branches of a solitary birch weren’t so lucky, and they writhed in wintery turmoil, as a few silvery snowflakes wended past in their swirling descent.

While my eyes were closed, the sun slipped behind an ominous cloud, intensifying the nothingness that I couldn’t perceive. Suddenly, I was conscious that I, ludicrous in my brightly-colored clothes, was a gross intrusion upon the pallor of the otherwise perfect, somber forest. Unable to exactly remember the path that carried me into this place, I pointed myself towards the little slivers of light peeking through the tree-trunks, and I surfaced in a field, restored to the daylight world I know.

–Angus Warren