The cold presses against my cheeks, sinking into the hollows around my eyes. I strap on my snowshoes and head up the unplowed road.
Though the forest is quiet, I know that it is alive. Between the boulders of Stimson Mountain the bear sows sleep, their cubs nursing and mewling like kittens. Rodents tunnel through the subnivean zone, the cavernous world beneath the snow, hunted by foxes and owls and ermine weasels. Deer linger in the hemlocks in their shaggy winter coats, and grouse leave wingbeats on the snow. The trees stand nakedly above it all, next year’s growth promised in every closed bud.
The round tracks of a moose merge onto the road ahead of me, and I picture a big bull fumbling up the hill, his fleshy bell bobbing with each postholing step. Somewhere on the mountain, that moose chews yellow birch twigs, waiting to wade in warm waters again. The road curls to the north and flattens. I enter the long, narrow clearing, the yurt squatting like an acorn at its center. I am here again.
I glide to the blue trailer, the miniature camper surrounded by useful things and precious things and things with nowhere else to go. Under the snow, I can see the rounded shapes of the upside-down wheelbarrow, the old culvert, the wooden stepladder, the disassembled car port, piles of scrap steel, fencing, buckets, and thick slabs of wood. Behind the trailer’s red door are shovels, saws, and axes, a bear hide that I keep failing to tan but cannot throw away. A few months ago, mice ruined my generator, and so now there are mouse traps on every surface, baited with frozen peanut butter.
The broken ridge of Stimson Mountain leans over me, shining with white winter light. One day this place, Bear Island, will be my home. Today, I am just a weekend visitor from an apartment in Burlington, an interloper in this wild world. I grab my pruning shears and point my snowshoes toward the orchard, where the fruit trees wait in the snow.
As is my custom, I take a detour up the path to the pond. Three years ago, when I bought Bear Island, the pond was a snarl of skidder ruts, a wallow of soupy black muck. Now green water gathers under the ice, cattails piercing its shallows. The pond has become a place where herons wade on their stilts, where black bears drink in summer. Somewhere in its belly, a school of trout live out their lives, their flanks pink, their glassy eyes bulging. I built the pond so that I could swim and stocked it with trout so that I could fish, but now what brings me the most joy is just knowing that both are here.
From the top of the dam, I turn to face my young orchard. The trees are little more than saplings, a constellation of tiny stars. Three years ago, I planted these trees among stumps and brush, the brown slash of the clearing simmering around them. Apples, pears, cherries, and chestnuts, their roots naked to the summer air, were thrust into holes in the sandy soil, the auger’s blade choking on roots and rocks. Each year I plant another apple or pear, another plum, another bright peach. More trees will arrive in April, sealed in a long cardboard box.
The clearing is far from an ideal place for an orchard. Thirteen thousand years ago, I would have stood on the shore of a massive glacial lake, its waters swirling around my feet. For two millennia, the lake filled western Vermont, covering land sunken from tens of thousands of years trapped under a glacier. For two millennia, the lake turned mountains into islands, valleys into long fingers of icy water. Thirteen thousand years ago, I could have turned south and walked over the broad valley, my snowshoes carrying me hundreds of feet above where the highway now sings its ceaseless song, where towns and villages cluster, where the big river blinks its slow, green eyes. Beneath the blue ice, tiny soil particles would have drifted like stray hairs, catching the light. Over thousands of years, they gathered: sands and gravels on the lake’s deltas and shorelines, clays filtering through its deeper waters.
Eleven thousand years ago, far to the north, the last memories of the glacier failed, its dam of ice suddenly breached. The lake rushed out of the broad valley, leaving this flat plateau, this sandy beach with no ocean stranded on the side of the mountain. Over thousands of years, the brook gnawed downward through sand and gravel, shaping the plateau’s eastern edge until it was as curved as an hourglass. Today that same brook rushes hundreds of feet below, its currents wearing caverns in the bedrock.
Over the succeeding millennia, the plateau’s soils developed in a process that was both organic and inorganic, both prescribed and unpredictable, both known and unknowable. As the memories of an ice age receded from the broad valley, the plateau became a tundra, a taiga, a forest one hundred times over. Roots plumbed the soil’s depths, twisting and diving in the dark, carrying communities of tiny things in their arms. Over unthinkable spans of time, the soil’s minerals were mined by fungi and bacteria, weathered by water and time, transformed physically, chemically, and biologically. Countless windstorms crossed the plateau, and the structure and the composition of its forest were changed in broad, sweeping strokes; again and again, the trees fell, their root systems lifting the dark topsoil and exposing the orange gravel beneath, turning the soil like hands in dough. Again and again, the forest regenerated, chasing death with life. Fires singed the soil’s upper reaches, some kindled by the first people of the valley, who crossed the plateau as they hunted elk and moose and caribou, their birch bark canoes beached on the shores of the big river far below. Slowly, the plateau’s soil deepened and darkened and changed.
Two centuries ago, a village of colonists bloomed at the foot of the mountain. The plateau and the mountain above were cleared and pastured, the forest exiled and kept at bay for a century or more. The plateau was home to the village’s baseball field, and on humid summer evenings the children of the valley would hike up the shoulders of the brook with their caps and their leather gloves, playing baseball as the sun ebbed behind the crooked ridge of Stimson Mountain.
Three decades ago, the plateau had been ignored by the people of the valley for generations. Miraculously, it had regenerated, becoming a young forest of oak and beech, red maple and pine. One day, the people returned to the plateau and began to clear the young forest again. They made a round clearing at the plateau’s southern end, dug a small gravel pit, built a steep, curving road that connected the plateau to the pavement below. For the decade that followed, the clearing was a log landing: the place where loggers parked their pickups as they rode roaring skidders to every corner of the mountain, where they stacked endless tiers of oak and maple logs, where they loaded hundreds of log trucks and sent them to the mill. One day in late autumn, the soils of the clearing were slick and muddy, and so a logger in a bulldozer scraped away what was left of the black topsoil, piling it on the edges of the clearing, exposing the orange gravel again.
From atop the pond’s dam, the topsoil is a faint bulge under the snow, ringing the margins of the clearing. At the clearing’s southern end, the gravel pit is an open mouth, slicing through ten feet of gravel and into a pool of soft white sand, fine enough to be caught by the wind. When I first came to Bear Island, the clearing’s soils—soils that had once been rich and deep and ancient—were depleted and compacted, barely able to grow tufts of thin, yellow grass. The clearing was piled with trash; cables and hydraulic hoses and oil buckets buried like poison seeds in the earth. To the north, what remained of the plateau’s forest was a tangle of skidder ruts, its trees anemic and half-alive, the spaces between them empty. After thirteen thousand years of reaching toward life, the plateau seemed transparent: a place that was less than nothing.
I exhale. Tiny ice crystals drift through the air like shoals of plankton, flickering in the low winter light. This clearing on the plateau, like this world, is a map of scars. I have begun to build something on the rubble of the past, but I know that this is no beginning. The clearing still remembers the crush of the glacier and the icy waters that followed. It remembers the forests that have lived here, the many worlds that have called this place their home. It remembers the pasture and the ball field, the log landing and the bulldozer. My life is just the latest chapter in an endless history, a brief moment on the edge of a massive skein of time.
This is an excerpt from How to Love a Forest chapter 1: Reimagining Our Forests, Ourselves.
