Wandering Home (14 page)

To my mind, Donald Armstrong has lived a nearly perfect life—good to his neighbors and loved in return, good to his wife and cherished in return, in a place that meant something to him and where he meant something. Doubtless he made less money than he could have almost anywhere else, but doubtless it didn’t bother him, since he had a little house with a little pond out back where he would feed the fish, and a huge garden that entertained and fed him in equal measure. And always always the woods and the mountains and the lakes. He told me about climbing Crane Mountain, our most massive local peak, in his youth: “We were full of beans and buckshot. We’d take that mountain at first speed. And then we’d climb the fire tower up on top, and we’d just look off. All those High Peaks in the distance. It was just amazing to us young people to see off, because we’d never been anywhere out of Johnsburg.”

That’s an almost incomprehensible idea now, to climb a mountain for a view of the larger world. We see it on TV every hour, or through the Net, or by car and
airplane and a thousand other ways. Our worlds are inconceivably bigger—even this sixteen-day journey of mine covers what we think of as a tiny territory, one crossed in a car in a couple of hours. But that doesn’t mean that the world I sort of know, or at least apprehend, is more complete or important than the much smaller world he has known. You can have a sufficiency of knowing, just as you can have a sufficiency of stuff.

Or more than a sufficiency. John Passacantando and I have been walking and talking for hours now, but the longer our trek stretches, the quieter we grow. We’re along the east branch of the Sacandaga now, rock-hopping, watching the water play. The
abundance
of it all! And the endless novelty—I have hiked these trails in the late fall, when with the leaves down you can read the swell of the ridges with an anatomist’s precision. I’ve skied them dozens of times in the winter—sometimes in heavy glop, sometimes on icy crust, each trip utterly its own. And I’ve come through here in the muddy spring, skunk cabbage pushing up through the last drifts, river at full throttle. I know people here who are passionate birders or fishermen; I know a woman obsessed with moss and lichen. Trappers and hunters (meaning, if they are any good, people who have taught themselves to think as animals think). Photographers, peak baggers, mushroom nuts. There’s a guy who loves to find wild beehives—he tracks the bees in his garden deep back into the woods. Sugar-makers, and paddlers. One local wired the swamp
around his home with dozens of microphones so he could record all the sounds of the wetlands. I know another guy who located dozens of apple trees, once growing in farm yards and now, generations later, surviving deep in the woods—he’d prune them, and go back in late summer for his harvest. Only one or two of these neighbors are affluent by the standards of contemporary American consumer society, but every one of them is affluent. I think people who don’t know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone’s interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven’t been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I’ve never seen in the fall (I’ve seen them in the summer—but that’s a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.

S
OMETIMES
I
GET
to cross something off, however. Today, for instance, which is the very last day of this journey. The trail through the Siamese Ponds wilderness ended at Route 8, the north-south two-lane that cuts through our township. It’s about the loveliest road I know—glimpses of the Sacandaga again and again as you drive south toward Speculator. And it’s also about the loneliest. There
aren’t any towns for twenty-five or thirty miles south of Bakers Mills. Or rather, there are a couple of towns but no one lives in them anymore. Ghost towns out West desiccate, preserved by the arid sun. Ghost towns in the central Adirondacks (Griffin is the one I know best, an old tannery town just south of here abandoned near the turn of the century) simply rot, cellar holes filling with birch trees, the forest reclaiming its own.

I walk down Route 8 about a mile, just one log truck passing me, and then cross over, heading east into the woods along a short trail to Kibby Pond. Two old and dear friends are waiting for me. Peter Bauer just may be the most effective conservationist in the Adirondacks. For a long time, it was outsiders who saved this place: rich New Yorkers who looked upon it as their vacation paradise and so exerted the power to draw the Blue Line, amend the constitution; many of the locals were bitter, resentful. But with each generation that feeling mellows some, and Peter has built a group, the Residents Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, that speaks with complete credibility on behalf of the park and the people who inhabit it. Steve Ovitt, who I’ve known almost since the day I came here, looks like a forest ranger even when he’s not in uniform—he’s clean-cut, broad-chested, strong-shouldered. Steve works for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, and he’s responsible for a vast tract of land centered on this forest. We’ve hiked and winter-camped all through these woods; he’s taken
me along on all-night searches for lost hunters and lost hikers and lost kids; there’s no one I feel more comfortable with in the woods.

Which is good, because today we’re leaving the trail altogether. After the quick hike into Kibby Pond, the path ends and we will bushwhack across the top of the Wilcox Lake Wild Forest, another hundred-thousand-acre chunk, and one with just as few trails and even fewer visitors than the Siamese Ponds Wilderness I’ve just come through. On the other side, seven or eight miles away, is the house where I’ve spent most of my adult life, but I’ve never made quite this trip. Nor for that matter has Peter, or even Steve—the woods is a big place.

As we start our wander, Steve is telling stories of his summer so far. Most of it’s been spent out West, leading the state’s firefighting crew that annually flies out to help in the battle against the biggest blazes on the vast national forests. Invariably they’re met with a certain amount of bemusement—what could New Yorkers know about forests? “I just tell them Teddy Roosevelt was our governor before he was president, so we have state land, not federal land,” says Steve. As it turns out, the New York crew are regarded as crack firefighters by the bosses at fire command in Boise—this summer Steve was in charge of five miles of fire line on the Crazy Horse blaze near Glacier National Park in Montana. He was calling in bulldozers, coordinating air attack—and flagging the driveways of houses whose location, or cedar shingles, made
them indefensible. “You can’t have timber to your doorstep,” he says. “There or here.”

Which is an interesting point. Because it’s usually so wet, the Adirondacks have a reputation as an “asbestos forest.” But Steve got his expertise right here, battling stubborn small fires in piney ledges around the park. “We have a thirty-year fire cycle, and we’re forty years into it,” he said. “We’re due—the incidence of small fires is up every dry year now. The fuels are built up.” I’ve fought Adirondack fires with Steve a couple of times—hacking away at duff with a mattock, sprinkling water from the Indian can carried on my back. Their smoldering persistence is uncanny, a little unsettling—you think you’ve got it out, and then it’s up and running again. And fire in the Adirondacks seems to favor steep, hard-to-reach spots. “Compared to this stuff we’re whacking through right now, the West is a walk in the park,” says Steve. “That land is all open out there. If I got a crew of those guys out here, they’d be having a fit right now, talking about being in the jungle.”

Indeed, the witch hobble was thick on the ground. Not only that, but it’s awfully easy to get turned around in these woods once you leave the trail. Even if the sun is out, it’s usually hidden by the trees; beavers make last year’s small stream into this year’s big marsh. I’m competent with a map and compass, but not competent enough. (That is, I almost always find where I’m going, but I have to worry every step of the way that I might not.) So it’s a
pleasure for me and Peter both to be walking with Steve, who never gets rattled even if he does get turned around.

T
ODAY HE’S GOT
one site he wants us to see on our meander, an illegal hunting camp he discovered some years ago on state land not too far from Kibby Pond. During the fall season, hunters can get permits to set up temporary outposts deep in the woods: a platform tent, usually, that stays up for six or seven weeks and serves as a base of operations. But sometimes sportsmen decide they want something a little fancier, and so they build permanent cabins—and these woods are big enough that without real detective work you’re unlikely to come across them. Steve’s predecessor as ranger hadn’t been especially aggressive in his patrols, and so for the first few years of his posting, Steve had easy pickings—many hunting camps where he either surprised and arrested the occupants or, finding them unoccupied, waited till the ground was safely covered with snow and simply burned them down. This one had been particularly grand: a nice wooden floor, a woodstove, windows out over a small marshy pond. A mile from the trail, in a place that the builder must have been sure no ranger would ever bother to visit. When Steve found it, he staked it out for a while; finally, when he couldn’t catch the builder, “I chopped up the floor and poured a lot of Coleman fuel everywhere. When I lit it, it took the roof right off.” Now a
few charred timbers remain, as a reminder to anyone else who might get the cabin-building bug.

Which is not to say Steve is against hunting—he’s about the most enthusiastic hunter I know. Or Peter Bauer, either, though that’s often the caricature of environmentalists. The Adirondacks were first protected by an alliance that included hunters and fishermen as well as backpackers and birdwatchers; class and culture have tended to separate that coalition in recent decades, and it’s taken a toll, both on politics and, in some ways, on biology. Next to the charred cabin, for instance, we come out on a marshy little beaver flow, hopping from one grassy hummock to the next to keep our feet dry. “This water’s so warm—look at that green algae,” said Steve. “These brooks used to have all kinds of trout, but that’s because people were trapping some of the beavers.”

“A couple of decades ago, they’d take 20,000 beavers a year out of the park,” added Peter. But the demand for beaver pelts has dropped past the point where not much of anyone wants to trap them anymore, and so the dams proliferate everywhere. Which is not such a good thing for brook trout, who can’t tolerate the warm still waters.

Of course, you might be able to help the system more directly by reintroducing the timber wolf, the most important animal that has yet to return to the Adirondacks. Wolves are strong enough to tear through the tops of beaver lodges—they’re almost the only effective predator
the animal has. But…so far efforts to reintroduce the wolf have stalled, largely because hunters worry that they will kill too many deer, too many being defined as “deer that
I
was going to kill.”

Nothing
is easy, not politics or biology, when the question is how to recalibrate a balance inevitably altered by our presence. I’ve watched state officials poison everything in an Adirondack pond with a chemical called rotenone. It’s designed to wipe out all the “trash fish” like perch, so they can be replaced with “native” trout. (No one really knows which trout were native to which waters, however; and anyway, anglers with bait buckets full of minnows usually manage to reintroduce the other species inside a decade. Some ponds have been poisoned three or four times.) Or say you did reintroduce the wolf—what if the main effect was to make life hard for coyotes, who seem to have filled some of the wolf niche in the Adirondacks, switching their diet to deer and learning to hunt in packs? Do you let forest fires burn? Do you fight them to protect the vacation homes people have built on their fringe? Do you go in and cut the little trees out of the wild so that the fires won’t burn as hot? “Management” of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.

Still, there are a few things one can say with some confidence. At the moment, in both the Adirondacks and Vermont, one of them is: keep the ATVs out of the forest.
Yesterday I made a philosophical argument, but today, walking with Peter Bauer, I get a small update on the down-and-dirty facts. Dozens of volunteers from his Residents’ Committee have been monitoring the situation across the park, and uniformly they report the same thing: the four-wheelers are ignoring every rule and regulation designed to control them, and they are turning trail after trail into a rutted, muddy mess. No surprise, really: he tells us about the ads they’ve collected from off-road magazines. “The basic message is ‘Get Muddy,’” he says—every picture shows the big machines leaping over boulders and plowing through ponds. In Japan, where the companies that build them are located, users are restricted to a few privately owned tracks, sort of like our go-kart circuits. But here, until a recent state ruling banning them on the forest preserve, users have been claiming the right to take them anywhere, and arguing, in a parody of political correctness, that restrictions on their use discriminate against people who can’t hike.

“People say, ‘I’m too old, I can’t get where I used to,’” says Steve. “To me, you get a certain amount of time, and then you get your memories. And if you’re driving in to some place on your ATV, you’re messing it up for the people who are making their memories now.”

B
Y NOW—MIDAFTERNOON—
we’re completely enclosed within the kingdom of my memories. We’ve crossed the
trail to Fish Ponds (what did I tell you about names?) and we’re climbing up an unnamed stream toward a height of land on the shoulder of Ross Mountain. We’re seeing lots of bear scat, which leads to bear stories. Steve tells about spending an anxious hour with a big guy a few miles south of here; I show the place where I surprised one while carrying my toddler daughter years ago. We watched it amble away—for us, ever since, the unnamed creek has been Bear Stream. This is deep woods now, but I know a place right off the brook where a cellar hole reveals an old farmstead. There’s an apple tree there, and, even better, a hop vine, still bearing a century after anyone stopped harvesting—I cut some of the bitter flowers once and brewed beer with them. There’s the yellow birch where our old dog Barley once treed a raccoon and then sat there, calmly, for two hours watching her like she was the movie of the week. There’s the slope where I kicked over a yellow-jacket nest and came away with seventy stings. Here’s a weird rock—a big boulder with a hole through it almost as if someone had bored it with a drill. The state geologist, Yngvar Isachsen, came to see it one day, and he looked at it for a long time, and then he said, “Damned if I know how that happened.”