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5. A Walk in the Woods: A Walk in the Woods Art & Artifact in a New England Forest
- University of Iowa Press
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many years ago: the desire to get away from other people, at least for a short time. Thoreau learned a lot from Joe Polis, to be sure, and was ultimately very glad to have recruited experienced rivermen as his traveling companions while approaching and leaving Mount Katahdin , but on the whole he always seemed taken aback when he came across other people and their works on his travels, as though they really didn’t belong out there in the forest: on noticing “a ring-bolt well drilled into a rock” on the shore of a remote lake, he notes that “it was always startling to discover so plain a trail of civilized man there.”1 Like many walkers and hikers, I too prefer to avoid the ringbolts when I take to the woods for an afternoon or a day. I go there to be alone, to think or to clear my mind. I go there to get outside my own crowded, noisy head for a while. I take plenty of walks in my residential neighborhood as well, but there’s something about being away from cars and houses and other pedestrians that encourages the pieces of a particularly knotty writing problem to fall into place, say, or that allows me to replace my all-too-human concerns with an outward gaze at a rocky ledge breaking through the forest floor or a turtle surfacing in a quiet pond. If I’m going to spend a day being surrounded by distractions, I prefer them to be the unexpected sights and encounters I can find in a patch of forest, not the usual time-eating tasks f i v e A Walk in the Woods Art & Artifact in a New England Forest t horeau isn’t the only one who’s ever enjoyed walking in the Maine woods, of course. I do too, and try to do it as often as I can. And I’m often driven to those woods by one of the same impulses that sent Thoreau there so QR I can find in my office. There’s value in having your most pressing concern be not losing the trail. I particularly love a good view. There’s something about getting some elevation under you and being able to take in a big chunk of space at a glance that cleans out the eyes and ventilates the soul. Sabattus Mountain, just outside Center Lovell near Maine’s border with New Hampshire, is one of my favorite climbs these days. It’s more like a big hill, really, not much of a mountain by western American or even Maine standards: a mere 1,280 feet, with a rise of only 500 feet from the base to the summit. You can climb it in twenty minutes at a leisurely pace. But its bald granite dome falls sharply off on its southern and western sides, offering views of the sort you might not think you quite deserve for so easy a climb. The view from Sabattus is one of those that allows you to indulge the illusion that you’ve ascended out of the humanized world completely into another, quieter, greener realm (fig. 9). From even that modest height, the forests on the ground below seem to draw together and fill in their gaps to hide everything that humans have added to the landscape. Everywhere you look, you see what seems to be a uniform blanket of treetops, broken here and there by a lake or pond and, very occasionally, a house or farm building, or a tiny clearing in which a microscopic cow or two is grazing. The road you drove in on has vanished completely, as have the various villages you passed through. Around to the west, the southern edge of the White Mountains corrugates the horizon. I can spend a long time just sitting or stretched out on the dome up there, choosing my spot carefully in order to stay away from anyone else who may have made the climb with the same idea I did, staring at soothing greenness or at stirring mountains or at nothing at all. Even though I know better, I like to imagine that, at least for a few minutes, I’ve traded one world for another. And yet, being me, I also end up taking close looks at the forest itself , both on the way up Sabattus and from the summit. While there’s therapeutic value in thinking of all those massed...