Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast

Living with the Woods: Disturbance Histories in Thoreau and Burroughs

Living with the Woods Disturbance Histories in Thoreau and Burroughs jim warreN T om Wessels’s Reading the Forested Landscape is a primer for reading the disturbance history of landscapes in central New England . Kent Ryden calls it a “primer in Forestese.”1 It teaches us to observe the effects of the six common forms of forest disturbance in New England: fire, pasturing, logging, blights, beaver, and blowdowns. In addition, it relates disturbance history to topography and substrates, so that ultimately the reader of Wessels’s book gains a strong sense of landscape ecology. Finally, the categories of disturbance histories, topographies , and substrates suggest that Wessels is reading forest history as the combination of nature and culture. As a textbook for studying nature and culture in the northeast woods, Wessels’s primer could hardly be better. After making your way through the eight chapters and accompanying etchings of Reading the Forested Landscape, you can hike through a forested landscape with a fresh eye. Stone fences do not enclose a hieroglyphic and distant past; instead, they open up questions of how the land was used—for cultivation, pasturing, or mowing—and when it was abandoned. Wessels teaches reader-hikers how to put parts of the landscape together, like a complex jigsaw puzzle. In addition, he teaches 214 • rethiNkiNg plaCe how much there is to know about plant biology before you can begin to discern patterns in the disturbance histories. So, for instance, the white pine weevil’s impact on the terminal shoot of a young white pine, leading to multiple branching, can become a clue to the open landscape the pine once inhabited, or a wall with many small stones in its construction suggests that the enclosed field was cultivated, producing an annual “crop” of rocks.2 Wessels freshens our eyes by bringing forest ecology and human history to bear on each other. This kind of interpretive exercise is not easy, especially for an unpracticed eye. When I walk in my home woods of western Virginia, between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies, I may happen upon stone walls, old apple trees, coppiced maples, interesting wind-throws, or wooly adelgids on hemlock branches. Sometimes I may recognize a couple of patterns from Wessels’s book, leading me to draw provisional inferences about the history, both natural and cultural, of the mountains I live in. Moreover, if I pursue the knowledge resolutely and well, it leads me further into the specific ecology and history of the southern Appalachians. So, for instance, I am learning that iron manufacturing shaped the landscape of antebellum southern Appalachia throughout the 1840s and 1850s, having an effect as significant, say, as the abandonment of farms and mass migration to the Ohio River valley and farther west in 1840s New England.3 How that fact translates to the experience of living in the twenty-first century forests of western Virginia, however, is by no means transparent. Only by seeking out the signs of logging, charcoal production, and iron furnaces can I begin to appreciate the place name of a neighboring town like Clifton Forge. Thus, in addition to providing knowledge about the New England forested landscape, Wessels teaches us how much we need to know and how much there is to see in any landscape. Often, moreover, he teaches us how to ask questions that require even more knowledge to answer. The primer becomes a way of seeing and knowing rather than a repository of knowledge. The same can be said of reading a literary landscape. In the “Ktaadn” chapter of The Maine Woods, for instance, Thoreau describes the descent from Mount Katahdin toward the East Branch of the Penobscot River. As the party crosses the “Burnt Lands” to the southwest of Baxter Peak, Thoreau wonders if the clearings were “burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, liviNg with the woods • 215 exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there.”4 Thoreau asserts that the natural pasture presents “primeval, untamed, and forever untameable Nature,” and that “Man was not to be associated with it. . . . Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain...