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

Reading Place in the Northern Forest

A s I write this in early spring, outside the door of our home in northern Vermont the ground in the yard has started to give a little underfoot, and the snow has begun to recede up the mountain slopes, leaving visible some of the secrets it has kept since late fall. Alongside the misplaced garden tools, dog toys, and flowerpots that are slowly reappearing after months of absence, more subtle contours of our neighborhood’s earlier history also become apparent as they lose their winter mantle. Squaring off fields, shoring up slopes, and helping to guide our road through fields and woods, miles of stone walls frame the narrative of this landscape. Although many of the walls near us appear thrown together only haphazardly, as though a farmer tossed stones over his shoulder and left them where they fell, in their heyday many of the walls stood straight and square and helped to determine a farm’s success or failure. In the century and a half since the majority of the region’s walls were built, annual cycles of freeze and thaw, the insistent push of tree roots, denning animals, and curious or mischievous visitors have all taken their toll—as Robert Frost writes, “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” The pasture across the road, now a tangle of matted yellow grass and clover, punctuated here and there by an errant poplar sapling, noneReading Place in the Northern Forest pavel CeNkl 2 • readiNg plaCe iN the NortherN Forest theless remains girded by walls of granite stones covered in the mossy vestments of age. The walls that define the landscape in Vermont, neighboring New Hampshire, and throughout the Northern Forest are veritable stories of our region’s history as they run from fields, through woods, and across unlikely stretches of hardscrabble hillside. According to one estimate, there are more than 250,000 miles of walls in New England and New York. Written in granite, schist, lichen, and moss, these occasionally improbable lines of stony verse indelibly trace the history of our place even as they inevitably succumb to the soft earth’s invitation to tumble down. The writer and wall builder Kevin Gardner has made a craft of mixing metaphor with manufacture in the deliberate and meditative practice of building stone walls today. For him, the work is about cat caves, cigars, cantaloupes, puddle caps, snouts, and cheap seducers. Building a stone wall seems almost as much like writing as writing sometimes feels like precariously stacking stones in a wall. In the glossary to Gardner’s book The Granite Kiss, he defines the “granite kiss” of the book’s title as a euphemism to describe fingers pinched between two rocks. I like to think of the term as more descriptive of rocks that fit tightly together, each dependent upon the other’s stability to keep the wall standing straight, but Gardner offers terms for these rocks as well—through-stones, which pass the width of a wall, and thrufters, which add strength by reaching into the depths of a wall. Of course, the stones themselves are fragments of the region’s geologic record, their composition hinting at which northern ledges glaciers bore them from thousands of years before. Weaving in and out of woodlots, coursing beside roads, skirting the edges of fallow fields, these walls piece together stories of the land, its people, and the history of their encounters. What the language of the walls tells us is the relationship between people and the place they inhabit; it isn’t only strength that a wall’s larger stones provide, but interdependence. If a frost heave dislodges a thrufter, the wall will not stand long. the eNviroNmeNtal and cultural stories that interweave the nearly 30 million acres of the Northern Forest are an uncountable array of stones, all fitting closely together.1 The Northern Forest, stretching across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, is part of the larger boreal forest that reaches north into Canada and west across the Great Lakes. In the Northeast the forest is a zone of transition between the broadleaf readiNg plaCe iN the NortherN Forest • 3 forests of central and southern New England and the spruce-fir forest that stretches toward the Arctic Circle. Within this broad area live roughly a million year-round residents, many of whose lives are intimately associated with the forest ecosystem and whose individual stories...