Find me one forest
The one I can’t think of
when I try to picture a forest
Find me one forest
not once leveled
in trade for flat, abused fields of crop
Where the trees don’t have to heal around hardly recognizable
rusted barbed wire, and the rivers and streams that cut in
between the hills don’t wash up old cow bones, broken glass
bottles, and brittle plastic that falls apart if you try to pick it
up; beer cans that tumble out of old stonework culverts when
they collapse.
Find the forest that hasn’t been scoured over
generation by generation
for the tallest, proudest, most sacred ancient tree of the land,
and felled it, sold
any worth an easy cent.
Find the forest with the most uneven,
beautiful bumpy ground
from centuries of undisturbed puddles,
and rotting logs,
tree roots and winding trickling streams.
From well-worn night trails of the deer finding their way in
the dark and beavers sculpting community and land by
transforming waterways
Find just one… where the echoes of cars on the highway can’t
be heard, muddling into the bird songs with a heavy, distant
drone.
Find me one forest
The one I can’t think of
when I try to picture a forest
A northeastern deciduous forest,
like the ones I grew up in,
the ones my mind can conjure
when I try to picture a forest,
The ones that make me wonder
Just what they were like
Before the chestnut trees were wiped out
With their canopies reach out above, often 10 stories high
those giants who cared mothered the Northeast with their
sturdy branches, plentiful food, deep roots, and thick trunks,
who made up every fourth tree on the land
Before they vanished
functionally extinct in less than half a century
ancient roots pushing up young saplings,
destroyed again by a fungus that was never meant to reach
here
Before, like the death of a single butterfly, but on a
cataclysmic scale,
The forests, wetlands, meadows, and rivers had been
irrevocably transformed,
and healed, and rehealed from unhealable traumas:
from the damage we bring every year,
from those ripples that spread from a single tree, let alone
millions of acres
How much has changed?
I can only try to imagine.
As I’ve never been there, and we will never get to
If you would like to further research the chestnut
blight pathogen or the legacy of the American
chestnut, I would suggest these three articles:
- Rocky Leaf Water Environmental- “The
American Chestnut: From Cradle to Grave” - “Death of the American Chestnut” by George H.
Hepting - “Chestnut Blight” by forestpathology.org
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