Cartography of the Back Forty

Home for the holidays, I escaped the madness of a sequestered family and took a walk in the woods.

I know these half-erased and overgrown trails well because I made most of them as a kid, playing Revolutionary War Minuteman, Luke Skywalker, building forts and playing at Indians, or just stalking myself among the popples.

Others have been through too of course...the bear hunter baiting out by the Cedar Tree, deer hunters making long cuts to form sightlines from the deer stands, ancestors from last century bringing bags of garbage out to the dump in back.

Just inside the forest, at the edge of the yard really, beyond the railroad tracks, in sight of the house (meaning the sites were laid down in extreme youth, when the woods were scary unless you could see your home through the trees), He-Man guys are buried in old tupperware and so are pets--a seagull with a broken wing rescued from a garbage can on the shore, a crow.

Deepest in is the river and the old shack where the creepy hermit lived decades before I was born, residue of wolf kills, in the winter snowshoe tracks from mysterious passers through.

And in between is the Cedar Tree.

Not sure who nailed the ladder steps onto the tree; not the deer who come to rise up on their hind legs and nibble at the tips. But the stairs are for wreath makers who come to fill out their Christmas swag with cedar and ground pine.

Beyond that is this little crazy schizophrenic ganglion of Scotch Pine branches gone crazy--a tree tumor.

We call this a witch's broom and as such it's always seemed a warning to me not to go further. Beyond are darker pines, less light, the cranberry bog. It seems like something a witch might leave behind or put up on purpose, even, for kids like me--but even beyond the metaphor it says that things aren't quite right in this patch of woods; something's afoot that twists and gnarls reality and folds it upon itself like a weaver of cancer or evil. For some reason though these are never touched or snipped off the tree; they're left alone as if they are to be respected or feared as contagious.

Beyond the markers and sites well known by family and neighbors and the passing hunter, my back-and-forths across the wide expanse of acreage, from sunken fence poles in the east to sunken fence posts in the west, and beyond, toward the tree farm and the moribund spring or the neighbor's homestead, I've discovered other little bits of humanity that once served some sort of purpose but now seem nothing more than crude attempts at earth art or bones...a place that could have been a head-high treehouse or deer stand, a coil of garden hose cracked and brittle, an Easter lily sprouting incongruously in the middle of a moss pot set there by human hands after church one Sunday.

Trees will eventually swallow up everything, of course--wire and nails and trails.

It's pretty up there, but oppressive. The forests are thick and clotted and lying as they do upon the flat land there is no opportunity for you to gain perspective over the world around you. I've never been a tree climber and in any case the popples narrow at their tops would set me down again like a tree climber in a Robert Frost poem. You can travel for miles and only see what is immediately in front of your face--more trees, and beyond that, more trees. I think that's why I find the lake so necessary for any visit--for once, you feel like you can see far into the future.

So that's why when walking through the woods to be suddenly bisected by a human-made swale between two groves of pine is to come up short on the edge, crouch down, suddenly exposed, to scan the tree tops for hunter's orange or nest or biplane of some sort or glass or extinct studebaker.