Читать книгу Through the Woods - Gary Ferguson - Страница 13

Chapter Three

SEVERAL MILES EAST OF EUSTIS the road brushes against a wild-looking mix of fir, birch, and maple. The woods are spreading, fattening, flowing down the face of every hill, overhanging ponds and streams, nuzzling the edges of farms and fields. In the ditches dozens of yellow tiger swallowtails rise and fall from the faces of flowers, unsure whether to eat or dance. Pure blue highway now, all twist and jitterbug. Flycatchers throw off loud, electric buzzes from the trees, as if the woods were shorting out under the weight of the July sun, and red-eyed vireos dash back and forth across the cracks in the road. Meadows are crowded with mats of bindweed and yarrow, and beyond them, along the edges of the woodlands, stream long, colorful runs of barberry, foamflower, and lily-of-the-valley.

Not just plants, in the scheme of things long past, but medicinals too. Crushed yarrow leaves to stem bleeding in the shops of the carpenters and blacksmiths and shipbuilders, lily-of-the-valley to strengthen the heart. Those in need of a laxative never had to look farther than a spoonful of dried bindweed root, and any Christian who’d been out carousing on Saturday night could rid himself of his bloodshot eyes in time for Sunday services with a quick wash of barberry water. (Berberine, the active ingredient in barberry, is still the main ingredient used to get the red out.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about where I should go, trying along quiet stretches of roadway to sort out exactly which woods to waltz with in the weeks to come. My first notion—and I swear there was a time I didn’t think this way—was to weave the trip around the so-called last of the best places: the biggest sweeps of forest, the wildest, the oldest. Lousy idea. Not that there isn’t a whack-on-the-side-of-the-head value to visiting the largest of what remains of our wildlands. But the celebrity status of such places can be a bit distracting, especially when all you really want is a certain old brand of quiet—smell the smells, visit with a few locals, head out for walks on land where it’s easy to lose the path.

I decide that when I finish my visit with the Conovers the best thing might be simply to make for the south in a loose drift, then slowly wend north again, docking at that handful of places I remember from a long, long time ago, when I was just a kid: the hills of Appalachia. That patchwork of woods and thickets near my old hometown, in the corny flats of Indiana. Those dark, sweet runs of pine in the far north. The places that know me. The places I’m pretty sure will welcome me back.

Beyond the towns the houses wear a settled, comfortable look. Harsh winters have scoured coats of paint into pale versions of the originals—reds have gone to rose, navy to powder-blue. Most rest beside well-tended gardens, and owners with more than a pantryfull of produce offer it to passersby on tables made of planks and sawhorses. I lose count of the yards of peas and flowers, of strawberries, beans, and beet greens. Along with things edible there’re tables of crafts—lots and lots of them. Some, including most everything having to do with fishing, are well down the road to tacky. But a surprising number are quite beautiful—quilts, bird carvings, pottery—giving another nod to the reputation Maine residents have long earned for creativity, for engineering a kind of backwoods Bohemia. It’s obvious, said one historian, that in Maine there’s an unmistakable impulse to create.

By the middle 1800s the state’s remote forest towns were overflowing with art: paintings, songs and plays, poems and rhymes and verse. Even the itinerant preachers who rambled through Maine’s backwoods seemed fond of serving up their sermons in rhyme. One clergyman rode into the town of Israel to announce the death of a prominent local woman, offering the news to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”

The Lord God took his rod

–and shook it over Goshen;

And poor Miss Lowe was called to go,

–and death it was her po’tion.

Far from being offended, the congregation nearly erupted into a jig.

“Why, there’s men in these woods that could write po’try as good as Longfellow and Emerson,” said one old lumberman in 1927. “If only they was booked up enough.” (It wasn’t unusual for people who were booked up enough to dive headfirst into the outback of Maine, surface with a strain or two of clever verse, polish it up and serve it to the rest of the country. Carl Sandburg’s acclaimed poem, “The Buffalo Skinners,” for one, was an adaptation of an old song written and sung by Maine lumbermen.)

Verse was especially easy to come by around the logging camps. It was functional art at its best, as often as not used to describe the working conditions offered by a given timber company. All it took was a couple of backwoods bards passing around ditties about how crappy some camp boss treated his men—or even worse, how bad the food was—and the next season that company would find itself having a heck of a time finding good workers.

The sages of the late 1700s had predicted exactly such artistic flurries in the country as a whole, saying how Americans would rise to new heights of creativity simply by virtue of having rubbed elbows with the woods. Some historians say these predictions were nothing more than part of an inferiority complex—that we looked across the Atlantic at the accomplished cultures of Europe and Great Britain, felt desperate to find something of our own to be proud of, ended up settling for woods, mountains, and rivers because that was all we had. But that ignores the fact that pride in nature had been building for a hundred years. Americans were never so thickheaded not to realize that without their forests they never could have dreamed of becoming a country. From the earliest Colonial times our commerce rested almost entirely on wood: lumber for the sugar works of the West Indies, white-oak barrel staves to Madeira and the Canary Islands, pitch, tar, masts, shingles, and clapboard to England, and entire ships to Spain and Portugal. New Englanders used to recline around fireplaces so big it took an ox to drag in the logs (the average house burned twenty to sixty cords of wood a year), and still had plenty of clear, choice wood left over for fences and wagons, fish traps and mill wheels, tools, houses, churches, colleges.

It was the great sweeps of forest, cut and smoldered into charcoal, that gave us the ironworks needed to turn out cannon and rifles in the Revolutionary War. And speaking of the war, one of the first real skirmishes of the revolution took place off the coast of Maine, when the townspeople of Machias prevented a British ship from commandeering a shipment of pine wood; chased it down, captured it, decorated it with evergreens and renamed it Liberty. When the time came for a young America to think in terms of identity, of heritage, we almost always saw ourselves in terms of trees—plastering them across our state flags, stamping them into our coins, sewing them as panels on the quilts we pulled over us to keep warm at night. Trees as the raw music that would become myth, legend, religion.