Читать книгу Through the Woods - Gary Ferguson - Страница 9

Introduction

AS NEAR AS I REMEMBER I left the ordinary when I was seven, in late summer, out with my parents off some potholed county road in northern Indiana on a hazy Sunday afternoon when the mayapples were hung and the milkweed was in full flower. My folks had packed lunch and driven my brother and me out some ten or fifteen miles from town, one thing in mind: to let us climb trees. There I was, standing in the crook of a maple, twelve feet off the ground, hugging the trunk, curtains of big green leaves wound up in the wind and dancing all over the place, making noises like a fast creek running through the sky. And my father, looking up at me from ground level through the scratched lenses of his gray-plastic glasses, muscled arms outstretched to catch me if I fell.

Thoughts of the woods have been with me ever since. They come in daydreams: sycamores and sugar maples with arms locked on the hilltops near Lake Wawasee; in the bottoms down below, crowds of pawpaw and white oak and hickory. They rise as pieces of past vacations spent rolling down some two-lane—first in a Studebaker, then in a Chevy—the back windows open, staring into timber: sprawls of tamarack and jack pine in Michigan, unbroken but for log taverns with halos of blue light from the Hamm’s beer signs in the tops of the windows. In Tennessee, dizzy rolls of red oak, chestnut, and shagbark hickory falling away from the top of the Cumberland Plateau.

We first went west in 1966, to Colorado, and I met the Rocky Mountains with my chin on the back of the seat, staring wide-eyed through the windshield. But there too it was the great sweeps of conifers—Douglas-fir, Engelmann spruce, lodgepole pine—that lent mystery to the mountains, that brought a feeling of possibility to those drifts of stone. Even now, the lion’s share of my childhood memories is shot full of leaves.

Which is why it was such a sad surprise when in my mid-thirties I looked over my shoulder to find that the trees had shrunk from my life, that they’d gone from being nothing short of ladders to the sky to being something merely pleasant; stories, where once there was myth. Of course fascinations don’t really burn up in flash fires so much as they drown by degrees—old dreams like old boats, sopping water, growing heavier with every season, harder to steer. And yet if I had to pick the heart of those troubled times, it was probably when I went home to Indiana after my mother’s death in 1988, hoping for one more ramble through some of the unkempt places I’d known as a child. But all I could see were the losses. Old wetlands, once thick with the smell of creation, shrouded in veils of pussy willow and spicebush, had been drained away, packed in dirt, filled with condominiums. Fence rows near Cromwell were plowed under, taking with them the fox and the raccoon, the songbirds that once hid in their thickets. Gone to the woodlots that had slept away the winters beside those yellow, stubbled fields of corn.

It was years later that I was wandering through the stacks of a library in Boulder, Colorado, when I stumbled across a passage about an all but forgotten American named Joe Knowles. On a rainy August day in 1913, this part-time artist, then in his mid-forties, stripped down to a G-string, shook hands with a group of bewildered reporters on the shore of King and Bartlett Lake in western Maine, then trudged off into the woods without a single piece of equipment to live as a wild man for sixty days. The idea, Knowles claimed, came from a dream in which he was lost in the woods, alone and naked, with little hope of getting out. “Not much of a dream,” he confessed, “but a damn real one.”

Joe Knowles emerged from the forest two months later a full-blown hero. Two hundred thousand people in Maine and Massachusetts turned out to see him—20,000 on the Boston Common alone. A book of his adventures sold more than 300,000 copies, and he toured vaudeville with top billing, preaching the virtues of life beyond the bustle and soot of the twentieth century. The next summer Knowles managed a similar feat—again to the cheers of the nation—this time in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwest Oregon. For whatever reason Joe chose to act out his “damn real dream,” he tapped into a belief, once commonplace, whose time had come again. It said that if our dance with nature had been such a big part of what we most valued about our character, then losing our wild places might mean losing that which held the best hope for the future. It was like gas to a spark. The land-preservation movement exploded. Youth groups sprang up everywhere—the Sons of Daniel Boone, the Boy Pioneers, the Boy Scouts, the Woodcraft Indians—each dedicated to maintaining the influence of the wilderness in children’s lives. In the years between 1910 and 1940, The Boy Scout Handbook outsold every book in America except the Bible. Frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner—the guy who said that in America, democracy was a forest product—was suddenly a genius. The woods were alive again in the American psyche.

Most historians say that Joe Knowles was a charlatan, that he never really did what he claimed to have done. They may be right. Still, he was the one who reminded me that our willingness to conquer nature has as often as not been tethered to a longing to save it—that there have in fact been generous times, times when we’ve waltzed with the woods like Cinderella on champagne. While early Christians were full of fears about wild places, the sons and daughters who steered America through its formative years courted those places, seeding a national commons of fable and myth and spirit-tales based on mountains and rivers and forests.

As unlikely an inspiration as Joe Knowles might be, he’s the one who left me hungry to go back out and roam the last wild places, places like Maine and Appalachia and the North Woods, looking for the people who still had pieces of the old American imagination in their pockets, people who never forgot how to warm their lives with the woods.