Woods Wanderer

Thanks to the government shutdown, I had the Saratoga Battlefield all to myself when I visited it a month ago. There were no other people there, that is. But the fields and forests of that park were chock full of deer. I must have encountered twenty of them during my morning walk.

No doubt the deer were taking refuge from the hunters going after smaller game, sighting in their rifles and getting ready for the deer season ahead. I could hear the occasional report of a rifle in the distance as I walked. The deer must have heard it as well.

Even though I am not a hunter, I do not disparage hunting. Short of poisoning deer or introducing more predators to the wild, I see no other way to keep their numbers down. Nature culls the herd each winter through mass starvation, but as a woods wanderer I find enough winter kill each spring as things are. Besides, I engage in another blood sport called trout fishing so who am I to judge?  Oh, and yes, I like the taste of deer meat whenever I get a chance to sample it.

Here’s the bottom line: If I were a four-legged denizen of the forest and on someone’s menu, I would much prefer being hunted down and shot towards the end of my days than to be penned up my whole life only to be “harvested” or “put down” by the most humane means possible. Running wild is the main thing. The rest is just the natural (or unnatural) order of things.

All this said, I like deer more alive than dead. Up to a point, that is. There are so many of them now that a midnight drive home is a dangerous proposition. I’ve come close to hitting deer several times this year. And few things are more depressing than seeing their rotting carcasses along the side of the road. Such a beautiful creature when alive. How sad to see them lying there.

Tags: deer, deer management, domestication, hunting, wildness

Yesterday, while I was out promoting my Adirondack book, a fellow asked me what my next adventure would be. I told him that I wanted to do the Cohos Trail in northern New Hampshire. Would I be hiking it alone? he inquired. No, I told him, my dog Matika will be accompanying me. He looked at me like I was crazy.

I have a few friends whose company I enjoy on the trail, and I like going out with my wife Judy every once in a while, but Matika is my #1 hiking companion. She’s my #1 fishing companion, too. In fact, during the past seven years, she has been with me on nearly every outing. Usually I mention her sniffing around in the background. Occasionally I write about her at length. Sometimes I don’t mention her at all. But she is almost always there.

Matika is a long-haired German shepherd that Judy and I rescued from an animal shelter in 2006. Her origin is hazy but we know the breed. We had another dog like her several years earlier. When we rescued her, the vet told us she was about a year old. In dog years, that makes her about my age now. If we’re going to do another trek together, we’d better do it soon.

Matika is smart, quite attentive, and gentle. She’s a good dog. She’s bossy with other dogs, though – a trait I haven’t been able to correct. She loves people. I can’t help but feel she’d make a good companion to a good number of dog handlers. But it’s my good fortune (and Judy’s) to have her in my life.

Matika loves the woods as much as I do. She also likes her soft bed and other creature comforts so I had my doubts about her penchant for wildness at first. But that doubt vanished when she hiked the 100 Mile Wilderness with me. After that trek, I’ve called her Wilderness Dog. And for the most part she has lived up to the name.

We’ve walked many brooks, bushwhacked, and hiked countless miles together. We’ve been overheated, bug-bitten, cold, rain-soaked, and muddy together more often than I care to recall. She’s slept with me beneath the tarp so many times that it would seem strange now to sleep under it without her. Matika is not my pet. Nor am I her master. She’s my canine companion, and there is no one who understands my wildness better, my wife notwithstanding.

Who is going with me on the Cohos Trail?  Wilderness Dog, of course. And that seems perfectly natural to me.

Tags: canine companion, hiking with dogs, Matika, wildness

You know it’s a wetter-than-usual day when the red efts come out. They disappear when the forest is dry and seem to be everywhere after a good rain. On a particularly wet day, it is hard to keep from stepping on them. And that’s exactly the kind of day it was yesterday. 

Savage forest: hot, dripping wet, incredibly humid, and overgrown. Pools of water everywhere, and the trail underfoot nearly hidden by knee-high vegetation. Mosquitos in their glory. Not for the feint of heart – for those who think the good life is all about being comfortable all the time.

The savage forest brings out the savage within. Twenty minutes into it, I was bug-bitten, sweaty, wet from the waist down, and happy. A mood like this cannot be explained. One either recoils from savagery or embraces it. There are no half measures, not when the woods get like this.

Nature isn’t just pretty flowers, rare glimpses of wildlife, picture postcard waterfalls, and rainbows. Sometimes it has an edge. Sometimes it can be downright inhospitable. Yet there is something magnificent about its endless variations. I wouldn’t want it any other way. So let the mosquitoes and red efts have their day. I will wander the woods all the same.

Tags: red efts, summer, the forest, wildness

Yesterday Judy and I went for a walk around Aldis Hill. Our dog Matika came with us, of course. There was rain in the forecast so we wasted no time getting out of the house. We knew we wouldn’t be in the mood to go anywhere once it started.

The early morning mosquitoes were there to greet us. We did our best to ignore them, focusing upon the lush forest instead. Recent rains have brought all the vegetation to life. I can’t remember the last time the woods looked this green.

Judy skirted the mud holes; Matika went right through them. I did something in between. One’s attitude towards mud often reflects one’s beastliness. I’m not quite sure why.

Daisies and buttercups were in full bloom on the grassy top of the Hard’ack ski slope we crossed, but the wildflowers that cover the forest floor in late spring were nearly gone. With the Summer Solstice only a few days away, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. That said, I am always amazed by how quickly the warm season goes by. There’s not a day to be wasted.

Lately I’ve been too busy promoting my new book, The Allure of Deep Woods, to get into the mountains as much as I like this time of year. In lieu of deep woods, I slip away to nearby pockets of wildness whenever I can. There is something ironic about this to be sure. No matter. Aldis Hill and places like it are enough for now.

Tags: hiking, seasonal change, wildflowers, wildness

Taking a day off from writing as well as the hotel job, I grab my pack, load the dog in the car, and head for the hills. The sun is shining and temps are already in the 50s. I have a feeling that this might be my last shirtsleeves hike for a long, long time.

I park my car along the edge of a rough dirt road cutting through the Belvidere bog then tag an ATV trail skirting some flooded areas. A woman with a pack of huskies suddenly appears. They are followed by an old man leading a draft horse. After that five hunters come along on two ATVs dragging a dead bull moose. What next?

The rest of the hike is a solitary affair. I walk up the logging road to a stream crossing then follow the brook while recalling a similar outing years earlier. Back then I had gone on a walking meditation. I had traced the Calavale Brook to its source before turning around. On the way out, weakened by a daylong fast, I had stopped to nap on a flat rock next to the brook. When I awoke, I saw two brook trout swimming in the nearby pool.

Finding a pool similar to the one where I had napped years earlier, I stop to eat and rest. My dog Maika stands guard after lunch, half expecting another surprise encounter. I listen to the brook tumbling over a five-foot ledge to the shallow pool while jotting down a few stray thoughts in a field journal. The surrounding trees, mostly birches, have lost all their leaves already. Here in the Green Mountains, winter isn’t far away.

It’s hard to explain the primary benefit of an outing like this. A day alone in the woods has a leveling effect. Whenever my boots are wet and muddy, and I’m sweaty from a rigorous walk, I seem to be more receptive to wildness both without and within. Then I see the world in a way that’s not possible in the developed lowlands. It’s instructive to say the least.

Walking out is easy – downhill all the way. I soak my feet good while wading the flooded areas. Otherwise there’s no adventure. Matika keeps stopping to sniff clumps of hair and bits of bloody flesh that the dragged moose left behind. That’s amusing. But all too soon we are back to the car and driving home. Yeah, these daylong outings never seem to last quite long enough.

Tags: Green Mountains, hiking alone, late autumn, meditation, wildness

Yesterday I finished turning over the soil in my so-called wildflower garden, removing all the plants from it, thus ending a four-year experiment. The time had come to admit my mistake.

I had visions of a small patch of wild forest in the corner of my otherwise tame property. A jumble of ground ivy, crabgrass, bindweed and dandelion emerged instead, choking out the daisies and other “wildflowers” that I had seeded there. Things don’t always work out as planned.

For four years I had successfully resisted the urge to pull weeds from that backyard plot – something I do religiously in the much more aesthetically pleasing garden in front of my house. In other words, I let nature take its course back there. Unfortunately, nature can be cruel.

Truth is, nature is neither kind nor cruel. It only seems that way when the wild world passes through the prism of our all-too-human values. That’s precisely where I went wrong. I thought I could drop the word “weed” from my vocabulary and the beauty of deep woods would magically appear in the corner of my city lot.

Soon my wife and I will put some shade-tolerant plants back there: bleeding hearts, columbine, and whatever woodland flowers we can find at the local nursery. Then I will cultivate the plot using methods as old as civilization itself, making it domestically beautiful. And that will have to do. After all, there’s no such thing as a wild garden.

Tags: backyard nature, cultivation, gardening, wild nature, wildness

  Every dog has a wild streak, I suppose, but Matika’s seems wider than most.  Or perhaps I’m only projecting my own wildness upon her.  Either way, she always looks comfortable in the woods, resting yet vigilant a few yards beyond camp.  I look up from my campfire and, for a few seconds, I fear that she has wandered off.  Then I spot her half-hidden in the understory, perfectly at home.  Yeah, that’s my dog.

I can relate.  I am never as comfortable in town as I am in the woods, miles away from the nearest road.  Most people think of time away from the amenities of civilization as “roughing it,”  but life in the woods is stress free compared to the alternative.  Ridiculously easy, I’d say, as long as there’s a dry place to sleep and enough food to eat.  No doubt Matika, if she could talk, would concur.

Of course I go into the woods to relax, not to earn a living, so it only stands to reason that my perception of forest life is skewed.  Earning a living is hard.  Lounging amid the trees is easy.  This is a subject that that 19th century woods wanderer, Thoreau, never adequately addressed.  And I, like him, have never fully come to terms with it.

It’s a dog’s life, we say, when things get tough for our pets.  And during these sweltering, dog days of summer, I don’t envy Matika when I leave her trapped in a house all day without air conditioning.  I may be just as cut off from the wild as she is, but at least I’ll be staying relatively cool today.  That said, we’ll both be daydreaming about a camp by the stream, immersed in green.  In that regard we share the same values, and the same fate.

Tags: the forest, values, wildness