Beneath the Canopy

This is the time of year when we are confronted with the grinding reality of life in the woods. The snow is gone, and the forest floor is a bare, spongy, wet, leafy, gnarly carpet of decay. A few green shoots are coming up from below, primarily ferns. The earliest buds on the trees are getting plump—my grandfather used to say the trees are getting “fuzzy”—and in a few cases beginning to leaf out, although the difference between where we are, five hundred feet above Peterborough and deeper into the woods, is significant: Peterborough, even main street, Hancock, is experiencing green. Not here. As I tap away on the computer (which is nearly a week before this column goes to press), it is still mid-April where we are.

Out the windows of our cabin is a scene of destruction. Limbs and trees that came down with the last snowstorm are on the ground with those that have been there for, well, ages. I have decided to build a road (more like a cart path) from the driveway into the woods that loops around the cabin so I can drive the John Deere lawn tractor, fitted with trailer, to collect debris. The dragging of brush and carrying of logs is otherwise all uphill. It is very uneven and littered terrain, so this will not be easy. But in the immediate area around the cabin, which has been thinned over the ages with views to the pond, it would be nice to have a cleaner landscape, sanitized as it would be from what life is really like beneath the canopy.

Beneath the canopy, very little grows straight. Every bit of ground is contested. Every angle of sunlight is made available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Everywhere there are predicaments—youthful beech trees that have gained a toehold in a stand of large red spruce that will stymie their future; white and yellow birch bent over the edges of every clearing, extending their limbs so far it looks as if they are begging for alms of sun. (They look exhausted and old before their time.) Hemlocks invaded by the woolly adelgid. The sprouts of maple trees in the thin soil on top of rocks, in the gardens, along the pathways.

Then there is me with my chainsaw, which cleared away half a dozen saplings of various sorts from the perimeter of the yard this weekend, and my clippers which freed an azalea from the clutches of a highbush blueberry.

I spent a lot of time with the blueberry bushes the past few days in the rain. We have dozens of them around, many close to the pond, and they suffered from neglect for years while our attentions were elsewhere. I estimate it will take another season to prune them all as the dense thicket of shoreline growth fills in this summer, cramping access.

I wish I could speak with them about their incessant and careless growing behavior. I wish I could talk to them all—the azaleas, mountain laurels, blackberries, and huckleberries. Also, their larger neighbors the beech, oak, maple, the pines. I would explain that, sometimes, too much growth is reckless. Sometimes big enough is big enough. Are these new shoots out of the ground necessary? What about these limbs that are now strangling other limbs and these branches that are overwhelming the fruit of other branches? If you were not so fixated on growing yourselves, maybe there would be more to share. Maybe so many of you would not be on the ground. I can point out that the blueberry bushes, whose growth was cut back early last spring, produced plentiful fruit. We agreed on a plan. There were reasonable expectations. We did not overreach.

If you spend enough time with a pair of hand shears in the woods, nature will get inside your head. I have seen it happen, people talking to plants. Then the mind wanders from shoots and limbs to debit limits and dust bowls, quarterly performance reports, bank crises, inflation rates, and rising oceans. The grinding reality of life we share beneath the canopy.

Published in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, May 9, 2023