LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM
THE WOODS PATH
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
I relax when I walk in the woods in summer. A visit to the shadowed paths
brings a tranquility that is missing in spring when the energy of return and
regrowth enlivens the world.
The hermit thrush continues to sing in the mornings and evenings with notes
as lovely as those in May, although I hear more satisfaction than
advertisement. I imagine young male hermit thrushes, perched on a branch,
attentive as their father trills his spiraling song for them to imitate.
A summer of showers and occasional rain encourages fern growth to
breathtaking lushness and jewel-like greens. Not far inside the woods, on
the south side of the meadow, an expanse of tall ferns thrives in an opening
and presents a dazzling sight at mid-day when I look out from the cool
shadows.
In other parts of the woods, ferns hide the path with trackless greenery.
Does the way turn sharply here or angle there across a low rise? The path
becomes more of a perhaps than a certainty through the plant growth. I sense
rather than follow a route.
At a strip of yellow flagging that warns of strands of old rusting barbed
wire partly enveloped by the growth of a red maple, I turn toward the shallow catchment of spring runoff that
was a vernal pool in April. The rains have not been steady enough to
maintain it. A mat of damp brown leaves is all that remains of the sunlit
shallows that swarmed with wood frog tadpoles. Where I watched spotted
salamander larvae wriggle free of their jellylike egg masses, dry branches
arch above the parched bottom. This season, no amphibian life will find its
way to the woodland from this place. My disappointment eases at the sight of
the streaked beauty of a northern waterthrush daintily turning the leaf mat
for tidbits. His loud brilliant song will not charm me today. He
concentrates on fattening for the flight south, rather than the pleasures of
spring, but his busyness amuses me.
I decide to follow a path to the part of the woods where I heard his song in
spring and called the pair of waterthrushes into view. This is the wettest
path in spring, but my husband and I have enjoyed wonderful bird sightings
here.
The path crosses a thick stand of small hemlock trees, part of the regrowth
of a lumber harvest fifty or sixty years ago. A few summers back, we ogled
an unblinking young saw-whet owl tucked into the dense branches beside the
path. Another summer, we spotted a tangle of long black and white ribbons
attached to remnants of the black and white balloons they had tethered at
the road side across the woods to signal the location of a celebration. The
ribbons dangled from the base of a wood thrush’s nest tucked against the
trunk of a small hemlock on a branch ten feet above the ground. The
thrush youngsters had fledged, but we wondered if the fancifulness of their
parent had been passed on to them.
One spring, we discovered a hermit thrush’s nest in a fern-bowered hollow
close to this path. The thrush stayed on her nest until the last moment when
our footfalls threatened imminent loss, and her sudden flight startled us to
a halt. We soon found the lovely circlet of twigs, grass, moss, and leaves
with five blue eggs intact, then hurried away to the alarm calls of the
thrush.
As I approach the stream and meadow edge, the path dips and rises where it
crosses the remnants of shallow pits. Here the thick marine clay,
deposited when glacial weight held this land beneath the sea tens of
thousands of years ago, was dug as raw material for a pottery. For almost
one hundred years, common utilitarian items of redware—milk and bread pans,
pitchers and platters—were produced in a family business that occupied a
corner where our woods abut a neighbor’s lawn.
Rather than walk home across the meadow, I continue on the path that will
bring me to another vernal pool beside the stream. This pool has not dried,
and I find both tadpoles and salamanders developing nicely. A catbird cries
from a tangle of grapevine that drapes across the stone abutment of a long
gone milldam. A shingle mill operated here in the nineteenth century, using
the northern white cedar trees that grew tall and thick on the wetland.
Dappled sunlight filters onto the banking between stone abutment and pool. I
lean against a white birch and think about where I have been this morning. I
have walked through memory and time.
These woods have been harvested perhaps four times since settlement at the
end of the eighteenth century. Nothing remains of the presence of the native
people who lived wholly and simply as life partners with the forest or of
the sixty-foot-tall “pagoda-like” northern white cedar or “firs crowded
together on each side, with various hardwoods intermixed,” that Henry David
Thoreau described in The Maine Woods.
Stonewalls and barbed wire fence remnants that range across the woods
testify that the meadow once extended well beyond its present thirteen
acres.
The paths that we clip and keep open for our passage would soon fill with
brush and saplings if untended. Our home on the edge of the meadow might,
over time, fall into disuse and leave less trace than the stone remains of
the old shingle mill.
In the meanwhile, I have “promises to keep” and chores to do, and I follow
the woods path home.
