That Old Wheel Keeps Turning

Time and the Forest

“Beginning at a point marked by an iron spike…” So begins the description of the property boundary between my childhood home and the endless maple, pine, and birch forest where I played as a boy. The forest where I learned to hunt and forage. The forest where I find mushrooms with my father. The forest where I proposed to my wife. The forest where my young daughter now plays.

My wife and I were approached by the elderly owner of this large forest parcel earlier this year. He had always hoped to build his dream home on a west-facing ridge deep in the forest the old timers here know as The Overlook. It allegedly once had a stunning view of the valley below and was a sort of “lovers’ lane” for those keen enough to know its location but has since been lost to the unrelenting green growth. He explained that he had run out of time and the dream of a house in the woods was one for his younger self. “That old wheel keeps turning,” he said with a touch of remorse, a touch of something unrealized, something lost. He knew though that I loved that forest and would provide it the stewardship he could not. We agreed on a price and closed on the deal in spring of this year. The boundary of my family’s land grew past that old iron spike into the forest I held dear.

The Overlook in winter. I intend to reclaim the view.

The iron spike may be an important marker to the town clerk in her small office attached to the library in our rural New England town, but to me the forest has always started at an old hollow maple tree. As a boy, I would throw a rock into the hollow before continuing my wanderings. I do it still, although it has become less of a game and more of a ritual at this point. It feels sometimes as though I am paying a toll. Other times as though I am sliding a bead on an abacus; a stone for every entrance into the forest, a stone for every day getting lost in the green. I’ve remarked to my wife that the old hollow tree looks near the end of its life; one day it may fall and I will have the opportunity to count just how many times I have visited that good green wood. 

For now though, the old tree continues to stand sentinel at the entrance of the logging road leading into a dense stand of white pine and snaking its way gently uphill past The Overlook to the sugaring grove where a 200-acre farm once stood. Remnants of the homestead remain, peeking out from the green. A cellar here, an old orchard there. A fallen chimney. A foundation. Stone walls that held sheep before the pastures and fields were reclaimed by the forest. The past echoes off those mossy stone walls.

Between my memories, the old hollow tree full of stones, and echoes of the old sheep farm, the boughs here hang heavy with time. They tell stories. Today on the summer solstice, a day when time seems to languidly stand still in easy eternity, I intend to begin telling our own small story of stewarding these woods.

After all, that old wheel keeps turning…