With space for three abreast, the trails feel more like logging roads, which they sometimes are. On them I can’t seem to get lost despite my trying the dead ends, which usually aren’t.
Where the pea-gravel stops, some adventurers have worn faint paths windingly through the forest for those who don’t wish to turn back at the sign. But these were practical adventurers, because their singletracks soon loop up with another sanctioned trail, the foreign but familiar gravel underfoot. At least they looped at all, so that others might discover for themselves these faint connectors and for a while, alone, lope.
This forest is “managed.” It has Stewards and Standards. Rest assured, the Rainforest Alliance approves. Even the wood, apparently, is Smart.
My brain gags on these indegestibles. Must we swallow such loaded, manufactured language as the official Idiom of Sustainability, or is that Ministry still accepting applications?
But damn, I guess I’ll approve too. The birds seem to, and the deer, if intercourse counts as a standard. And could they help it? To manage something is to already have invaded it, and this land, like the rest of the Carolinas, was farmed to near infertility back before the Great Depression. There was no going back. The Land Institute, I think, gets it right. We don’t need to fix the problems with agriculture; we need to fix the problem of agriculture.
The colonizers that took over the abandoned fields succeeded into different forest types than before. The “pre-colonial composition” is something we can only talk about—or carefully manage into existence, and even then, the soil probably wouldn’t support it, or the budget. But these colonizer species were quicker, less picky about nutrients and quality of earth. They were adaptable. Don’t hate those slender pines for being so successful; they were opportunists. (Who ever said modernity doesn’t learn from the land?)
The animals are learning too. Right here we’ve got birds rallying their troops for war, deer rolling around in the pine straw, and a few documented cases of obese raccoons. Really, the animals are going to be fine. At least the opportuntists will, the crows, does, and garbage eaters.
But have you heard about the albatrosses near Midway Atoll? It’s easy enough to believe in management solutions, in better standards, in animals adapting and surviving on our waste piles or within our suburbs like the thriving white-tail. Maybe the rest will get innovative with their habitat and corridor requirements, find drainage ditches under the interstate to new mating grounds. That, or, for the good of all, they’ll be “creatively destroyed.” It’s easy enough to believe because there’s no truth in it. The truth is we’re insupportable. It takes something ridiculous like these albatrosses to remind me on occasion, but I cried real enough and wished I had something more specific to atone for than our increasingly abstracted coexistence.
Can you believe it wasn’t the toxicity of the trash that killed them? Even the young ones ingested lighters, candles, toys, and plastic rubbish until their stomachs were three-quarters full. The mothers often fed it to them, after finding it afloat on the waves—2000 miles from any continent. Still they lived on this garbage—that’s more adaptable than we. They died from starvation when their stomachs had no room for food. Don’t be a fool. To this, none can adapt.
I rarely see trash in these woods, not even the beer cans and condoms you’d expect on the outskirts of a university. Humans pick up most of the dog poop too, and that’s considered a highly responsible act. I suppose the stewards take care of the rest.
In light of the albatross, that word responsible feels feeble applied to dog poop. In light of the albatross, my knees feel knocky walking these trails. My conscience, too, feels queasy because this is precisely that abstracted existence I can’t seem to expiate, yet can’t seem to forget.
I appreciate this forest, and will continue to walk here, even lope. But as a refuge, it won’t do. Leopold bought a shack on a sand farm, long abandoned, and tried to rebuild with shovel and axe “what we are losing elsewhere.” Scaled up and jargoned out, I suppose Duke Forest is doing the same—trying, though not always succeeding, to improve parcels of degraded earth and learning in the process.
As for me, if I am to offer real penance, I need a way to more intimately see my own albatrosses and daily live among them, the dead ones and living. Away from management, I would do better in a small place with its own marks of degradation and my own axe and shovel so that we both might be improved through work. I would need a shack place that reminds me of the larger places, though I may not live up to them.
Raw Skimmed Milk 