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3 | (continued) Having, as I say, been born and raised in New York, and living there for most of my life, I can tell you that this tranquility takes some getting used to. You may think I’m needlessly harping on that problem, but it turned out to be the mainstay of the curriculum at Woodlot College. I’ve remembered for years, in essence if not verbatim, a remark I once read by a man who’d apparently spent a good part of his life in such places. He felt that the key to living at peace with wild land lies in one’s ability to concentrate the mind upon “the small, natural changes that are constantly taking place.”
We tend, in other words, to treat the uninterrupted stillness of the natural world as “the calm before the storm.” Finding that the storm simply is not about to arrive, that there is no storm, we become increasingly irritable, if not plain scared, for no apparent reason. We would in fact welcome the storm, merely to break the tension induced by the calm—what one female columnist in Toronto stupidly calls the “eerie silence” of the forest. I can tell you with fair accuracy how long it took for this anxiety to drop to a tolerable level in my case: about three months. This was the time required for the stillness to become the rule, and the noise to become the exception.
Having set up the tent, I decided to forego the second trip I had planned, to bring over another, smaller, load of luxuries (books and food)—one Authority Encounter per day is usually enough for me—and I prepared myself for my first evening and night away from civilization in quite a while. I returned along the route to the river, down the old lane, the tractor’s only access to the water, paralleling the railroad tracks. It wasn’t a steep slope, but was always wet underfoot from groundwater seepage, and littered with glacial till—small, round stones; natural gravel—that made walking a bit of a trial, especially in failing light. The small floodplain, where the ground leveled off beside the river shore, turned out to be one of the loveliest, most fragrant, unkept gardens I have ever known. In the midst of its nearly tropical humidity and swooning perfumes, beside the path I ultimately made to the river’s edge, was a vast broken willow, more sculpture than tree, looking as old as the river itself, shattered by lightning or wind or age many years before. A few of its great, black boughs had been broken partway through, and had fallen to earth, still connected to the trunk, yet were still nearly all alive. Willows are remarkable for their regenerative powers; they seem impossible to kill. I can’t recall ever having seen a dead one. Beyond the willow, the foreshore flat was open to the sky, and luxuriant with grasses and small trees as far upstream as I could see. Downstream about twenty yards was the railroad bridge, a massive arch of stone and concrete, beyond which I never ventured all the time I was there—the property on the other side had been mostly cleared of woods, was apparently used as pasture, and belonged to people I didn’t know. By July, the grasses along the river were nearly my height, and impenetrable to a casual stroller. When I wanted to go upstream any distance, I took the shore path, above the flood line, or just waded on the bed of the river. Only once did I walk my allotted distance—from the bridge to within view of the houses—along the river shore itself. There was no trail: it was lush, green, perfectly undisturbed, with many a braided side-channel, and I could never tell when I was going to step off into the underlying mud. But I loved it— the quiet water, the birdcalls, the foliage, the sweet aromas of earth—makings of many a daydream in my life. |
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You do not need it emphasized that this is something that urban people find insuperably difficult. We’re used to a far higher level of stimuli, and woefully unfamiliar with the 
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