Head of School’s Notebook | Tracks

May 3, 2018

The only house my parents ever owned when I was growing up had railroad tracks behind it. The trains had stopped running long ago, but the tracks were still there, and the railroad bed was a frequent destination for my brothers and me. We fished the creeks below the bed, and hunted the quail and partridge that took up residence in the adjacent bottomlands in the fall.

The Connecticut that I knew as a boy was filled with young forests, which are ideal habitat for most game birds – actually, for most every creature that roams the earth. Barberry bushes, multi-flora rose, bittersweet vines, juniper bushes, alders and willows with their plentiful berries and buds mean ample sustenance for any hungry critter.

Ironically, we owe the bounty of our youth in Connecticut to the excesses of an earlier time. In the beginning of the twentieth century, New England was essentially clear-cut. The trees were taken down to make way for family farms and the burgeoning charcoal industry. Because the trees had to be burned to produce charcoal, the air was perpetually saturated with particulates. My father has seen bird skins from the time and the feathers are permanently stained by soot.

Often farmers would leave a few of the big white oaks alone to provide shade for their cattle, which is why you can still find some 300 year old trees. “Wolf oaks” they called these sentinel trees. But they stood vigil a century ago over a landscape that looked more like Nevada than New England.

I walked those same railroad tracks recently. The tracks themselves have been taken up in the intervening years and old bed is now a community hiking trail, both positive developments. But the surrounding forest is no longer young. The undergrowth that provided such a bounty is gone now, the sunlight that nourished and sustained it blocked by the mature trees that have grown up since my youth. I shot my first ruffed grouse (the king of New England game birds) in those bygone brambles more than forty years ago. Now the grouse are gone, too.

I don’t know how to feel on those tracks anymore. I am naturally nostalgic, so it is easy to yearn for what was. But I don’t want to go too far back either, to the barren landscape that eventually gave rise to the abundance of my youth. I want the life, not the death. But it doesn’t work that way.

That’s one of the great lessons of growing up, I suppose, whether you are a man or a forest. And as unsettling as that truth is, it’s also strangely reassuring. That which is will not always be. And that which isn’t may well, in time, come … or even come again.

I may not be around to see the forests of New England renewed or the return of the quarry I so eagerly sought as a boy, but I trust that those very things may still happen somehow someday. If they do, I hope more than a few youngsters in the generations that follow find the joy my brothers and I did of seeing nature at her fertile and resilient best. It’s quite a sight.