Ben’s Column: A quick complaint

A few years before the American Revolution, Rip Van Winkle fell asleep for two decades on “a green knoll covered with mountain herbage” in the Catskills. While the Constitution was written and his wife grew ill and died, he was in an extended dream, drinking Holland’s gin and playing ninepins against a cliffside with a ghost of Henry Hudson. For me, the real thrill of Irving’s story is his Catskills forest, which, within lush barricaded rooms conceals raucous spirits and hides a man napping for so long only a short walk from his house.

Besides his sleeping knoll there seem to be many other lovely rooms in the woods: glens, ravines and the fortified “amphitheater” where the dead explorers entertain him. These are all places made private by the full greenery of the live “fairy mountains.” In books, words like glen, ravine, glade, dell, mead and grotto have all seemed particularly appealing, some less than exact concepts in my mind. They are nonetheless all appropriate habitats for hidden life. I think, though, that forests with all kinds of private stages are not just a convenience of old romances. It’s clear enough that deciduous woods of the kind that cover most of the eastern U.S. and Europe were once much thicker. Because we are used to walking in woods which are transparent, we’re absolutely deprived of the glades that are the ideal place for all kinds of pagan encounters, and so we don’t know, except through art, what we’re missing.

Since eastern woods were skinned of their trees and topsoil, and their regrowth has been overbrowsed by deer, the situation has been dire for glens, dells and other crucial clearings. Meads and knolls are okay, but face invasive grasses and the like. Grottos and glens benefit from being partially geological features. They probably remain the most dependable natural shelter for foxes, cougars as well as certain kinds of apparitions. There was an interesting rumor about the woods near my high school — supposedly, the school founder could be seen in Victorian dress in a particular cave, no larger than a coffin, within a cluster of boulders. Staring down into it, you would think she must have been very small, or else that she must have had to lie down in there, and couldn’t have been very threatening when she appeared. Regardless, there was some kind of haunt there.

I visited a larger cave called the “Stone Church” a few years ago, inside a megalith of metamorphic rock sitting on the forest floor of Dover, New York. Intercepting a short trail, it had an open arch similar in size to the entrance of a middle-sized cathedral, out of which a rigorous stream issued, descending through a tumble of mossy rocks, then slowing and winding in a broad, scummy channel down a slight incline and toward the town. 

Balancing on some wide stepping stones inside, you’re in a dark, spacious channel, with a floor of moving water and a waterfall back where the altar would be, falling through a narrow opening in the ceiling, which also lets a small amount of light in. The receding, unlit corners of the cave, where its walls fell into shadow underwater, suggested the possibility of passages to and from another realm, and made the toes prickle when jumping between rocks.

The legend is that in the 1600s, a Pequot chief named Sassacuss hid inside this cave with 20 men, from the colonists who pursued them. By the 20th century it was popular to get married inside the “church” and there was an inn for tourists. Clearly, any care for the subtleties of natural space were already long gone if a wet cave wedding seemed romantic and rustic, rather than unlucky for all souls involved. 

The woods of Dover are like the woods of most of the state, and much of the country. They are picked over, an overall brown color at eye level and down, with the exception of invasive or inedible shrubs like barberry and thorny smilax growing in unsociable snarls and thickets. The cave was the park’s only feature. I thought if there were some kind of Last Judgment in this particular forest, or any kind of mystical resurrection, that cave would be the one portal all the primeval animals would spill out of — ground sloths, direwolves and so on, all squeezing out of a few clefts and hollows. It wouldn’t be ideal, but unfortunately they really would have few other options. 

It’s hard to understand how nearly all forest cover in the Eastern U.S. was at some point cleared. When the ideal was to be a self-sufficient farmer with fields and animals in a river valley, and to trade surplus for buttons or rum from the empire, settlers spread out and deforested the entire landscape, hoping to grow even on the thin, hard-earned topsoil covering inhospitable bedrocks of gneiss or shale. Most land was exhausted quickly and allowed to reforest on whatever soil had not washed away in the rain. The woods of the region have grown up only since then. 

Real ancient forests will have large grandfather trees of many species. They will also appear pocked with wide craters from centuries of treefalls, which excavate and drop heavy crowns of dirt. In these ditches, animals can nest under swells of leafage. They will not be smoothed over, up and down hillsides, or littered with old stone pasture-walls. Once you start looking for these things, you can no longer think of the woods as so inhuman. 

For these reasons and others, walks can be boring these days, through the hills that look like giant leaf piles, sometimes nearly silent, with families of deer moving slowly over great distances. It’s difficult then not to indulge in an American tradition, and project exactly what is needed onto recalcitrant land — to imagine a different world over the hill, or through the dark passage. Personally, I cherish the classroom diagram and the museum diorama which depict an old and ideal spring: complete and composed, with canopy, undergrowth, chestnut trees, flowers and leaf-buds at each stage of opening, and one animal of every kind, each one important.

Better yet if there’s a protagonist, a creature with some extra personality, who you can really try to identify with — maybe a newt, lounging under the bulrushes in a clear vernal pool.

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