In wildness is the preservation of the world. Henry David Thoreau

I bought that bumper sticker at the Thoreau Society store in Concord, along with a small collection of his late writing—I wanted to support the society, but hadn’t much money.  It was the only bumper sticker on my late, lamented Corolla; my new (to me) Ford Focus has none.  (I may need to go back to Concord this year.)

I know a Wild Place hidden in plain sight not far from my home in the city.  I have only been there a few times, and not at all in almost a year.  But I’ve been looking for an opportunity: a weekday morning when school is in session but I’m not at work.  Quieter that way.  Less chance the neighbors will object.  Finding myself at loose ends this morning, I took my tripod and went.  

 A pile of rocks makes a good vantage point to see a good fraction of this place.

Context is important: here are the rocks my tripod was on.

Almost immediately I came upon Change.  A new make-shift camp had been set up not far north of the more substantial one near the southern border.    Trash on the ground included left-over paint balls, evidence of battles.  The snack food bags showed that the youth were doing more harm to themselves than their opponents.  (I didn't even know Twinkies were still made!)

I already knew the local kids played in the woods.  And it bothers me.  And it bothers me that it bothers me.  It's the old conundrum in its most urgent form.  Wilderness is not a democratic concept: if it's for everyone, it ceases to be really wild.  Its attractiveness, perhaps even its value, declines with popularity.  

When I was young I had my own Wild Place: an old cow pasture just the other side of a stone wall from my yard.  It ceased to host its little herd of Black Angus cattle when I was still very small, and during my formative years it was undergoing secondary succession--changing to shrubland on its way to being forest once more--at about the same rate I was.  The field was my personal kingdom, my wilderness, my battlefield, the place I acted out childhood games, my place to be at home in nature.  

I was in my middle teens when the backhoes first showed up to install their upright perforated pipes, and it became increasingly clear the old field was to be subdivided for houses.  I engaged in futile acts of vandalism in an effort to slow or stop it that I knew would fail even as I broke or filled with rocks those pipes installed to assess the height of the water table.  I was away at college and then graduate school as the houses went up.  There is no sign today that the field ever existed except one: the old stone wall still divides my parents property from that unspeakable subdivision.  

That particular field was the nearest Wild Place, but not the only one.  I can't claim that the biodiversity of that town suffered measurably with its disappearance.  It was simply mine, and helped form me, and shape the feelings I have today toward wild nature.  

Today a generation is growing up that lacks direct connection between people, and still less a connection with nature.  It is this generation that will make the hard choices needed to avert even more catastrophic climate change, mass extinction, overpopulation, the continuing depredations of the most effective invasive species the world has ever known.  

This Wild Place is still wild, still beautiful--though I wish the kids would clean up after themselves.  But I cannot in conscience grudge their adventures.  They are doing what I did.  (I was decades older before I learned to value leaving no footprints.)  I hope playing and building here will lead them to value diverse over simple, life over possessions, Wild over tame.  

Thoreau's quote is easy to misread.  I've done it myself repeatedly.  He was not talking about Wilderness, though that has its own value.  He meant Wildness--OURS. 

I didn't realize how noise would telegraph from the tripod.

Scenery.

 Besides rabbits (Eastern Cottontail, since New England Cottontail has gotten scarce) and Canada goose, I also saw signs of coyote, heard birdsong, and accidentally bothered a big red-tailed hawk.

Video shot from flat rock below.

Besides vernal pools, the melting snow has created a little stream.

Life consists with wildness.  The most alive is the wildest.

Walking    Henry David Thoreau

What is happening in Hockomock Swamp?

 From a February 2013 walk in Hockomock Swamp. 

 

Hockomock Swamp is one of the premier wild places in eastern Massachusetts, and important in colonial history as a Wampanaoag retreat around the time of King Phillip's War.  (Douglas Watts, nature writer and a local man of Wampanoag descent, has a couple of quirky videos that introduce the swampscape.)  When in February, 2013 I discovered (via Google Earth) that an old railroad embankment makes a nice, accessible transect through the eastern edge of it, I made a winter walk of it.  Finding almost no dry ground in sight except the embankment itself, I haven't been in a hurry to go back. 

But a brilliant afternoon yesterday after a weary week of work invited me back just to check in.  My boots were on my feet and shiny new snowshoes in the trunk (just in case the remaining snow justified them). 

Stepping onto the embankment, I found the snow packed by heavy machinery.  Had earth-movers had been using it to turn around?  No: the tracks ran straight on along the embankment as far as overhanging trees allowed me to see. 

 

Heavy traffic within the last few days.

The second vehicle had wheels at least two feet in diameter.

 

The tracked vehicle's traces are overlain first by the V-tread,

which is then scored by the motorbike (presumably a recreational rider).

 

Surveyor' stake.  Who can decode it?  The last number might be 

an elevation in feet (its value varied little from stake to stake), 

but above what baseline?  Water table seems unlikely.

 

The gray color of the soil in this excavation shows it is waterlogged,

so the iron oxide that would normally redden it is in reduced form.  

There were signs of three vehicles: one leaving a track like that made by a tank-type tread, partly obscured by a second vehicle with two-foot wide wheels leaving a V-track, and then a motor bike with knobby tires.  I followed them for a good half-hour, although I probably didn't get half a mile.  Nevertheless the vehicles appeared to be making a one-way trip, which means they might have turned onto a power-line right-of-way that crosses the embankment near the north end of the swamp forming part of the Bay Circuit Trail, and then crosses a road that borders the swamp. 

The powerline right of way is popular with the ATV crowd.  (Feb 2013)

At intervals, a worker with boots with a square knobbed tread had gotten down and driven labeled stakes into the ground.  I tried without much success to decipher the code on the stakes, although I'm sure it would be obvious to a surveyor. In several places there were small excavations where gray, anoxic earth had been turned up, as if to plumb the depth of groundwater.  It seemed a crazy idea, since standing pools and streams are visible  two or three feet below the level of the embankment on both sides. 

Plainly no development could happen off the embankment; perhaps a road was going in?  But that makes no sense to me, since a main road roughly parallels the embankment only a few tenths of a mile away.  I left the swamp after perhaps an hour, upset by the discovery.

The Swamp itself--off the embankment--remains wild, 

and what damage has been done on the embankment is largely superficial, so far.

After an hour on the web, I am only a little the wiser.  As an Area of Critical Environmental Concern, and a wetland buffer full of rare and endangered species, the roughly one-third of Hockomock that is not in private hands belongs to the state Division of Fisheries & Wildlife as a Wildlife Managament Area.  The rules for WMAs would seem to preclude development of any kind, to say the least.  Several private companies operate on the border of the swamp, at least one of which operates heavy vehicles: are they using it illegally?  The stakes make it look rather "official".  

Oh--probably there will be a new power line on the embankment.  That would make sense.  I hope it's true.  For now, though, the mystery remains.

What, in the middle of the woods, could make a sound like a creaking door?

The answer came as I watched trees move in the wind, and saw an old oak with two trees fallen against it.  As the oak's crown twists in the wind, the fallen trees probably rub against it.

 

That's right: you have to put your head sideways to watch it.

Just don't let anyone see you lying on your desk.

(The annoying tapping sound is me trying unsuccessfully to hold the camera still.)

This was another visit to "my" newly-discovered Wild Place.  I decided to stay an hour or so, look around a bit, and set awhile in my Thinking Place.

 

Me on the comfy rock in my Thinking Place.

 

The woods around my Thinking Place.

When is "Wild" not "Natural"?

Feeling a renewed proprietary interest in my little Wild Place, I am considering a plan to make it a bit more natural, if not wilder, than it is now.

The little bit of wood at the pointy back end of our wedge of land has little of beauty although the neighbors have a few nice trees.  Without any fence or other visible boundaries, I can enjoy the neighbor's trees almost as much as my own, they lending character simply by their nearness.  But two of the prettiest of these, twin red oaks of respectable size for the city, died some years back and both have fallen, leaving the lot more bush or scrub than woods. 

So I have decided to take it in hand.  Although the very definition of a Wild Place is one which is unkempt--not planted, landscaped, mowed or even raked--I think I can make a good case for intervention.  I reason thus: although Wild, my wood is no more than half native, being choked by at least three species of invasive alien plants. 

 

Norway Maple (Acer plantanoides)

First, there are the Norway maples, of European origin, first imported as street trees and still valuable for that purpose.  Norway maple (Acer platanoides) has three characteristics that make it dangerous in a wild setting: it casts very deep shade, so seedlings of other trees find it hard to get enough sunlight to survive; its roots are so close to the surface of the ground that they hog all the surface water, leaving too little even to grow grass; and it is prolific in reproduction, sending its children spinning down on their little wings to establish themselves in practically any environment.  Together, these talents spell TAKEOVER.  And that's pretty much what it has done on my land: many--especially of the younger--trees on my land are Norway maples.  I don't quite hate them.  No, not quite. 

 

English Ivy (Hedera helix)

The forest floor is dominated by English ivy that is as prolific in its way as A. plantanoides.  I first dealt with it by heroic efforts when we first bought the house.  This is the ivy whose climb up the brickwork of the hallowed halls of academia make them "ivy league."  If it simply stayed there, all would be well, but it has been spreading through the woods like Tolkien's goblins in the days of seeming peace, when I am lulled into a false sense of security.  English ivy (Hedera helix) also resembles A. platanoides in the depth and permanence of its shade: the plant has thick, dark green leaves that are evergreen. so that even the early wildflowers, with a strategy to emerge to capture sunlight through plants still bare of leaves, cannot get enough light.

 

Vinca minor

Another ground cover invading my land along a a broad front is Vinca (Vinca minor, I think).  It is coming in from the north edge, and is now advancing into the wood.  But it also got into my meadow garden, where I have worked each year to pull out any vines that dare to show.  I cannot eradicate it completely, since some of the plants are rooted in the middle of bunch grasses such as my big blue stem (Andropogon gerardii)--very secure hiding places, since I love my grasses.

 

European Buckthorn (Rhamnus frangula)

Finally, I recently realized I have a good many invasive buckthorn (Rhamnus) bushes in the woods.  Long ago I had misidentified it as a species in the Dogwood genus.  [Wrong again: it is in fact Gray Dogwood.]  I didn't paid much attention to them until I correctly identified it elsewhere as part of a biology review project, and then found it popping into my consciousness here at home.  I haven't yet tallied the number I have to deal with.