If I were a tree, I’d want to live in the Adirondacks, safe from chainsaws, at least within the boundaries of the park. I’d stand on the shoulders of giants.

Though given that Adirondacks is said to derive from the Mohawk taterontaks, meaning “bark eaters” or “those who eat trees,” I’d want to be careful where I grew. Trailside locations could be dangerous.

I’d put on my scariest face.

I’d hang with a rough-looking, tattooed posse.

I’d wear camouflage.

I’d sleep with one eye open.

I’d hide behind a rock.

*

For the next Festival of the Trees, which has the suggested theme “If I were a tree.”

Already I am looking at the photos and saying — as one does about a place visited in dreams, or about a life spent dreaming — was I really there?

To someone from the unglaciated Appalachians, more than the young, rugged mountains it’s the abundance of natural lakes and ponds that seems exotic, even without a glimpse of the elusive moose whose dark bulk we kept seeing in every lakeside spruce and drowned stump.

Even the creeks looked different, wrinkling over such different rocks.

They seemed so impetuous, compared to the slow calm waters of a Pennsylvania trout stream older than the hills it flows through.

Waterfalls were everywhere, as you’d expect in mountains that are still being born. I admired the shining staircases they made, perfect in their jumbled lack of uniformity.

We who are mostly salt water might at least aspire to an anadromous return. For me, the north woods with its bare granite outcroppings and abundant lakes conjures up an idyllic time and place I barely remember, having moved to Pennsylvania from our lakeside farm in central Maine when I was five. But I imprinted deeply on forests like these. My mother has said that as a small child, being taken into the forest was the one thing guaranteed to stop my otherwise nearly incessant crying.

More than once last week I thought of the Chinese proverb, “Humans seek out high places; waters seek the low.” I watched clouds form beneath my feet.

Wildness is like love: you can’t just suspend it for a little while in the interest of some other attachment, and expect it to return unharmed at your convenience. Once you violate it, it ain’t coming back — at least, not for a long time. But especially in an economic downturn, it’s easy to forget the long-term economic and ecological benefits of wildlands in the search for a quick fix.

What just happened in Pennsylvania is instructive, I think. Read this shocking summary of the Pennsylvania legislature’s assault on state parks, state forests, and the state environmental regulatory agency from the chair of the State Public Lands committee of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Sierra Club, Arthur Clark. It’s worth pointing out, too — for the benefit of my more partisan friends — that this all happened under a Democratic governor, with a state legislature narrowly controlled by the Democratic Party. (Pennsylvania’s last good governor for public lands issues was actually a Republican, Tom Ridge.) Though Gov. Rendell was happy to accept Sierra Club support in his reelection campaign, he can’t run again, and he appears to have some rather more important friends in the oil and gas industry.

The take-home message? While much of New York’s water supply is protected by its constitution, Pennsylvania’s groundwater, streams and rivers are about to be drawn down and probably contaminated on a massive scale by deep drilling for the Marcellus shale unnatural gas boom. New York had Verplanck Colvin; Pennsylvania had Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service and twice the governor of Pennsylvania, who defined forestry as “the art of producing from the forest whatever it can yield for the service of man.” Their legacies couldn’t be more different.

UPDATE (10/13): Here’s the Harrisburg Patriot-News editorial on what they call (riffing on the new Ken Burns documentary) “The Conservation Compromise: Pennsylvania’s Worst Idea.” (Hat-tip: R. Martin, PA Forest Coalition email)

So much of what we see when we follow a trail is the trail itself. Between watching our feet to avoid tripping over rocks or getting bogged down in mud, and keeping an eye out for trail blazes, it’s a wonder we ever manage to notice anything else.

For some people, this is an argument for bushwhacking, but in fragile ecosystems and/or treacherous terrain with lots and lots of hikers, going off-trail doesn’t seem too responsible an option. And if you read accounts from early hunters and climbers in the Adirondacks, it’s obvious that their trail-free excursions often entailed a great degree of flailing about, wielding axes with abandon to extricate themselves from a blowdown or patch of krummholz, and sometimes ending up on the wrong peak.

Still, one feels a little guilty just adding to the numbers who hike these trails every year. When I visited the High Peaks region with my hiking buddy last week, we found many of the more-traveled paths to be virtually indistinguishable from streambeds but for the greater quantity of mud they contained. Even the dry parts had been gullied out by decades of waffle-stompers, exposing networks of roots and the bare granite that’s never more than eight inches down.

The Adirondacks were polished clean by glaciers during the last ice age, so soil has been building only for 8000 years. Even without any help from humans, landslides are a perpetual risk on the steep slopes. A lumber boom in the mid to late 19th century led to raging forest fires, and in some of the burned-over areas the soil, no longer held in place by living root systems, subsequently washed away. Luckily, the unique “forever wild” provision in the New York state constitution that protects the Adirondack Park explicitly bans logging.

Ironically, the man who deserves the lion’s share of the credit for that protection is also responsible for some of the bare summits we see today. Verplanck Colvin (delightful name!) was the state surveyor whose yearly reports to the New York legislature built the case for protection, accurately observing the capacity of mountains covered in old-growth forest to retain water like a sponge, thereby guaranteeing the water supply for rivers and canals down-state. Heavily influenced by George Perkins Marsh’s seminal 1864 study Man and Nature, Colvin was a true visionary, who could see in a moss-covered rock the source of life and industry for millions.

But surveying the peaks meant establishing lines of sight from one to the other, and this often entailed cutting and/or burning everything on the summit higher than five feet. Sometimes the erosion that followed was as severe as that following one of the clearcuts Colvin decried. Where today yellow paint marks a trail across bare rock, Colvin and his men might’ve camped among dwarf spruce, sometimes for days, as they waited for clouds to lift on an adjacent peak.

The highest peaks, of course, rise above treeline, exposing delicate alpine vegetation to generations of view-hungry hikers. The last time I visited the Adirondacks, I was surprised to be greeted by a “summit steward” — a plant cop — when I finally reached the top of the second-highest peak. That’s the way it has to be, though, I guess. I was touched to see how many hikers had carried a small rock all the way up to the top of Algonquin Peak (I’d missed the sign at the trailhead) to extend the borders of protected, wild gardens where native alpine plants were slowly being reestablished.

Most hikers do want to do the right thing. We wouldn’t go out there if we didn’t love nature — though I sometimes wonder at the backpackers who soldier along at a rapid clip, sans binoculars or camera, and rarely seem to lift their eyes from the trail until they get to the next official view. Probably they in turn wonder at day-hikers like me, dawdling along, not seeming to care how much ground I cover — and often pointing my camera at the ground right next to the trail. But I think we’re both walking, literally and figuratively, in Colvin’s footsteps.

At dawn in the campground,
“The Sound of Music” on a flute.
I’m plotting murder.

*

Squatting to pluck puffballs
from a stump, her raincoat
pale in the dark woods.

*

Never mind how
you got here. Just sit,
O glacial erratic.

*
At the back of the store,
a free view of the stormy lake
moving three ways at once.

*

Not far from John Brown’s grave,
a state prison looms
above the larch.

*

When I open the Adirondack
pages of my notebook,
two grains of sand fall out.

The approach passes through alder swamp, sugar bush, hemlock stand. Here and there the rotting hulks of beeches, killed by the blight. A couple of rumbles usher in a brief rain shower. Afterwards, the scent of balsam seems even stronger than before. Sometimes you see it first, sometimes you just smell it.

*

From the base of the mountain all the way to the timberline, the one constant theme is paper birch. All else seems mere punctuation. Yet the guidebook claims this is a modern aberration, the legacy of fires that followed the clearcuts a hundred years ago. The short-lived birches rot as readily as they burn. Someday soon the conifers will reclaim all the upper slopes, and lightning won’t be able to take any more than it can touch.

*

The trail maintenance workers have placed stepping stones through a slough of mud. I hop along awkwardly in my heavy boots. My daypack flaps against my back, canteen flops against my belly. I wouldn’t remember any of this were it not for the soundtrack provided by a winter wren, its long and liquid air. I stop, taking in whole lungfuls at time.

*

Higher, climbing into the blossoming of plants in berry down below. Water trickles from the mountain’s every pore.

*

Generations of hikers’ boots have cut this mountain to the bone. We scramble up a bare granite trough through the ever-more-compressed forest of birch and balsam and spruce. The rocks are scored with shallow scratches, too brief and random for a glacier. Very large dogs with unclipped toenails, I wonder? Just then two hikers round the bend wielding alpine hiking poles – imagine ski poles without the horizontal projections for grabbing the surface of the snow. I envy their superior footing, even as I wince at the metallic racket. On either side of the trail the moss and humus lie thick as a mattress under the tangle of krummholz.

*

The trees start to shrink at a most convenient elevation. Every pause for breath takes my breath away. I peer out over the tortured crowns at the grand sweep of lakes and mountains stretching off into the haze. My hiking companion gathers spruce needles for our noontime tea. Clouds and the shadows of clouds. The shimmering lakes. The dark mountains.

*

What’s this, a black-capped chickadee singing in a foreign language? No, a separate species: the boreal chickadee. I had forgotten such a thing existed, if I had ever known. Strange to think they’ve been here all the time, with the equally unfamiliar Bicknell’s thrushes and pine martens. And how must we appear to them, popping up out of the elfin forest in our brightly-colored gear? Like chickadees everywhere they can’t resist coming in for a closer look.

*

For the last mile, a series of signs has warned sternly against the folly of proceeding any higher without the proper gear, and has exhorted us to protect the vegetation by staying on the trail. Now on the summit, we encounter an actual plant cop, on duty here all summer. “Hi, my name’s Kristen, and I’m the summit steward today!” I resist the urge to ask for fresh ground pepper in my soup. The truth is, I’m envious of her job.

*

When the clouds roll in, one thinks: this could be the coast of Labrador. Those waxy, pointy leaves wearing thick coats of down on the side away from the sun – that’s Labrador tea. Those yellow flowers like a child’s crayon sun: alpine goldenrod. We spot three-toed cinquefoil, mountain sandwort, various branched and crustose lichens. Something very small that darts behind a pebble. Two bold juncos.

*

We find a shelf of rock facing east where we can sit and watch the clouds swirl past, ogling the iconic, landslide-scarred face of Mt. Colden whenever they clear. The lunch is as luxurious as I can manage; my only regret is the absence of a white linen tablecloth. After tea – Earl Grey steeped with spruce – I sit with my back against the stone. My companion lies supine for a while, and finally says, I can feel the whole mountain underneath me.

*

I do not need to be alone in the wilderness, though I do share King Cormac’s view that one should speak quietly in it, if at all. I like watching the tiny figures of hikers moving around slowly on other, nearby summits, and imagining all the folks congregating on Mt. Marcy, still shrouded in clouds. And I’m impressed by how many people have carried stones to the summit. This smacks a bit of carrying coal to Newcastle, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s needed, but it is a neat way to get people involved in “healing the wounds.” The summit stewards are restoring the fragile vegetation one square foot at a time. Each rescued patch must be edged in stones to ward off careless boots. People who come here want to do right, most of them. The summit steward has a kind word for each hiker who eagerly tells her they’ve carried up a rock.

*

The way back down is slow, each step studied carefully in advance. The farther we descend, the more the massed mountain above us weighs down our feet and makes our legs tremble.

*

The return along the approach trail seems endless and unfamiliar. How could we have missed it on the way in, all this sameness?

*

After supper and a brief walk to the lake, I crawl into my tent and collapse. I lie sleepless on my back for hours, feeling the mountain in every bone and muscle. I don’t remember my dreams.