To get to the old growth from the day-use area, you follow an asphalt path, through 100 yards or so of pretty standard second-growth northern hardwoods. Crossing over is theatrical. You step over a threshold and the understory opens and the canopy rises and you adjust your perspective for looking skyward.

Medieval cathedrals used soaring arches supporting high domed ceilings to draw one’s attention up, sublime in the realm of the holy. Here without cold stone and stained glass and illusion. Here, high afternoon sun washes brightly through canopy-ceiling cracks reconfiguring endlessly in the breeze. 

I am a pilgrim again. Take my silly self-indulgent fatigue from teaching all day in the July heat and hang my imagination among the cones of the vaulted pines, hang it where the fine hemlock needles wave on the hot wind blowing in over the barrens by Grayling. Let me sway and bend with the shaggy old maples. Sustain my biological machinery churn with all intensity until November freezes hard. Then let me sleep.

Its incense is last-summer pine needles baking in the heat, turning brittle, turning their pitchy attachment points opaque – and chalky when I roll them between my fingers. Hot afternoons smell like this.

I take my Au Sable students to Hartwick Pines State Park every year. I tell them about the anomalous relict presence of 49 acres of Great Lakes old growth awash in the aftermath of the cataclysmic cutover. I describe the habitat features of an old growth forest and invite them to see the change occurring despite the stasis perspective of a single short visit.

I tell my epiphany, how these trees rewired me. 

A Michigan kid, I grew up playing in Michigan forests and camping with my family in Michigan’s state parks. I tell them about forever heading north from Hudsonville for some woodsy adventure once I could drive and how later, as a grad student, I drove myself up I-75 dozens of times from East Lansing to the central UP to dead-reckon my way across icy-spring swamp forests that swallowed the time I had to give. 

I thought I knew Michigan forests. On a whim, I jumped off I-75 one spring day and discovered that I didn’t.

I didn’t understand that Michigan trees should normally be that big and that old. I didn’t understand that Michigan understories should be that layered with big dead trees and generations of big limbs broken off in the shear of summer thunderstorms or under the weight of wet winter snows or how the steady rain of death feeds new life in the dark tangles of moldering limbs in various states of soft decay, returning their sequestered sunlight nutrients to the forest soils. Providing shelter and foraging substrate for animals tiny and big, and places for seedlings to nurse. I didn’t understand the economy of deep shade.

I knew the monarch white pine back then, the tallest tree in the stand, meriting its own interpretive sign. It’s dead now, its trunk broken by a storm, its bark released and sloughed away. Its outer rings well into the process of melting into a pile of punky chunky fragments. 

The sign is now a memorial. 

I imagine it was awkward for the state park staff. The happy boosterism of celebrating the biggest tree, giving it a royal name and its own interpretive sign, building a faux-rustic fence around that trunk (that everyone ignored to get their tree-hugging photo). I imagine it was awkward when a storm broke the top off, inflicting the mortal wound. Investments of attention have a momentum of a sort. Now we valorize a memory embodied in the presence of a single dead snag and remember a discrete “what was” – even as 49 precious acres, a larger living presence of what was, fades away forever like a weathering photograph, with no memorial.

I remember the big beech trees here, the maples’ steady companions. I remember the first time I saw the wispy white harbingers of beech bark disease. I remember the time after that when all the beeches showed tell-tale cankers rippling black through their otherwise smooth elephantine bark. They’re all dead now. Looks like they’ve been dead for years. The park saws the tops of the ones still standing – probably to prevent them from being a hazard for visitors. 

Back at the van, a student offered that it felt “off” or wrong. Another remarked at the irony of valorization of the logging era – pretty much the origin story of the park itself. 

Chestnuts long dead, elms lost in my lifetime, ashes lost more recently, beeches, oak-wilt, wooly adelgids, spongy moths – there’s an insect plague incoming from the west on the lodgepole pines, a close relative of our jack pines. Forest diversity, in all its measures, is draining away around us. The climactic envelop for this place is leaving it behind. It’s ecologically adrift. 

So am I.

Some mornings, evaluating the day from my faculty cabin on Big Twin, I can’t tell if the haze is periodic summer humidity or Canadian wildfire smoke, or both. More heat, more drought, more storms, more ecosystem dysfunction. More numbing toxic denial.

Forests are dynamic. I teach them about it but it takes repetition and a history explains things that I try for but struggle with. I’ve seen the changes in yearly hot afternoon snapshots, slowly grafting my emergent history onto the history of the place such that it passes from abstract, other, and outside myself to something personal. We stand broadside to a canopy gap and I point out the parabolic cluster of dog-hair maple seedlings racing for the recently opened patch of sunlight. I could make a metaphor of that.

Likely it’s always been this way in these forests, except that maples have the advantage in the face of unnaturally high populations of hungry deer. An ice-storm created another canopy gap this winter. Maybe the next prof can interpret it for the next cohort of students, but I can see the contestants there on the forest floor ready to bolt from the suddenly opened gate. The trajectory of this relict is what ecologist coldly and clinically call a “novel or no-analogue ecosystem.”  There’s isolated beauty in the math but only a fool would bet against the long odds. Maples will be the last trees standing.

I did the oak-tree-passenger-pigeon thing with them on day one again and read them Leopold’s pigeon essay. A bit of that last paragraph won’t let me be.

We run the timeline backwards to understand the forest as it is, what do we call it to imagine the timeline running forward in our ecological imagination for what it might be? 

“To see America as history, to conceive of destiny as a becoming, to smell a hickory tree through the still lapse of ages – all these things are possible for us, and to achieve them takes only the free sky and the will to ply our wings.”

A becoming. I want to know what that means. I want a piece of it. Another student described resurrection as a process that begins here, with us. 

Betting against the odds is the professor’s conceit. We play the long game.

A becoming is contingent. It depends on what we can know, what we will love, and therefore what we will defend or nurture. That’s the thing to teach. An expansive imagination, a dreaming even, of a better richer forest, of a better richer world. When the cutover stumps finally melt back into the duff and heroic white pines tower again and hemlock elders shade the understory. When humanity recovers its senses.

When loss and compromise meet their necessary endpoints.

When that happens, I want someone to remember.

Quote: Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and sketches here and there. Oxford University Press.