Forest Journal
Returning to the Forest at Idylease
· Richard Zampella
Reworking the Idylease Tree Farm website began as a matter of organization: bringing the history, management plans, photographs and present-day stewardship of the property into a clearer record. But a website about a living forest cannot be built from records alone. It also has to show what the land looks like now.
This afternoon, that work sent me back into the forest to take new photographs for the site.
I had not been that deep into the forest in many years.
No compass was required. I still knew how to read the terrain.
I remembered the navigation landmarks from when I was a boy—the grades, the turns, the changes in elevation, the openings in the woods and the places where one route gave way to another. The underbrush had grown dense, and the forest had changed in the ordinary ways a forest changes, but the underlying geography remained legible to me.
I carried a shovel in case I encountered a coyote or a bear. As I pushed through the underbrush, the blade struck the stones beneath my feet, a hard metallic sound that followed me through the woods.
I was not lost. The routes were still there in memory.
At Kanouse Brook, the forest opened into water, reeds and wetland vegetation beneath a broad summer sky. I stopped to take the photograph above. It will become part of the reworked site, a contemporary image placed alongside the older photographs and records that document how the property has been managed over time.
Standing on the stones to take the photograph, I had the simple thought that the ground beneath me belonged to Idylease. The vista did not.
That connection matters. Management plans can describe acreage, forest stands, prescriptions and dates. Historical photographs can show what existed before us. A photograph taken today records what those years of management have become on the ground.
The work on the website had brought me into the woods for a practical reason, but walking those old routes changed the afternoon. I began thinking less about the photographs and more about the familiarity of the terrain.
And I thought about my father.
I wondered whether he had ever taken my routes. Had he read these same grades and turns? Had he crossed these same stones and stood in these same openings before I ever knew the forest?