A Walk in the Woods (27 page)

Imagine it—a wall of ice nearly half a mile high, and beyond it for tens of thousands of square miles nothing but more ice, broken only by the peaks of a very few of the loftiest mountains. What a sight that must have been. And here is a thing that most of us fail to appreciate: we are still in an ice age, only now we experience it for just part of the year. Snow and ice and cold are not really typical features of earth. Taking the long view, Antarctica is actually a jungle. (It’s just having a chilly spell.) At the very peak of the last ice age 20,000 years ago, 30 percent of the earth was under ice. Today 10 percent still is. There have been at least a dozen ice ages in the last two million years, each lasting about 100,000 years. The most recent intrusion, called the Wisconsinian ice sheet, spread down from the polar regions over much of Europe and North America, growing to depths of up to two miles and advancing at a rate of up to 400 feet a year. As it soaked up the earth’s free water, sea levels fell by 450 feet. Then, about 10,000 years ago, not abruptly exactly but near enough, it began to melt back. No one knows why. What it left in its wake was a landscape utterly transformed. It dumped Long Island, Cape Cod, Nantucket, and most of Martha’s Vineyard where previously there had just been sea, and it gouged out the Great Lakes, Hudson Bay, and little Sunfish Pond, among much else. Every foot of the landscape from here on north would be scored and scarred with reminders of glaciation—scattered boulders called erratics, drumlins, eskers, high tarns, cirques. I was entering a new world.

No one knows much of anything about the earth’s many ice ages—why they came, why they stopped, when they may return. One interesting theory, given our present-day concerns with global
warming, is that the ice ages were caused not by falling temperatures but by warming ones. Warm weather would increase precipitation, which would increase cloud cover, which would lead to less snow melt at higher elevations. You don’t need a great deal of bad weather to get an ice age. As Gwen Schultz notes in
Ice Age Lost
, “It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets, but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.” In terms of precipitation, she observes, Antarctica “is the driest large area on Earth, drier overall than any large desert.”

Here’s another interesting thought. If glaciers started reforming, they have a great deal more water now to draw on—Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes, the hundreds of thousands of lakes of Canada, none of which existed to fuel the last ice sheet—so they would grow very much quicker. And if they did start to advance again, what exactly would we do? Blast them with TNT or maybe nuclear warheads? Well, doubtless we would, but consider this. In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska’s glaciers? None.

Just beyond the pond was a side trail, the Garvey Springs Trail, which descended very steeply to an old paved road along the river, just below a spot called Tocks Island and which would take me in a lazy loop back towards the visitor center where I had left the car. It was four miles and the day was growing warm, but the road was shaded and quiet—I saw only three cars in an hour or so—so it was a pleasant stroll, with restful views of the river across overgrown meadows.

By American standards, the Delaware is not a particularly imposing waterway, but it has one almost unique characteristic. It is nearly the last significant undammed river in the United States.
Now this might seem an inestimable virtue—a river that runs as nature planned it. However, one consequence of its unregulated nature is that the Delaware regularly floods. In 1955, as Frank Dale notes in his excellent book
Delaware Diary
, there was a flood that even now is remembered as “the Big One.” In August of that year—ironically at the height of one of the most severe droughts in decades—two hurricanes hit North Carolina one after the other, disrupting and enlivening weather all up and down the East Coast. The first dumped ten inches of rain in two days on the Delaware River Valley. Six days later the valley received ten inches in less than twenty-four hours. At a place called Camp Davis, a holiday complex, forty-six people, mostly women and children, took refuge from the rising flood waters in the camp’s main building. As the waters rose, they fled first upstairs and then into the attic, but to no avail. Sometime in the night a thirty-foot wall of water came roaring through the valley and swept the house away. Amazingly, nine people survived.

Elsewhere, bridges were being brushed aside and riverside towns inundated. Before the day was out, the Delaware River would rise forty-three feet. By the time the waters finally receded, 400 people were dead and the whole of the Delaware Valley was devastated.

Into this gooey mess stepped the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with a plan to build a dam at Tocks Island, very near where I was walking now. The dam, according to the Corps’ plan, would not only tame the river but allow the creation of a new national park, at the heart of which would be a recreational lake almost forty miles long. Eight thousand residents were moved out. It was all done very clumsily. One of the people evicted was blind. Several farmers had only parts of their land bought, so that they ended up with farmland but no house or a farmhouse but no land. A woman whose family had farmed the same land since the eighteenth century was carried from her house kicking and bellowing, to the delight of newspaper photographers and film crews.

The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well. A dam across the Missouri River in Nebraska
silted up so disastrously that a noisome ooze began to pour into the town of Niobrara, eventually forcing its permanent abandonment. Then a Corps dam in Idaho failed. Fortunately it was in a thinly populated area and there was some warning. Even so, several small towns were washed away and eleven people lost their lives. But these were relatively small dams. Tocks Dam would have held one of the largest artificial reservoirs in the world, with forty
miles
of water behind it. Four substantial cities—Trenton, Camden, Wilmington, and Philadelphia—and scores of smaller communities stood downstream. A disaster on the Delaware would truly be a disaster.

And here was the nimble Army Corps of Engineers planning to hold back 250 billion gallons of water with notoriously unstable glacial till. Besides that there were all kinds of environmental worries—that salinity levels below the dam would rise catastrophically, for example, devastating the ecology lower down, not least the valuable oyster beds of Delaware Bay.

In 1992, after years of growing protests that spread far beyond the Delaware Valley, the dam plan was finally put on hold, but by this time whole villages and farms had been bulldozed. A quiet, remote, very beautiful farming valley that had not changed a great deal in 200 years was lost forever. “One beneficial result of the [canceled] project,” notes the
Appalachian Trail Guide to New York and New Jersey
, “was that the land acquired by the federal government for the national recreation area has provided the Trail with a protected corridor.”

To tell you the truth I was getting a little wearied of this. I know the Appalachian Trail is supposed to be a wilderness experience, and I accept that there are countless places where it would be a tragedy for it to be otherwise, but sometimes, as here, the ATC seems to be positively phobic about human contact. Personally, I would have been pleased to be walking now through hamlets and past farms rather than through some silent “protected corridor.”

Doubtless it is all to do with our historic impulse to tame and exploit the wilderness, but America’s attitude to nature is, from all sides, very strange if you ask me. I couldn’t help comparing my
experience now with an experience I’d had three or four years earlier in Luxembourg when I went hiking with my son for a magazine assignment. Luxembourg is a much more delightful place to hike than you might think. It has lots of woods but also castles and farms and steepled villages and winding river valleys—the whole, as it were, European package. The footpaths we followed spent a lot of time in the woods but also emerged at obliging intervals to take us along sunny back roads and over stiles and through farm fields and hamlets. We were always able at some point each day to call in at a bakery or post office, to hear the tinkle of shop bells and eavesdrop on conversations we couldn’t understand. Each night we slept in an inn and ate in a restaurant with other people. We experienced the whole of Luxembourg, not just its trees. It was wonderful, and it was wonderful because the whole charmingly diminutive package was seamlessly and effortlessly integrated.

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition—either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit—that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn’t
all
wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilled fields.

I would have much preferred it if the AT guidebook had said: “Thanks to the Conference’s efforts, farming has been restored to the Delaware River Valley, and the footpath rerouted to incorporate sixteen miles of riverside walking because, let’s face it, you can get too much of trees sometimes.”

Still, we must look on the bright side. If the Army Corps of Engineers had had its foolish way, I’d have been swimming back to my car now, and I was grateful at least to be spared that.

Anyway, it was time to do some real hiking again.

I
n 1983, a man walking in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts just off the Appalachian Trail saw—or at least swears he saw—a mountain lion cross his path, which was a little unsettling and even more unexpected since mountain lions hadn’t been seen in the northeastern United States since 1903, when the last one was shot in New York State.

Soon, however, sightings were being reported all over New England. A man driving a back road of Vermont saw two cubs playing at the roadside. A pair of hikers saw a mother and two cubs cross a meadow in New Hampshire. Every year there were half a dozen or more reports in similar vein, all by credible witnesses. In the late winter of 1994 a farmer in Vermont was walking across his property, taking some seed to a bird feeder, when he saw what appeared to be three mountain lions about seventy feet away. He stared dumbstruck for a minute or two—for mountain lions are swift, fierce creatures, and here were three of them looking at him with calm regard—then hightailed it to a phone and called a state wildlife biologist. The animals were gone by the time the
biologist arrived, but he found some fresh scat, which he dutifully-bagged up and dispatched to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Laboratory. The lab report came back that it was indeed the scat of
Felis concolor
, the eastern mountain lion, also variously and respectfully known as the panther, cougar, puma, and, especially in New England, catamount.

All this was of some interest to me, for I was hiking in about the same spot as that initial mountain lion sighting. I was back on the trail with a new keenness and determination, and a new plan. I was going to hike New England, or at least as much of it as I could knock off until Katz returned in seven weeks to walk with me through Maine’s Hundred Mile Wilderness. There are almost 700 miles of gorgeously mountainous Appalachian Trail in New England—about a third of the AT’s total trail length—enough to keep me occupied till August. To that end, I had my obliging wife drive me to southwestern Massachusetts and drop me on the trail near Stockbridge for a three-day amble through the Berkshires. Thus it was that I was to be found, on a hot morning in mid-June, laboring sweatily up a steep but modest eminence called Becket Mountain, in a haze of repellent-resistant blackflies, and patting my pocket from time to time to check that my knife was still there.

I didn’t really expect to encounter a mountain lion, but only the day before I had read an article in the
Boston Globe
about how western mountain lions (which indubitably are not extinct) had recently taken to stalking and killing hikers and joggers in the California woods, and even the odd poor soul standing at a backyard barbecue in an apron and funny hat. It seemed a kind of omen.

It’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that mountain lions could have survived undetected in New England. Bobcats—admittedly much smaller creatures than mountain lions—are known to exist in considerable numbers and yet are so shy and furtive that you would never guess their existence. Many forest rangers go whole careers without seeing one. And there is certainly ample room in the eastern woods for large cats to roam undisturbed.
Massachusetts alone has 250,000 acres of woodland, 100,000 of it in the comely Berkshires. From where I was now, I could, given the will and a more or less infinite supply of noodles, walk all the way to Cape Chidley in northern Quebec, 1,800 miles away on the icy Labrador Sea, and scarcely ever have to leave the cover of trees. Even so, it is unlikely that a large cat could survive in sufficient numbers to breed not just in one area but evidently all over New England and escape notice for nine decades. Still, there was that scat. Whatever it was, it excreted like a mountain lion.

The most plausible explanation was that any lions out there—if lions they were—were released pets, bought in haste and later regretted. It would be just my luck, of course, to be savaged by an animal with a flea collar and a medical history. I imagined lying on my back, being extravagently ravaged, inclining my head slightly to read a dangling silver tag that said: “My name is Mr. Bojangles. If found please call Tanya and Vinny at 924-4667.”