Essay: July 12

7/12/00

An Opening in the Trees

By Elizabeth Hunter

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”

Poet Robert Frost wrote that line about a New England forest filling with snow. Strange then, that it’s in midsummer, when the wood thrush is singing and morning mist or evening fireflies are rising on the cool air brushing the flanks of my mountain ridge that Frost’s words most often surface in my mind. Sitting on the back porch, I’m amazed at the lush overlay of textures.

The mountain cabin in which I’ve lived almost half my life stands in a small clearing on the backbone of a dry ridge sloping in a southwesterly direction toward the North Toe River. A stand of tall white pines on the south side of the ridge blocks sunlight from my yard till late morning. Yellow poplar, red and white oak, buckeye, and beech border my clearing into the west, north and east.

The electric line that keeps my refrigerator, lights, and water pump running goes up the ridge along the edge of the pines from a main line half way between me and the river. Every few years, a crew from my electric cooperative clears this right-of-way — something they did early this spring, one day when I wasn’t at home. When I returned, the altered landscape shocked and angered me. The crew had done an extraordinarily thorough job this time. Not only had they cleared everything under the line, but had cut every side branch growing toward the line from every pine, almost to the top of the trees. Instead of a narrow slot running from my cabin to the main line, they’d opened a space that felt as gaping as the space does in your mouth after a tooth is pulled. Looking at it, I felt exposed, and I couldn’t look anywhere else.

Which makes it all the more surprising that in the four months since the clearing crew came through, it’s not just that I’ve gotten used to it — nor that I’ve remembered that on the kind of evening Frost’s poem describes, I won’t have to worry that a snow-laden pine branch will crash to the ground and douse my lights. Right now, this opening in the woods offers rewards.

I’m a bird watcher and, as such, could wish that our summer woods were a little less dark and deep. Lush foliage conceals the whereabouts of the neotropical migrants that arrive just as trees are leafing out and depart long before they’re bare again. By their songs I know that ovenbirds, scarlet tanagers, wood thrushes, hooded warblers, and red-eyed and blue-headed vireos nest in the woods around me, out of sight but never out of mind. Now, thanks to the electric company, in some ways I have a better view.