"North Woods"

[fiefoe]

I mostly picked this because this is pretty close to my neck of the woods, (heh), but it turned out to be a very solid and pleasurable read. Daniel Mason's inter-connected stories offer a wise view of people's relationship with their land, and what can be left behind -- that is, not much -- but still, we should take a pause.

• Of Flora, the dominion of the toad and muck-clam, the starscapes of the fireflies, the reign of wolf and bear and bloom of mold. And around them, in the forest, everywhere: the spirits of each bird and insect, each fir, each fish.
• And were you marryd with this husband before God? I askd her, for I had seen she did adorn herself as would the wicked, with a ring of silver on her finger. Or was it the D—l who shaped that omen to your skin?
• Colors change. Yellow creeps down from the mountain and slips into the veins of the hornbeams, red limns the oaks and maples, and in the understory, violet consumes the lemon-yellow wings of the viburnum. Leaves fall upon the brook that splits the hillside like a tear in the fabric of the earth.
• Now, in the place that was once the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman, one of the apple seeds, sheltered in the shattered rib cage, breaks its coat, drops a root into the soil, and lifts a pair of pale-green cotyledons. A shoot rises, thickens, seeks the bars of light above it, and gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs that once guarded the dead man’s meager heart.
• An inch more, and I would have been lost forever. But God had noticed me. Or simply, pressing His brush to the unfolding scene of battle, He bent the fabric of His canvas, and saved my life.
• Ah, but bleeding was for general lunacy, he said, whereas mine was most particular—a pomomania, so to speak, a madness for fruit alone.
• Thus the spleen was tilted off its axis, and, via a sympathy, began to act upon the circulation of the lymph, which acted on the blood, the blood on the phlegm, the phlegm on the bile, the bile on the jus gastrique, and so on, eventually imparting its momentum to the fluids of the cord. From there it was but a skip to the brain, lengthening the medulla oblongata and tugging open the recently discovered lesser operculum, the “guardhouse” of the cerebrum, through which raced fancies, notions, images, and even—and here he whispered in a low voice—passions, or, as they say in French, passions.
• was a matter of augmentation, fecundation, intermingling, producing even more fanciful fancies, notional notions, passionate notions, fanciful passions, &c, &c, &
• Nearby, a single rain-wet apple beckoned. I reached; it slipped beyond my fingers. Another wind: again the apple rose, up, up, higher, and, at the height of its curve, it seemed to pause as if considering the worthiness of its petitioner, and swung down into my hand.
• When I bit into it, I had the sense of tasting not only with my tongue, but deep within my palate, a scent more than a flavour, as light as lemon blossoms, before a second wave came spreading through like syrup.
• Such was the swarming into the wilderness during those years, that it was nigh impossible to find an idle hand,
• My girls, who had learned to graft before they learned their letters, could not be counted on for their vocabulary, but what they lacked in learning, they made up in instinct. As I read to them the list of varieties in The Pomological Manual, they hurrah’d their favorites, Mary’s earnest gaze brightening each time I lighted upon a Royal or a Regal, while her impish sister cast her vociferous vote for the Winter Monster, the Hogsnout, and the Bright Young Maid.
• Swiftly did my daughters dispense of Osgood’s Pippin as too ordinary, Osgood’s Nonpareil as too immodest, Osgood’s Rose too floral, Osgood’s Prize too presumptuous, Osgood’s Belle too Gallic, Osgood’s Harvest too matter-of-fact. Osgood’s Red didn’t do justice to the hints of green that made it so lovely. Osgood’s Dessert sounded like a pastry, while Osgood’s Sugar ignored the complexity of the fruit... For a while, we settled upon the Osgood Beauty, and the Osgood Glory was a durable selection, before the girls eventually dismissed it as too martial.
• Too many times had I been mismeasured: call a man mad once and he will be forever vigilant. But what could satisfy me? For a Fruit is a Thing, while that which I was searching for was nothing less than that which could transcend the tangible, speak to astonishment, invoke not only pleasure, but the perception of something vast, supernal, nothing less than enchantment itself.
• “And sometimes he has me participating,” said my faithful batman. Which is why, to this day, if you are passing the Fludd property on a morning, and you look into his apple orchard, you will see the diligent farmer, his wife, their three daughters, and their grandchildren, all squatting red-faced and bare-bottomed at the base of the accursed apple tree, thinking this will be the s—t that brings them fame at last.
• But how can she who has not had her breast pierced by a bayonet sweetened with an autumn pippin understand my passion?
• Was not Eve herself in fact a cutting, taken from Adam’s rib?
• If life, as the man said, was a song, theirs was more refrain than verse. And yet to have claimed that a warm spring morning walking over earth carpeted with apple blossoms was somehow the same, substantively, spiritually, as a cold winter noon spent pruning, or a harvest evening heavy with the smell of juice and hay—this would have betrayed an ignorance not only of country life, but of the thousand seasons—of frogsong, of thunderheads, of first thaws—that hid within the canonical Four.
• “Got stamina,” said George, as if in apology, but the girls had turned their attention to a pair of blister beetles engaged in the same act as the van Hassels, though far more delicately.
• Mary, whose longing for precision and clarity extended even into language, thought that there really should be a word for this particular kind of explaining boys did to girls, while Alice watched the old man and felt a kinship with someone who had learned to untether part of himself and let it roam, while the rest of him was bound by circumstance.
• Heartbreak, interrupted George, came from bee stings. There was a girl who died of it in Oakfield: his father had ministered at the funeral. She’d swollen up to the size of a sow, before she went. “Near burst,” he said, and shook his head somberly. How terrible, thought Alice, but Mary had lost all patience. “Comes from longing,” she said. “Any fool can tell you.” And the three children turned to Joe, who began to speak, but then, deciding otherwise, kept his silence, as if they were on their own to figure this one out.
• For the next three years, they battled outbreaks of canker and tent caterpillars, attacks of waxwings, and accusations of Loyalism. The first was vanquished with applications of vinegar, the second by vigorous smoking, and the third and fourth by the placement of two scarecrows in redcoats to scare the birds and mock the Crown.
• But they were alone, and in an instant, she became aware of the magnitude of all that might be broken, saw, in her sister’s bent and trembling form, the fury that could, in one sweep, send the entire shelf of pots crashing to the floor. Please, she thought, please, don’t. She could recall the moment when she’d stopped her sister at the wasp’s nest.
• who, she learned, had died the summer following their one-day courtship, from typhoid fever contracted at the Springfield fair. She dreamed again of being folded in his arms, and wished that he’d been bolder, drawn her off the road into the meadows, amidst the boneset that old Joe Walker once prescribed for heartbreak. The memory of the van Hassels braying, once so risible, now came to pain her,
• Alice kept her list of children’s names, Mary kept a different list—far better referenced and annotated—of all the local husbands who got drunk and beat their wives.
• But Sukey was like sandpaper compared with Cristobal, and Mary, in Park Square, ran her fingers through the samples of fabric with nothing short of lust.
• “We don’t need one,” she said with a shiver of revenge, recalling her sister’s verdict in the pottery so long ago. But Mary persisted. Within a year, Alice’s first objection was taken care of by the declaration of War against England, and the new tariffs against English wool.
• She was running when she reached Mary. Her sister turned, and with a single swing, she felled her, and the only sound was a sharp gasp of shock. — “They are not for cider,” said Mary, standing alone in the orchard, the savaged trees around her.
• open, and read that George would always love her, but that he was an old bachelor and stuck in his silly ways.
• There are stones and loam and sand, insects and earthworms, bird bones and crushed snail shells, roly-polies, and tufts of grass that wilt within the darkness beneath the deck. There is a half-decayed mole, and a live one, broken jugs, a Roman coin that will be rediscovered by a young boy walking on the shoreline 317 years later, and another, a “crown of the double rose” bearing an image of Edward VI on horseback, that will sift down into the silty depths of Massachusetts Bay and disappear forever.
• In the felted boots of a young girl, traveling to Albany with her mother: hedge parsley. In a hemp sack, dropped by a Dutch settler, after his murder on a lonely road near Hoosick Falls, and then on the wind: common groundsel.... In the ticking of a mattress discovered by a minister to be the locus of his wife’s betrayal, fury-scythed to pieces and released into the Plymouth fields: Scotch thistle. In the pocket of a milkmaid who had thought it was a carrot: Queen Anne’s lace.
• She was the third he’d lost that season, and he must make an example for the rest. Of course, thought Phalen, that the enslaved would weigh even the most severe “example” against the horrors of their bondage was what kept his business brisk.
• Who fought him until the very end, while others went with him so quietly. But then, standing in the bedrooms of such righteous people, he’d see the muslin drapes and calico skirts, and to his many hates, he added that for the pious who preached the slave’s equality, but wore cloth made with his sweat.
• Ghost apple, she called it when he asked, but it was dark red and green, and anything but ghostly, and when he asked her why the name, she told him that the orchard it was from was haunted,... And so, for the second time in seventy-five years, a child’s apple led a grown man to the north woods place.
• knowing then that he had found her, he grabbed the next board with both hands and pried it off. And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth. Darkness below. He lit his match and crouched over the space, not understanding at first what he was seeing, the flickering light upon the fife, the pink, frilled dresses, the open pairs of eyes, the axe.
• Trevors finds my curiosity curious—says there are but two places they could have gone, and accompanies this with an eye roll to the heavens and down below. But the place is rank with Time—why shouldn’t I wish to scrape away the strata?
• here, the banks are lined with fantastic ice—columns like organ pipes, bulbs straight from the glassblowers, thin sheets through which one can watch the rising bubbles. Indeed, I have become a connoisseur of ice these days: the sleet that falls like hissing sand, the white that coats the roads like baker’s dustings, the crystalline mesh, thin as spun sugar, that shatters with the passing of my hand. Ah, the whimsy of a God who would deliver water to the earth in the guise of such fine powder!
• more sketching just in service of a later canvas: this would mean running the world through the sieve of my perception, and I wish to paint what is.
• Woods, from the Old English wode…also meaning “mad.”
• and then demurely took to the sky, only to change her mind and return to land low on my belly. Heart pounding then, my world reduced, incredibly, to that faint tickle, astounded at the ludicrousness of my arousal, and yet completely alive to her. If a girl could become a tree, a heifer, who’s to say some nymph might not grow such glassine wings?
• She’ll promise a well-appointed country room, the most gracious comforts. I promise nothing but the bittern, the spring onion, the morel—in sum, the whole freshness of June.
• Out here, no one tears down anyway—one just adds upon, agglutinates, house to house, shed to shed, like some monstrous German noun. Everywhere one finds these rambling masses: new wing goes up, old one becomes the servants’ quarters, old servants’ quarters become the barn, old barn becomes the carriage house, and so on. They molt, these houses!
• But the very act of composition, in that specific sense a painter means when he speaks of the act of bringing together various parts into a harmonious whole—this act of cohesion naturally places the subject front and center. Cole is a good example: all meant to be wild nature, but there is no doubt that it is man’s eyes we are looking through. This is not to doubt his skill. But he is always there, and my most exquisite moments are ones of dissolution. But what does this mean anyway? Can there be art without the human in it?
• Carried the barn over so that it might serve as a carriage house. You read that correctly: carried. It’s an art here—mastered back when they were rolling logs out of the woods. Woke up one morning to find he had the barn up on screw jacks, then twenty-two oxen, snorting like the cattle of Geryon, come rumbling up our road.
• And in that silence, I sensed between us something which had been there since Green Hill but had lay slumbering, unable to make itself known before we threw the heavy fetters of Society off. Precipice…slumbering creature…Erasmus, I mix my words, but I trust you might find meaning in them. In sum: that was why I came home: my wish to preserve the wonder of our friendship, and not risk those perfect days by asking greedily for more.
• Read it again—there was no world left beyond your words. Let the critics debate your greatest poems, for me there will be none other than your letter. In answer, I enclose the above, written at my desk, while you wrote at yours.
• made me feel, if for an instance, that I am equal to the gauntlet thrown down by these woods. For how, indeed, to capture this? Gone the slow and cautious gilding of the birches, the faint yellowing of the sugar maples, this inching into autumn: no, now the forest plunges headlong into it. Yesterday it was the hornbeam, today the chestnut—I’d hate to see her tailor’s bills.
• Began the morning cursing at the limits of my cinnabar, only to discover that what I needed was a deeper blue.
• I propose a new calendar: not one autumn but twelve, a hundred. The autumn when the birches are yellow but still have their leaves; when the beeches are green but the birch leaves have fallen; when the oaks tint to the color of ripe apricots and the beeches yellow; when the oaks turn a cigar brown and the beeches curl up into crispy copper rolls. And so on: I’ve missed a few. But to call it all just “autumn”!
• Nothing can placate her, despite my insistence that what I have with her and what I had with you exist on different planes. She would be my wife always, never did I think otherwise, never did I hope to cause such pain.
• But the whole house breathes, always has. Creaks and tilts. Cracks and whispers with the cold. A whole chorus, but in none of it is him.
• In May, the forests of his paintings appeared to her a second time. A green cathedral, oaken apses alight with moss. And now they shared stories, slipped in and out of conversation. Like thinking, she thought: it came and went so gently. He spoke of the woods, the trees, the spring birds. It was like being with a child, all this naming, like being with Adam,
• Around her rose the woods, the mountain, the silent trees that William had taught her to love so deeply. No, she thought. They did not need somebody else. A squirrel joined the cardinal in his alarm.
• “The word. The word for what they were doing. It rhymes…with…pottery…with bonhomie…with psalmody.” “Sorry?” “Psal…mo…dy…, madame. Vile, vile psalmody.” She looked up, her eyes now wide.
• There is a painter and a poet, and they are so…delighted in each other’s presence.” Mrs. Farnsworth straightened, almost defiant now. “They are men, madame. Two men.”
• For all his bombast, she did not dislike him. A proper adversary. At the same time, one did not need to believe in an afterlife to feel some outrage at those who so swiftly cast away the past.
• Anastasia, terrified, transfixed, could see a pair of half-formed beings, one of pure white light and the other of a thousand shifting colors. Tumbling, playful, luminous creatures. She wished to go with them. She wished to scream.
• All along her back, she felt an exquisite chill. “Wait,” said Anastasia. “I hear it.” And she did. From far away, she felt it ripping through the sinews of the cosmos.
• During its brief existence, the spore has never left its host tree. Shaped like a blunt spindle, bisected by a thin septum like the scoring on a pill, it has lived forever in the damp depths of its chamber, arranged with its brethren in orderly rosettes. Release, therefore, when the west wind comes sweeping sheets of spores off of the ruined forest, brings about a transformation that is nothing less than ecstasy.
• And so, until now, this forest has been spared. Each summer the chestnuts fill the canopy with lambent plumes so bright that it is said that they are lit by private sunshine. Each autumn, mast covers the forest floor with nuts. In the spring, the leaves are soft and green, with hints of russet. They are thriving when the inoculum sets down.
• How he imagined it! The warm light flickering across his wife’s bounding breasts. The bodies tumbling over a fireside rug (bearskin, or “Persian”). The moist lock of her crotch as if a kind of second flame. O savage ritual of sacrifice and purification! Such thoughts had only quickened (dare we say, burned brighter)
• And so, when the day came and the couple reluctantly climbed back into the Nomad, they left behind some logs of elm, and in the elm, the larvae of a scolytid beetle overwintering within the bark.
• For the larval chambers of the elm bark beetle are nothing short of masterpieces. What might we compare them to? Etched Viking labyrinths? The facial tattoos of certain Pacific Islanders? A giant centipede? But they are nonpareil. Such symmetry, such grace! Other beetles, in comparison, are mindless stumblers, leaving winding, drunken squiggles in their wakes.
• Do not ask me how she got there; she came from another log, as did her mother before her—it is logs and beetles all the way back.
• And beneath the bark, within the gallery, what heaven! The scent was overwhelming—it was as if he’d walked inside her genital chamber itself. He purred and dipped, so befuddled by her smell he nearly mated with a mite. The mites cleared out—they had long learned not to get between a pair of scolytids in heat.
• why? How? Her smell! Her hushed clicking of encouragement! Her open genital chamber! And then to greet him with such violence! Was he not welcome after all? But to leave, well, it was not so easy: try turning around inside a corridor the width of a rice grain with your aedeagus hanging out.
• Robert stole his case notes from his desk. She still had them! And it was lucky that he had stolen them, for the doctor had written terrible things. Had they proceeded, Robert might have been left like the man in Henry’s book, or worse. It was one of the times in her life when she’d been certain that someone was looking out for her, for him.
• The account was a mystery, Professor Trumbull told them. No one knew who had written it—it had been found scrawled in the margins of a Bible belonging to a colored family in Canada, handed down over the generations. The story’s end, the killing of some English soldiers, had puzzled historians, he said, and it provoked a heated discussion among the Benevolents about justice that left Professor Trumbull in a state of almost orgasmic pedagogical bliss.
• Imagine, if you will, a tree coated in blood. Five yards up, in the crook of a branch of the old oak, the snow-covered body had disgorged its contents down the trunk. Blood coated the bark, filled the crevices, and hung in scarlet icicles.
• We decide to pay her a visit. Flynn and Burke get our crunchy morsel in a body bag and throw him on the back of the horse—apparently, that’s how they do hearses in these parts—
• Imagine, if you will, four different structures under four separate roofs, all stuck together. Papa and Mama Bear with two li’l ones in between, and then imagine that someone came and took a bat to Papa’s head, because a tree had fallen and a good quarter of that house was collapsing on itself and fit to be condemned.
• Sixteen papers, and somehow, on the flight, she’d read just two of them. Now she shuffled through the rest. “Painted Words—Cross-Genre Influences in the Antebellum North.” “Eros, Deception, and the American Séance.” “Materializing Memory: The Function of Phantasm.” “ ‘Bold Bug’: Erasmus Nash’s ‘The Damsel’ and the Desire of the Demure.”
• His Eclogues were her favorite of that quarter’s readings: a “hot Walden,” to use the felicitous phrase of one of her undergraduates,
• “Soul Heirs,” “Harrow,” “Stitchings”—where did it all come from? The book was massive and terrible and untethered, and as a reader who prided herself on not slinking before difficult texts, she found herself in awe at its sheer strangeness. Diabolical tools, a ruptured earth, words which froze in winter: were it a poem, not a disease, she might find it fascinating. But his suffering was far too close.
• Robert, she thought, suddenly. Because one needed friends to be a Bobby or a Bob.
• Stacks of phone books, broken along their spines and filled with newspaper clippings, weather forecasts, sports scores, obituaries, the names all unfamiliar. No rhyme or reason she could ascertain. Sound and fury, she thought, signifying nothing. Or signifying something, but something lost.
• And any actor named Erasmus deserved a little credit—she couldn’t decide if it was more amusing if he’d been named for Nash, or just for the author of In Praise of Folly. She could see the paper now: “The Influences of 19th-Century Pastoral Poetry on Amateur Sex Films: A Review.”
• Then, there, in the room of her empty house, or the archives of the library where one could still find such forgotten equipment, they would watch the screen light up before them—robin, sapling, eternal beetle—the images stripped of all their prior meaning, signifying nothing but the gentle motions of a forest that no longer was.
• Sadly, Isaac knows nothing about how his great-grandmother came into the book’s possession, save that she once fled slavery in Maryland, said the volume sustained her in her flight, loved it so that when she traveled to see a daughter in New Brunswick she would bring it with her like a talisman.
• Tell the world you’ve found a 1662 Massachusetts Oak Tree Twopence at a Quabbin boat launch, and every detectorist in Massachusetts will be out there the
• Those of you who know me best may be aware of some of my private interests, not just birdwatching, but my collection of ribald pirate songs, my turnpike memorabilia, my work-in-progress on Puritan woodcut erotica. If I have not spoken to you of my True Crime! magazine collection, it is perhaps because I remain a little self-conscious
• No, it couldn’t be, and yet…the shoe fit perfectly! The “Nightmaids” Letter lacked a crime scene; the True Crime! story lacked a suspect.
• the three female members in question, Dorothy Ketterman (Puritan numismatics), Maude Loomis (non-maritime scrimshaw), and Shirley Potter (tin-ceiling design),
• the subtle burdens of a mother who sold fantasy and a father whose family had fled Cambodia when he was nine, and who, by his own admission, had chosen his career because of its clear-eyed embrace of disaster at the core of life.
• her mind fast and light again, she couldn’t explain it. It was as if she had been made aware of a structure to the world, an architecture which existed beyond her and which her sadness could not consume. She had identified a white oak, three red maples, and an ash
• In the brief, exalted moments when she could picture the grand cinema of the forest’s passage, she felt like nothing less than a clairvoyant with a crystal ball. Here Pocumtuc men and women cultivated fields along the river floodplain. Here the beech and oak rose slowly in the shade of nurse trees. Here the birch shot up after the King’s men took pine to raise as masts over their ships…It was as if the past were written everywhere upon the land. In the size of stones found in the snaking walls, which told whether the land was used for crop or pasture.
• Witness trees, she’d tell them. An old term of trade for trees that marked invisible boundaries. Now also used for those that were present at important moments in our history. In other words: the ones that witnessed us.
• William Henry Teale, however, was something of a revelation—photographically precise and seemingly intent on recording exactly what he was seeing,... the exactitude with which Teale had distinguished ferns that lost their leaves in winter and those that didn’t, the different holes drilled by the different woodpeckers, the clustered sapling oaks that suggested a forgotten squirrel cache. But what struck her most was the vision of a forest she had previously only imagined. How extraordinary it was to look at a grove of massive beeches unblemished by beech scale, hemlock unmenaced by the adelgid, ash before the borer, elms before Dutch elm disease, chestnuts before the blight.
• But this is what it would have sounded like, the wall text told her. Between 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America.
• She felt as if she had fallen in love with someone only to learn that they were dying. She could recall the winter day in the forest outside the library at Amherst when she first began to sense the possibility of an enchantment. And a decade had passed, and every day she’d felt the wonder grow deeper, and every day, reading the journals, attending conferences, she found herself confronted by the mounting evidence that she was losing the very thing that had saved her.
• But then the war came and he’d gone off to fight and left the place in the care of his daughters, and after a time, the girls had had a little falling out. By then he’d had what one might call a change in circumstances, and before he knew it the land was someone else’s,
• As for his daughters, well, with regards to apple trees, one of them had what one might call—to use a word he’d picked up from a book he found at the house some years ago—a “complex,” and it was probably better not to “activate it.”
• Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past. She has come to think of them as her private Archive, herself as Archivist, and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.
• The glens echo with the songs of long-lost warblers (and by now, she’s learned them), children singing in Mohican, wolf howl. Rivers so thick with fish that she could walk on them. The ghosts of the damselflies, dryad’s saddle, elm trees: a thousand angels on a blade of grass.
• There is no hesitation. She is accustomed to indifference—it is what one might call the great lesson of the world—and yet she still expects a pause, some kind of recognition or acknowledgment. But the fire doesn’t stop. It takes two hours, and the house is gone.