Out of the woods we came, and to the woods we must return, at frequent intervals, if we are to redeem ourselves from the vanities of civilization.
- Paul Jamison, Preface, The Adirondack Reader, 2^nd Edition, 1994.

In the remote heart of the forests of the Town of Saranac, in the hills rising from the Saranac River valley to Lyon Mountain, just inside the northern edge of the Adirondack Forest Preserve, the Saranac New Land Trust (NLT) consists of something far more than a land conservation project.

NLT is a 501c not-for-profit corporation run by local naturalists working hard to make NLT’s 280-acre forest available and highly accessible to the public for educational, recreational, and soulful enrichment. This membership-based organization is enjoying a revival of interest and participation as it undergoes shifts from its 1978 founders’ efforts to those of “new blood,” including those “young” friends who introduced me to it, Stuart and Jennifer Douglas (Hyland Design). “Young,” I say, only because they are about half my age, but wise beyond their years in endearing ways.

These ambassadors of NLT raised my awareness not merely through modern forms of pamphleteering, not just through email or phone calls or referrals to their web site, not just through gab and hype. They put their boots to the ground and helped arrange, publicize and host a free and open-to-the-public event similar to a favorite Balsamean activity: a Full Moon Bonfire Gathering, on December 13, 2008.

NLT is people, not just land. Yep, seriously: of the people, by the people, for the people; that is, for the underlying purpose of enriching the relationships between “the people” and “the land,” which should be inseparably integral to each other’s lives.

NLT seeks new members to help sustain the organization and move it into a more active role in the community. Recent developments include a new board of directors, extensive improvements to the network of trails, including mapping and signage, a web site overhaul, newsletters, property access and building improvements. They expect to offer programs and projects for community groups and individuals interested in shared participation in the cultivation of this expansive community forest resource. As with any member-based outfit, your participation is needed to help advance community interests in eco-centric, sustainable co-existence with Nature, with the great advantage of existing and evolving NLT resources. Or, just enjoy the use of a forest free of molestation by “the vanities of civilization.”

Watch the NLT web site for new information, activity and event announcements, newsletters, and membership opportunities: www.newlandtrust.org.

The Saranac New Land Trust is certified Balsamea-compatible! So says:

- The Balsamean

A light broke upon my brain. It was the carol of a bird.
– Lord Byron

May 9, 2008 – Early this morning I finally got a chance to see a merrily singing White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis). Perched about 12 feet up in the top of a young birch tree, it entertained me for a long time while I regretted not having my camera handy.

Photo released to the public domain by Ken Thomas

          If Balsamea had an anthem, it might be the song of this prolific singer, with some percussive accompaniment of red squirrel chatter, and the laughter of woodpeckers. The White-throated Sparrow’s song sounds plaintive and happy at the same time, as if to say, “I’m alone, but I’m enjoying my solitude until you join me.”

          I read that they live up to ten years. No doubt some of the white-throated sparrows I hear were native Balsameans long before I arrived. They seem unoffended by my presence.

          The shrill whistling song consists of two long notes followed by three rapid triplets, sometimes only one long note, sometimes three, sometimes not all three trailing triplets; perhaps juveniles practicing. It goes something like this: “me, ME, me-me-me, me-me-me, me-me-me.”  There is an audio recording at the USGS Infocenter, but it’s not a particularly good recording. (See below for links to more recordings.)

          Tradition describes the song verbally as “Poor Sam, Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,” or “Oh, Canada, Canada, Canada.” I prefer to interpret it as, “Here we sing-for-thee, in-the-tree, happily!”

          I don’t know where these singers were all my life, because I don’t recall hearing them prior to moving to the Adirondacks several years ago. Perhaps living here amidst so much boreal forest awakened my awareness of nature. I think so.

          They spend winters in the southern states, come north in the spring and stay until autumn throughout the northern states and Canada. Hearing their song for the first time each year is a reassurance that winter is finally over.

          They sing any time of the day and often at night. Recently one serenaded me all night long.  On a silently windless night, long after all the other birds have finished their sunset choruses, when I hear this sparrow’s song, lilting through the trees in the dark, it feels like an auditory dessert, a surprise lullabye sung just for me.

          A Google search on “white-throated sparrow” yields many hits but here are some recommendations:

          I enjoyed reading nearby Southern Vermont Chris Petrak’s blog post titled, White-throated Sparrows Are Practicing Their Songs, where he says, amidst a thorough essay on the singer, “The White-throated Sparrow has one of the most recognizable songs of any sparrow, or any songbird for that matter. To my ear, the clear, whistled notes of the song sounds plaintive and mournful, a song of ruefulness and longing. I have to remind myself that it is a love song, a song to establish territory, warn off rivals, and attract a mate. There is nothing plaintive about the White-throat’s song to another White-throat. To one of his own kind on breeding territory, it is a declaration of territorial prerogative or an invitation to erotic adventure.”

          One of the more authoritative treatises on this singer is at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology. Their sound recording has three long notes before the triplets. I occasionally hear them sing that way, too.

          Video clips are available at the Internet Bird Collection.

          National Public Radio affiliate KPLU and Seattle Audubon offer an excellent recording as part of a radio essay written by Dennis Paulson and narrated by Frank Corrado at birdnote.org, in Sounds of the Boreal Forest Transcript-782, with a sound track of the boreal forest provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York.

- The Balsamean

On Weather

Another personal essay by Zivara from his Summer 2003 journal.

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When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shop-keepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too … I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.
– Henry David Thoreau

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June, 2003 – Spring in the Adirondacks has finally warmed up and dried out after a wet, cool beginning.  Still, nothing about the weather has stopped me from enjoying the outdoors.  Being out there under all kinds of conditions, including rain, wind, snow, ice, darkness – things people deem negative – are opportunities to enjoy the experience of reality in nature as it really is, not merely as it is in “fair weather.”  Each condition is a unique and enjoyable experience in its own way.

For me, the least preferred condition is high heat (over 80) with full sun.  But those are days for being in the water and slow saunters in shady places, and there are plenty of opportunities for that.  I’ll take a cloudy or partially cloudy day over a full-sun day any time except in winter when the sun is a better friend to me.  Some day I want to be “out there” in a hurricane, hunkered down in a hollow, ready to leap and run out of the way if a tree comes down at me!

One night I stayed out until well after dark and never turned on a flashlight, so my eyes could adjust and get their night vision.  Then I walked back to the car, partially cross-country and partially on the trail, in what most would call “complete darkness.”  It was not “complete” at all.  Humans do have some capacity for night vision.  Night walking makes for very mindful walking, too, when all your attention is really on walking, not on how you’re going to pay the bills or deal with tomorrow’s appointments.

We are like aliens on our own planet.  The experience of “adverse” conditions in nature is not really adverse!  Each has its own beauty.  Shutting ourselves in against them leaves us disconnected from reality as it really is, knowing only a partial reality that we create in our buildings and yards and cars, even our gardens, but not the one filling the majority of the space in the world.

We know most of the roads and stores and major buildings within fifty miles of home, but we don’t know our way around a single square mile of any woods without well-beaten paths, and many can’t even navigate those without taking wrong turns.  Many people can’t even use the sun to tell them what direction they’re going.  Neither would they recognize the same large tree in the woods if they walked past it ten times, usually because they’re too busy thinking about other things and other places and other times instead of what is right in front of them in the present moment.  We’re too busy going someplace else to enjoy where we are.  We’re too busy racing forward to take a moment to turn around and see where we came from, which is the best way to recognize the way home.

Thoreau once wrote, “I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.  There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one.”  I find it interesting that he said “unconsciously yield to it,” then claims that it is heedlessness and stupidity (or not being consciously aware) that gets us lost.  This points up the need to learn to know that “magnetism in Nature” by conscious effort, by heedfulness and careful attention, until it becomes second nature, so we can then “unconsciously” follow it the way we “unconsciously” drive a very complex machine at the death-defying speed of a mile a minute (and faster) over fantastic distances.  If we put half the effort into learning what nature is doing within our sight as we put into learning to drive and maintain a car, we’d all be smarter than foxes and owls in knowing nature, and never afraid of the dark.

I can sit or stand still for an hour in the woods and just look at what is within immediate view, and do it repeatedly at the same place over and over again throughout the seasons, and see completely “new” and different things every time.  Not to mention hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling, and the apparent changes, or differences, incurred by changes in daylight and weather.  Just a small change in the speed of the wind makes a place altogether different.

That’s why I spend so much time on the same trail and in the same wooded area over and over again.  It’s also why I’ll never tire of the woods and trails within ten miles of where I live now.  To me, going ten miles away is to the outer limits of my territory.  Ten miles!  In eight months of living here, I don’t yet know one percent of the public land within three miles!  (I’m surrounded by public lands … one of the best things they do with my taxes.)

An example of this phenomenon of being unconscious of reality is that I believed I had to carry-in rocks to make a fireplace at my little “Big Pine Refuge,” a plot 200 feet off a certain trail.  So I dutifully hauled in dozens of rocks from the trail and the creek, a few at a time, over many visits.  But with each visit to the place, and repeated observations of the surrounding fifty feet, I learned more about it.  Finally I found that there were enough large rocks within fifty feet to make a wonderful fireplace that could be there for a hundred years before nature buries it in her inexorable progressions through changes of state.  In just two days, using only what I found within fifty feet, I built a fireplace larger and more fortified than I could have made in months with scores of the rocks I had strength and will enough to carry from the trail or the creek two hundred feet away.  Now, mostly for the sake of tradition, I still bring in at least one rock on every visit, to build a cairn, a monument, a cenotaph in memoriam to billions like myself who have died and have been dying of life detached from reality.

I am aware that at any moment a microburst of air can blow down the huge Pine (of nearly a three-foot diameter) nearest my fireplace, or that it may just fall over of its own weight at any time.  When the great Pine goes down, its roots will flip up and toss about my silly little monument like a house of cards in a gale.  I’ve considered this carefully, and determined that it is no matter for concern.  The joy has not been in having it, but in building it, in being there, in all the hikes associated with each visit to the place, in all the real living simply and joyfully lived there and nearby.

It is much more a monument in homage to the God who loaned me the Big Pine Refuge than it is a fireplace.  There I am much more naturally inclined to prayer than in church or in my apartment.  That place is a church to me.  (I may yet learn truly that every place and every moment is sacred.)

I should write a Will to have the ashes of my carcass dumped into this fireplace by a few friends gathered to build a fire in it, with the supply of wood I stacked little by little in a hidden stash nearby, burning a tribute on top of my ashes to celebrate the passing of life enjoyed there.

Though it seems that I enjoy such things more alone than in most kinds of company, it would thrill me no end to know that someone else came to regard and enjoy the place as I do.  But that may be impossible for anyone who did not experience the transformation of the plot from just another spot in the woods to a refuge.

I don’t have a fireplace there.  I have an altar.  And I did not build it.  It was there already, just waiting for some idle arms and legs to bring it together, and a heart to appreciate it and the process of its appearing.  In a sense, it has been there always, partly inside of me and partly scattered in pieces on that little plot of ground, waiting for a long time to materialize, using me as part of its process, not at all anything that I can call mine.  It is a temporary gift for me to enjoy while I can.

I cherish it more in knowing that at any moment it may disappear, as do all things, and as will I.  Everything changes.  Nothing is forever but God, the All, the Nameless, the Placeless, the Presence in all presence, the Conscious in all consciousness.  I seem to know this best when I am alone in the woods.

I think it’s true that I’ve never been to the same place in the woods twice without finding it different (and I add to the changes by my repeated presence).  Not so in our cloistered world of houses, offices, stores, cars, roads, and sidewalks.  We do all we can to create sameness and familiarity, which is the opposite of what Nature does … and what God does.  We box ourselves into a fabricated reality for security, but it makes us falsely insecure when pushed out of the box, which is inevitable and frequent.

Not that I don’t appreciate my little boxes, like my stone fireplace/altar.  I enjoy creating them, too.  It’s human nature to do so.  But again in the words of Thoreau, “To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.”  Even a sacred refuge can become as boring to me as a TV commercial if I abuse myself of it with exclusive attachment.  The fact that my “Big Pine Refuge” will be destroyed eventually by nature is something good to know.  So I happily regard it as a temporary gift, and gratefully acknowledge that there are many more to be experienced everywhere.

I laughed out loud when I read in the same Thoreau essay of 1862, when this country was still almost completely wilderness, “When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shop-keepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too … I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.”  No wonder I’ve felt suicidal at times.

Besides … getting back to the matter of the weather … many forecasts couldn’t be more wrong if they intentionally lied.  Many are the most pleasant days, with just a few quickly passing showers, when they had predicted rain for the whole day.  So if I depend on the forecasts too much, I’ll miss a lot of “good” days, and there have been many “good” rainy days, and snowy days, and dark nights, too.  They’re all good.

Zivara

… the place …

Balsamea: a bit of Adirondack forest

The Balsamea Forest Refuge (BFR) is a privately owned 19-acre forested lot located in the northern reaches of the Adirondack Mountain region of northeastern Upstate New York, west of Lake Champlain and Vermont, within about an hour’s drive from the Canadian border and Plattsburgh, NY.

Regrown from original forest cleared in the 19^th Century, Balsamea is now the home of (in estimated order of population density) balsam fir, white pine, maple, birch, beech, red pine, spruce, aspen, a rare few oak, cedar, and scotch pine, and a few yet unidentified species of trees, and the wildlife they support.

Among animals sighted in recent years there are whitetail deer, fox, turkey, red squirrel, porcupine, rabbit, and a variety of birds such as finches, chickadees, sparrows, robins, blue jays, woodpeckers, doves, crows, and hawks. Though eastern coyotes and black bears have not been seen or heard lately at Balsamea, they are in the area, and a very rare moose may wander through from time to time. A few harmless snakes are around, all manner of northeastern forest insects, and mice, of course, and the resident game warden, Dr. Buddha Buddy The Miracle Dog. We are not aware of any invasive species, but are concerned about encroachment by the pine-killing Sirex Woodwasp, and suspect that Spruce Budworm takes some firs and spruces to make room for our developing hardwoods.

A variety of shrubs, berries, grasses and flowers grow throughout, especially many wild blueberries. About a dozen pink ladyslipper orchids have been spotted, and there are sure to be more decorating the land with their delicate June blooms. The soil is mossy, acidic and rocky.

The property is very flat throughout, with no surface water or wetland features, sitting on top of something like a plateau half a mile above a major river. Although we have a share of black flies and mosquitoes in season, the lack of water features helps make them less a nuisance than in other areas.

Four rock walls run through the property, ranging from 1 to 4 feet high and from 3 to 6 feet wide. Part of the property near the road frontage was once the corner of a farm field long ago abandoned to nature, now overgrown with trees. Guessing from the existence of the rock walls, the property may have been used for farming, livestock grazing, or maybe housing for a nearby iron ore mining village (extinct since the late 19th Century). No old wells or building foundations have been found on the lot. There is no evidence of mines or mining equipment on the lot, either. The mines are located a short distance away, and have, to our knowledge from historical accounts, all flooded and caved in long ago.

Except for a small camp established by the current owner, and some selective logging of the largest, oldest trees by the former owner around 2002, there has been no human development on the lot since approximately 1890 when the mining village closed down.

The lot is currently surrounded by other forested properties except for one house across the road.

The Adirondacks

The Adirondack Mountains of Northeastern New York State are part of the Laurentian Mountain system of Canada, not the Appalachian chain as many mistakenly believe. Balsamea Forest Refuge is located within the Adirondack “Blue Line,” denoting the roughly six million acre region under the jurisdiction of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) created in 1971 by the State legislature “to develop long-range land use plans for both public and private lands within the Park.” The so-called “Park” was originally a forest preserve created in 1892 by amendment to the State constitution, first denoted on a map by a blue line drawn around the preserve (thus the “Blue Line” name). Today about half of the “Park” is public forest preserve, the other half privately owned lands highly regulated by the APA. Refer to the Adirondack Forest Preserve page of the NY Department of Environmental Conservation.

- The Balsamean