By Mack Williams
On some sunlit days when standing in my backyard off of the Old Concord Road in the late 50s and the 60s, I could see evidence of a cleared circular space of ground at a distance of about 100 feet into the forest. It was illuminated from above by the sunlight passing through a matching clear circle in the tree canopy. The optimum times of its visibility stretched from when the leaves of autumn had fallen, to just before the time when the growing leaves of spring reached full-size.
As a child , I remembered hearing that the circular cleared space of ground was the site of some lumber sawing years before, being nothing formal like an actual sawmill, but a small and temporary sort of set up, not unlike those brief camps established long ago by the Native-Americans when passing through an area during the hunt. Whatever path to it which might have originally existed, had become completely erased by forest growth, accompanied with the fallen and decayed forest litter built up over many years , since the back woods was not regularly raked and burned as was our yard at the annual leaf-burning time.
Back then,the only way to navigate toward that “clearing” was to fashion an impromptu path, always constructed by combining the careful coordination of my constant sight of that brighter circle, with my steps around the intervening treelets, logs, brush, briars, spider webs, etc. On those times that I made my way back there, my path around the varying ( varying in type and varying in degree over time) obstacles differed with each repeated journey, so no well-beaten route was ever established.
Upon reaching, and stepping into that circular space where the wood was once sawed , it felt to me as if the ground were covered with something of the same consistency as that of the foam stuffing found in couches or pillows, as it had a bouncy kind of “give” to it. What I was standing on was, of course, the built-up layer of sawdust from the wood sawed there. I never dug into it, but imagined it to be at least a foot in depth. In addition to standing out from the rest of the forest by its “springiness”, that ground also stood out visually, still being a yellowy-orange color, characteristic of sawdust.
The sawdust, exposed to rain and sun over the years by the arboreal opening, still retained its singular character and had not yet decomposed to become a component of the soil. Wood, it seems ( even as sawdust), can last much longer in death, far exceeding the span of time which constituted that of its growing, such as many-centuries-old houses and fallen tree trunks, lying seemingly forever on the forest floor.
A few seedlings had made their way up through the sawdust “mulch” back then, but just a few, as they were only “chance” plantings anyway. When I last stood in that place decades ago, the lowly sawdust and clear sky above it still held their limited sway within the thick forest.There were a few massive granite rocks very close-by, millions of years older, and of course in no way connected to the sawing which had transpired ( Rowan’s great rocks never “accompany”; they always “predate”, by eons).
In recent years, when I would think about the old woods behind my first home, I sometimes wondered if over time, a great many more happenstance plantings of acorns had occurred in the old sawdust, to the extent that both circles of ground and sky might have become filled.
On September 15th, 2012, I made my most recent visit to my childhood home. My friends, Charlie and Pam, who live there now, gestured toward the woods behind the back yard, where I saw something which I had never seen within that woods in all my years of growing up there. Just beyond a now thin, almost transparent expanse of trees at the backyard’s limit ,could be seen a wealth of sunlight and blue sky all across a good portion of the area beyond ( not just peeping through as before), the result of recent and on-going logging.
The sight of that greatly multiplied quantity of light making its way, relatively freshly into my boyhood woods, reminded me of something in one of my son Jeremy’s favorite movies when he was a child: “Never Ending Story”. In it, the shadowy “Nothing” is consuming everything in the universe, but when Charlie and Pam called my attention to those cleared woods on that recent day, I saw the reverse. I beheld a place in which the equally-devastating “Nothingness” of blue sky and bright sunshine (seen as negative only in this case, for in any other, I always welcome them both) is in the process of devouring a good portion of my boyhood forest-wandering place of shadows, dankness, toadstools, and moss. My father, brother Joe, and I often set out through that area many years ago in search of just the right cedar tree at Christmastime, taking care not to walk through the webs which the spiders had strung between the trees, but soon there will be nothing in that place from which the present-day spiders can hang their spinnings.
I never took the time in any of my recent visits to the Old Concord Road to walk back into those woods behind my old home in order to see if any additional seedlings from wind-scattered or squirrel-scattered acorns had grown sufficiently enough to fill that bare sawdust ground, while also rising up to cover the correspondingly vacant heavenly circle above it. Now, instead of any past possibility of the forest having expanded, or ever expanding in the future to fill those places of sawdust and sky, it is presently shrinking fast in man-made retreat, revealing even more ground, and uncovering even more blue.