I was given two CDs for Christmas. The first, by Louis Armstrong, begins with his classic, “What a Wonderful World.” Hearing it makes me know what it means to experience tears of joy.
The second CD, by Lyle Lovett, includes the breathtaking song “This Old Porch.” It’s partly a lament for the loss of the old Texas, as he sings, “This old porch is like a weathered gray-haired 70 years of Texas, who’s doing all he can not to give in to the city….”
But the song is also defiant, ending with the words, “... remembering the falling down and the laughter of the curse of luck from all those sons of (guns) who said we’d never get back up.”
While neither Armstrong’s New Orleans nor Lovett’s Texas are my home ground, these two songs linger with me, singing in perfect pitch about why we all care so much about our own home ground. Readers of this magazine and supporters of the Center are among the legions who defiantly “get back up” from the falls we experience as we protect the intimate relationship to land that much of our culture seems so willing to give away.
Why do we do this? We do it because, no matter how unsentimental we’re determined to be, we all experience those moments when we stop in the middle of our walk in the woods, or shut off the chainsaw, or wait patiently in a deer stand and look around us, thinking, “What a wonderful world.” Whether our inclination is to count the unseen bugs in a rotting stump or to labor in a stand of hardwoods to harvest a livelihood on a brutal winter morning, we each have these moments of awe and defiant determination. Others may walk away, but we won’t; it’s just too precious to leave behind.
The Center aims to celebrate this spirit. In concert with our readers, writers, contributors, Northern Woodlands Goes to School students, and other organizations with which we share common cause, we celebrate both the simple beauty of the Northern Forest and the hard and often frustrating work of those who work in and cherish it.
In our last issue, we asked in this space for feedback on how we’re doing our job. Your response was overwhelmingly positive, and we are very grateful for that. But we know that, like everyone else, we’re likely to fall down now and again; we hope that, when it happens, you’ll help us get back up.
Within this stubborn, defiant community working to protect the vitality of our forests, there is room for disagreement about how to do it, but there is also a growing awareness that we need to pick each other up when we stumble.
Beyond the simple beauty of our forest landscape, it’s this shared sense of responsibility for each other and for the land that makes us an integral part of that beauty. The world really needs all of us to keep doing this.