There’s something about the angle of light on early spring days in Vermont, when the snow cover is almost gone, and the sun shines through the stark canopy right down to the forest floor. The light seems to throw every tree into relief. Every ribbon of yellow birch, every yawning hollow in a wolf maple, every line of sapsucker holes ringing a basswood is revealed, and the woods remind you that they are made up of unique individuals, each with its own story.
My oldest daughter started taking the bus to school this past winter and recently became interested in walking home from the bus stop. For about a month now, on warm enough days and with her little sister in tow, I’ve walked 1½ miles round-trip to the bus stop and back, ascending from and descending into the little mountain brook valley where we live, as spring unfolds day by day.
These walks have coincided with my part in a roadside ash tree inventory, intended to help our town prepare for the inevitable arrival of emerald ash borer. Well after logging the inventory data into the GIS app on my phone, I’ve remained attuned to each of the ash trees along the school bus walk: the quadruple-trunked behemoth at the corner of our neighbors’ horse paddock; the arrow-straight specimen at the foot of the hill, dinged at its base by a snowplow; the 2-foot-thick sentinel, huggable from the muddy road. (At the risk of being sentimental, why not hug the tree? I’m going to miss it someday.)
The stretch of road I love the most is about a tenth of a mile long and runs along Mill Brook. On one side is a narrow micro-floodplain trafficked by coyote and deer; on the other starts the steady ascent to the top of Mount Ascutney. Walking this section of road at this time of year, we can see several ephemeral freshets and waterfalls feeding into the brook, but in a couple of months the view will be obscured by ostrich ferns that even now are scheming to bust through the gravel dust and leaf litter.
Here, white ash trees grow beside sugar maples, a lone cottonwood, and not a small amount of withered elm. Sometimes I wonder if the photos I take of my daughters dancing and skipping down the road will one day resemble the sepia prints of New England downtowns prior to the onslaught of Dutch elm disease. I think about my girls as adults coming to visit us through woods unrecognizable from their childhoods – especially this tiny brookside segment, where they learned to pedal their bikes, helped pick up wave after wave of blue Bud Lite cans from careless joyriders, and simply did a lot of quiet noticing even when I wasn’t noticing them doing so, absorbing the feel and familiarity of their home as the baseline of their lives.
My own baseline was quite different, although similarly shaped by both ecological loss and recovery, even if I didn’t learn this until much later. If as a kid I had seen a bald eagle – a species which in the 1980s was just beginning its recovery from the ravages of DDT, illegal shooting, and habitat loss – it would have seared into my memory. For my girls, eagle sightings are a regular occurrence. The eventual loss of the ash trees could go either way – one they recognize and grieve, or one they imperceptibly adapt to.
When I was growing up in Massachusetts, I felt the clear distinction between the sunny, red oak groves enclosing the front yard, and the cool, shadowy hemlock woods behind the house. About 10 years ago, my parents had several of the hemlocks removed, not out of woolly adelgid fears but to allow space to replace the deck with a sunroom. Now, flocks of wild turkeys – which I never saw as a kid – wheel through daily, and the young clearing behind the house is festooned with blackberry brambles and other pioneers.
Perhaps some good, something surprising, will emerge someday along this familiar stretch of road, too. After the ash trees are gone (unless some of them prove to be resistant, which is both possible and hopeful), other trees, vines, and flowers will take their chances, born by wind or scat or root. The generations of people who follow may look with curiosity at pictures of what once was, wondering what it felt like to walk among and beneath the ash trees, like the disappeared elms and chestnuts before them. My family will love them while we can, attentive and hopeful for whatever comes next.