This story was originally shared with us during our Story Contest by Southeast Conservation Corps crew member Jake. The contest has ended, but you can always share your stories with us for possible publication on The Field Guide! Please email your stories to communications@conservationlegacy.org. 

 

 

There are two dangers inherent in trimming brush, and at the moment I am confronting both of them.

The first is physical fatigue, the strains and overuse injuries stemming from bending too much from the back, from swinging too much with the wrist. The second is tedium, a side effect of bending and sweeping for hours in silence with little more than a stiff breeze and the chance of autumn rain for company. The first I mitigate by bending from the knees, using my core, drinking water. For the second, I attempt to create meaning out of monotony. I reach out with the loppers, clip a beech limb, bend to collect it from the ground, toss it into the undergrowth. Reach, clip, bend, toss. The motions build upon each other like waves, or maybe better, like tree rings, or the seasons that etch them into the cross section of each young tree I cut.

I think of Bonsai trees pruned into intricate miniatures of the trees above me. I think of Zen Buddhists meditating by raking pebbles in a stone garden. I bend to lift a branch, and think of Buddhist pilgrims who bow 10,000 times on their way to Bohdgaya. Then I look at a small hemlock sapling I am about to clip, and think of a hemlock. I lower the loppers a moment. It’s certainly one of the benefits of manual tools—they make you think before expending the effort to cut something down. Cutting or not cutting hemlocks. Leopold said that being a conservationist is a matter of what one “thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop.” I know that a trail like this needs a corridor six by eight feet, enough to hold the brush back off its pedestrians. But I also know that the world needs hemlocks, and I have seen 200 year old giants lying dead from beetle kill. With each sapling I pause at, I feel the hope that this tree out of the hundreds around could be the one to beat the blight and the beetles and sway over this hiking trail a hundred years from now. Or over an abandoned game path. The hemlock itself, and it’s potential for sequestering carbon, may have a say in which. That, perhaps, is the true beauty and value of trail work.

In trimming brush, you continually confront the questions of conservation in concrete form. I nurse a deep affection for hemlocks, one truthfully founded more on their spectacular size and beauty than their ability to store carbon or harbor other species. Their recent history of decline only makes the affection more convulsive. In this question, though, I know where the answer tends. The corridor of sacrifice: the knowledge that each hemlock cut alongside the trail allows for thousands more to grow in the trail-less forest around, the whole of them saved from the saw by a public that supports public land for recreation. It’s saving the forest by the loss of a few trees. That doesn’t mean I like cutting them, but an ecosystem view salves individual misgivings.

However much you plead with the rhododendron to be a trail, it would much rather be a thicket.

Much like farming, trail work is a cure for the dual delusions of ‘hippyism’ and mastery. However much you attempt to value all living things and de-center the anthropocentric conscience, you develop an itching annoyance at privet’s stubborn procreativity, rhododendron’s webs of interlocking stems. Like a farmer, you find yourself called upon to exert a piece of human will onto the land, and the land, to your surprise, resists. However much you plead with the rhododendron to be a trail, it would much rather be a thicket. Aggravating as it may be, it is comforting to observe that here in Appalachia the natural environment still has the health and resilience to be able to push back. In many places, such as the overgrazed desert grasslands of the southwest, that is less and less the case.

The contest though, is grounding, a reminder that if you want an omelette, you have to break some eggs. Considering modern industrial-agricultural methods for producing eggs, it might be better to skip the omelette altogether, and have a bagel instead. But the American people demand their omelettes, and you, as a servant of the public, are set to provide them. So you extend the loppers and slice the base of one more tiny hemlock seedling. As I’ve said, trail work provides a dual cure. For even as you work to reshape the natural character of a six by eight foot corridor, you are constrained by what erosion and roots and two million boots a year will do to a trail. You cannot make the trail behave by sheer grit and force of will alone. For that, you need to start thinking like a mountain. Thinking like the branching root system of an American Beech. Thinking like a dehydrated hiker who is thinking, in fact, of nothing but the air conditioning of their SUV. In that thinking, and in the learning and humility that hopefully comes with it, you learn to treasure each stone, sapling, and grain of sand even as you pull it from its nest and dash it into the underbrush. You become neither transient tourist nor abusive developer, but another thing entirely: a steward of wilderness, or something like it.

A raindrop plaps on my helmet and I am still trimming brush, filling my mind through the hours. The rain starts to roll through in earnest, and in a distant curve of the trail I see my crew leader pause to reach for her rain jacket. I pull on my own coat against the chill and keep working. In the damp silence of my coat’s hood, I remember the litany of why’s, the forest of reasons for which I am standing in the rain whacking at sticks with an only slightly sharper stick. This too is a sacrifice: to the corridor, to the forest, and a sacrifice to the greatest hope of all:

that maybe one Homo sapiens of the many come to walk these trails will hear…hear truly…and the world will be transformed by that hearing.