In the southwestern part of our town is a large area, several hundred acres in extent, that is known locally as simply ‘the woods.’ These woods ‘recommend themselves,’ in Thoreau’s apt phrase, because no one else does. They remain officially undiscovered and vulnerable, one of the last large undeveloped and unpreserved tracts of woodland left on the Cape, and as such a refuge of genuine neglect amid staged rurality, planned open space and carefully managed preserves.
Of course these woods constitute no real ‘wilderness,’ even in the loosest sense of the word, though even with a map it is easy to get lost in the maze of roads that cross and recross in weblike fashion throughout its extent. The roads themselves, all dirt, suggest heavy human traffic in the past and from what I have been able to glean, it has been one of the more used sections of our town. Though apparently there were never many dwellings built this far into the interior, the entire area was once a large, enclosed sheep pasture, the only remnants of which are the old names ‘Eastgate’ and ‘Westgate’ which still cling to a couple of the roads.
The terrain is typically hilly moraine, pockmarked with numerous and frequently extensive bogs and swamps which even twenty years ago had been largely abandoned, and which now have sizable pines and swamp maples growing up among the fruitless cranberry vines. Yet one can still find, partially hidden beneath catbriar thickets, decades of leaves and the camouflaging weathering of time, a network of floodgates and dikes, concrete culverts running under the roads, and several abandoned cranberry shacks, some of which were later turned into summer cottages and in their turn abandoned, too.
All this indicates that these forgotten bogs were once intensively cultivated, that large investments of time, money and human enterprise were made here. Places in the woods where four or five sandy roads now seem to meet aimlessly were once busy intersections for wagons hauling in picking equipment, mountains of boxes and families of Cape Verdean pickers from North Harwich (many of whose descendants own large parcels of the bogs today) who made these cutover woods ring with song and enterprise, where only the jay calls and the split-pear tracks of stunted deer are found today.
The only human inhabitants now are seasonal summer residents of a dozen or so ‘camps’ built along the shores of the string of herring ponds that border these woods. These modest houses are for the most part fairly old, some neglected, but all unpretentious and set well back from the shore so as to be nearly imperceptible from the water. As such they present a contrast to the series of recently built homes on the opposite sides of the ponds, many of which are practically cantilevered over the bluffs, their faces hanging out all year round to every passing canoe and frog.
One mild Sunday in early October our family spent the afternoon biking along the deserted roads. At one point we found a system of linked footpaths marked with weathered, wooden signs nailed to dead oaks. These bore such hand-lettered legends as ‘SALLY’S ALLEE’ and ‘TINKER’S LANE,’ named after children of a generation past whose families still summer here, though Tinker is now a banker in New York and Sally has not been down an alley in years.
The woods, I have said, are no wilderness, yet nature, being no purist, reclaims her own without prejudice. Under the short oaks the roadsides were paved with wintergreen and may-flower, and we could see the withered, brown husks of numerous ladyslippers that flourished unremarked here last June. As we pedaled along, we flushed several coveys of quail, a few grouse, and even a doe that went bounding with hard small hooves up out of a shallow kettle hole. The abandoned bogs and swamps, most of which are connected with the ponds, provide excellent breeding grounds for the thousands of herring that migrate up from the Bay each spring, as well as suitable habitats for night herons and green herons that ring the ponds in summer.
We stopped to watch the waterfowl at a narrow, wet neck of land that runs between two of the ponds. A flock of coots paddled away at our approach and several handsome little buffleheads, or ‘butterballs,’ darted back and forth across the water. A pair of white-necked common loons, subdued in plumage now and a pale reminder of the wailing, brightly patterned birds I encountered on a Maine lake last summer, dove with little fillips and bobbed up again. On the far side of the pond a few canvasbacks fed quietly, an advance party, I hoped, of the hundreds of these ducks which have wintered here the past few years.
A less ‘virgin’ tract of woods it would be hard to find, yet it contains, more than most places, the essence of what I demand from nature. Much more than pristine wildernesses and austere mountain peaks, I crave the feeling of men having been in a place, of having experimented repeatedly and earnestly with it in a biodegradable way, and of having had the grace and good sense to abandon it when it was no go, leaving no permanent scars, only good ghosts and a fine wildlife habitat. These woods have that sense of human depth to them as few places I know. Even the trees themselves, scraggly rather than primeval, show signs of recent ravagement by gypsy moths, a human import.
It is this kind of connection with the land that I think we most want. We desire, at bottom, neither a subjugation of nature nor a self-segregation born of a fear of our own destructiveness, but rather that intermingling of man and his environment, a land held truly in common, that produces the truest, richest natural history. Not only our numbers, but our notions of ownership and use, seem to have grown to the point where we can no longer afford such ‘places of enlightened neglect,’ as a friend of mine calls them. We must either appropriate them forever into some irrevocable human shape, or else quarantine them off for some sort of ‘passive recreational use.’
I myself have put a good deal of time into trying to acquire or preserve just such areas for official conservation use. As a conservationist, I know that either we must manage them or they will be managed for us in not too many years. Yet I still cannot help but feel that there is a certain sterility, or stasis, that is shared by restored windmills and national parks, where all conceivable activities have been programmed, regulated or prohibited – in a word, circumscribed. I suppose it is that any place from which we have deliberately removed our full engagement is, in a sense, no longer natural.
In such a polarized world, with all its lines drawn, a place like this, still so anonymously and indefinitely designated as ‘the woods,’ remains valuably alive, open-ended and open to all universal forces, natural and human. It is one of those diminishing number of places on earth whose fate has not yet been pigeon-holed one way or the other. Because it remains alive in this way, it is almost tremblingly vulnerable. Yet because of its vulnerability it retains, for a little while at least, the enriching possibility of something further (though probably something final) happening here of which we are a living part.