Chapter 2

Babes in the Woods

Keeping a sanctuary of trees is a journey of constant discovery. The keeper comes on board usually after the trees have been on the road, so to speak, for decades or centuries. This ancientness is utterly beguiling to tree lovers. Even if knowledgeable about forestry in general, they usually have no notion of what has transpired in the past in their grove, or in the place where they are seeking to buy a grove. Just to think about how, a century or more ago, Native Americans or immigrant settlers might have stood under the same oak tree you are standing under today inspires awesome daydreams.

There is no specific, particular knowledge about how trees got to where they are growing or why they remain. Who and what kinds of people and other creatures walked here, lived here when these trees were just sprouting? Before they sprouted? This kind of knowledge appears all the more intriguing now that anthropologists and archaeologists are convinced that what the first Europeans found in America was not a natural “forest primeval” or wilderness but, at least partly, a human-managed forest. This conclusion greatly alters how we should view the woodland we choose to live in. If we are to manage it “correctly,” we must take into account not just the botanical and biological environment of the place, but how its natural history may have been influenced by humans, animals, and insects. Only then can we begin to define what “correctness” might be.

I am fortunate to know at least a little of the past two hundred years of my woodland because, first of all, I grew up in it, and because I still live in it eighty years later. More than that, the land round about has always been owned or managed by my kinfolks, so I have had the good fortune to learn from ancestors what happened here for a hundred or more years before I was born. My pioneer forebears knew personally people who had been acquainted with the Wyandot Indians who lived here until 1842. Some of the folklore of these woodlands that was passed down to me is centuries old.

Growing up, my siblings and I spent at least as much time in these groves as we did in our cultivated fields or in the barn and barnyard, and, if sleeping time is not counted, even in the house. None of the woodlots belonged to us at first, and the fact that five of them now do strikes me as nearly miraculous.

But the explanation is logical enough. We loved those tree groves so much that, as adults, we were willing to go to quite extraordinary lengths to own them and thereby keep away the bulldozers that obliterated so many other tree groves in our county. Our favorite grove we called Adrian’s Woods on the western border of the farm, named after the relative who owned it. Many a day we played there with our cousins for hours. Kerr’s Woods, to the south, belonged to “two old ladies in Columbus” and was farmed by Adrian and his brother Raymond, and before that by great-uncle Dave. The eight-acre grove just to the north of us my father bought after the previous owner, Ralph Snider, died. Many years later, after I had spent much time in other faraway woodlands, my wife and I came back here and acquired a fourth woodlot about two miles from the home farm where we have lived now nearly four decades. A fifth woodlot is part of my brother’s farm. There are several other woodlots in the same area that I roamed while growing up. Today, old pastureland near these groves is also growing back to woodland. These woodlots have been my lifelong college of what I call “deep forestry.”

This education actually began with a grove on the east side of the home farm that did disappear, in the forties, to the bulldozer. This was the first woodlot to vanish in our farming community, which is probably why I remember it so well. When the farm on which the grove stood was sold out of the Rall family when I was about nine, the first thing the new owner did was to cut down the woodlot. He could hardly be blamed, I suppose. It was such a nondescript little scrap of land, as far as it could be from the roads that methodically mark every mile square in our county. It was being used mostly as a trash dump, a common fate of woodlots in those days. The new owner said he just wanted to “square up the farm,” an excuse often used to cut down groves in our flat, checkerboard-square, Corn Belt landscape, where everyone is a straight shooter and always makes “square deals” and never (horrors) runs in circles. The geometry of squares and rectangles rules our way of thinking. Everything must always set square with the world.

There were a few giant trees in the grove that were no doubt worth some money, or at least they would be today. My oldest sister and I, who witnessed the end of the grove, were not at first dismayed because Dad said that logging off the trees would encourage morel mushrooms to grow there. Hunting morels in the spring was our most exciting pastime. The spongelike fungi are hard to see on the woodland floor and seem to pop up where you have just looked. Morel hunters know what I mean.

But I remember the disappearance of that grove so well for a reason that is hard to put into words. The stumps remained for a couple of years afterward, and the burdock grew rampantly in the sunlight that now reached the woodland floor. Someone said that burdock roots could be harvested and sold, but we had, then, no knowledge of how to find buyers for such products. We did indeed pick a big sackful of morels there, though.

Then one spring day when I walked back to “Nelson’s sawed-off woods,” as my sister still calls it, after Nelson Rall, the previous owner, to hunt for more morels, there was nothing there except black soil. The area had been transformed into farmland. I stood there transfixed at the total absence of the tree stumps and the new seedlings that had already started to grow back. I tried to figure out exactly where the biggest oak stump had stood, where we had found the most morels. It just seemed impossible to my boyhood mind that this remote little retreat of mine had so totally vanished into thin air. Poof! There was something evil about it.

I became at that moment a defender and savior of woodlots. Heightening my resolve, my elders were upset at the disappearance of “Nelson’s sawed-off woods” too. The Ralls (my mother’s family—there were at least fourteen nearly contiguous Rall family farms in the neighborhood) were, with one or two notable exceptions, extremely traditional and conservative in their farming philosophy. No one at that time was accustomed to such sudden disappearances of tree groves because no one had grasped yet the power of bulldozers. And a sacred rule of rural life had been violated. I can still hear Adrian saying to his brother Raymond—bellowing it actually, because he always italicized important announcements by shouting: “A farmer must reserve ten acres of every hundred for a woodlot.” I never forgot that, mostly because the longer I lived, the more I became convinced that he was right.

I have often wondered about my attraction to wild nature, particularly woodland. If anyone were ever foolish enough to sequence my DNA, I wonder if they would find a tidbit of genetic scrap that was supposed to have dropped off along the way, like the primate tail shriveled and finally dropped off the human butt, so they say. This stray gene might tie me closer to the sanctuary of the trees than is true of most people. Or is it possible that everyone possesses this genetic grist and they just have not had the opportunity to express it? Perhaps this is the gene that guarantees the continued existence of the human race. We who have it will save humanity, not through any intelligence or wisdom, but because we can’t help it. Or maybe we are the ones headed for extinction and the humans who can graft iPads to their tailbones will survive.

Our tree groves grow in an area of fertile farmland, the kind that normally is the first to see its trees cleared away for cultivated fields. The topography of the land is mostly flat with only small slopes backing away from the creeks that curl between the level cornfields. These trees are what remain of the old-growth forest that covered this land two centuries ago. They protect little pockets of virgin soil never touched by the blundering, bludgeoning point of the plow. In other words, the trees are not themselves the only treasure here. Perhaps in these remnants of primeval soil there live microbes, or unique combinations of microbes and mycorrhizal fungi, that give to food grown on them a vital healthfulness that is being lost in farmed soils. Maybe that is why the Indians’ medicinal plants really did work sometimes. If so, the microbiological life of this soil may be capable of “reseeding” the depleted soils in the fields around the woodlots, should humans ever come to their senses, just as the trees still growing there are fully capable of reseeding the fields around them with more trees.

There were quite extensive stretches of wetland prairie not far away from our groves (some remnants still remain) that as far back as I can trace were free of trees. Between the prairie and the forest, and more often on little hillocks within the prairie where the land was naturally well drained enough for trees to grow, there were stretches of savanna with stands of oak trees, called “islands” by old-timers. These savannas, where extensive, are also called “oak openings,” and some of them still exist as preserves and parks in northern Ohio and elsewhere. Natural history indicates that there was almost constant war between the prairie, the savannas, and the deep forest. Fire ruled this war. The thick prairie grass in the fall was prone to great fires, some intentionally set by the Indians, most caused by lightning. The fires killed all the trees except for bur oak. For a while, the oaks would advance, then the grass would advance. The savannas were the no-man’s-land between the two armies.

The landscape of field and tree grove asserted itself after the prairies and the great forests were mostly gone, and it remains across middle America as far west as the Great Plains even today, wherever concentrated farming operations and the traditional love of woodlands bump heads. The bulldozer boys would like to knock down all the trees on the more level land, but there is enough sacred regard for groves in the bosoms of many rural people still today to keep some woodlots intact, even on good farming land. These groves, easy to see from highways because they stand out like islands in the corn, have mostly been neglected after the days when wood was necessary for heating fuel. Needless to say, they can sometimes be bought if you are willing to pay a little more than the going farmland prices. When a farm is sold these days, the wooded areas are almost always sold separately because they are much in demand by tree-sanctuary lovers. Tree people can outbid the farmers for the woodlands because they don’t have to buy the whole farm and can pay more for the woodland than farmers can justify.

Woodland Indians back in the dim light of prehistory were the first keepers of the forest where these groves still remain, and they were no doubt managing the trees much more than the white settlers realized. Bob Chenoweth, in his fascinating book titled Black Walnut (Champaign, IL: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), gives ample botanical and even archaeological evidence that black walnut and white oak groves were planted and managed by humans in prehistoric times, because neither species will sprout and grow up on its own in dense forest. Where groves of these species are found, you can rest assured that at one time it was in a sunnier part of the forest, kept that way by Native Americans in the aftermath of a fire or windstorm.

I would give anything to be able to roll back history and talk to the Wyandots who lived among our trees before us. Our biggest white oaks behind the house today were sprouting when the Indians still lived here in 1842. Once, in Kerr’s Woods, I was helping Raymond and Adrian round up their sheep in the fall. At one point, Raymond reached down and pulled up a plant from the woodland floor, peeled back the root, and started chewing on it. Then he started shivering and tears welled up in his eyes. “It makes you do that,” he said calmly. “Indian turnip. Tastes awful but cleans you out good. The Indians knew.” I was wide-eyed at his strange behavior, but as children will do, I soon accepted the experience as just part of everyday life. But I never forgot. Many years later, walking in Kerr’s, I suddenly remembered that incident and decided to check old Raymond out. I remembered the cone of red berries on top of the stalk of that “Indian turnip” and knew by then that it was what is colloquially called jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum). I looked it up in an old medicinal herb book. Sure enough, the plant was called, in pioneer times, Indian turnip, and the root, although “quite poisonous when fresh” according to the herbal, was commonly eaten by the Indians after boiling. How did Raymond know? This knowledge surely came to him from oral tradition. There is in fact quite a bit of family folklore that claims there is Wyandot blood in the Rall family. What I saw Raymond do, I feel sure he had seen his father do, who in turn had seen his father do it. That would have been my great-grandfather, and he had learned it from people, perhaps the Taylors for whom he worked, who were living here before the Wyandots were forced to leave. One of the Ralls married a Taylor. The only problem was that someone along the way forgot to tell my ancestors that they were supposed to boil the roots first. Whenever I see a jack-in-the-pulpit in my tree groves I think of Raymond, and I hear the footfalls of the Wyandots.

The Indians were of course masters of the woodland. They knew all about hickory nuts and walnuts and sweet acorns that could be ground into bread flour. They boiled maple sap and built cabins and longhouses out of logs and tree bark without benefit of saws, hammers, and nails. On the prairie lands five miles south of our groves they conducted fire-ring hunts annually. The tall grass was set ablaze in a circle, forcing deer within the ring of fire into an ever-smaller concentration where they were easier to kill. One of these ring hunts is described in some detail in a precious early history of our county, Atlas of Wyandot Co., Ohio from Records and Original Surveys, published by Harrison & Hare of Philadelphia in 1879. Most counties have atlases like this, and because many of them have been reprinted, they are more easily available now. Ours contains priceless information about what the county was like before white settlers “improved” the landscape. It also contains plat maps of all the townships, so that ownership of any tract at that time can be tracked. These atlases are of special interest for those trying to put together a history of their tree sanctuaries.

What does this have to do with understanding woodlands? Everything. The ring-hunt account mentions that the Indians would wait until rain was threatening so that, hopefully, the fire would be extinguished before it burned off too much grass outside the circle. The hunters would have noticed early on (who knows how many centuries they were doing this?) that when the fire did spread too much outside the ring, it would go through the trees on the higher land in the prairie. The bur oaks and sometimes other white oaks would survive the fire. This knowledge was not lost on the Indians. Fire became not only their way to corral deer but a tool to open, or keep open, sylvan glades for the food trees they desired, but which wouldn’t grow in dense forest shade.

Every year, starting about 1820 but in earnest after 1870 when my ancestors arrived here, pioneers nibbled away with their axes at the trees around their cabin clearings to make fields. More importantly for our family’s tree groves today, Dave Harpster, after whom the nearby village is named, and a few other shrewd pioneers looked at the prairie and saw opportunity. Here was land that did not have to be cleared. The prairie was being ignored by the “sodbusters” because it was mostly too wet to farm without substantial drainage. But Harpster figured it would make good sheep and cattle range. He bought up some five thousand acres of it—the government was practically giving it away—and became known eventually as the Wool King of the World, even in the banking houses of New York City. He set the tone of local farming at that time. Others saw what he did and took sheep farming one step further. R. N. Taylor, who in 1870 owned much of the land that was later owned by our family, was one of them.

Clearing land of trees was a slow and onerous task. The job was not over when the trees were cut and disposed of. The forest is extremely resilient and, as was often said jokingly, in about the time a pioneer took to sharpen his axe, new trees would be sprouting back up again. Cleared glades in the forest would quickly bounce back with a new stand of saplings before the stumps could all be cleared or burned away. The farmer, wanting cornfields, needed a way to keep his land clear of this new growth that sprang up in the sunlight while he was getting rid of the old trees. That’s where sheep came into the picture. Cows would eat off new growth too, but sheep would do it better and would, on that scant diet, produce wool. For ranchers like R. N. Taylor, who didn’t own as much prairie as Harpster, sheep became the rotary mowers of their day. Much better in fact. Mowers do not grow a wool crop every year.

Using sheep to keep cleared land free of regrowth until the plow could take over, or to keep pasture lands too hilly to plow clear of trees, became standard practice in our area. Sheep became the weed eaters and brush killers of that time, keeping pastures looking like golf courses and wooded areas like parks. Sheep were a necessary part of almost every farm until about 1950. Not by accident did the sport teams in our high school get the nickname Rams. (When the girls’ teams came along, they were called Lady Rams!)

My great-grandfather and his brother hired out to R. N. Taylor when they emigrated from Germany and from him learned the ways of sheep. Over time, the Ralls acquired the Taylor lands and continued to raise sheep on the uncultivated parts of their farms. More land was cleared, but some squares and rectangles of old-growth forest remained, because, as Adrian said, they were supposed to remain. Grazed by sheep, the woodland returned an income over and above the income from the wood. But grazing effectively prevented the next generation of trees from growing. Or so it seemed. Because no new trees were coming along, and because the white oaks and hickories lived longer than other species, the foresters said that oak-hickory was our “climax” forest—that woodland here would end up in a more or less permanent stand of these two species if left to its own devices. I am quite sure now that there is no such thing as a climax forest, yet the foresters still teach it. For instance, the oak-hickory “climax” grove behind our house has transformed itself over the last forty years into a maple “climax” grove.

Even if the sheep were bad for the groves, they made of the woodland a wonderful playground for children. There was no underbrush. Also, without new competition coming along, the white oaks and hickories seemed to produce much more bountiful nut and acorn crops than they did in ungrazed woodland. Large buckeye trees grew in Adrian’s Woods. We gathered the buckeyes, built a fire, and threw them into the flames, where they popped explosively. Who needed firecrackers?

There were black walnut trees in Adrian’s and Kerr’s too. We hunted squirrels and trapped raccoons and muskrats. Fried squirrel was much tastier to our way of thinking than wild rabbit. My father insisted that young raccoon, plentiful in the woods, were good eating too, but he never persuaded my mother to cook them. Coon hunting was nevertheless a favorite neighborhood occupation. We had a saying: “When it’s dark, the coon hunters own the woods.”

The three groves contiguous to our farm served different purposes for us, actually. Kerr’s was more for gathering nuts and hunting squirrels. Adrian’s was mostly for playing pretend games. I was Uncas, the Last of the Mohicans. Or sometimes I was the Deerslayer or the Pathfinder. I avidly read the Leatherstocking tales by James Fenimore Cooper, wordy as they were, until finally I began to imagine that I was a Mohican. I’m still wondering. Since the Logsdons fought in the French and Indian War, how do I know if maybe I bear some DNA from the Mohicans? Science has just discovered that some of us even possess Neanderthal DNA. The chances that I am the Last of the Mohicans are certainly better than that.

Snider’s Woods was never grazed because it was never Rall land or, as far as I can tell from the old maps, Taylor land either. So there was always a good growth of that evil stuff the Ralls referred to as “bresh” in Snider’s—thorns and thickets under the younger trees. Where Dad had cut firewood there was an especially splendid growth of “bresh”—mostly black raspberries, and even some rare yellow and red ones. We reserved Snider’s mostly for hunting morels, however. Just as the nut trees flourished better in the open Kerr’s Woods, so morels seemed to be more plentiful in the denser Snider’s Woods. Dad eventually moved the old brooder house where Mom had raised chicks for years from near the house to the woodlot. There it became our cabin in the woods where my sisters and brother spent much of their growing-up time when I was far away in other woodland adventures. We were all a bunch of woodrats, I guess. Oddly, one of the very first articles I ever wrote for a magazine was about that brooder-house cabin in the woods.

Snider’s Woods gave us another lesson in deep forestry. In the very center of the woodlot there was a raised oblong bed, measuring about 100 feet by 50 feet. It was hard to make out amidst the fallen leaves and underbrush, but around it a shallow ditch had been dug. It was here, we learned, that old Mr. Snider cultivated ginseng to sell. Ginseng needs a shady place to proliferate, and making a raised bed probably provided for better drainage. We thought of ginseng then about the same way society views marijuana today. Growing it was not illegal actually, but we decided there must be something as shady about it as the forest floor it grew on. We certainly thought there was something shady about Mr. Snider, probably unfairly, and avoided him. Now I dearly wish I could have talked to him about ginseng. There were still a few ginseng plants growing in his woods just a few years ago. Wild woodland ginseng fetches a very fancy price, perhaps because it requires eight years from planting to harvest. Just another of a long list of projects I always planned on but never did.

By the time I was thirteen years old, I had mastered at least the basic idea of how a woodland culture might flower today, even if I did not use such a fancy term for it. It was not that I knew very much, but my experiences had opened my mind to the possibility of a life drawing sustenance directly from the trees. I knew that I could stay warm in winter with wood. I knew that this material could be shaped into tools and toys and furniture and barns and houses. I knew that a tree grove was full of food of all kinds. I knew there were medicines there much cheaper than those in a drugstore, and perhaps just as effective. I tried chewing on willow twigs to stop a headache as folklore directed. It didn’t seem to work, but I found out later that willow bark does contain salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin. I learned that tree shade on a hot day could be much more comfortable than air-conditioning and that a cold day was much less cruel on the lee side of the woods. Most of all, I learned how lucky I had been to grow up among the trees. That was reason enough to have my own grove, if ever I became a father myself. I would have a place for my children to play and learn there’s more to life than the make-believe of television.

Then I made probably the stupidest decision of my life, only to have it turn out to be the smartest thing I ever did. I decided to listen to my teachers when they suggested that I should study to become a priest. Looking back now, the real reason I went along with the idea, or at least the real reason I stayed in the seminary as long as I did, was a little detail my teachers didn’t appreciate. The high school prep-seminary where I chose to go was situated on four hundred acres of woodland. My cousin Ed, who was my frequent companion in the woods, decided to go too. We thought about those four hundred acres and decided it might turn out to be fun to study for the priesthood.