Chapter 3

Going to School
in the Forest

I stopped walking so that the rustle of leaves my feet were stirring up would not drown out other sounds. But there was nothing else to hear except a bit of plaintive birdsong far off and a whisper of wind in the trees. I was standing deep in a forest I knew to be at least four hundred acres in size because that’s how much woodland belonged to the seminary where I was going to high school. But the expanse of trees stretched well beyond that, covering the surrounding knobby hill country so characteristic of southern Indiana. Much of it was too steep to farm. To my boyhood mind, this was heaven. Perhaps I could walk all day in one direction and never see another human. I could shout out profanities as loud as I could and no one would hear me, maybe.

“Damn!” I yelled, just to hear what it sounded like with the volume turned up. The only answer was the echo of my voice drifting through the trees.

“Hell and damnation!” I tried again. The leaves on the trees barely quivered.

I was in a mood for what I considered, at age fourteen, to be ornery language. I had been in the seminary now for two months. My homesickness was so acute I sometimes felt like I was going to vomit. I had always gone to the woods to nurse my sorrow, and here at the seminary that was easy to do. The forest grew almost up to the walls of the school buildings, dormitories, priests’ residence, library, chapel, barn, and other outbuildings. Slipping away, I felt a kind of wild comfort. No one in the whole world knew exactly where I was.

That day I had wanted to explore my new sylvan Shangri-la to the fullest, and this was the first chance that had come to me—a Sunday afternoon called Visitor’s Day when students whose homes were nearby could enjoy visits from their parents. My parents were too far away, which made me feel all the more sulky.

I walked on for another few minutes and then stopped abruptly. Among the enshrouding trees ahead was an indication that I was not in pristine wilderness as I wanted to believe. Hunkered down under the trees was a log cabin, a magical sort of thing to me, as I had known them only in adventure books and not in real life. Obviously other humans had been here before me. As I gingerly edged forward, ready to flee at any sign of life, it became clear that this was an abandoned cabin. The clay chinking between the logs was falling out, the chimney was cracked and crumbling at the top, and there was a generous covering of leaves on the roof. The logs were all round, none hewn or sawn flat-sided, again indicating possible pioneer times. But the roof was covered with tar paper, which suggested something more recent. Closer inspection revealed that there was only one room to it, with a porch in front. Inside was a crude fireplace only.

I sat on a bench made of branch wood on the porch, overwhelmed by the spirit of the thing. Log cabins meant to me Indians, bears, wolves, pioneers warming themselves before the hearth, Daniel Boone, Abe Lincoln—the entire ambience of frontier times when humans and trees confronted each other with nothing more between them than an axe. A log cabin symbolized the embrace between civilization and nature, humans literally wrapping the trees around them as they might draw on a coat and hat. This was how the initial partnership between American life and the trees was formed, it dawned on me, and so it continued, even to the present, with humans desiring to live in log houses long after such houses had been outdated by technology.

Then, about a hundred yards away, I found a second cabin. It was not as well put together as the first one but was similar in size and construction. I was curious even then about how the cabins were put together. My only previous knowledge of log construction, from reading novels of pioneer life, had led me inadvertently to think that building this way was something complicated, requiring special knowledge. What I inspected now said otherwise. Where the logs crisscrossed at the corners, they were notched. That was logical enough. The notches held the logs in place and also allowed them to fit closer to each other on the walls so that less chinking was necessary between them. Anybody should be able to figure that out and put up such a building with an ax, chisel, saw, and a stand of trees nearby.

The roof raftering was a little more complicated, but it was easy to see how it was put together too. Small logs, about five inches in diameter, had been used instead of two-by-fours, their ends notched into cut-out stair steps up the slant of the gable end trusses. Wherever logs crossed they were notched to hold them in place. Seeing it, I could grasp how easy it would be to imitate. Anyone with will and energy could do it.

From my previous reading, I knew that pioneer cabins had clapboard roofs, not tar paper, and, from my days of making kindling as a younger boy, that hand-rived shingles or clapboards were not all that difficult to make. But how they were actually installed I learned from an old book:

The clapboards were rived or split out of straight green oak timber about four feet long, eight to ten inches wide and an inch thick . . . a froe was used for this purpose with aid of a wooden mallet to drive it into the block of wood prepared for the boards. The end of the block was inserted into a forked log so as to form a pry to aid in the splitting with the froe, the handle of which served as a lever to aid in the splitting. The clapboards thus made were laid in rows across the horizontal rafters overlapping upon each course several inches and being placed lengthwise up and down. They were not nailed but kept in place by weight poles, as they were called, consisting of round logs eight to ten inches in diameter, laid across the roof the whole length. These poles were kept in place by split blocks laid endwise between them on the clapboards, the lower pole being fastened with wooden pins driven into auger holes bored in the lower log. (From Martin Welker, Farm Life in Central Ohio Sixty Years Ago, vol. 4, tract 86 [Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1895], p. 34.)

It occurred to me as I studied these two sylvan cabins here in the seminary woods, that they could be built without purchasing anything except the tools to work the wood, in this case an ax, a froe, and an auger and bit. Didn’t even need nails. If a froe were not available, in a pinch, clapboards could be split with an ax. And pioneers knew how to bore holes with burning sticks. Or a roof could be made entirely of straight saplings notched to the rafters and pushed tightly against each other, cramming the cracks with moss or bark. It would leak, maybe, but clapboards sometimes leaked too, according to the old accounts. I only vaguely realized it at the time but the log cabin was teaching me an important lesson. A person did not have to have a bunch of money to build a house. Just lots of trees.

I took a new friend, Bryan, to see my great discovery (see the photo he took of me back then on this book’s cover.). We would gather there often over the next four years, using the better cabin as our secret clubhouse, as boys are wont to do. We would spend almost as much time there away from the seminary classrooms as we were allowed. The school classrooms taught me about human society; the woodland classroom taught me about nature’s society. To my surprise, only a few students found the cabins and the woodland around them as fascinating as we did. Most of our classmates seemed uncomfortable in the woods, wary, ill at ease. That knowledge provided me with another lesson in woodland culture. The “ramparts people,” as I would come to call those of us who liked to live somewhat removed from so-called civilization, were a minority. Most of the students who spent four years at the seminary rarely walked deep into the woods.

Bryan and I liked to sit on the roof of our forest classroom in the fall, just back from summer vacation, and gather up the beechnuts that fell there from the huge tree that grew close by. The beechnuts were hardly bigger than peas and were difficult to see or collect on the forest floor. On the roof, we could scrape up a handful at a time. I wondered if that’s why the builders had located their cabin under a beech tree. Eating them was slow work that required cracking the nut between one’s teeth and then picking out the meat, sort of like eating sunflower seeds. They were very tasty, though, and worth the effort. Another lesson: The forest always has food if you know where to look.

Who had built the cabins remained a mystery for some time. Older students seemed to know nothing about them, and teachers seemed unwilling to talk about them. When we finally learned the history of the cabins, some of that aloofness was understandable. The Franciscans had started the seminary about a decade earlier, during the Great Depression. At that time, they were so poor they could not raise enough money to feed the students, and so some of them were sent home. The ones who stayed built the first log cabin and probably ate a lot of beechnuts. When times got better financially, those boys who had gone home were allowed to return if they wished. For reasons never exactly spelled out, but probably just because boys will be boys, a gang rivalry built up between the ones who had stayed and the ones who had returned. The former would not allow the returnees into their log cabin, so the latter built a second cabin. So bitterly were the two groups divided that the rector of the seminary finally closed both cabins and forbade the students from visiting them. Supposedly the order was still in effect, but by that time, some ten years later, it was no longer enforced.

I found this history extremely significant, not because of the story itself, which was really just about boys and their clubhouses, but because still in the 1930s there were high school students who knew how to build log cabins and did it. In just ten years’ time, cultural attitudes had changed enough that most of the boys coming into seminary did not even like the environment of the woods, let alone want to build log cabins there. The Second World War had come and gone, and with the end of it also came the end of the old agrarian society in which even boys knew how to build log cabins. From then on, house building came at the mercy of the money economy, with the result finally that millions of people could no longer afford a house.

There were more woodland lessons to learn, in which the school curriculum and the woodland classrooms sometimes overlapped. Among the trees new to me here was the American persimmon. When not fully ripe, these persimmons were extremely astringent. Just biting into one puckered and numbed the mouth and tongue painfully. And I was not by far the only one in the seminary to have learned that lesson. Like all boarding schools, ours had an initiation rite. Freshmen were forced to eat a green persimmon. Probably because I was small and childlike for a high school student, the sophomores mercifully forced me to take only one bite. But from then on until after frost when persimmons start tasting good, I hid out in the woods every evening during recreation period if I saw sophomores gathering to wreak more punishment on freshmen. In hiding, I saw one boy pummeled by upper classmates until he ate a whole green persimmon and vomited. Here I was learning another lesson: Beware of any society that encourages ritual cruelty, especially one involving green persimmons. Actually, if one believes the old herbals, unripe persimmons are good for a variety of medicinal purposes, so maybe I should view the seminary initiation more positively.

At any rate, once a persimmon is ripe, after a frost or two, the scene changes. The fruit tastes quite sweetish and sometimes hangs on the trees even into spring if there are not many raccoons and opossums around. The longer it hangs, the sweeter it gets. The taste doesn’t quite compete with that of peaches and apricots, but for boarding school boys, always believing themselves on the verge of starvation, they were a treat. I imagined that back in the thirties, when food was scarce at the seminary, the boys ate lots of them. Maybe that was how the initiation rite got started. I once ate a persimmon that had hung all winter on a tree and had dried up into something reminiscent of a dried apricot. It was quite delicious. Many years later, on a visit to the University of Maryland, I was treated to persimmon ice cream, also very delicious. Another way to eat persimmons is to mix them with honey and cook them a bit. (See chapter 15 for a recipe for persimmon pudding.) The pioneer’s delight was to find a bee tree when persimmons ripened.

The pawpaw was also a new discovery for me. Bryan called them “wild bananas” because they were yellowish, longish, and tasted faintly like bananas. Our biology teacher, who occasionally took his classes on walks in the woods as part of his instruction, singled out the pawpaw’s long and elegant leaves, like nothing else in the woods. I remember the day he pointed the tree out to me, so well in fact that I also remember the date: March 3. It was warm for that early in the year, even in southern Indiana, and I remember distinctly experiencing that same feeling of contentment and bliss that I had felt as a child on that late February day in Snider’s Woods back home. I could feel the sap rising in my veins and in all of nature around me. I was at home in the woods, and I was wholly happy.

Thinking back now, I realize how fortunate I was to have had a teacher who understood that the best way to learn about reality was to encounter it face to face, not by reading from a book in a classroom. He said the pawpaw was really a tropical tree and that it was still a matter of debate how it had gotten this far north, and on into Michigan in fact. He told us about a butterfly of great beauty, the zebra swallowtail, whose larva lived only on pawpaw leaves. He must have been a very eloquent teacher because thereafter Bryan and I spent hours in the woods hunting for the zebra swallowtail. When we finally found one, we understood. Black and white and red, the butterfly had two tails or tresses hanging down from its abdomen, longer than the rest of its body. It was as striking as any tropical butterfly in the illustrated books, and we figured we knew why. It was a tropical butterfly, just as the pawpaw was a tropical plant. If prehistoric humans brought the plant north with them for its food and medicinal value, then it was logical that the butterfly had come along too. Another lesson: The trees did not necessarily get here in the woods on their own initiative.

Another teacher-priest introduced us to more forest lore. His nickname was Sludge—don’t ask me why. He taught classical Latin with as much boredom as we felt studying it. But he started every class with a joke. He was serious about horticulture and farming, however, and decided to make a clearing in the woods along the creek to grow watermelons to sell at the farmers’ market. Watermelons, he maintained, developed a much sweeter taste when grown on virgin soil. Some of us immediately volunteered to help clear the land. It sounded so Daniel Boone-ish.

We learned something right away. Clearing even an acre of forest is terribly hard work. To think that humans had cleared thousands upon thousands of acres without chainsaws or piston power of any kind totally astonished me. We piled brush on stumps and burned both, we grubbed out roots, we hoed, we labored in our spare time throughout a whole school year, ultimately clearing enough bare earth for a big patch of melons. Even then there were roots and rocks that we were not able to dislodge, and brush and weeds sprang back up almost as fast as we could cut them down. I now understood why my ancestors kept sheep around while clearing land.

I kept wondering how Indians and the earliest pioneers had cut up logs without saws. The same book that described in detail how log cabin roof shingles were installed had the answer:

But at the period of which we write [1835], the ground had to be cleared of brush and fallen timber previously deadened every spring before plowing. There being no cross-cut saws, and to save the labor with the ax to cut up the logs, they were burnt into sections by . . . what was called “niggering,” putting sticks across logs and setting them on fire. These had to be stirred up often to keep them burning. . . .
These logs were rolled together in log heaps and with the brush were burnt up. Then the field had to be “sprouted,” that is the sprouts of green stumps cut off. Generally a patch of new ground would be cleared each winter for a turnip or potato patch and be ready for the spring. (From Welker, Farm Life in Central Ohio Sixty Years Ago, vol. 4, tract 86, p. 30.)

It took us a whole year to clear enough land for a watermelon patch, and then only roughly. The melons were indeed very sweet, especially the ones we ate on the sly when we thought Sludge wasn’t looking. (I’m sure he knew.) Another lesson learned: Virgin soil seems to contain nutrients no longer available in farmed-out fields that make watermelons taste sweeter, especially stolen ones.

The most mysterious textbook in this high-school forest education was a large grove of pine trees among the hardwoods. Pines were not native to this area as far as I could learn. How did they get there? With visions of prehistoric Indians bringing pawpaws from the tropics, I imagined all sorts of possibilities. I think now, using tree books and memory, that these were shortleaf pines. In those days merely calling them pines was good enough for us. The grove covered about ten acres on the highest point of the forest and was known locally as Hicky Hill. No one I asked knew its history. I supposed that it had been cleared for a pasture field at one time and then a few pines were deliberately planted, or perhaps accidentally planted by birds carrying seeds in their droppings. Maybe a forest fire had cleared off the old growth. The pine trees must have reseeded themselves and spread, since some were quite tall and others of varying ages down to Christmas tree height. Evergreens rarely reseeded themselves in my home country, so I was mystified. Even after I had learned the facts of soil pH, climate, and agronomy that try to explain such things, I remained puzzled by this phenomenon.

For a boy from a part of the country where groves of evergreens don’t grow naturally, the place was magical. Walking into the pines and being completely surrounded by them was uncannily spooky, but also palpably restful to the spirit. The silence was unearthly. I could see nothing but green pine needles and hear nothing except, on windy days, the sound of the breeze through the trees. Years later, Andrew Wyeth, the famed artist who roamed the pine forests of Maine, told me that he could tell with his eyes closed what kind of evergreen tree he was standing under by the sound the wind made blowing through it. Remembering Hicky Hill, I did not doubt him. And I understood why I liked his paintings and why urbane art critics often did not. They did not know our world.

This pine grove gave me my first notion of what could be called natural or organic Christmas tree farming. The seminary had a long and revered tradition of decorating all the buildings with wreaths and garlands and evergreen boughs at Christmas time, mostly, I presume, because it owned this grove of evergreens that grew without any human labor of planting and pruning and spraying. We would make a grand, joyous trek into our woodland in early December and bring back armloads of pine boughs and bushels of pine cones for making these decorations. It taught me a lesson that would come in handy later on: A sanctuary of trees can add to one’s income and delight by producing holiday decorations.

Watermelons were not the only horticultural interest of our Latin teacher. He took over the apple orchard that had been languishing on the seminary property. He taught his gang of watermelon workers how to prune trees. When frost threatened in apple blossom time, he would recruit us to tend smudge pots through the night. We were delighted to do that work because we were then excused from chapel exercises in the evenings. I had never heard of smudge pots before, but their smoke and warmth did indeed fend off the frost a little. Just as interesting, at the far end of the orchard, where the trees grew right up next to the adjacent woodland, the apple blossoms survived better than in the rest of the grove, smoke or no smoke. Another possible lesson suggested itself: Perhaps fruit trees could be grown and managed as a part of the natural forest rather than in artificial blocks of isolated orchard.

But the best lesson I learned in those days had to do with my old friend, the morel mushroom. Next to the watermelon clearing I found an astonishing patch of them one spring day, at least a bushel basket full. The dying roots of the trees we had cut down probably had something to do with the bountiful growth. A find of this kind would have brought on wild celebration back home. My find rivaled storied stands of morels such as my grandmother told about in the land-clearing days of the late nineteenth century. I proudly took the mushrooms to the cooks, asking them to fix this treat for the student body. The cooks, nuns from Germany, had never seen such strange fungi before. They were leery. I told them to fry them in butter. (You can’t go wrong with anything fried in butter.) Later on that day, I was summoned to the rector’s office. He wanted to know where I had gotten the idea that these queer-looking things were good to eat. “They are poisonous,” he said, quite beside himself with huffiness.

I was astonished. Dumbstruck was more like it. Then outraged. But the seminary was much like the army in that underlings did not argue with their commanding officers. I could only bow silently. Perhaps the rector had good intentions—just thought it best to discourage students from eating wild foods. Perhaps he knew there was such a thing as a false morel, which looks a little like a real morel and is slightly poisonous. He certainly didn’t think a mere twerp of a student could know anything about such an esoteric subject because of course he had not been raised in the woods. But whatever good will I tried to ascribe to him, I learned that day another important life lesson: Priests and teachers and other forms of authority do not necessarily know as much as I do.

I did protest to our science teacher, who surely knew about morel mushrooms. He appeared nervous, shifty-eyed, distracted. He would not even hear me out. He merely mumbled that the first lesson of the priestly life was to obey orders. Class dismissed. So I learned an even more important lesson: Those who know the truth will not always have the guts to stand up for it.

From that day on, I started to doubt my decision to become a priest but, oddly, I continued on for quite a few more years. The main reason I did so was that I was almost always in close contact with the natural environment I loved. After high school, there was a year, mostly awful, spent in northern Indiana, known as the novitiate year, which was for seminarians what Parris Island is for marines. I endured because, again, we could escape in our free time into a nearby woodland that was dotted with lakes. In fact, there was a grove of trees right next to the seminary building that would in a few more years become a parking lot. At that time, it was an abandoned orchard, thick with brush and invading hardwood trees. It provided me a chance to observe what happens when you don’t spray fruit trees. About half of the apples were just fine, especially for cider. I could jump the fence that divided the grove from our campus lawn and in that instant vanish from polite society even though there were houses all around.

In fact there was a bar on the other side of our grounds called the Rendezvous. Imagine this. A band of wild seminarians rendezvoused in this old orchard, making cider—putting handfuls of pulverized apple pomace in pieces of cloth and squeezing the juice out by wringing out the rags, all the while listening to the music emanating from the more worldly Rendezvous not far away. Our cider to us was every bit as delicious as the beer was to the customers of the bar. With a dozen of us giggling and squeezing away, we could strain out a gallon or so in an afternoon and let it ferment hidden away there in the thickets. Even then, I thought of writing a magazine article entitled “Making Hard Cider the Hard Way.” How could I quit a life so full of so much fun-crazy mischief?

I also stayed on there because I knew that the next year we would be at a seminary college that was not as strict as the novitiate. The college was situated in tree groves along the Grand River in Michigan. The river ran right through the seminary property. Oh boy.

In our new college seminary, I became a river rat as well as a woods rat. I could hear the water of the river tumbling over rocks from my bedroom. By now our gang of hard cider makers had developed a spirit of camaraderie stronger than that between blood brothers. One of our priest-teachers dubbed us “the Sonuvabitchin’ Davy Crockett Boys,” a title we flaunted. We were ramparts people and proud of it. We roamed the woodland that lined the banks of the Grand River a mile or so upstream and down. We fished for walleye pike, hunted rabbits, and trapped for mink and muskrat. I made myself a pair of mittens out of moleskins. We even had a cabin in the woods, this time courtesy of the wealthy industrialist who had owned the property before the Franciscans turned it into a seminary. We combined studies in Aristotelian philosophy with impromptu courses in wilderness survival tactics. Even under the strict regimen of seminary life, I felt as free as the hawks that I could watch out the classroom windows, hanging high over the river. I guiltily realized that I loved wild nature a whole lot more than I loved the priestly life. But because every day I had ready access to the wildwood, it was difficult to do what I knew I must do: leave the seminary.

The situation was almost amusing, although it did not seem so at the time. Seminary life in the Franciscan order in those days was strongly influenced by monasticism. The ideal was for students to live a monkish life away from the so-called fleshpots of the sinful world. Sequester them out in the country where there were fewer temptations and allurements of worldly life. But that philosophy completely misjudged my kind of temperament and mentality. Temptation for me did not come from the world of men, or even women, but from nature. I did not give a hoot for fast cars, fine clothes, mansions in the sky or anywhere else, travel abroad, fancy restaurants, so-called financial independence, or any other worldly pleasures that money could buy. I wanted only a log cabin in the woods, a rifle, and a dog, as I often said. I was being lured away from priestly life by the temptress of wild nature that religious authorities doggedly kept right on providing me. It was like trying to help a man lead a celibate life by insisting that he live in a women’s college dormitory.

I mention all this not so much out of sentimentality for a quaint past nor for the humor inherent in the situation, but because of the theme of this book—the marked way that the trees kept stretching out their arms to embrace and comfort people like me caught in situations of life rife with confusion and at times despair. When poets speak of the sanctuary of the trees, their words are often mere poesy. When I speak of sanctuary, I mean it actually, physically, and literally. I realized that I would have to quit the seminary, not because I disliked the kind of life I was leading there, but because in a few years I was going to have to leave the woodland sanctuaries that went along with it.

Having finally gotten up the courage to disembark, so to speak, I learned that the Franciscans had purchased a farm in Minnesota along the Minnesota River where we would complete our theological training. Damn. I just had to stick around long enough to see what that was like. To me, the totally untraveled and half-cloistered student, Minnesota translated not only into the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, but ten thousand tree groves. It was right next to Canada, which suggested trackless wilderness at hand. It was also right next to the Dakotas, which meant the Far West to me: cowboys, ranches, maybe Indians, hopefully bears and antelopes. For a young man who did not have enough money to drive to the nearest village and buy an ice cream cone, I thought that Minnesota might be as close to adventure as I was ever going to be able to afford.

And so I stayed on for a few more years, loving the land of ten thousand lakes, millions of trees, and the Minnesota River, where I sometimes sat on a log, naked, and communed with an old hermit beaver. He seemed to me to be as disgruntled with life as I was. Although one might say that I was continuing a huge mistake, it turned out, like all my other mistakes, that going to Minnesota was a fairly smart move. I learned for sure that I not only loved woodlands, lakes, and rivers, but also subsistence farming. I learned what I was meant to do with my life.

And I learned practical things from the woodland wild too. I learned to split fence posts because we were making new fields on our tract of farmland. Knowing about fence posts was hugely important to me because, much later, I would find myself trying to promulgate pasture farming as the salvation of the world, and what pasture farming needed most of all was fence posts. To make one out of white oak, the bark had to be peeled off, especially the end that was going to be in the ground. The bark, said neighboring farmers who were as much my teachers as the theology professors, absorbed and held water sort of like a sponge, hastening decay. A spud, a heavy chisel-like tool about five feet long, was used to scrape off the bark. If the posts were from a tree cut when alive, it should be cut in the spring when the sap was rising (exactly the wrong time for firewood). At that time the bark will separate or “slip” more easily from the wood. Alternatively, if the logs after cutting were allowed to dry a year or two in the open air, the bark also came off rather easily.

This business of removing bark from posts to make them last longer was at odds with the information I had read about logs in log houses. Most books went out of their way to say that the pioneers did not remove the bark from the logs of their houses because leaving it on made the logs last longer. The situation, however, is not the same for both cases. The log in the log home is above ground and so not subjected to the constant moisture of being in the ground. I think the pioneers did not debark their cabin logs because there was no need to. The bark, above ground, would come off in a couple of years anyway.

My tree vocabulary kept increasing. Not that the trees I became newly acquainted with grew only in Minnesota, but for the first time, I was in a position to notice them. American basswood, or linden, was the most interesting to me. It was an extremely soft wood, but strong enough to use for framing farm buildings. Either green or dry, it was easy to drive a spike through. The wood was stringy and fibrous, and the Indians had shredded and woven it into rope and fabric. It was often called bee tree or honey tree, because it blossomed heavily, providing bees with lots of nectar. Its leaves when young made a decent salad. The softness of the wood made it especially favored by woodcarvers. It was a common, cheap tree in Minnesota at that time. Who would have divined that eventually demand for it from woodcarvers would make it a fairly valuable wood? When I finally got my own grove of trees to live in, the first thing I did was plant a basswood. Had I been smart enough to plant a couple of acres of them, today I or my children would be looking at a profitable harvest in about the year 2020.

By now the Davy Crockett Boys were “sophisticated” enough after our days of rendezvousing in an abandoned orchard to know that anything sweet had the possibility of making an intoxicating beverage. What’s more, whatever we made was bound to taste tolerably good if for no other reason than that it was forbidden. Forbidden wine, like stolen watermelons, always tastes better. Quaint little wild plum trees (Prunus americana) grew on the edges of our woodlands. The fruit was fairly good, better than pawpaws or persimmons to my taste, and, when fermented, packed quite a wallop. We amused ourselves by popping corks on jugs of “aging” plum wine, as if we were opening bottles of champagne. Any resemblance between the two ceased after the popping.

We also investigated the mysteries of elderberry wine, another fruit of woodland edges. We should have learned from the plum stuff not to bottle up the brew too soon. Unfortunately, we were slow learners. We hid the bottles of contraband (making any kind of liquor was forbidden by seminary rules) in the hay mow of the barn, hoping it would age into something a little more delectable than the kerosene-like taste that it first developed. One day the bottles started exploding, just as my father’s homemade beer had done back home. We had to give the dairy barn walls a new coat of whitewash to hide our sinfulness.

Something else the Minnesota woodland taught me. Or at least a farmer living there did. He had a large family and was fairly poor. His farm was close to ours. One day when I was visiting him, I happened to notice that one whole side of his barn was covered in squirrel skins and tails. I was taken aback. “Oh, we depend on them for part of our meat supply,” he explained. “They are quite delicious, you know, and I have taught the kids how to shoot straight.” I had been a squirrel hunter as a child, but it had never dawned on me that in today’s world (this was 1953, but we surely thought of ourselves as quite the modern go-getters) a family could provide itself with a significant supply of meat from a tree grove for the cost of a box or two of .22-caliber bullets. Why did he nail the squirrels up like that? “That’s my son, bragging,” he said with a grin. But then he added: “Sometimes there’s a market for them from fur buyers.”

Needless to say, I never enjoyed life any more than I did in those years. The Sonuvabitchin’ Davy Crockett Boys were possessed of a genius for having fun in the woods in ways that were very unworldly, but not in the sense that the seminary life was supposed to strive for. I can remember several times, around a campfire, asking in all earnestness why we couldn’t just stay here like this forever, helping people out who needed help, a merry band of Robin Hoods in our own Sherwood Forest. As full of folly as such words were, I was totally sincere. I really had no other desire in life at that time. One of the theology professors, not altogether jokingly, told me I was a danger to society.

Reality finally brought me to my senses. Because I got good grades, I guess, the order’s authorities decided I should go to Rome to finish my theological training. I was supposed to feel honored and thankful to be selected for this move. Or maybe our superiors just wanted to export their biggest problem as far away as they could. But for me it was the end of Robin Hood days. I said goodbye to the seminary. The Franciscans breathed a sigh of relief. The pope would have done so too if he had known what had almost come his way.

The woodland sanctuary had saved me. It had kept me sane (well, sort of) until I found myself, and then it convinced me to leave a life I was not fit for. In a way, it saved both our Latin teacher, Sludge, and my friend Bryan too. They both eventually became missionaries to Africa, living in the bush—the African forest—where they could channel their love of woodland and wildness into helping people, building churches and schools, and occasionally shooting poisonous snakes and rogue elephants that threatened the villagers in their care. They became Robin Hoods in their own way.

Strangely enough, now, after all the years of being separated halfway around the world, Bryan and I are practically neighbors again. We sit at the edge of my tree grove, sipping martinis instead of wild plum wine, remembering those Robin Hood and Huck Finn days of long ago in Indiana and Minnesota. Huck Finn is as appropriate for us as Robin Hood. Mark Twain had long ago become my favorite writer, and he was influenced greatly by the beckoning trees. If you have any doubts about that, read his marvelous description of the tree grove of his boyhood in the new Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010; pp. 218–20). Nor would Twain, like my favorite artist, Andrew Wyeth, be the last of the famous people who, I would learn, were drawn to sacred groves.