Ghost story

The scariest stories I know about our woods are seldom told around the campfire. There are waves of tree-killers advancing toward us, some that are already here and others — incipient invaders — that only vigilance at the point of introduction manages to contain. 

The free and global movement of goods and people makes new introductions inevitable. The forests of our future may well consist of hickories and red maples and not much else.

When I walk in the woodlands at this time of year, in places where the oaks and hickories are rooted deep, I am haunted by ghosts. There used to be giants in these forests. I feel their long shadows cast from that long-abandoned canopy. I see their lingering remnant, in shrouds of golden brown, lurking down below, among the witch hazel and hornbeam. I sense their connection to other shades from the time of my grandfather’s grandfather that once filled these skies in unfathomable numbers, slaughtered in their abundance to utter extinction. 

The American chestnut has not yet gone the way of the passenger pigeon, but it is a pale shadow of its former glory. Chestnut roots have survived in our woodlands for more than a century since their trunks and branches succumbed. They reach with Sisyphean shoots for the sun, only to be blighted anew by the old killer. 

Some see hope and renewal in this unequal contest. Others see a metaphor for human folly. Here is a fit subject for a good poet, and indeed there is one named William Heyen who wrote a book-length poem back in the mid-1980s called “A Chestnut Rain” that manages to evoke Walt Whitman and Wendell Berry in a voice of his own. 

The loss of the chestnuts is an epic tale but no fable. At the time of European settlement, woodlands along the Appalachian spine from northern Mississippi to southern Maine were the heart of chestnut country. Chestnuts prefer well-drained soils that are deep enough to accommodate their thirsty roots. This may help explain why they were not a significant tree species in northern New England except in the deeper soils of the Connecticut River Valley. Under the right conditions these trees grew to prodigious size, rivaling in scale and stature the old-growth firs of the Pacific Northwest. Such valuable timber was aggressively harvested, but there were still large chestnuts during the 19th century, and forest stands where American chestnut comprised 25 to 33 percent of the canopy species. 

They were formerly in the southeast Piedmont country too, but here they encountered a deadly threat long before the knock-out blow of Chestnut Blight. Phytophthora root rot is thought to have arrived in the United States in the late 1770s or early 1800s and is now considered invasive in more than 70 countries worldwide. The American Chestnut Foundation believes this fungal disease was responsible for eradicating this tree from the lower elevations of the southeastern woodlands more than a century before the unintentional introduction of the better-known chestnut blight. Both the blight and the root rot persist in the former range of this species, complicating efforts to re-establish disease-resistant chestnut hybrids.

Salvage logging in the first decades of the 20th century removed living as well as blighted chestnuts from our upland forests. We won’t know whether any of those harvested trees had better resistance to the blight unless some of their re-sprouts manage to set viable seeds, which they very rarely do. 

Back in 1875, the naturalist and explorer Alfred Russell Wallace concluded, “We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which the hugest  and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappeared.” Perhaps it helps to remember that beyond our span of years, not centuries but millennia before our time in this place, there were other giants here. Creatures of the tundra and the taiga, they browsed in forests now fathoms deep on the continental shelf. They were here as well, before the chestnuts reclaimed the land that the ice abandoned. 

Science has not settled the role that over-exploitation by paleo-hunters might have played in the loss of the mastodon, or what that loss may have meant to the ecology of the landscape that formerly supported them both. 

For all our creativity and adaptation, humanity is deeply connected to our environment, and all our actions have consequences. It is important not to close our eyes to the ghosts of forest past as we contemplate the future. How much of it we pass on depends on how much of it we see and understand, and ultimately how much of it we value, and love.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at www.greensleeves.typepad.com.