TOWNSHEND — Once it was part of a vast and ancient forest that spanned the continent. Enormous trees grew, died, and fell in the silence of this eternal forest.
The arrival of the first Europeans changed everything. Steel tools cut through trees, transforming woods into pasture. By the end of the Civil War, most of Vermont had been cleared for grazing land.
Veterans who had seen the rich flat land of Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland left the state in droves in search of longer growing seasons and better soil.
The forest reclaimed the land, and pine trees swayed high above stone walls that used to pen livestock.
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Today, the forest is an odd patchwork, divided by a spider's web of roads and dotted with islands of civilization.
By the standards of Alaska or Siberia, the Vermont woods are not true wilderness. Walk deep into the forest, and you will see the handprints of man: an old oil can, a stone wall, a discarded shot shell.
The woods have been clear-cut, surveyed, subdivided, logged, and mined. But despite all the molestation of the virgin forest, the Vermont woods still hold their mysteries.
The trees hide abandoned quarries and old native American cemeteries. Planes have gone down in the forest and have never been found; hikers have disappeared.
There are ghost towns, little more than clusters of cellar holes filled with sticks, dense patches of conifers where wild animals leave their skulls.
There are vast swamps where huge birds sit motionless atop dead trees and tiny meadows where deer frolic at twilight.
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But few people see any of it.
Most of us don't have the time to explore the woods. And the forest doesn't make it easy. In summer, clouds of biting insects guard the woods. In winter, it's the cold and snow.
For many people, the woods evoke a primal terror.
“I don't like having all those trees around me. You don't know what's there,” a friend of mine said. For her, the forest held unknown horror, all just out of sight.
It's not an uncommon sentiment. The deep woods still hold our primal fears, a leftover from the days when our ancestors fought to survive in the wilderness.
Sit on the edge of the forest at dusk, and you will see your own primal fears come into being before you. As the sun sets, the world changes.
That dead tree over there becomes a huge man standing still, watching. The moss-covered boulder becomes an enormous bear. Your hearing sharpens, and the mouse rummaging through the leaves a few feet away sounds like a gigantic predator, coming closer.
Taking a walk through the woods at night is like taking an inventory of our genetic memory. The veneer of civilization is very thin.
In some ways, we live on the margins of an invisible world. How many of us venture into the woods at night? Not many.
Maybe it doesn't matter. The forest is still there all around us. The woods are the wild heart of Vermont, a place where harsh beauty and freedom reign.