WILLIAMSVILLE — I learned orienteering in midtown Manhattan, where the streets run east and west, and the avenues run north and south. Better yet, the streets and avenues are numbered, with the numbers going up to the north and west, and at every intersection, there's a sign, telling you exactly where you are.
With the firm grasp of the cardinal points of the compass engraved in my mind from early years, I have great difficulty finding my way around other, less logically organized cities.
My friends in Chicago have explained that city's street system to me, but it's based on names, not numbers. Boston is worse, and San Francisco harder still. But I know how to read a map - as long as there are corresponding signposts to tell me where I am. I'm confident about finding my ways in a city.
Not so in the woods.
I've taken orienteering courses. I have a pretty good idea about using a compass, and I try to stick to blazed trails. But I often get lost in my thoughts while I'm supposed to be following a footpath, and I've been known to look up and, not finding a street sign, panic. The only time I really feel confident about bushwhacking is when there's snow cover and I can follow my trail home.
Generally, I'm a language-dependent reader, one who looks to words for directions. But living in Vermont, I've slowly come to realize that there are other ways to read. Indeed, nature has its own vocabulary, like a foreign language that, with practice and training, even I'm beginning to learn.
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Books help, as do role models, and I've been lucky to make the acquaintance of someone who provides both: Lynn Levine.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Levine moved to Vermont as a young adult and became the state's first female forester. Over time, she has also become a passionate naturalist and educator - so that there will be a new generation of people to appreciate the northern forest in which we live.
Levine has learned how to read nature. On a recent walk across my land, she showed me how to identify the winter woods: sugar maple, white oak, slippery elm, hemlock, and white pine.
Now that I know their characteristics and names, they are no longer just trees at the edge of my field but individual species. In the case of the wild apple riddled with horizontal lines of holes drilled by the yellow-bellied sapsucker, the tree became an individual specimen - with a story.
As a language-dependent writer, I tune in to stories, and suddenly, the woods seemed more familiar. It gave me hope that I, too, could learn to read nature, whose language is not words but signs that can be learned with close attention to the details that spell out the story of the land.
Because snow transforms the landscape into a blank page, I have learned to interpret some of the drama written in the tracks that tell the story of local animal life in winter. But my knowledge is limited to the broadest of plots - a small animal running from a larger animal in pursuit.
Lynn showed me how to decode the action: a squirrel running away from my own dog. She also showed me a print in the snow I would not otherwise have seen: what looked like an isolated series of brush strokes told the story of a large bird of prey swiping the snow with its wing tips. I'd seen the hawk weeks earlier, before the snow, when it buzzed my flock of laying hens, who scattered in a panic, and have been locked in the coop ever since.
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In her effort to educate people about nature, Levine has written a field guide to the fauna of the northern forest. Mammal Tracks and Scat: Life Sized Tracking Guide is used by outdoor educators throughout New England, and it's easy enough for a bookworm like me to use, bridging my comfortable world of book learning with the wild world of nature - where I'm out of my comfort zone.
Levine was the project manager responsible for creating Treasured Trees: A Walk through Brattleboro - a great walking tour for urbanites to appreciate the natural world thriving in our human landscape. More recently, she was the force behind the new Woodland Interpretive Path, part of the Retreat Trails, a network of footpaths developed in the 19th century, when outdoor activity and farm work were the preeminent treatments for mental health.
Levine not only engaged students from local schools in developing the narrative plaques that explain different places along the Woodland path, but she also had the students develop an audio file download with more information, poetry, and stories for people to listen to as they strolled along.
By employing the technology that schoolchildren now depend on, Levine hopes to make the stories and wonder of the forest accessible to an ever-widening population.
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Most recently, Levine has adventured into the world of young adult fiction in order to address the issue of gender and the outdoors.
Levine has become comfortable in nature because she followed her passion rather than the cultural expectations for females born in the middle of the last century. She knows girls can thrive outdoors. They just need to learn how.
In Snow Secrets, Levine tells the story of two very different girls, Jasmine and Sarah, who learn how to track from Tess, an Abenaki woman. Being outdoors together provides the girls with both adventure and an escape from the mean-girl culture of middle school.
Tracking gives the girls a common language. They develop both courage and skills, and together solve a mystery.
By turning to fiction, Levine deliberately comes indoors, where both girls and boys spend more and more of their day. It is her hope that a story like Snow Secrets will lead readers - people like me - into the woods, where instead of being lost, we'll find ourselves in nature.