Interstate 5 splits the spine of the great inland valleys of California from Oregon to Mexico, mostly with views of bare ground - desert really, except for large industrial farms growing produce and tree products where water flows, supplied by massive and expensive aqueducts that drain the Sacramento and American rivers up north. The exception to this boring north-to-south highway is the Pacific Coast Highway -PCH, and the east-to-west roads through the Sierra and coastal mountains, those with even numbers. One has to be in awe of the majestic giants that cover the hillsides and the Sierra. But …
Transplanted to the western edge of the continent over fifty years ago, I unknowingly acclimated to the vast stretches of little or nothing interesting going north or south, of roads that go for miles upon miles with only the slightest of curves, bumper to bumper at seventy miles per hour, or those cheek to jowl to subdivision homes themselves cheek to jowl.
A recent return to the colonial side and a nostalgiac day trip back to upper Vermont rebounded memories long sidelined and feelings long forgotten It is a different world settled in a different time; towns far apart, houses far apart. Farms hewn from forest land raise a collection of stones each spring, material for walls that make good neighbors. The farms, the homesteads, and the towns big or small are all forest clearings.
Vermont is eighty percent forest. The four lanes, the two lanes, and the one lane cut through the trees, leaving towns and cities unseen, for the most part, creating surprising vistas at every turn, meeting other cars every mile or so. No doubt left that you are in the midst of a full-on forest.
The Boreal forest differs from much of the country, even other areas with many trees. This biome that circles the global north, generally above the 50th parallel, dips ever so slightly into the upper reaches of the Northeast Kingdom and then extends across New Hampshire’s North Country into Maine.
The West Coast has two seasons each year, summer and winter. The northern sector of the East Coast has the usual four seasons, more if you include the black-fly season, January thaw, mud season, and the fourth of July. It was spring. The trees were beginning to leaf out, the distant mountains still more black than green, but forest upon forest of hardwoods and softwoods building strength day by day, anticipating the reds and yellows of fall. Red maples, white and yellow birch, beech, hemlock, and balsam create woodlands hard to see through, with saplings growing where old growth fell during the harsh winter. So different from the western states.
The Northeast Kingdom’s two-thousand square miles, also over eighty percent forest, encourage life in small towns - fifty-five of them, for its sixty-five-thousand inhabitants who get to and from mostly on unpaved roads.
It is a different feeling, being in a forest completely surrounded except for the occasionally cleared farmland, the small towns with white-spire churches, and few houses. You are enveloped in your environment, you sense the closeness, and you wonder where the people are and where they work. You know where they hunt and fish.
They say you are what you were when. You once tramped these woods, hunted these forests, fished those ponds, drove the dirt roads, and lived the life that people live who live in the boreal forest. It made you independent, uncomfortable in crowds, with a preference for the rural drive rather than the interstate.
Back now, within miles of the Pacific, life demands a return to the crowded roads, the life in the fast lane, missing the new memories of the boreal forest. Readjustment came much too quickly.
