Trip to Baxter State Park

 Since we’ve moved here, we haven’t explored much beyond our immediate neighborhood.  Every day there are tasks and chores to do, and there are always things we never get to.  We’re surrounded by natural beauty and there are always new things to discover right in the woods and fields behind the house.  Yet there are places beyond this immediate environment that we’ve been intending to explore.  During his visit last week, my dad, who has lived in Maine now for many years,  reminded us that the summers are short here and the winters long, and if you aren’t mindful, the window of time for warm-weather exploring will close.


So M. and I decided that we will set aside one day a week to explore a new place.  When the day came, I was reluctant to go.  There are peas and green beans ready to be picked and frozen, the chicken run needs to be expanded, the house needs cleaning, the grass needs cutting, and there are many books on my to-read list.  We actually postponed for a day, and I picked and froze some peas and beans, processed some cilantro and froze it, and read more in the awesome book I was in the midst of (The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell—a freaking  stunning piece of writing). M. cut some of the grass and printed out some maps for us to use the next day.

We got a pretty early start, out of the house before 10 a.m., and headed to Baxter State Park in Millinocket, Maine.  I’d been there camping a few times with my parents ages ago, never as an adult.  We thought it was pretty close by, less than an hour drive, but it turned out to be much further.  It took about an hour of driving to get to the front gates of the park, and then another forty minutes of driving on the dirt road within the park to get to a trailhead.  In the future when we go there, we’ll plan to stay overnight rather than fit our driving and visit into a day trip.  One complication: they don’t allow dogs so we have to leave S. at home.  He was not happy that we went exploring without him.  

We parked at Kidney pond and ate a quick lunch from stuff we grabbed at the grocery store in Millinocket.  From there, we took a short hike to Rocky Pond where we stopped and took photos and rested.  We then took another short hike over the ridge to Little Rocky Pond.  The paths were fantastic:  there was moss everywhere!  There were large boulders draped in mantles of moss, and trees growing out of the tops and off of the sides of the boulders.  The boulders were encased in cages of tree roots and the roots were covered with moss.  I could see how leaves, fallen over time, decomposed and created humus on the tops of rocks.  Seeds from the surrounding trees landed in the humus and moss, and the roots of some took hold and grew into trees.  These trees then shed their leaves down onto their own rock and the surrounding rocks to create more humus for the trees to feed from.  

During our hike to Little Rocky Pond I found myself whispering every time I spoke to M.  I realized that I felt like I was in a cathedral.  I don’t believe in God, or even some kind of pantheistic deity or spirit.  I’m wary of what I consider platitudes, such as “all things are connected” or “nature is holy.”  I also don’t believe in the existence of some kind of mystical, meta-physical force or consciousness that is beyond scientific explanation or verification.  And I don’t believe in worshipping nature or the intrinsic beauty or goodness of all that is natural, except insofar as the existence of nature is necessary for us and the things we value to be.  

I do believe that one possible trait for humans to have is curiosity, a desire to know and understand.  Curiosity practiced over time and satisfied, rather than stifled, can lead to an appreciation of complexity and a desire to seek out new environments that are likely to demonstrate complexity and hold opportunities for us to exercise our curiosity.  

Some kinds of natural environments, like the forest, have this complexity.  One way to think of it is that the forest is like a library, only better.  Like a library, a forest is a place that offers numerous opportunities for learning and the pleasures that accompany learning. Unlike a library, though, no one has sorted out what is into tidy, discrete bundles of knowledge that are waiting to be consumed. The knowledge is not organized according to subject area or by the Dewey Decimal System.  It’s a complex of puzzles where even the puzzles haven’t been picked out and named, and the rules aren’t known.

To be in the forest is to be faced with a multi-sensory collection of perceptual data, not just words on a page.  Depending on which particular piece we pick out, it may connect to some other thing we have experienced or learned—something we’ve perceived in the past (such as the scent of ferns or the feel of moss under the feet that we had ten years ago when we went walking with our father), or something that we read in a book (that flower over there, is that the one we were reading about in the nature guide last week?).  It may spark associations:  as I looked around at the bushes growing by the side of the pond, I realized that I was having a hard time telling the difference between azalea leaves, branches, and flowers, and those of blueberries.  I’d never observed the similarities before, yet once I did, I began to think of other similarities that I had known of between the two, such as how both grew in acidic soils as underbrush in areas of dappled sunlight. 

The forest, if you pay attention, is an opportunity to exercise intelligence.  It’s also a place where I actively reflect on and exercise my values. 

A forest is an eco-system.  In a manner of speaking, it is true that everything there is connected.  When I walk through a forest, I feel acutely aware that this is an ecosystem, a complicated web of interconnected processes, materials, and beings, all of which exist independently of me.*  My entrance introduces a new variable, my feet crush the moss and insects, my presence scares away the deer and the birds, my breath changes the atmosphere.  It is the home of millions and millions of living things, and what I do while I am in their home affects them.  I’m aware that every action I take there will have consequences on them that I am not aware of and that I do not understand.  

One thing I wrestle with in my thinking is the rights that I believe living things ought to have.   Living things of all kinds react to their environments. I don’t think it’s correct to say that they want to live and to flourish because that implies self-awareness and I don’t believe that all living things are self-aware. But when a living thing, an animal or a plant, is faced with a situation where it can take action that contributes to its preservation and growth and or action that does not, the living thing takes action that fosters its preservation, growth, and reproduction.  Sometimes the thing that takes action has a brain and a central nervous system, and demonstrates behaviors that lead me to believe that it has sensations and emotions and desires.    

As a living thing, I am dependent on other living things to provide me with food and water, shelter, and air.  Beyond the obvious need for living things to provide me with basic things like food, the operation of my body depends on millions of living things who live out their lives inside of me and on the surface of my skin.  

For me to live, things must die.  I prefer to minimize the dying.  In some cases, the death of other living things is pretty clearly necessary for me to live. I have to eat, for example. In other cases, though, I engage in actions that affect other living things and their growth in significant ways, and these actions aren’t strictly necessary.  I chose to take a trip to the forest for my own enjoyment, or in more ennobling-sounding terms, to enrich my experience and to grow.  I want to live my life so that I hold myself accountable for the effects of my actions on other living things.  In the case that my life choices affect others, I want to minimize harm to them from my actions.  The solemnity of my experience in the forest reflects a kind of respect that I have for other living things, an appreciation that they, like me, are alive and experiencing and responding to their environment and, in a manner of speaking, they want to continue to be and to do.  It involves a recognition of the responsibility I have to minimize my disruption of these processes.  

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*On a larger scale, this forest is not independent of me, of course.  My actions or inactions all influence the forest:  my consumption of fossil fuels, and my support for political candidates who make policies that preserve land and fund state parks are just two ways that I affect the forest.