On a long walk through deep woods you rarely think about property lines, but a logging project on your own land will bring them into sharp focus. You don’t want to make the mistake of cutting your neighbor’s trees.
In late fall, when hunting season was over, I spent a few days in our woods marking trees with tape because our loggers would be cutting close to two neighboring properties. One border was relatively simple. The second was trickier because we had reopened an old logging road to transport the cut timber, and the road runs briefly into our neighbor’s property and back.
One problem with property lines is that they are often drawn with a ruler at a desk, as I did back in 1976 when we bought 80 acres and immediately subdivided a third of it.
The land beneath my ruler was anything but flat, and it was textured with its own natural and human history. Animals are free to ignore this paradox; their trails follow the contour of the land without a thought to property lines.
Most of the time I prefer to think of the land where we live not as deeded property but as a generous and ageless host that was here before human life appeared on the planet and will remain when all life is gone. Rather than stumble into a theological argument, my instinct is to turn to literature for help.
William Faulkner readers know that the setting for most of his fiction is Yoknapatawpha, a fictitious county in northwest Mississippi, land that once had been Chickasaw hunting grounds. As Faulkner tells it, when the legendary chief Ikkemotubbe realized that white settlers expanding westward would inevitably claim Chickasaw land as their own, he quickly sold it, making himself rich.
Many decades later, when Isaac McCaslin inherits some of this land on his 21st birthday, he tries to refuse the bequest because his grandfather, father and uncle had farmed it with slave labor.
By this point the Civil War has been over for a quarter-century and slave labor had been replaced with share-cropping, but to repudiate his inheritance, Isaac argues that the land never legally belonged to his grandfather “because on the instant when Ikkemotubbe discovered, realized, that he could sell it for money, on that instant it ceased ever to have been his forever, father to father, and the man who bought it bought nothing.” (From The Bear.)
I am drawn to abstractions like this, to the Romantic notion that land can never be really owned, but Isaac McCaslin’s moral idealism turns out to be a trap he is unable to escape for the rest of his life. I live in a practical world where we hold the deed to our land and pay taxes on it every year, where we expect to one day pass it along to our children.
At the same time, I nurture the illusion that a borderless woods begins at our door and stretches for miles, a woods where the deer browse, turkeys forage and owls hunt, all without a thought to whose woods these are.
When we enter these woods, the challenge is to un-learn most of what we know and to walk as freely as animals. Henry David Thoreau expresses this well in his essay Walking: “When I go out of the house for a walk … I finally and inevitably settle southwest. … The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side.”
By this Thoreau means that when he goes walking, he turns his back on Europe and the notion of land as property that explorers and settlers brought with them to the New World.
The stone wall running a thousand feet along the southern border of our land is referenced on our deed, and another, much shorter one along the northwest corner.
We often think of stone walls marking property lines, as in Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall; but most of the old walls we encounter hiking in the woods now have nothing to do with property lines and probably never did. More likely, they were a decorative solution to the abundant stones farmers unearthed when they cleared fields for crops and grazing animals.
Now they seem like ghosts from another time, like the cellar holes and family graves we come across in deep woods, all of them reminders that our time on Earth is just a microsecond in geologic time.
Our logging project has left behind a lot of debris: hemlock bows carpet the forest floor, stumps and butt-ends flare yellow like small fires, and the logging road is barely passable where “corduroy” logs were laid down to prevent erosion.
The short-sighted interpretation would be that the woods will never be the same, but there is a more-enduring truth. Our loggers will return to do some tidying when the woods dry out, but most of the healing will be natural over two or three years.
The floor of a forest is never neat, certainly not ours before the logging began. One year a microburst uprooted two dozen trees in a single grove, and every year trees that are starved for light or weakened by disease fall on their own.
Experts will tell you that the debris from logging is good for birds and small animals, for mosses and fungi; and I hope I’m not rationalizing when I believe they are right.
On my periodic walks I have been removing the tape ribbons I tied to mark our land, but it will take a few more trips to get them all and little more time for the trees on our side and on our neighbors’ to become again a borderless woods stretching for miles.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford.