In the damp beechwood, fifty paces north-north-east
from the highway’s service pull-off, archival
traces of pre-industrial woodland: pines preserved
well in gummy turpentine, hollowed-out white oaks
scarred bone-stiff by historic fires. This slushy floor
spreads out scattered in the protruding snouts of antique
tree stumps. We trace the rings to play their records,
log data from these crumbling years. Across the forest
stands a witness tree, some old carved and long-expired
demarcation of property, settler incursion.
In a young bed of saplings it stands alone, well-notched,
untethered to breathing roots, limbs, the limitations
metabolism makes. For a hundred years and more
it has claimed this parcel for its maker, has noted
what was claimed, has upheld that bargain through flame and flood.
Those private boundaries are invisible now,
lost in time to lotteries, auctions, networks
dense with handshake transactions; they exist presently
as plots that bend with climate, the rain: pine-oak heaths,
acidic coves, granite outcrops, rock streambeds. We left
for the truck, followed the path of a flowing
ephemeral creek conceived just this morning
after two nights’ hard pour. Grimmia, rock moss,
along its uncertain edges oscillates
between definition and decay: it grows
plush with the rain, gray through the gaps: it unfurls,
dessicates, and, in concert, ticks the march of time.
Hawks hover low at our eye-level, drenched in sunlight.
Chickens faintly squall beneath the tightly woven
quilts of grasses and crops below us. We descend
the ridgeline’s knob by means of the thin path down its back,
stumbling between views of the valley, the old town
hidden under forest, its half-forgotten footprint
filled now with fresh plantings: Hosta more than Heuchera.
Streams fill the Bad Creek Hydro Project’s braced bowl
on the vale’s far side. Come nightfall its pumps will start
pumping, pouring the empty basin full again,
and by the following noon its turbines will charge
new-built leisure cabins, barn lights and single-wides.
Three lustful farm dogs within earshot rush deeper
into the wooded dark, as fast or faster
than the lumbering bison who once plodded
the region’s sod with their hooves, grazing after
waves of conscious fire expanded prairies into these
primeval hills, their lowlands first cleared in sequence
by archaic settlements, plain by plain cultured
into domesticity. Woolen, robust, huffing
smoke from their nostrils, they galumphed long before
colonial speculators built ramshackle forts
and shattered the town, though not for long after.
Whatever else waits lost beneath the clay’s slow climb
will likely be lost forever, stranded in this place
begun in bedrock and driven by bloodspill across
histories outside the school-halls: myths of horn and hide,
hide and guts, guts a great many lifetimes gone.
Carson Colenbaugh (he/him) is a poet and forest ecologist based in the southern Appalachian Mountains and Piedmont, the traditional and ancestral lands of Cherokee, Yuchi, and Muscogee peoples. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Hollins Critic, and elsewhere. His research concerning the impact of fire exclusion policies on early 20th century Eastern Cherokee culture was recently published in Human Ecology. His favorite tree is Table Mountain pine, he thinks scuppernongs are better than muscadines, and he wishes his banjo playing sounded more like Roscoe Holcomb’s and less like Kermit the Frog’s.