set, and subset

 

August and Albright Nature Grove

as summer starts to wind down

and the flatter lands call me back to work,

I like to have an adventure

up here in these Smoky Mountains,

a goodbye to the teacher called mountains

to whom I regularly apprentice myself,

today is 7 miles of climbing up and down a valley:

first on a gravel road

where those settling these lower reaches of the slopes

coaxed plants to give them corn, sweet potatoes, apples,

where chestnut trees showered sweet nuts upon them,

and allowed their wood to be shaped into house and barn,

a wood ready to be worked and resistant to rotting away,

that world of the settler is gone,

and the cove hardwood forest aches to return,

for 90 years the trees, without help from us,

have been reaching back to the sky,

and slowly, steadily recreating the world that thrived here

since the Great Ice retreated some ten millennia ago,

for reasons all too rare in these Southern Appalachians

a section of this upper valley was spared the “clear cut,”

and enough old growth trees were allowed to remain

so that we, in our visit,

can see a ghost of what was,

when the forest, without humans,

created a world where the wolf knew it was home,

where the bison and the elk,

of countless other species, of fauna and flora

lived and thrived together in a harmony

we humans cannot even achieve just with our own kind,

we humans have had the vision

to set aside some spaces

from the destructive scouring

of reducing what is not “us,”

to what “we” want,

our challenge is to realize

that “we” includes the wolves, the trees,

and all the species that are part of the family of life,

we cannot live if we do not act upon the reality

that there is a set called life,

and that we are at best a subset of it,

which knows its place, and uses it well.

by Henry H. Walker

August 8, ‘20