Joyce Kilmer Memorial Grove

Dead Hemlocks, a photo by FreeManWalking on Flickr.

Mid-morning now. I walk peaceful and relaxed on a gentle stroll through the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Grove. The sun is rising but the tall trees this preserve was created to protect still reach to the sky and snag a little of it with leafy boughs, scattering the rays so that the sun casts rays of cathedral light onto the forest floor. A fitting memorial for the man who wrote “Trees”:
I think that I shall never see…
Joyce Kilmer was a thirty-two year old intelligence officer in the U.S. Army when he dided in France in July 1918 from a single bullet to the head. In his brief career as a published writer he managed to write one of the most recognized poems in American literature. I dare say only Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” or “The Road Less Travelled” even come close. A Veteran’s of Foreign Wars Chapter from New York wanted to memorialize Kilmer and petitioned the U.S. Forest Service to find a fitting stand of trees. After considering several sites they chose 3,000 acres in western North Carolina. This stand of hemlock and tulip poplar is one of the last stands of virgin forests in the East. The trees here are so impressive that even the logging companies who had owned the land had waited to cut these big trees last. But cut them they would have. The logging equipment was already on site when the money finally came through for the Forest Service to purchase the land in 1934.
Now the forest is preserved for the ages, allowing people to walk through a cove of giant poplar trees, 400-years-old, over 100-feet tall, 6-feet or more in diameter. You say not very big by Weat Coast standards where the redwoods soar 350-feet into the sky and the giant sequoia are large enough to build a two-room house in a hollowed out trunk? Maybe so, but these poplars are the biggest thing around and are the representative giants of the forests in which they stand. Remember, life is best contemplated on the local scale. By doing so one can find inspiration that crosses geographic boundaries. Consider each thing and consider them in their place.
The real story for me however wasn’t walking through the poplars. It had only been maybe ten months since my last visit and I had already experienced their beauty and heaviness of life and abundance.
The hemlock are the real story here. Every hemlock in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Grove is dead, killed off by a pin-head sized insect called the hemlock wooly adelgid. The story is the same throughout western North Carolina and the pest is spreading into eastern Tennessee. The insects suck the moisture out of the needle of the tree and the tree starves. Forest managers have attempted to save the trees by applying a chemical cocktail known as a deep root treatment but this is expensive and there are many, many hemlock trees on the slopes of rich, streamside woods in the southern highlands. Biological agents, i.e., little beetles, have been released as well but as yet the effectiveness of these have been difficult to assess.
And in western North Carolina the damage has already been done. The lower trail in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Grove looks like what Joyce Kilmer must have seen in the war ravaged forests of World War I France. Forest Service personnel have used explosives to bring down most of the hemlocks along the trail. This leaves behind an irregular, highly splintered stump which resembles a tree brought down by high winds. The stumps do look more natural than if they had been taken down with the smooth cut of a chain saw. But still, the whole area looks ravaged. All by the one little insect barely visible with the naked eye.
Back at the truck I eat some cheese and crackers and consult my map. It’s time to head back to the reality of the city. While sitting on the tailgate I notice a family, a dad, a mom, a son, and two daughters, walking around wearing shirts with the word BIGFOOT and the silhouette of a large hominid on it. Curious, I ask what it is all about. “We’re looking for signs of sasquatch in North Carolina and northern Georgia,” says the father, taking a last drag off his cigarette before their stroll through the woods. “We were part of a documentary that’s going air on Animal Planet in June.” I told him I’d be looking for it and wished them happy hunting.
We all look for what we believe is out there, what we haven’t found but hope to find. There is a large creature in our dreams that comes out when we are silent and alone. The monster is addiction. It is the strain of troubled relationships. It is the lack of fulfillment that creeps into our day-to-day lives. Maybe it is a large hominid. Whatever our monster we want to look for it, show the world we have power over it. To show the world we can cure it with a chemical cocktail. Or to relinquish responsibility for our lives to a God who goes by many names. It is in the pursuit of that which we hope to be real, that elusive but enlightening moment as yet not experienced, that we take to the highway across state lines, that we turn onto meandering back country roads, that we lay on the ground at night and stare up at the stars.