Thoreau's Legacy by Richard Hayes Read Free Book Online

me, as to my father, each growing tree is a living sculpture, its form determined by the mountain’s myriad microclimates and the infinite patterns of forest light. The hundred-year-old black oak in our front yard spreads an umbrella of arms; in deep forest, its sisters grow straight up.
    The trees provide their own background music. We arrived the other night in the middle of a lively argument of katydids in quadraphonic chorus. The next night a barred owl checked in with its “who cooks for you?” call.
    “Gronk!” cry the ravens as they ride the morning thermals, and a pair of hawks cry “kee-yer,” circling the ridge around midday. A pileated woodpecker has tried to fool me into thinking it’s a flicker, but I have learned to distinguish its lower call. Sometimes the flicker drums on our metal roof—a wake-up call you can’t ignore.
    I want to pass these sights and sounds to my sons and grandchildren as a refuge for their spirits, as they have been for mine. But we don’t own the mineral rights. Any day it chooses, a company can come and push our house, our trees, the very bones of the hills, down into the hollows, flattening Crooked Ridge, burying Brackens Creek, wasting the timber, which they don’t even bother to harvest, and destroying at least ten homes on our ridge and in the valley below.
    When I was a child, I thought this mountain was “forever.” Now I am old. I do not know if the mountain and the trees will outlive me. I can only breathe to the sky my hope that I will stand here again in this glow of evening light.

    Lillian Marks Heldreth is a professor emeritus of English and Native American studies at Northern Michigan University. Born and raised in the mountains of West Virginia, which she still frequently visits, she lives in Marquette, Michigan, on the south shore of Lake Superior.

The Carson Range
    Betty Owen
    Looking east from the mountains, you see a vast expanse of desert sagebrush and scrub, with a few clusters of piñon pine but none of the thick stands of conifers found at higher elevations. Some may see the desert as colorless and drab, but to me it is a uniquely beautiful place. I have lived here for almost twenty years and have watched the diminishing mountain snow pack, the long droughts, and the dropping water levels in the lakes.

    Betty Owen , who will celebrate her eighty-seventh birthday this year, lives in Carson City, Nevada. She is a widow, mother, grandparent, painter, and avid recorder of her nature walks.

    The Carson Range of the Sierra Nevada. Photo by Betty Owen.

Bloomington Canyon
    Helen Whitaker
    THE BEAUTIFUL MOUNTAIN AREAS OF THE BEAR LAKE Valley in southern Idaho have been my second home since early childhood. The old-growth pine forest of Bloomington Canyon, in particular, with its diverse plant and animal life, has been my nature lab. When I was growing up, the weather patterns and climate conditions remained fairly consistent from one season to the next. People could pretty much count on heavy snowfalls in winter, cold rains in spring and fall, and relatively mild temperatures in summer. Ever since the 1880s, when the area was settled by pioneers, there had not been a dramatic climate change that altered the lives of the canyon creatures and plants, and rarely did a weather event dramatically affect the area. All through the 1970s and early 1980s, when I was exploring the canyon on horseback, the weather patterns and climate conditions remained constant. One main landmark was an ancient Engelmann spruce tree, which scientists had estimated to be more than two thousand years old. I could always count on seeing that majestic beauty towering over the other trees as if surveying its domain.
    In the mid to late ’80s, however, the western United States moved into a drought cycle, and ten years into the drought, the weather in Bloomington Canyon changed drastically. There was very little snow during the winters, little to no rainfall in the spring and fall, and