Alder Bog
If you start in the right place and move like water, you can walk through many worlds in less than a mile. You begin on a ledge as night exhales its last breath. The moon is setting in the west, vapor rises out of the fields and forestland and moves up the landscape. The fog first appears in the lowlands below the ledge and moves its way up the ridge, like water filling a pot. The stars shine overhead, but you become submerged.
The vapor condenses on spider webs, goldenrod, the fleece you’re wearing, the mountain ash gripping the ledge. Condensation drops off the leaves of the tree and onto the rock. What doesn’t get absorbed by the lichen disappears into the grass. The moon disappears, and the sun rolls up above the hills to the east. You step off the ledge and disappear into the grass. You walk down through the meadow of goldenrods, daisies, Queen Ann’s Lace, vetch and clover. Your boots and pants become saturated. Coated with droplets of fog, the spider webs lose their lethal surprise. The silk connects all the meadow plants and flowers, turning them into overloaded telephone and telegraph poles. You understand why the world has not been conquered by flying insects.
Not long ago this meadow was pasture for a few cows kept by an Amish farmer up the road. Covid killed off his dairy business and the cows went with it. The barbed wire came down and is left neatly coiled on stones. The cedar fence posts remain, driven deep in the ground. A little brown bird, a finch or a sparrow, rests on one, watching you as you pass.
Flowing down and bearing south you step past the cedar posts, and the old pasture becomes a plowed field. The riotous city of wildflowers, spiders, fence posts and little birds turns orderly. Tractors outfitted with GPS systems and laptops have laid out precise rows. Potato vines fill the rows, planted in the spring, hilled, and sprayed with fungicides and pesticides all summer. The work is done by one person riding in an air-conditioned tractor. No webs, no flies, no birds, no flowers other than potato blossoms. The farmer won’t leave a single boot track and won’t breathe uncooled air in this field until harvest time in the fall.
The field isn’t irrigated. All its moisture comes from rain and fog. What isn’t taken up by the potatoes sinks into the soil. Some of it flows out in seeps at the bottom of the hill. A trickle flows under a junked truck rolled into the woods: an old International Harvester, last registered in ’93. The keys are still in the ignition that will never turn again. There’s a white pine pushing up through a hole in the bed of the truck. Someday maybe bees will make honey in the old engine block.
Between the interred truck and the potatoes there’s a 12-foot strip of bare earth, then a mowed border, more wildflowers backed up against the trees. Black-eyed Susans, bindweed, burdock and campion, safe from the herbicides. Beyond the flowers is a 15-acre block of red pine. A sign tells you it’s a “tree farm”. If you grow the right trees in the right way the government gives the landowner a tax break. A forest bred and raised like cattle, or potatoes. No light reaches the forest floor. There are some red squirrels pulling on cones up in the canopy, and some chickadees floating around, but it's largely barren. Not even mushrooms grow in the dark heart of the managed forest.
Nothing, however, stays managed forever. Winter storms have blown down a lot of the red pine. Smaller trees: moose maples, fir saplings, birch and popple and even a few stringy dandelions are growing out and around the dead pines, reaching for the sun. There’s grouse in here, the new growth is getting chewed by deer. A barred owl makes the last call of the night, and the ravens announce the new day. Water moves, carving valleys, smoothing stones, taken up in the phloem of the trees and sinking through the earth.
The ground gets softer as you pick up a trail along the edge of the forest. You skip around puddles in the ruts of an ancient logging road. You followed the water and you’re in the bog. Alder grows up thick, rooted in pools and clinging to soggy moss and decaying vegetation. Hackmatack, cedar and spruce hold on to hillocks of green and silver moss, marsh grass and labrador tea. Nothing grows very big. This is the water home. It’s the low place. No skidder and logging team will show up here. It’s too wet and there’s nothing worth cutting. If you stand here too long, you’ll sink.
The vapor that enveloped you on the ridge rises from here. Little fish shine in the deeper tarns. Impressive leeches want to touch your boots, dragon flies circle the clearings, pitcher plants and sundews wait for small insects to drop in. Streams are born here. One starts to your south, nothing more than a dimple on the face of the moss, but it’s the road for the little shiners to move out of the bog, through the alders, where you can’t follow, and down to a brook that flows into a river and many worlds away, into the sea. It is the way.
Not the lungs of the world, nor the eyes of the world, but the liver and kidneys. Leaves fall, grasses are pressed down by ice and snow into the damp moss. The summer rains fill the streams and pools. The morning fog rises, condenses and returns distilled. The bog’s work is slow and quiet: sleeping, breathing, washing the water.
MATT DYER lives in far Northern Maine a few miles from the Canadian border. Read more.