Second Growth

Recent days have found me walking in the forest of the Piedmont, the Carolina hills where I live. Between the Blue Ridge escarpment some thousand feet up and the coastal plain that trails away from the fall line starting around 200 feet above sea level and descending to the beach, the Piedmont is an unusual part of the world with an unusual history. Lawson spent a month or so there. I've spent two decades. So I know the outdoors, the forest, the wilderness. 

Here is how you get to the wilderness:

Car. Your street. Bigger street. Big street. Entrance ramp. Divided highway. Exit ramp. Big intersection. Big street. Smaller street. Small street. Gravel shoulder. Then you click your key and the car beeps and you go off into the wilderness.

Just like John Lawson did, right?

So okay, I can be a little jealous of the actual wilderness Lawson faced and his actual relationship to it, but what I'm noticing right now is not just that -- it's that everything we call wilderness around here, in the Piedmont, is second growth. "The Piedmont is either plowed, paved, or in succession," according to the Field Guide to the Piedmont, by Michael Godfrey (I found this quotation, and at least one other I'll use here, through The Duke Forest at 75: A Resource for All Seasons). Which is exactly right. 

A bunch of nice trees sticking out of a hillside, virtually every single thing planted within the last 70 years. That's Piedmont nature; we don't have a square inch undisturbed by people. That's not bad -- it's just worth noticing.

The image above could pass as a driver's license photo for Piedmont natural areas. It's second-growth forest, a mixture of oak-hickory forest and conifers, on a slope. The occasional tree might be old, but overall everything started growing in the last hundred years. It's pretty, with rivers winding through valleys and ravines, but it's tame. The Indians managed the forest long before Europeans arrived -- both burning underbrush to chase game into their hands and girdling trees to fell them for areas to plant. Indian agriculture also exhausted the Piedmont's red clay soil, never especially bounteous. When an area gave out, they'd just move along and plant elsewhere, and the forest would reclaim the exhausted field. (For more on this see The Tuscarora War.)

Once Europeans came along, not so much, according to Herny Oosting in American Midland Naturalist in 1942: "Land was cheap and little thought was given to agricultural practices that would maintain soil productivity. ... [A]fter several years of cultivation without fertilizing, they became relatively unproductive. It became common practice to abandon such fields and clear new land." Which is why most of what we Piedmont-dwellers call "wilderness" is basically abandoned farms, gathered up by government or university in the 1930s and 1940s, now managed for research, the teaching of forestry practices, and recreation.

Every walk I take in the woods, I traverse forest road, developed trail, following blazes, gravel pathways, little wooden bridges, consciously rural in character.

For that reason perhaps more than any other I'm looking forward to my next trip following Lawson's path. I will pass through well-managed landscape -- the Francis Marion National Forest -- that has been inhabited by Indians for millennia and Europeans for centuries, but the land is so swampy and kind of difficult that much of it remains in the shape it was when Lawson visited and before; it is named for the famous Swamp Fox of the Revolutionary War who used its trackless backwaters as a base from which to harry the Tories. In any case, land too swampy for farming makes for undisturbed territory. In the little town of McClellanville, which I visited during my first section, I saw the Deerhead Oak, uncertainly estimated to be 1500 years old but many hundreds of years old no matter what. Lawson could have seen it.

Moss grows on a rock by the New Hope Creek in forest managed by Duke University.

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You see a lot of stuff like this in Piedmont forests. It's nice to know somebody's paying attention, but you won't exactly feel like you're the first one up on Sunday morning.

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And he could have seen many of the bald cyprus I'll see there -- and have seen in Grifton, not far east of here, where he died. But that's coastal plain, not Piedmont. That's in swampy areas where the farming is hard and you can just pass through in a boat. Once you get to the fall line -- where the rivers stop being easily navigable from the coast -- the settlers tended to farm where they were, for as long as they could, then move on, leaving wrecked land. So in my neighborhood -- virtually anywhere past the fall line in North and South Carolina -- you don't see many such landscapes, many such trees. 

And so I'm glad I'm soon heading back out. I want to see some first-growth woods. And I'm glad I'm following Lawson, because that's made me think about the second-growth woods of my own.

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