I am walking through Zealand Notch, south toward Thoreau Falls. It’s a gray late November day, well after the kaleidoscope has departed the hillsides. Winter’s onset sits heavy in silent, bare birch boughs all around me, like a wordless warning. It’s easy to slip into a sweet sort of melancholy if one wants, to sigh for the lost glories of autumn, and I do. But the forest disrobed offers me a chance to scan for signs of the cataclysm, so I do. I imagine the rusty rail track that once bisected the notch, just yards from where I walk. I close my eyes and try to conjure the voices of loggers, of rough, tired men shouting and grunting as they wrestle large timbers onto the rail cars. I open my eyes again and for a moment can glimpse the waste left in the loggers’ wake, all stumps and slash and churned mud reaching up to the shoulders of Zeacliff. (How did the author of the book on New Hampshire’s logging railroads put it? “[A] pile of burnt rubble and sterile soil.” A useful apocalypse.)
 

A slight breeze stirs the leaves on the ground. I indulge myself: an almost imperceptible gesture of recognition from that forest’s descendants? They seem to whisper: Yes, it was once so. 

Suddenly a screaming crescendo invades my eardrums; my reverie explodes. I look up just in time to watch three fighter jets speed, in quick succession, through the middle of Zealand Notch, like well-aimed arrows. The planes cock their wings at slight angles, cockily, blasting southward just a few hundred feet above the naked treetops, each lower than the one before, until I can see the pilot in the cockpit of the last. I can make out the circle-cross symbol on its blurred fuselage. This last jet banks, rolling left, east of Carrigain, its wings curling off invisible notch rails like a boy home from school, heading out the door to play. 

I move on, reflexively chagrined and stewing. Joyrides on my tax dollar— harbingers of cataclysm to come. But I am secretly heartened by the display, by the exuberant excess of it. I consider the valley, and how it must not be surprised or unsettled. It gets this all the time, really.

The flat, forgiving path permits quick and careless strides, and I silently review the history of these valleys: never really settled, just hunted and wondered and wandered until 130 years ago, then cut with abandon, their beds laced with railroads, erosion, calamitous fires, the illusion of sterility, frenzied re-growth, the invasion of recreating hordes armed with good intentions. The flanks of the mountains are densely covered, but now in late fall, the naked armies of birches surrounding islands of spruce tell ghostly tales of what was taken. 

Such swift-moving debris—where did it all go? 

N ow a chain saw’s bellow and stutter ricochet from the other side of Whitewall, and I am brought back to the present. My shoulders tighten with the memory of the afternoon’s work, hauling birch and maple logs through a slippery wood up to the hut. All these sounds chomp and stomp, and flatten the hearing of them. They seem to augur strange weather or seek for the clearings, where wildness can only be measured next to its absence. Melancholy sweetens and thickens. The intruders behind these sounds, after all, are my...

JONATHAN MINGLE is a writer based in Vermont. In 2004 and 2005, he worked as a caretaker of Carter Notch and Zealand Falls huts, and at the Hermit Lake Shelters.

The full text of this story may be found in the Winter/Spring 2011 issue of Appalachia.