Fools Like Me

Day Four, May 26, 2008

The Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is one of those places that people look at on a North Carolina highway map and say, "ah, there's no reason to go there." That would be a terrible mistake because there are few places in this nation where a soul can see the eastern American forest as it once was. I've been in forests throughout all of Kentucky and a lot of Appalachia and have been impressed by the size of some of the trees. There's been times that I've had to remind myself that every piece of ground on which I have hiked has been logged and a lot of it once was clear cut as the growing country spilled out onto the treeless prairies of the Midwest.

When I was a freshman at Male High School, my freshman English teacher made me memorize Joyce Kilmer's poem "Trees," and I can still recite a good portion of it today.

"Poems are made by fools like me
But only God can make a tree."

It wasn't until I had English Literature my sophomore year in college that I learned that Joyce Kilmer was a man. Besides being a poet, Kilmer was a heavily decorated soldier in World War I and served in the Regimental Intelligence Section, in which he led patrols into the "No Man's Land" between the network of trenches in Europe. Kilmer was killed during the Second Battle of Marne in 1918.

After the collapse of the timber market in the 1930s, a forester recognized the importance of the trees standing in the mountain cove and suggested that it be preserved as an example of a virgin stand of American hardwoods. In 1936, the U.S. Forest Service purchased about 13,000 acres around the cove and preserved the stand of ancient trees.

If anyone reading this has never seen an original stand of forest, then I urge you to take a trip to Kilmer Memorial Forest. If you're in Kentucky and can't get there, you should check out Lilly Cornett's Wood's in the mountains.

When we started our hike into the Kilmer forest, all of us were impressed by the size of some poplar trees near the trailhead, but we later learned that they were dwarfs compared to the big trees in the cove deeper in the forest.

My wife and I once owned a house in Shelbyville, Kentucky, and a massive poplar tree stood beside it. The tree towered over the house, and the diameter of that tree was probably about 8 feet. If I had to guess, I'd say it was about 100 years old, which was about the age of the house. It was probably the largest and oldest tree in that part of the town, and I could spot its top branches from one of the main streets in the winter.

That tree in Shelbyville wouldn't make the "D" list in the Kilmer Memorial Forest. We found a poplar tree that was probably 450 years old and had a diameter at six feet from the ground of over 21 feet. If I had to guess, I'd say it was well over 100 feet tall. The fascinating thing about old poplar trees is that they are nearly as big around 50 feet from the ground as they are at six feet. Some of the branches in the tops of these trees are as big as most of the trees in a place like Mammoth Cave National Park.

The day before I awed at the sight of an omnipresent structure designed and built by man. On this day I stood in awe of something God designed and built a half century before John Smith set foot at Jamestown in neighboring Virginia. While the lost colonists of Roanoke toiled, suffered, and died at the other end of North Carolina, the trees at Kilmer swayed in the sun and wind.

"A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray..."

The impressive thing is that there are more than just one of these trees in the forest. There are hundreds of them. One tree took three and a half of my wingspan (six feet) to link around it. It took Dana six spans to get around it, and Sylvia had to link eight times to make it around. Parkman is not a tree hugger and opted out of the nonsense because he was pretending to be a Civil War soldier.

When I worked at the Filson Club Historical Society in Louisville, I often lectured civic and school groups. People always asked me if I would like to time travel, and I always answered "no." It usually shocked everyone, but when I'd look through our museum and see old doctors' and surgeons' kits I realized nothing could lure me out of the era of modern medicine. We should be thankful for what we have.

However, I've always wished I could see the American forest before the logging industry and before Endothia parasitica (chestnut blight) destroyed the American Chestnut trees. These trees were the "queens" of the American forest and the blight destroyed them all. It is my understanding that they were larger than any other tree in the east, and they had aromatic blossoms in the summer.

I still find chestnut stumps in the forests, and occasionally find the sprouts of chestnut trees. They only live a handful of years before the blight wipes them out.

A blight is now killing all the hemlock trees in the United States. I know very little about it, but all the hemlocks in Appalachia are dying and a lot are completely dead. We talked to a forester, who was on vacation from Kentucky on sort of a busman's holiday, who told us that we should remember the hemlock because they won't be around in a few years. They do look ragged, too. There are plenty of very old ones in the Kilmer Memorial Forest, but they are in bad shape. I hope Sylvia and Parkman remember seeing those huge hemlocks at Kilmer and last year when we hiked over Clingman's Dome on the Appalachian Trail.

Just like at Fontana Dam the day before, we lingered at Kilmer. I spent parts of the rest of the vacation wanting to go back there.

On the way back to our cabin, we stopped by the Cheoah Dam. Dana took pictures of the dam because it is the one from which Harrison Ford's character in the movie "The Fugitive" jumped to escape from Tommy Lee Jones.

We also celebrated Dana's birthday. We bathed the kids and ourselves and went to the main dining room at Fontana Village. We had some pricey, good food, and the kids tried to stay on their best behavior while worrying about why they had so many forks and spoons. When it was finally time to go, they bolted from their chairs and could not wait to get out of that place.

It was a far cry from the freedom of the trail amongst those massive trees.