Blue Highways: Forest House Lodge, New York

Unfolding the Map

A venture into the forest can be a transforming experience, regardless of the moods of the forest on any particular day.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) wanders into a forest and eventually seeks out the warmth of the Forest House Lodge roadhouse.  While we sit with him for a few moments at the bar with a Genessee Cream Ale, I'll reflect a little on my love for the forest.  If you want to get lost in an Adirondack Forest, enter underneath the boughs and push past the brambles to the map.  Watch for poison ivy!

Book Quote

"The forest became heavier, sky darker, mountains higher, settlements further apart....I was at the heart of a great wilderness second only to the Northwoods of Maine in the eastern United States.  An occasional woodsy gift shop or burger stand built like a chalet did not prevent the forest from being pervasive, ominous, and forbidding; nor did they quiet the strange cries of birds from the dark hemlock.  Then a cold rain blew down, turned to hail, then eased to a drizzly fog.  It was early afternoon, yet headlights vanished after twenty yards as if the damp extinguished the beams.  Birch, alder, conifers - nothing but trees and water and fog for miles.

"East of the village of Blue Mountain Lake, dominated by a bluish hump of the Adirondacks, the road descended to a small building - part house, part tavern - snugged against a wooded hill and surrounded by vaporous mountains.  The mist glowed orange from a neon beer sign.  The building, white clapboard trimmed in red with a silvery corrugated tin roof, was the Forest House Lodge.  In fact, it wasn't a lodge, but something even better: an antique roadhouse.  The roadhouse - institution and word - has nearly disappeared from America."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 6

I'd love to have found an image of the Forest House Lodge, but alas, I couldn't. Here's a picture of the Adirondack Museum, nearby in Blue Mountain Lake. Photo at < a href="http://www.art.com">Art.com Click on photo to go to host page.

Forest House Lodge, New York

LHM sets up his stop at the Forest House Lodge by contrasting the gloom of the forest with the coziness of the roadhouse.  I will come back to this theme a little later.  In the interim, I'd like to share with you why I love forests, even if they are dark, gloomy and scary.

I grew up in an area that was heavily forested.  I say "was" because over the years, as the lumber company in my hometown went from being a locally-owned corporation to a subsidiary of major corporations such as Boise Cascade and Georgia Pacific, and as shareholders began to demand more, a cycle of greater cutting occurred.  The logs that exited forest logging roads on trucks got smaller and smaller.  It will take many generations for the redwood forests that I grew up in to regenerate themselves.

However, when I was young the forest was a big place, and even if as an adult I can see how much we've lost, it is still a big place, especially when I stand on the side of the road at the summit of Seven Mile Hill and look out over the tree-covered mountains toward the coast.

It was in these forests that I learned the beauty of nature.  If you've never experienced late afternoon in a Northern California forest on a sunny spring or summer day, you haven't experienced one of life's pleasures.  On the ground level, the light streams through the breaks in the leaves and leaves a diagonal dappled pattern on the forest floor.  Insects buzz, serving as a break in the silence save for the rush of a breeze in the leaves.  Above, the light shining through leaves that are just opaque enough to allow a little light through turns those leaves a brilliant green.  The radiant blue of the sky above contrasts just right with the greens of the forest.  The dried leaves on the forest floor have their own, woody and loamy scent.

I even loved the forest in winter.  A redwood forest in winter, some would say, is a pretty miserable place.  Cold and misty, you get chilled to the bone while water droplets from the trees fall onto your neck and travel down inside your shirt, along your spine, and deposit themselves in your underwear.  The deciduous trees have lost all their leaves, so everything seems barren despite the leaves still present on the conifers.  There is perpetual fog, partly because the trees themselves create their own ecosystems and therefore create the fog that lingers around their treetops and the rain that nourishes their roots.  The forest carpet of dead leaves is wet, like a sponge, and hideous looking huge mushrooms, most likely poisonous, spring up everywhere.  Yet, even in this environment, I was happy.  The rivers ran full, often with salmon swimming to their spawning grounds.  The air smelled fresh and clean.  When we had a cabin, the wet outdoors meant lazy days indoors by a fire.

Regardless of the time of year or the circumstances, when I'm in the middle of a forest it seems like a living being.  I don't just mean that there are lots of trees, plants and animals that are all living and dying in their individualities.  I mean that taken all together, it is as if I am standing in the midst of a large, living, breathing being.  It is hard to describe, and if you're concentrating on some task, you're bound to miss it.  But if you stand and listen, and open your mind, you can feel the spirit of the forest.  My father, who for all his faults could have moments of extreme transcendence, used to tell me to "listen to the trees," and we'd sit in silence.  I think that in those moments that he was tapped into something larger than himself, me, and all of us that have confined ourselves to a narrow range of our senses.

And this sounds a lot like what LHM describes in his quote - this sense of the forest as something larger.  For LHM, however, he feels a need to escape it.  Let's do a little thought experiment.  Let's imagine that LHM is traveling not in 1980 but in 1780.  Ghost Dancing is not a van but a carriage of some kind, perhaps a stage, drawn by horses and a driver.  While LHM dozes and muses in the carriage, the forest outside broods and darkens, an energy that can't be understood but can be felt.  It's cold.  After a long time of travel, the carriage descends into a valley and at the bottom is light, warmth, food and drink and a little mystery and intrigue.  The roadhouse.

LHM writes the roadhouse is disappearing from American life.  I would argue that it has just reacted to the more mobile American way of life.  A roadhouse originally offered both food and lodging, along with entertainment and gambling, but now you rarely find a place that is not a hotel that can offer such amenities.  It makes sense that when society relies on horse or foot-powered transport that all of the amenities needed by travelers is concentrated in one place.  That is probably why they were considered to be a little disreputable, as Wikipedia puts it.  It seems to me that the function of the roadhouse, in the modern age, has split among multiple types of establishments.  Hotels, restaurants, casinos, and nightclubs all offer individualized parts of the roadhouse.  Interestingly enough, those establishments that offer all of those things are now considered upscale, and called resorts.

In Europe, one can still find remnants of what we would consider the roadhouse, though more reputable.  I've read that in parts of Europe, such as Germany and Austria, one can go for a hike in the mountains and forests, and find establishments serving food, drink and even lodging at various points along the way.  I wish we had more of this concept in the U.S., along with the right to traverse private property as is common in places like Sweden.  Such privileges would make even more forests available to the common person, might encourage more healthy outdoor activities, and would certainly get me out in the mountains and forests more often.  Thankfully, I still have my own little corner of a forest in the form of thirteen acres in Northern California.  Even though I hardly get there anymore, it is nice to know that this small slice of forest, a part of a disappearing forest that once covered much of the western United States, is still there for me.  I can still tap into that energy that connects us with something larger than ourselves.

Musical Interlude

In this post, I'll include two songs.  The first is Redwood Tree by Van Morrison and I thought the song captured some of the feeling I had about my own redwood forest and my love of forests in particular.

The second song, Roadhouse Blues by The Doors, is a modern reference to the checkered past of that particular American institution.

If you want to know more about Forest House Lodge

I couldn't find much on the Forest House Lodge Bed and Breakfast, which the former roadhouse has become.  Here's some information on Blue Mountain Lake, the community in which it is situated.

Adirondack.net: Blue Mountain Lake
Adirondack Museum
Indian Lake Chamber of Commerce
Wikipedia: Blue Mountain Lake

Next up: Somewhere on the Hudson River

Blue Highways: Somewhere on Muir and Salt Creeks, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

This post is a fun one, mostly about banana slugs!  Slimy, ugly and utterly fascinating, these creatures are.  I grew up with them.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) comes face to face with one, and then lets it get away from him.  Somewhere in his van crawls a banana slug, making sleep difficult.  Who wants to wake up with a slug on their face?  I don't!

I made some guesses for this post, picking spots on Muir Creek and on Salt Creek to represent where LHM might have stopped.  To see these two places, navigate to the map!

Book Quote(s)

"Oregon 230 followed a broad mountain stream called Muir Creek. When the morning warmed, I stopped along the banks to fill a basin and wash....

"Big yellow-hooded blossoms of the Western skunk cabbage spread over the margins....Looking nothing like cabbage, the leaves were used by Indians to wrap food for cooking; they pulverized the hot peppery roots into a flour that helped save them (and the Lewis and Clark expedition) from starvation in the early spring before other edible plants sprouted."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 2

"I crossed the Cascades on Oregon 58....

"At noon, the journey began a kind of sea change that started when I drove up an old logging road into the recesses of Salt Creek....

"After a sandwich, I poked about the woods and turned up a piece of crawling yellow jelly nearly the length of my hand. It was a banana slug, so named because the mollusk looks like a wet, squirming banana. I wanted to photograph it, but a drizzle came on, so I bedded it down in damp leaf litter in a pail. I could drive out of the rain to take its picture."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 2

Salt Creek, below the Falls. Image by "miatasailor" at Flickr. Click on image to go to host page.

Somewhere on Muir and Salt Creeks, Oregon

Why so many quotes today?  These passages of LHM's make me a little homesick.  I've written in many posts that I am from the north coast of California, and the climate, animal and plant life of that area is very similar to what you find in Oregon.  The forests are made up of tall trees - in my home area the trees are predominantly redwood and fir, and in this part of Oregon you have pretty much the same type of coniferous forest, minus the redwoods.  At all times of year, especially in valley's and gulches near streams, the land is wet and lush.  Coniferous forests often create their own weather by holding and trapping the moisture that they need to survive underneath the forest canopy.  In winter, regardless of whether it is raining or not, one can often walk beneath the boughs of the trees and get bombarded by water condensing and rolling off the needly leaves in heavy drops.

I love those types of forests.  In the winter, the lushness and dampness brings to one's nose a heavy smell of vegetation.  The forest loam, made up of fallen needles that have accumulated over years, provides a soft, spongy ground to walk upon.  Rivers, swollen by the rains, run high and rapid, looking very different than the dark green, brownish streams that are their summer guises.  Sometimes, large fish negotiate the rapids, occasionally leaping out of the water - these are salmon returning to their birthplaces to spawn at the end of one of the most fascinating circular journeys of our world.  Born upstream, if they survive various dangers after they hatch they swim downriver to the ocean.  There they become saltwater fish for the majority of their lives, anywhere from one to five years.  At some point, they heed the call to reproduce and find their way back to the stream that they left so long before.  They swim against the stream, negotiating all kinds of obstacles and dangers both natural and man-made.  If they make it to their spawning ground, then depending on their gender they lay eggs or release sperm to fertilize the eggs.  And then, after a glorious moment of reproduction, they die.

This type of environment is like where I grew up, and I still get a thrill walking through the chill of a dripping coniferous forest, the smell of the rotting vegetation, the smell of newly fallen or cut wood from these areas, and the smell of the clean, and I mean really clean, air.  My pants might get wet from walking through living and large vegetation such as the skunk cabbage LHM mentions.  A walk in such areas is usually followed by warming my backside against the heat of a warm indoor fire.  There's nothing like it.

A face to face view with a banana slug. Photo at The Murky Fringe blog. Click on photo to go to host page.In this world lives one of the most fascinating creatures.  I used to run across them as a boy.  LHM is entranced enough by one to revert to a boy himself and put it in a pail to take with him.  I'm writing about the banana slug.  On wet days, it was not uncommon to find one, slowly sliming its way across the leaves, leaving a trail of sticky goo behind it.  These creatures are related to snails, and have the same type of movements, sans shell.  Their antennae slowly move back and forth, with what appear to be little eyes on them.  They look like a banana.  If I touched one or picked it up, it was always slimy.

A pair of bananas. Image at the Magickcanoe blog. Click on photo to go to host page.

If a banana slug fears, it should fear little boys.  Little boys are the bane of pretty much every slow-moving and slow-witted creature.  For banana slugs in particular, every type of torture could be devised.  Slice them, dice them.  Put firecrackers under them or around them.  Throw them at other kids.  Put salt on them and watch them horribly shrivel up and die.  I partook in some of these activities, usually because of peer pressure.  Secretly, I was delighted by banana slugs.  They were just so, harmless.  They seemed like manatees or cows of the mollusk world.  They did their own thing, not really caring about anything else, paying attention only to their own world.

The UC Santa Cruz mascot, Sammy the Banana Slug! Image at World's Best Information. Click on photo to go to host page.

I was very happy when I learned some years ago that the University of California at Santa Cruz had taken the banana slug as its unofficial mascot.  The students chose the name as a statement against the hyper-competitiveness of college athletics, since UC-Santa Cruz didn't have organized athletics at the time, but when the university decided to join the NCAA Division III in five sports, the chancellor wanted to give the teams a more dignified name.  However, the Sea Lions didn't catch on, and in 1986 the university bowed to student pressure and officially changed its name to the banana slugs.  The lowly banana slug went from a regional nobody that little boys tortured to the rarified heights of university mascot, symbolized by Sammy the Slug!

Back to LHM, who put the slug in a pail and put it in Ghost Dancing in order to drive out the rain and photograph it.  What happened?  He forgot about it, then later found the pail empty.  Somewhere in his truck, a banana slug was marauding around and haunting his dreams that night.  Maybe he was right to fear...after all, a banana slug has no known predators (except little boys)!

Musical Interlude

You don't know how hard it is, sometimes, to come up with a decent tune for the musical interlude, especially when you are writing about banana slugs or skunk cabbage.  However, I found a band from Northern California called the Banana Slug String Band, whose musicians write and play educational songs for kids about the environment.  A few that were really cool weren't available, but here's one about redwood trees called Big Red.  Since I came from the redwood region, I enjoy looking at the trees.

If you want to know more about Muir and Salt Creeks

Muir Creek Falls
Muir Creek Trail
Wikipedia: Salt Creek Falls
World of Waterfalls: Salt Creek Falls

Next up: Corvallis, Oregon