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A Walk in the WoodsBill Bryson |
The two-income family
Harper´s magazine in December struck a sombre economic note with an article by Nancy B. Mavity on an unsettling new phenomenon, the two-income family, in which husband and wife both went out to work to pay for a more ambitious lifestyle. Mavity´s worry was not how women would cope with the demands of employment on top of child-rearing and houswork, but rather what this would do to the man´s traditional standing as breadwinner. ´I´d be ashadmed to let my wife work,´ one man told Mavity tardly, and it was clear from her tone that Mavity expected most readers to agree. Remarkably, until the war many women in America had been unable to work whether they wanted to or not. Up until Pearl Harbor, half of the forty-eight states had laws makin it illegal to employ a married woman.
In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to...
In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition - either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Damm and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and temote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit - that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn´t all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilles fields.
Fashion was moving on...
Fashion was moving on. American holiday makers were discovering the seaside. The White Mountain hotels were a little too dull, a little too remote and expensive, for modern tastes. Worse, they had begun to attract the wrong sort of people - parvenus from Boston and New York. Finally, and above all, there was the automobile. The hotels were built on the assumption that visitors would come for a fortnight at least, but the motor care gave tourists a fickle mobility. In the 1924 edition of New England Highways and Byways from a Motor Car, the author gushed about the unrivalled splendour of the White Mountains - the tumbling cataracts of Franconia, the alabaster might of Washington, the secret charm of the little towns like Lincoln and Bethlehem - and encouraged visitors to give the mountains a full day and night. America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.
The State Senate of Illinois...
SPRINGFIELD, ILL. (AP) - The State Senate of Illinois yesterday disbanded its Committee on Efficiency and Economy ´for reasons of efficiency and economy´.
- Des Moines Tribune, 6 February 1955
The first people to venture deep into the woods from the east...
The first people to venture deep into the woods from the east (the Indians, of course, had got there perhaps as muc as 20,000 years before them) weren’t looking for historic creatures and passages to the west or new lands to settle. They were looking for plants. America’s botanical possibilities excited Europeans inordinately, and there was both glory and monet to be made out in the woods. The eastern woods teemed with flora unknown to the old world and there was a huge eagerness, from scientists and amateur enthusiasts alike, to get a piece of it. Imanine if tomorrow a spaceship found a jungle growing beneath the gassy mountains of Venus. Think what Bill Gates, say, would pay for some tendrilled, purply-lobed piece of Venusian exotica to put in a pot in his greenhouse. That was the rhododendron in the eighteennth century - and the camellia, the hydrangea, the wild cherry, the rudbeckia, the azalea, the aster, the ostrich fern, the catalpa, the spice bush, the Venus flytrap, the Virginia creeper, the euphorbia. These and hundreds more were collected in the American woods, shipped across the ocean to England and France and Russia, and received with greedy kenness and trembling fingers.
If there is one thing the AT teaches...
If there is one thin the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy - something we could all do with more of in our lives.
For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing.
For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing. All of its internal life exists within three paper-thin layers of tissue, the phloem, xylem and cambium, just beneath the bark, which together form a mois sleeve around the dead heartwood. However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between the roots and leaves. These three diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do is one of the wonders of life. Without noise or fuss, every tree in a forest lifts massive volumes of water - several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day - from its roots to its leaves, where it is returned to the atmosphere. Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter of machinery, that would be needed to a fire department to raise a similar volume of water to that of a single tree. And lifting water is just one of the many jobs the phloem, xylem and cambium perform.
They also manufacture lignin and cellulose, regulate the storage and production of tannin, sap, gum, oils, and resins, dole out minerals and nutrients, convert starches into sugars for future growth (which is where the maple syrup comes into the picture), and goodness knows what else. But because all this is happening in such a thin layer, It also leaves the tree terribly vulnerable to invasive organisms. To combat this, trees have formed elaborate defense mechanisms. The reason a rubber tree seeps latex when cut is that this is its way of saying to insects and other organisms, ´Not tasty. Nothing here for you. Go away.´ Trees can also deter destructive creatures like caterpillars by flooding their leaves with tannin, which makes the leaves less tasty and so inclines the caterpillars to look elsewhere. When infestations are particularly severe, some trees can even communicate the fact. Some species of oak release a chemical that tells other oaks in the vicinity that an attack is under way. In response, the neighbouring oaks step up their tannin production the better to withstand the coming onslaught.
By such means, of course, does nature tick along. The problem arises when a tree ncounters an attacker for which evolution has left it unprepaired, and seldom has a tree been more helpless against an invader than the American chestnut against Endothia parasitica. It enters a chestnut effortlessly, devours the cambium cells and positions itself for attack on the next tree before the tree has the faintest idea, chemically speaking, what hit it. It spreads by means of spores, which are produced in the hundreds of millions in each canker. A single woodpecker can transfer a billion spores on the flight between trees. At the height of the American chestnut blight, every woodland breeze would loose spores in uncountable trillions to drift in a petty, lethal haze onto heighbouring hillslides. The mortality rate was 100 per cent. In just over thrity-five years the American chestnat became a memory. The Appalachians alone lost four billion trees, a quarter of its cover, in a generation.
A great tragedy, of course. But how lucky, when you think about it, that these diseases are at least species specific. Instead of a chestnut blight or Dutch elm disease or dogwood anthranoce, what if there was just a tree blight - something indisciminate and unstoppable swept through whole forests? And in fact there is. It’s called acid rain.
Each time you leave the cosseted and hygienic world of towns...
Each time you leave the cosseted and hygienic world of towns and take yourself into the hills you go through a series of staged transformations - a kind of gentle descent in squalor - and each time it is as if you have never done it before. At the end of the first day, you feel mildly, self-consciously, grubby; by the second day disgustingly so; by the third you are beyond caring; by the fourth you have firgotten what it is like not to be like this. Hunger, too, follows a defined pattern. On the first night you are starving for your noodles; on the second night you are starving but wish it wasn’t noodles; on the third you don’t want the noodles but you know you had better eat something; by the fourth you have no appetite at all but just eat because that is what you do at this time of day. I can’t explain it, but it’s strangely agreeable.