Alder Stream / David Crews

“Alder Stream” for Northeast Wilderness Trust
by David Crews

During the fall of 2020, I was able to visit each of what Northeast Wilderness Trust refers to as their ambassador wilderness preserves—as part of a project to “write the land.”  Alder Stream in Atkinson, ME—what is also ancestral land of Penobscot Abenaki peoples—contains extensive groves of wild reproducing chestnut trees. This poem includes italicized lines from Lauret Savoy and Masanobu Fukuoka, and is part of a longer sequence for Northeast Wilderness Trust / link included below.

David Crews
Dec, 2020

Alder Stream

The colors are turning

here, in the most heavily logged state of the nation’s
history

stretches of I-95 go without trees

I look at the road atlas and see highways that network
northward boughs and branches

Paper birch, Gray birch, Black birch

In the distance big mountains loom where the AT nears
the end of its two-thousand mile pilgrimage

here, in the Maine woods—Abenaki ancestral lands

American beech, Balsam fir, White cedar

How and why do we know what we know?

Some say this land contains the largest grove of wild
reproducing American chestnuts

sits at the farthest northern reaches of chestnut habitat

here, at the ecotone

how light can I make myself?

Stepping through leaves spiked burrs rest just underfoot—
some dried and brown, some open, some still green

encasing delicate seed

these trees are smaller and more sick than I imagined

Blight of the American chestnut in the last hundred years
includes the loss of more than three billion trees

infected by a pathogen that colonizes a wound in the
bark

Red oak, Eastern white pine, Tamarack

The grove of chestnut sits atop a slight ridge just over
the Piscataquis river

contraptions of netting here and there to catch falling
debris—part of a study

how this land too some think proves the farthest reaches
of the blight

Penobscot river, Piscataquis river, Alder stream

alder of the genus Alnus—flowering plant, of the birch

alor, aliso, el for red, brown

Speckled alder, Red maple, Striped maple

Some researchers claim the only way to restore chestnut
populations—genetically engineered species

A single step away from the source can only lead astray

Up close and without vista the woods look imperfect

broken branches, fallen and rotting trees, half open burrs,
and fresh scat pressed and smeared on a rock

how I am drawn to fields of seeding milkweed

their pods opening to soft, silky, starlike filaments—
the coma lifting into wind

O teach me to love the mutilated world

Scientists say it is not uncommon in evolutionary history
for a species to give another species a gene

when a genetically engineered father tree is planted
near a wild mother, half the chestnut yield will carry

a blight tolerant trait

at what point will the wild chestnut tree be gone?

Quaking aspen, American elm, Black ash

So it is told that a squirrel once could travel Georgia
to Maine on only the branches of chestnut trees

Castanea dentata—American chestnut

My steps bushwhacking here are delicate for these
chestnut trees are not big

leaves now quite familiar: elongated, serrated, still
very green

I see them everywhere scattered about the dense
forest illumined in pockets of sunlight

what if I did not know to maneuver the burrs?

What living creatures does each step press into
the earth?

How obvious this love for birds someone once said
—they need no trails

to be feather-light and adrift to thermals

I could love the mutilated world

The chestnut contains over 30,000 genes of DNA—
researchers want to give it one

peacekeeping enzyme that protects the tree from
a harmful acid

I look on Alder stream and its beaver dams and wonder

which trees are mountain alder, which are speckled

these woods speak a language of water and light

and I yearn to translate what’s lost

where to praise means to save, and to preserve keeps
trees from dying

still, I know so little of life’s reckonings

The memory of what we found shapes me still

Black spruce, Eastern hemlock, American chestnut

David Crews is a writer, editor, and wilderness advocate who currently resides in southern Vermont / ancestral lands of Mohican and Abenaki peoples. He cares for work that engages a reconnection to land and place, wilderness, preservation, nonviolence. He currently serves as managing editor for Wild Northeast.. Find David and more of his work at davidcrewspoetry.com

Northeast Wilderness Trust (newildernesstrust.org) is a non-profit land trust, founded in 2002 to fill the vacant niche of wilderness protection in the Northeast. Their mission is to conserve forever-wild landscapes for nature and people. To date, they have protected more than 41,000 forever-wild acres across New England and New York.

The above poem is part of a longer sequence that can be found here: Four Poems for Northeast Wilderness Trust