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“The Great Forest” was published in the Wilderness Magazine, spring 1994.

“Rage is not the politically correct emo­tion to feel in an old growth forest. Awe, veneration, respect, humility­, these are expected. But I want to pummel the furrowed bark with my fists, stamp my feet on the moldy ground, scream into the dappling canopy. I want to weep. The thought of the forests lost, fragmented, and de­graded throughout the east only an eyeblink ago, during the logging booms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is overwhelming. It’s not that the trees on this rocky Blue Ridge mountaintop in western North Carolina are huge and imperial, the charismatic megafloral equivalents of bears and wolves. On the contrary: they are stunted white oaks, forty feet tall and eighteen inches in diameter, yet they have been documented at 350 to 450 years old. Their limbs ripple sideways like braided hair undone; their trunks are hirsute with mosses. From them emanates a mysterious life of which we know almost nothing. These living sculptures are the most perfect biologi­cal expression of which this ridge is capable. Once cut, half a millennium would pass before such trees appeared again, if at all. “