The urge to imprint myself on the land came on early. It was an urge to map, name and label the landscape that I explored almost daily.
The Wiconisco Creek, which back then we locals knew as the Sulphur Creek, was the dominant feature of that landscape. In my small segment of the world, it was a mostly straight water course, varied primarily by depth ranging from eight-foot-deep holes to ankle-deep crossing and by things that had somehow found their way into the stream.
The giant stump of some long-gone hemlock tree, jutting out into the stream, was a natural landmark. The spaces among its exposed roots were natural set locations for traps that brought in a good number of muskrats and a few mink each winter. It was one of the first landmarks that I noted on a crude map.
Just upstream of the stump was one of the easier crossings of the stream. A bit downstream of the giant stump, an old tree trunk with an abbreviated fork where a limb had once branched off was half-buried in yellowish mud and pebbles. When the flow was low enough, the upstream end of the log offered another crossing point. It was noted on my developing map.
A few dozen steps back from the stream, along trails that cut a zigzag pattern through a dense forest of hemlock, was the spring-fed pond where we safaried regularly for newts, frogs and turtles. I remember naming it Turtle Pond on the map.
Near Turtle Pond, a few years later when I reached the age to begin pursuing deer, I built a deer stand in one of the hemlock trees, where several of the hoof-pocked deer trails came together. My older brother was quick to point out that my stand was situated in a spot where almost no deer ever showed before full night had fallen. Despite the abundant deer sign, including buck rubs on many saplings, it was not a great location for a deer stand. It became a tree fort.
A massive oak tree stood at the edge of the hemlocks, sending down bushels and bushels of acorns in good years. I don’t recall the label I mapped onto the ancient tree, but it was a landmark of the first order, visible for great distances across the farmer’s fields and meadows that opened away from the hemlocks. Squirrels usually darted up into the oak or retreated back into the hemlocks on our approach.
Rabbit Hill was the name I gave to the sloping, tangle-covered hillside that angled away from the giant oak and hemlocks. It was packed with holes and tunnels excavated by groundhogs but by then shared with rabbits. We almost never failed to boot out a few rabbits and some pheasants when we walked the trails along that hillside. In the fall, small game hunting season, it regularly echoed with the baying of beagles in pursuit of the rabbits.
The base of the hillside quickly sogged its way into one of the two wetlands – we called them swamps back then – at the extreme upstream and downstream edges of the area I frequented most. This one I noted as the West Swamp. It was loaded with muskrats and the accoutrements of their lives: small houses and feed beds and the trails that connected them. In winter, when ice covered the landscape, the trails showed through like a highway system.
The other wetland – East Swamp on my map – was smaller, but equally rich in muskrats. A small spring-fed brook spread out across that low-lying tract, creating a foot-soaking grassland that concealed the pockets of water and the muskrat holes and trails. The acid mine drainage in the Wiconisco Creek was stronger here, closer to the source in the side of the mountains. Muskrats trapped there required washing whole in clear water before they could be skinned.
My map no longer exists beyond the bits and pieces left in my memory. Most of the landmarks also are long gone from that landscape. Old stumps and fallen trees will last for years, but they too pass, except in our memories.
