At 77, I’ve been thinking a good deal about my youth. After half a century living outside of New York, which I left following high school graduation, I returned to the Empire State in 2019, settling 120 miles northeast of where I grew up. I’m home, and yet, there is a noticeable difference in the fields and forests between these two locales.
As a child, I used to walk the three miles from where I lived to where my grandparents lived. I would pass an Allis-Chalmers dealer where tractors and hay balers were sold, though I never actually saw any of them leave the lot. I would pass the grange hall, which was the social meeting place for the fifty or so people in my town. I knew I was halfway to my destination when I reached the sawmill that eventually caught fire and burned to the ground. Just beyond it was Kazen’s Pond. I never knew anyone named Kazen, so I don’t know why it was called that. In the winter, people would race their cars on the ice. It was not a large pond, nor was it very deep. But it was deep enough to claim the life of a ten-year-old girl I knew from school, when on one bitter winter’s day the ice beneath her feet gave way. I think her name was Anna.
So the pond gave life and the pond took life — Anna’s life. I was about her age then, perhaps twelve, and present when they pulled her out of the water and someone in authority declared her dead. There was no CPR. Someone said she had been underwater for twenty minutes, so that was that. Today, we know better. It was the first time in my life I had seen a deceased person, and she was a child as I was. I walked on. But her memory has never left my mind.
I passed some homes where friends and schoolmates lived before arriving at my grandparents’. Had I walked another fifteen minutes I would have arrived at the location where the Woodstock Music Festival was held in 1969. By then I lived in another state, oblivious to what the wider world was making of it all.
The forests and fields I wandered through were saturated with living things — deer and other wildlife were plentiful. We had problems with black bears who would raid our trash cans almost every night. Barn swallows outnumbered robins and were definitely more entertaining to watch. After it rained, you could barely walk on a hard surface or roadway without stepping on earthworms. And then there were newts and salamanders everywhere. Mushrooms would pop up through moss carpets two inches thick, and you could peel those carpets off rocks in single patches nine square feet each. Rhododendrons and mountain laurels exploded with flowers every summer, and there was princess pine everywhere. Beechnut and butternut trees were not hard to find. Nor were chestnut trees — or at least their persistent root sprouts, the blight having claimed the great trees a generation before my own.
Except where I now live. Here, a two-hour drive from where I grew up, we have none of this. Rhododendrons are confined to nurseries, and swallows are difficult to find even if you have a barn on your property. I wondered where all the porcupines and bears, newts and swallows had disappeared to. And more importantly, why?
How it all came to be
The answer to the question can be found 375 million years¹ ago as the area around Kazen’s Pond was the foothills of the Acadian Mountains. These mountains produced hundreds of small streams that carried sediment westward, forming a vast delta or alluvial plain over the underlying Devonian bedrock — deposits that over time lithified into the sandstones and shales that now form the Catskill bedrock. As the Acadian Mountains eroded over time, the depositions created a huge plateau which leveled the land. It was the Ice Age that carved the Hudson River Valley and sculpted the topography of the Catskill Mountains that we see today. From this, Kazen’s Pond eventually emerged, perhaps as a kettle lake, though I can’t rule out the agency of beavers in the process.
The relative lack of limestone and dolomite in the Kazen area means there is less buffering of acid than usual. The acidity persists because siliciclastic Devonian rocks — sandstones and shales — contain virtually no calcium carbonate to neutralize it. The relative abundance of vegetative matter in the black shale and mudrocks and the historical acidity in the rain from industry which originates further to the west in Pennsylvania also play a role. But by the time one reaches the Upper Hudson Valley, there is a preponderance of limestone and less exposure to acid rain and other contaminants, so there is a starker contrast between acid-loving plant life such as the Pink Lady’s Slipper (Cypripedium acaule) and the Jack-in-the-Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) in the Kazen area and the base rock of the Albany region. The Pink Lady’s Slipper and Jack-in-the-Pulpit were two of my favorite plants.
One other thing from my youth I miss is the plush carpeting of mosses, which is absent in the Hudson Valley for the same reasons above. The acid-base balance of the forest factors in, but also the relative humidity is higher in the Kazen’s Pond ecosystem. This is because the glacial terrain has created thousands of ridges and hollows to trap moisture on which moss depends. Under-neath the moss would be a unique biome not visible under other circumstances. These denizens labor ceaselessly, playing their role in sustaining the health of the forest, which is important to the broader scheme of things.
In grade school we learned poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Many of his more famous works as set in New York State. His poem Evangeline begins with the words:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Some of these druids are lofty, with green branches that seem to scrape the sky. Others, like the photo above, are sentinels fallen, but not forgotten.
A word more on trees
Kazen’s Pond and Sullivan County have a vibrant population of hemlock trees. They are not the dominant species, but they are what is called a “foundation species.” In other words, these trees provide the necessary complements of life for other species of trees, flora and fauna in general. Hemlocks help regulate temperature², moderating the forest floor from becoming too hot particularly where they form groves along stream corridors and north-facing slopes, and they provide moisture retention. Their needle litter is among the most acidifying of any northeastern tree, maintaining the low soil pH that supports the distinctive community of moss, fungi, and acid-loving plants described above. Hemlocks affect soil chemistry in important ways as well.
A typical day in Devonian times where Kazen’s Pond would someday emerge
I asked Claude (who prefers that I address him as Virgil) to describe a typical day in the late Devonian epoch as the groundwork for Sullivan County was first being laid.. Here is what he postulated.
Given the well-established theory of continental drift and the existence of supercontinents, there was a time when what would become the Catskill Mountains was closer to the equator than Caracas, Venezuela is today. If you could be present back then and peered through the darkness at the night sky, you would be stunned by the brilliance of it all. Without any light pollution, the stars, the Milky Way, and, low on the southern horizon, the ghostly smudges of the Magellanic Clouds would be positively glorious. But don’t bother looking for the Southern Cross. Three of its five stars had not yet been born.
But that was the Devonian world, ancient beyond imagining. Now let’s fast-forward another 165 million years, to the Late Triassic and the world of Coelophysis. The moon, if it were visible, would appear marginally larger than our present-day moon, and the tides would have been correspondingly stronger. In the darkness you might hear crickets and katydids. Both were present in that ancient world, and there is no reason to believe they sounded any different than they do today. You would not hear birds such as owls, however (Aves did not yet exist). Mammals (Mammalia) were present, but only as tiny, shrew-like creatures, almost certainly silent and nocturnal.
When the sun came up, you would notice a subtle difference in coloration reflected from plants and objects, owing to carbon dioxide levels approximately three times higher than today. You might also detect the sharp resinous scent of conifers, which covered the terrain. Midday temperatures approaching one hundred degrees Fahrenheit were well tolerated by these ancient trees, which thrived in the hot, semi-arid climate.
Coelophysis ran on two legs and was a carnivore — once thought to be a cannibal based on bones found within skeletal remains, a claim later reexamined and disputed. Coelophysis individuals grew up to nine or ten feet long and weighed between thirty and fifty pounds. When not hunting for food, they were also trying to avoid becoming someone else’s meal. The phytosaurs and among them Smilosuchus, along with Saurosuchus and Postosuchus (pictured) were particularly fond of Coelophysis prepared au gratin.
Postscript
This is how it all began — and over the eons, the diversity of life has populated the land of my youth. Unfortunately, hemlock trees in New York State have been under attack by the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae) since the early 1980s, and the ravages of this pestilence portend ill not just for the particular species, but for the forests of the Catskills as well.
Much of what we see in nature is described by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle. But there is another account of our origins offered in the biblical book of Genesis. Genesis relates the fall of man and the consequences that sin and rebellion had upon creation. The devastating effects continue to this day, expressed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which warns of disorder emerging from a once ordered state. Against this entropic tendency, creation has its restraining forces — what theologians following Paul might call the katechon — and among them, in the Catskill hollows of Sullivan County, stands the eastern hemlock. It fights valiantly but perhaps vainly for its right to exist.
So, there is another effect of the Fall that accounts for what we see today at Kazen’s Pond and the plight of the hemlock trees. In ‘Stand Your Ground,’ I addressed the need to resist the encroachment of tyranny and the death and destruction that inevitably follow (be that tyranny spiritual, cultural, political, or ecological) as the hemlock endured for centuries until the woolly adelgid emerged. If man can wage war on the environment by salting the earth or poisoning the oceans with oil and pollution, then so can pests such as the woolly adelgid conquer and destroy. This insect, native to Asia, was first detected in the eastern United States in 1951, having arrived on imported nursery stock. As a result, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of hemlocks have succumbed to its onslaught.
As noted previously, the hemlock tree is a foundation species, and other flora and fauna owe their well-being and even their presence to this single species of tree. It provides the necessary conditions (e.g., soil pH, shade, and sanctuary) to a wide diversity of plants, insects, earthworms and other annelids, fungi, and so forth. As the assault on the hemlock continues, the diversity and visible presence of even the hardiest among hundreds of species of living things will diminish or disappear.
How are we better for that?
This is not natural selection. This is total impoverishment — extinction on steroids! Every metric that science can bring to bear will show that nature in this part of the state, in this state, in this country, on this planet is in distress. Care must be urgently taken to protect not just the area around Bethel, NY, but all of the Kazen’s Ponds in America.
[Photo: A woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae) — responsible for an apocalyptic assault on nature in general and on the Eastern Hemlock trees of New York State in particular. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service. Used with permission.]
Footnotes
1Common geological time scales are included. As someone who believes in special creation, but is not necessarily a supporter of a “young Earth,” I understand that some teachings of intelligent design and Darwinian theory are contradictory. I’ll leave the resolution of these mutually exclusive principles to someone better qualified to address them.
2Typical trees in the Northeast prefer an internal temperature of 70 degrees. They do not have a built in thermostat as people do of course, but through transpiration, the orientation and shape of their leaves and so on allow them to make necessary adjustments needed to maintain optimum temperature. Of course, after the leaves turn brown and fall off in autumn and while denuded in winter, trees are at the mercy of the elements even as other flora are. Helliker, B.R. & Richter, S.L. (2008). “Subtropical to boreal convergence of tree-leaf temperatures.” Nature, 454(7203), 511–514. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07031
