The forest is a machine. The trees, the streams, and the wildlife; they all act like gears in a fine time piece. When we enter the forest, then we too, can become a part of the machine. There is a huge benefit to this. To hold a red-spotted newt in your hands, to let a cold mountain stream numb your feet, to look up through the transparently green leaves of beech and maple, and beyond, the deep, impenetrable dark green patchwork of hemlock, and the silvery torn bark of the river birch, to listen to the wingbeat of a swallowtail butterfly fluttering in the smoke of a day time campfire. To remember a world from long ago, and to see it now, in an ever changing light.

Swallowed up by the drumming rhythm of the forest is easy in the Pennsylvania Wilds. Here, there is a huge expanse of public land for recreational use, for sustainable harvesting of timber and other natural resources, and although, even in the most wildest of places there is broken glass and dented rusty cans, the forest machine is so powerful and thunderous that I feel the detritus sin of man can’t possibly stop the wheel of the forest from turning. I hope I’m not naive. After all, just as the welcome sign to Potter County says, this is God’s country.

When I am surrounded by healthy native forest, I think of the fractured, urban settings that I work in many times: no butterflies, no red-spotted newts; the urban forest that I know is more like a motor that spits and sputters, but hardly a well-oiled machine by comparison. I look to the wild, working forest for inspiration, like a postcard that we pin to the wall of somewhere we’ll make it to someday. Even in the shadow of that postcard though, there is human pressure in these wild swaths out here. The broken bottles and dirty cans-small trickles of humanity in the leaf litter. On the ride in, I see a new facility-not like the old log cabins built nearly fifty years ago by the civilian conservation corps-a modern station with big metal silos for pumping or monitoring natural gas with a plastic sign labeled by a corporate, acronymic name. I wonder what it will look like in fifty years? Will it have the nostalgic effect of the log cabins? There are dirt roads everywhere through the mountains that can carry other machines too: tracked feller-bunchers, log-skidders, trucks with foresters and sawyers. Logging is a celebrated tradition in Pennsylvania. The state’s tradition of forestry management is nearly fifty years old to boot. So then, I look at the landscape and the literature, and I am relieved to know there is a long, rich history of people working in this wild forest. I am hopeful in the management of the forest. It is an old story about business and industry, about jobs and careers and friendships too; about people making a living and living lives in these storied woods. I can hear my grandpa again telling stories about when he worked in the CCC camps, about when he went west hunting in the wilds for rabbits and grouse and white-tailed deer.

From my hammock, slung between a young beech and maple tree along the high May water of Prouty Run, I have these thoughts. We are on a small, two day stint out here in the wilds, my son and I and another good friend, leaving one machine for another, swallowed by the adventure. I pitch a tent for my toddler in the spotted shade at nap time, dappled with dark shade and bright green, which reminds me of the long-tailed salamander we found just a few hours ago. I laugh when I think of his excitement, pressing his face as close as can be to those wild little creatures, or the bone chilling blast of cold water he felt launching himself into the creek from the top of a small bank undercut by the water’s path. This forest I can share with my son, and on the rushing waters of his emotions I can flow back in time to my childhood. The forest has resurrected memories for me from him. And so the forest is a time machine too: we can experience life again from those that we give it too.

The forest works for us. So I would say, take someone close to you and go into the forest. Because if you care, and if you listen, and if you look, and if you press your hand against it; you will hear it, you will see it, you will feel the rumble of the machine. The warm sunlight hitting your face, the cool rustle of leaves, the birdsong, the rush of a memory being made-of memories coming back. This is the work of the forest machine.

And I hope, just like a fine time piece, that the gears will turn forever.