Linda Underhill’s The Way of the Woods: Journeys Through American Forests

 
In The Way of the Woods, Linda Underhill is an engaging, widely informed guide who leads us through various American forests from Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains to Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. As we follow her through old-growth hemlock and sequoia, she enlarges our journey by drawing on poetry (Dickinson, Keats, Neruda, Basho, cummings), philosophy and religion (Buddha, Odin, Chief Seattle, Thich Nhat Hanh, Plato, Christianity, Lao Tzu, Druid), history (Native Americans, colonists, explorers), and science and natural history (Thoreau, Leopold, Carson, Muir).

All this lore becomes part of Underhill’s invitation to get your legs out from under the desk and into the woods. In a style that is accessible and, at times, lyrical, the spiritual walks hand in hand with the pragmatic. In “Ode to Autumn,” for example, she waxes poetic about the colors and scents of leaves, but also takes a realistic look at the problem of deer over-browsing our forests where hunting is part of the solution. Just as we learn that trees were sacred to Odin, we become acquainted with some wonderful ecological terms such as subnivian space and scuzz.

As we follow Underhill from forest to forest, meeting some lively, modern-day druids along the way, we hear the stories of some of our nation’s iconic trees. They are stories of sweetness, and they are stories of struggle. In one essay, we are persuaded that, like wine grapes, the sugar maples and their delicious sap possess their own terroir, and then, in the next, we learn of the decimation of old-growth eastern hemlock due to its susceptibility to the invasive woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae). Other stories include the western red cedar, Sitka spruce, and sequoia.

One question that Underhill poses is, Do we need a new story? After all, the Quinault and Sumerians had stories and beliefs that underscored the sacred importance of their respective cedar trees. If we had such a mythology, would we act to preserve rather than destroy? Maybe science will give us this story.

One question I have is, Where is Big Pharma on the eco-front? Underhill tells us that these companies have recently “gone to the forests of Madagascar to study the rosy periwinkle, a tropical shrub that produces two substances found to be effective in treating Hodgkin’s disease and childhood leukemia.” Shouldn’t Pfizer and other pharmaceutical corporations be the superfund for preservation efforts? Wouldn’t that make their industry sustainable? Their profit, like people and just about everything else, depends on the diversity of flora in our forests.

Maybe what I appreciate most in this marvelous collection is Underhill’s ability to write about the spiritual without sounding sappy (sorry, couldn’t help it) or too detached. This collection is an ode to being in the woods. When she’s in the woods, she says she’s “connected to the joy of being alive” and she feels as if she’s “inside the mind of the universe.” I know exactly what she means. It’s “like being in love.” Truly trees are our first and last cathedrals. Underhill has been inside some of the anthropogenic ones—Notre Dame, St. Peter’s Basilica, and St. Paul’s—but she says that “none of them compares with the beauty and majesty of a forest, where the trees are alive and reaching for the sky, where the light is always changing, where wind, rain, fire, and ice are all celebrants in the daily liturgy of life on planet Earth.”

Amen to that.