“Meili, this way.”  I beckoned my fourteen-year-old goddaughter to follow me over a brook dammed by beavers, up a gully and through knee-high underbrush shaded by hemlocks, beech trees and oaks.  A city girl, she didn’t like being left off at my house in the woods while her mom meditated at a Tibetan Buddhist retreat.  But she’d brightened when I promised her “a surprise.”  It was on nearby property belonging to the Boy Scouts, which like most of my environs, I explored when no one was around.

A few minutes later, I pointed to a gray, waist-high slab of stone set vertically in the ground.  It blended into the terrain so well I’d originally almost missed it walking by.  A gravestone, I thought, its inscription eroded by water and forest microbes.  In two other spots closer to my house, isolated stone markers with a bit of engraving still visible sat after having fallen over.  “Somebody must have been buried here, two hundred years ago,” I told Meili.

Her eyebrows lifted and she nodded slowly while considering the stone.  “Two hundred years ago, wow,” she replied.  Then she reached out a finger and rubbed a spot on it.  “What’s this, a ‘C’?  A ‘G’?”  I rubbed too.  It looked like a capital “G,” slightly raised rather than carved.  I walked around the slab and rubbed a spot on the other side that looked like a capital “C.”  I wrinkled my forehead and thought.  Just “G” and “C”?  

An “aha” hit.  It wasn’t a burial stone.  It marked the boundary between two towns that started with “G” and “C.”  But so deep in the woods, not near any roads, nor near any signs of old property lines?  Meili nodded again as I explained why the stone’s presence puzzled me.

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After moving to the hills of Western Massachusetts 21 years ago, I hiked on and off every trail not marked “No Trespassing” within three miles of home.  With a new local friend named Amelia, we hiked further afield, exploring snowmobile trails, conservation parcels, utility right-of-ways, discontinued train lines, abandoned logging tracks, parks and wildlife refuges of every sort.  

We never knew what might lie on the other side of a hillock.  Once bushwhacking from her house to mine we encountered a hollow whose air felt heavy and dark.  Spooked, we hurried on.  More often we’d happen upon a structure of stones, mostly intact yet long abandoned.  Amelia and I would study its shape and guess its original purpose.  A charcoal kiln?  A livestock pen?  A maple sugar house?  A marker for Captain Kidd’s buried treasure?  Stone walls in various stages of tumbling down crisscrossed the woods so rampantly that we didn’t wonder about them. 

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University of Connecticut geology professor Robert M. Thorson says New England has more than 200,000 miles of old stone walls.  Glaciers left behind the component stones when they retreated during the last Ice Age about 20,000 years ago.  The retreat formed ponds and lakes that filled with what became rich black soil.  For the earliest European settlers, the land seemed luxuriously fertile.  Replicating farming practices back home, they cleared forests and cut down trees without mercy for building materials and firewood.  Their deforestation then caused rocks underneath the topsoil to heave to the surface during every spring thaw.  This required farmers to clear the stones so they could plant.  In a bothersome annual chore, they hauled rocks to the edges of their property, where they stacked them into walls.  Thorson says these walls thus represented “linear landfills” – junkpiles.

Most New England stone walls date from 1775 to 1825.  My town was settled in 1761 and formally incorporated in 1781.  Most woodsy backroads near my house have stone walls on both sides, indicating byways that have barely budged from the early days of the town.  But right in front of my house there are no walls.  Investigating up the hill across the way, I discovered a splendid stone entryway amidst the forest.  Two chest-high stacked-stone towers stand far enough apart for a horse-drawn carriage to pass through, with walls stretching in both directions from the towers.  

Until a new owner of the property banned me and another neighbor from his land for 99 years, I loved visiting that entryway.  I’d climb the hill on a trail or arrive by ducking between trees.  I’d feel an uplift at that unruined ceremonial gate.  Just me, stepping into a life-sized diorama where people had guided horses, adjusted bonnets and boots and prepared to step down into a milieu that had crumbled into dust and dirt. 

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Robert Frost, in his poem “Mending Wall,” described how New Hampshire’s spring would spill the upper boulders of his stone walls until his neighbor and he rebuilt it.  All the same, well-built stone structures can last for millennia.  I once posed in a crouch in front of the Sphinx in Egypt and climbed the interior of one of the pyramids – each around 4,500 years old.  In Spain, a 2,000-year-old many-arched Roman aqueduct thrilled me when I learned it continued to bring water to the city of Segovia until 1973. 

In the last few years, new jungle-penetrating radar has revealed underneath Guatemalan rainforests previously unsuspected stone networks of Mayan roads and cities.  Researchers call the 650-square-mile ruins a “megalopolis,” with causeways, canals, reservoirs, elevated highways, fortresses, temples and palaces as complex and sophisticated as the ancient empires of China or Greece.  I envy the explorers who will unearth the secrets of these stones, hidden under a lush green canopy for more than a thousand years.

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If the 200,000-plus miles of stone walls within rural New England indicate farmland that had been cleared and planted, why did most areas become wild woodlands again?  Thousands and thousands of families who had homesteaded in the hills left.  In my town, the population peaked in 1800, declined slowly every decade after that, then dropped more sharply after 1840.  In Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History of New England’s Stone Walls, Professor Thorson attributes the area’s depopulation to economic crashes, weather disasters like the Year Without a Summer (from the 1816 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Philippines), the advent of railroads, the widening of men’s horizons when they fought in the Civil War and more.  Mostly, families packed up their possessions and headed to flatter, less rocky territories in the Midwest.

Several times on my regular walking routes I’ve stepped into the roadside twigs and leaves to pee and noticed for the first time a roundish dent in the terrain ten or twelve feet in diameter.  That’s a grown-over cellar hole, the vestige of a home whose wooden uprights and roof long before rotted away.  Contemplating the earthen residue of past lives, I think of Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: “Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”  Instead of desert, here it’s forest leveling the remains, but the wistful feeling about human dreams’ collapse is the same. 

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In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman calculates how long it would take before our civilized world degenerated into catastrophic entropy if humans suddenly all vanished in a blink.  Within a century, the roof of any suburban house would have fallen in on an interior infiltrated by raccoons, squirrels and other creatures.  In a city, within just twenty years the stilling of subway pumps and burst pipes from the absence of heating would cause flooding both underground and above, which in turn would make pavements buckle and crumble. Weisman thinks New England’s stone walls would remain part of our landscape for only a few centuries from now, buried when the surrounding leaf litter turns to soil.

During my wanderings I’ve observed a few startling breakdowns of place.  When I first moved to the country, an old dirt road stretched several miles long, including a section that traversed a marsh.  A few years later that segment of road degenerated into a beaver dam across which you could hotfoot but no longer drive.  Now the road consists of two parts completely cut off from each other by lake-like water.  A newcomer might wonder why two unconnected roads in one town bear the same name.

Closer to home, my neighbor Sam got annoyed one summer when environmentally destructive quad bikes began roaring along the snowmobile trail behind his house.  After the “No ATVs” sign he posted didn’t work, he axed two medium-sized trees – his property – so they blocked the trail.  The snowmobile club relocated the trail farther up the hill, through a stand of young white birches.  Three summers later I could no longer spot the junction where the path had originally turned behind Sam’s house.  With no one treading the path, it had already reverted to wild grass, leaves and downed branches indistinguishable from its surroundings.

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Of my neighbors now, only Sam and one other besides me like to traipse around off road.  Half-hidden trails and hillsides that you have to crash and duck your way up apparently don’t beckon to the average country person.  And to some, poking in any cemetery, old or new, feels morbid.  Amelia and I once discovered an iron-gated cemetery with one lone grave.  We read and reread the woman’s epitaph and spun speculative stories about her life.  Our most astonishing relic, though, turned up when she and I left a rutted path and trudged straight up toward a hillcrest that promised a fantastic view.  Below the top we rested near a big rock and while munching on granola bars we noticed bolted into the rock a bronze plaque.  Its inscription read: 

Erected by members of the High Street Walking Club in memory of

Edward C. Gere
Our leader over these Hampshire hills on many pleasant walks
1926

“The Gere family owned the local paper back then,” murmured Amelia.  “But can you believe it, right here they must have taken a rest and then old Edward told them, ‘Let’s go, boys. Onward!’”

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Five years ago, during a road trip around France and Spain, I decided I wanted to see the prehistoric paintings at Lascaux, which I’d learned about in Art History 101.  However, in the 1960s the French government closed the famous cave, saying that visitors’ breath and sweat were damaging the ancient art.  In 2017, though, they opened a facility next to the cave consisting of an “exact replica.”  Come on, what’s the point of visiting a fake, I scoffed.

My research turned up the Grotte de Rouffignac, 16 miles from Lascaux, which included the “Cave of a Hundred Mammoths.”  Dated to about 15,000 years ago, the actual cave was open for tours.  Along with a dozen others, I mounted a rickety train reminiscent of a decrepit ride at a county fair.  It rattled us first into a damp, dimly lit rock corridor, where our guide shone his flashlight on bison and rhinos etched onto the stone and drawn in brown.  He also pointed out scratch marks from the claws of bears that long ago denned in the cave.  Deeper underground, we arrived at a domed space like a capitol rotunda, where we stepped off the train and gazed in awe.  

Above and on the walls, realistic mammoth upon mammoth made me shiver with joy.  Whether it was their impact on my imagination or some just-perceptible trace of the artists’ energy, I exulted in the creativity that persisted in this chilly natural enclosure.  Hundreds of generations ago, real human beings painted here with hopes, ideas, beliefs and feelings.  Imprints of their hands, breath, experiences and intentions lived on.  The unknown and unknowable mixed with the evidence around me in an ecstasy of past and present that raised to the nth the delight I felt discovering back home what predecessors left.