A Naif in the Forest by Darrell Berger

Wing Tips to Hiking Boots: Musings of a New, Full-Time Poconos Resident

Violet the Corgi was on full Squirrel Patrol recently, when she stuck her snout into the roots of a dead tree. She frequently becomes sufficiently obsessed following her nose as deeply as it can penetrate that I must lure her away with cries of, “Violet. Want a treat?” This time it didn’t work. I followed her to the tree.

While she was trying to identify the varmint who lived there, I noticed a human artifact that shocked me. Wrapped low around the tree’s trunk, three or four times, was a coil of barbed wire.

We had passed that tree countless times and I never saw the wire. I was surprised that my immediate reaction was revulsion, I assume because of my association with barbed wire in war and interment camps, rather than as a way of keeping my livestock on my property.

How did it get out here in the forest, where the only signs of humanity are “No hunting” signs and brightly colored property line ribbons? Had someone sometime felt such an emphatic need to keep others out or their own animals in that they needed this?

How long had it been there? My forensic knowledge of barbed wired being nonexistent, I placed its age as somewhere between 7 years, when we started walking past it, and a hundred and thirty years, when it came into wide use.

It transformed the vastness of the American west. It allowed armies to channel the advance of enemies, so they could be more easily shot. It allowed governments to more easily inter their undesirables. It does such a great job at what it was designed to do, that barbed wire today is no different than that of a century ago.

This tree was dead before the wire adorned it. The wire hung loosely near the roots. Had the tree been alive, it eventually would have surrounded the wire, taken it into itself, absorbed it. Its barbs would no longer signal danger or inflict pain. Thus nature, if given the chance, heals.