Size Doesn't Matter

When it comes to appreciating nature, size doesn’t much matter.  No matter how big or small a natural feature, event or being, there’s always something else out there even bigger or smaller or, more importantly, every bit as compelling.

I was reminded of that fact while hiking through Cook Forest on Super Bowl Sunday.  Situated on the Clarion River in northwestern Pennsylvania, Cook Forest was established in 1927 to preserve some of the last remaining stretches of old growth forest in a state whose vast woodlands had been “harvested” by the timber industry in the 1800s.   Among the leaders in that timber industry was the Cook family whose scion – John – built a sawmill on 765 acres he purchased in 1828 at the confluence of Tom’s Run and the Clarion River. After his father’s death, Anthony Cook added two more sawmills to the business and prospered handsomely, but in the early 1900s the A Cook Sons Company began exploring ways of preserving some of the remaining virgin timberland.

In cooperation with the Cook Forest Association, A Cook Sons Company effectively “ate” the taxes on their forest holdings for more than two decades before the state legislature approved the purchase of the land – based on the condition that the Cook Forest Association raise the funds to purchase 6,000 adjoining acres.  That they did, and in 1928 Cook Forest became the first Pennsylvania state park dedicated to a natural landmark.

And what a natural landmark.   A hike along nearly any of the park’s 29 miles of trails quickly transports you into a primeval forest of towering white pines, hemlocks and hardwoods largely untouched by the ax or saw of Man since the earliest pioneers visited the area in the mid-1700s.  Those evergreens are among the tallest remaining trees east of the Mississippi, cresting 160’ and more above a floor carpeted in fallen pine needles and leaves, lush pockets of ferns and wind-downed trees covered in an emerald cushion of moss punctuated by various fungi and the first tentative sprouts of a new generation of trees that won't reach full maturity until the 22nd or 23rd centuries.

Of course, Cook Forest’s white pines and hemlocks would be little more than saplings in California’s groves of redwoods and giant sequoias.  But as I said, size doesn’t much matter when it comes to appreciating nature.  I can hardly imagine being more (or less) profoundly affected by a stroll through a grove of redwoods or sequoias than through the majestic calm of the Cook Forest’s “Forest Cathedral.”

Stand amid a stillness broken only by the tops of the evergreens softly hissssing in the high breezes and you can’t help but feel a sense of reverence, what Paul Woodruff calls “the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control.”

Somewhere hereabouts stands the Longfellow Pine, said to be THE tallest tree in the northeastern United States at 182’.  I say “somewhere” as, unlike Sequoia National Park’s celebrated General Sherman tree (274.9’) for example, the Longfellow Pine stands in anonymity among its neighbors, no signs marking its presence, no trails directing visitors and hikers to its precise location.

Small wonder.  A glance around the Forest Cathedral reveals that, unlike the corrugated bark of the pines and hemlocks, the smooth trunks of many hardwoods have been (and continue to be) defaced by irreverent Kilroys whose egos are inflated by scratching their Lilliputian marks on the Ents of Cook Forest.  One can readily imagine what might befall (literally) the Longfellow Pine were its precise location widely advertised. 

But it is not only the towering evergreens which ought to trigger that “sense of awe at things outside our control” in Cook Forest.   A small chunk of wood lying among the giants felled by a 1956 micro-burst reveals a riot of swirling graining patterns of such incredible delicacy as to be worthy of any art museum – patterns no doubt endlessly mimicked but never quite duplicated in the tens of millions of board feet surrounding the Forest Cathedral.

Imagine the time and natural forces necessary to create such exquisite work.  Imagine further that it sprang from a seed that was, in turn, nurtured, shaped and – finally – brought crashing down by the sun, rains, snows and winds of two hundred or more springs, summers, fall and winters.   And that white pines, hemlocks, oaks, beech, maples, cherry and white ash almost beyond number have already taken its place and continue to thrive in this special corner of Pennsylvania called Cook Forest.