Where I Live

In this part of the world newly made mountains, the Taconics, the Greens, the Whites, and the Adirondacks, once towered at least as high as the Alps do today. Time and erosion have tamed them, however, and today the highest of the Green Mountains is less than 4500 feet high. (Peaks in the White Mountains and the Adirondacks are somewhat higher, but boast nothing that can compete with younger ranges like the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, and the Himalayas.) At various times dinosaurs thundered over this spot. Then, much more recently, about 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, ice covered it, ice thousands of feet thick, ice that slid slowly down from the north, carrying with it great glacial boulders, grinding down the mountains, and carving hollows and valleys. 

If I had looked up—very briefly, I’m afraid—from this spot around 10,000 years ago, all I would have seen were the underbellies of fish. With the melting of the ice, this valley had become a lake, Lake Bascom, as it was named by geologists. You can still see the signs of high water on the slopes of the mountains here. After the lake retreated, I might have seen—briefly again in most likelihood—the mega fauna of post-ice-age New England. Giant sloths, mastodons, dire wolves, saber-tooth cats, American lions and short-faced bears. These, once numerous, would decline and finally vanish as men, originally from Asia, populated the continent. 

Three hundred years ago very few Native Americans and no Europeans had ever visited the spot where I sit here writing this. It is entirely possible that human eyes had never rested upon it let alone human feet. Two hundred years ago, this house was under construction. Anglos had already been here in numbers for 60 years or so, and as solitary individuals perhaps 100 more. At those times the hills and mountains were rife with “old growth,” great trees of enormous proportions, hundreds of years old. Passenger pigeons were so numerous that they darkened the skies in the millions and millions, and the rivers and lakes were crowded with trout and bass.

(From the Preface to Right Here.)