Hawksbill

Watch for an old orchard along the edge of the Drive, coming up around mile forty-three. Many of the apple trees are visible from the road, blooming in late April and early May. Stray apple trees and locusts mark a hundred old fields in this park, slowly being shaded out. Somebody planted those apple trees. You've just come past the top of this whole park. Hawksbill, four thousand and fifty feet, just forty feet above Stony Man. Its gray cliffs are lava again, some of them a hundred and fifty feet high, stacked up with rubble benches in between. The best thing about that mountain is the weather it's kept. On the upper few hundred feet of Hawksbill, the naturalist Napier Shelton found balsam fir and red spruce, trees that belong in New England, surviving on a climatic island. Presumably, he wrote, they were more widespread in the last ice age, and they retreated to the highest spots as it warmed. That was nineteen seventy-five, and an insect was killing the firs even then. He pictured that ice age, too. Sit under dark conifers on Stony Man, he wrote, with gray jays overhead and a porcupine going from tree to tree. Far down the ridge a pack of dire wolves crosses a saddle, then bolts as a great gray mastodon comes out of the forest. The crest has strange trees of its own. On the highest ridges, wind and the weight of ice keep breaking branches, and anything that pokes above the rest gets sheared off by winter storms. From a distance the forest looks clipped, like a hedge. Inside it's stunted and twisted, and Shelton called it gnomish, especially on misty days, when the moisture turns the lichens green. So if fog has taken your view, you've got the right weather for it.