Forest Bathing at Alan Seeger

It’s a green place, a quiet place, a remnant of the forest that existed in central Pennsylvania when my fictional sheriff Gideon Stoltz would have been alive. 

I was a young boy when I first visited Alan Seeger Natural Area, in a state forest near where I grew up. Our family would picnic in the shade of the trees that tower up on the site. The natural area, named for a poet killed in World War I, protects a 120-acre stand of what used to be called “virgin timber” and is now generally termed “old-growth forest.” 

The trees have massive trunks and crowns that knit together high overhead, keeping the place cool and dim even on a hot summer day. Hemlocks predominate, mingling with huge white pines, oaks, black gums, cucumbertrees, and tuliptrees. Some of the trees stand more than 100 feet tall and exceed 500 years of age. 

alan seeger natural area, photo by charles fergus

A trail winds through the area, crossing Standing Stone Creek on a narrow wooden bridge. I once met a water snake curled up on the creek bank, basking in a patch of warmth where a sun-shaft reached the ground. Another time I spotted a Canada warbler, its lemon yellow breast necklaced with black streaks, the tiny jewel-like bird flitting among twisted stems of rhododendron that choked the ground beneath the ancient trees. 

One foggy, rainy day the flutelike songs of hidden wood thrushes rose up all around me. Thoreau wrote of the wood thrush “singing his evening lay.” I stole that archaic noun, lay, and used it in Nighthawk’s Wing to describe how Gideon hears the ethereal singing of thrushes at day’s end. 

My father was a professor at Penn State University. He studied fungi and collected mushrooms for the school’s herbarium. He would dig them out of the ground with a pocketknife (never would he pluck them, for that could destroy key morphological features) and carry them home in paper sacks. His favorite place to collect was Alan Seeger. Often he enlisted my help. 

We found red mushrooms, pink ones, turquoise, violet, orange, white, green. Mushrooms that looked like oysters, parasols, coral, brains, dead fingers, melted butter. Mushrooms that felt as slimy as a slug, or waxy, or rubbery, or silken. I remember some of the common names: stinkhorn, turkeytail, earth tongue, hen of the woods, old man of the forest. The most dramatic and ominous of all: the destroying angel, pure white, standing like a sentinel in the gloom – a mushroom that, Dad warned me, could kill me if I ate even a tiny piece. 

In those old woods, I became fully open to the sights, sounds, and smells of a fantastic natural world. Sometimes I wish I could go back to those days. It’s a period that seems hopeful and serene, and when I leave the present and venture back in my mind, I think about racing lightly down woodland paths, holding hands with protecting and loving adults, and believing that life goes on forever. 

The Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku literally means “forest bathing,” and it’s recognized as an important form of nature therapy. Both my parents died suddenly and unexpectedly: my father on Christmas day in 1986, my mother on Labor Day in 1995. After their deaths, I spent important time at Alan Seeger. The place helped heal my soul. 

Now I do my forest bathing in Vermont, hiking through our woods in spring, summer, and fall, snowshoeing in winter. When I can, I make my way back to Pennsylvania, where I always visit the old forest at Alan Seeger. For me, it’s a touchstone – a link to the solace of nature, to Gideon Stoltz and his time and place, and to my own past.