The end of August in North Carolina is hotter than hell. The air, drunk on humidity, shimmers like the orange southern sun beaming through glass that’s wavy and rippled with age. It’s sticky. Sticky with the smell of Japanese honeysuckle blooming nearby, but this forest is thicker than Vaseline and I can’t see those yellow and white flowers like miniature suns of sweetness casting light on the forest floor. The pines – loblolly, shortleaf, Virginia – dropped some needles in protest of the ever-rising mercury and litter the red clay soil with a soft, tangy blanket underfoot. Cicadas and crickets and frogs at some distant stream sing together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in insectine dissonance. It’s hot and still and I wish I could bottle it and keep it with me forever.
There is a smell floating like lazy smoke through these trees. Musty and earthy. It smells like old green: rich, resinous, verdant. It’s just as sweet as the honeysuckle but with an acridity entirely its own. Overgrown with vines and trees is a building made of old, old logs and a rusted out metal roof. No windows adorn its simple, unpainted sides. It’s taller than wide and has what looks like a half-fallen over front porch. Looking in through the dark front door, the smell is intoxicating and the absolute essence of a North Carolina summer: an old tobacco barn nestled deep in the forest.
Dave walked us down to the forest to learn more times than I could ever count. We would cross the grassy hill behind school, down through the ephemeral creek with the old rope swing that was probably not safe (but we swung on it anyway), through the grove where the fourth graders built castles of pine needles, and across the bridge we weren’t allowed to cross during recess. In that great beyond, a path led to an old dirt road that snaked for miles. Nobody really knew where it started or ended, but it was a gateway to nature for this school in the woods. Our classroom was a stocked library of at least a dozen species of oak, four kinds of hickory, three kinds of elm, five kinds of pine, cedars, beeches, buckeyes, hollies, hornbeams, ironwoods, black cherries, persimmons… much as I tried, I probably still don’t know all the trees that lived there. But Dave knew. It seemed like Dave knew everything, that there wasn’t a plant he couldn’t introduce us to.
Dave is a soil scientist, a naturalist, a man of quick quips, and above all else, he is an educator. He didn’t have to teach me about trees and soil and wildlife tracks and riffles in rivers for eight precious years, from my sapling years of middle school until I left everything and everyone I knew to come to Stanford – but he did anyway, because he loved it. All of it. Every week for those eight years, the other Envirothon kids and I would cling to every wise word spoken in his big, booming Massachusetts voice, cloaked in old denim shirts and cargo pants and big goggly glasses – he really looked like a soil scientist – encouraging us to wander and wonder and be wild, with a glint of mischief in his twinkling eyes.
That odd time of August is both late summer and early fall, a time of sweltering days and cool breezes at night – and is when the persimmons are ripe. I had my first persimmon in that forest, off that dirt road a little ways down from the crumbling barn. Dave brought us out on Friday after school, as he always did, so we could learn some trees while they still clung to their leaves. I was maybe 11 or 12 or another little age like that, still green like those leaves. I was only just meeting them. I met the persimmon in the clearing. The tree was gnarled and twisted, stooped in the understory like an old man. Those branches were heavy, laden with fruits that looked like orange and green tomatoes. Dave strolled up to this tree (they were already friends) and plucked one persimmon of each color.
He handed me the orange fruit. It was heavy and round, thin skin taut around succulent flesh. “You’re sure it’s safe to eat?” I asked. I was so timid back then. Dave smiled. “Try it.” The first delicious bite of a crimson ripe persimmon exploded in my mouth with juicy perfection I couldn’t believe was just waiting for me in the woods. The sweetness dribbled down my chin and onto my brown Envirothon t-shirt. Two bites later, the fruit was gone. The saccharine syrup coated my tongue and I hardly wanted another, but Dave offered me the green persimmon and I took it. “This one isn’t ripe, but you need to learn to taste the difference.” I looked suspiciously at the unassuming fruit. How bad could it be? The instant I tentatively nibbled the persimmon, my mouth turned inside out with a scowl and a smack. This fruit was sawdust; it was astringent, it was sour, it was drier than a desert. I tried to spit it out but there was hardly any saliva left. I dropped it on the ground and reached up, up, up for another tender ripe fruit.
I didn’t know these winsome days of forest walks were numbered. These trees, this forest seemed older than time itself: expansive, boundless, aged and ageless. I suppose the days are not numbered until someone starts counting them. I wasn’t counting, but somebody was: counting them so they were numbered, counting them until there was nothing left.
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Winters were different, and as each one passed, I grew to know that forest like I knew myself. Leaves that once shaded the forest floor on sunny days carpeted it with a crisp brown crunch. Dave told me that in a pinch, you can identify trees in the winter by looking at the shapes of the dead leaves gathered underneath. It’s much easier than puzzling over bark and leaf scars, but he made sure I learned those too. Black cherry has lenticels – horizontal slits through which the bark breathes – and if you snap a twig, it smells like bitter almond. Cyanide.
With all those leaves on the soil, the forest opens up. In the summer, you can barely see beyond the next couple of foliated friends, but in the winter, you can see forever through the forest: a landscape of cold brown and gray. Amongst the naked and shivering trees, one hangs onto its dead leaves through the winter, the beech. Its leaves are paper thin, and straight veins run parallel to each other from the central vein to the tips of its teeth. They are a brilliant whitish tan color, like the belly of a baby deer. In the winter sun, they illuminate and glow: ghosts of trees, so easy to pick out against the winter forest. In the wind, they sound like shimmers.
The beeches were not the only beings we could see glowing that day in the chilled air. It was probably a Saturday, since the sun was still young in the sky, and Dave was walking some of the big kids and me down the dirt road. I had never been this far down the path, this far past the old tobacco barn. Something gleamed in the distance off the trail, and as we got closer, I could see it: a toilet. Sitting by itself, alone in a patch of sunlight twenty feet off the trail. Unassuming, covered in just enough algae that it glowed green like it was made of radium. We begged Dave, please, please, PLEASE let us go look at the toilet! He sighed with the exasperation of a parent whose child is begging for a cookie after they’ve already had dessert; fine, but only for a few minutes.
I raced as fast as my little legs could take me but the big kids beat me to the toilet. Kadin sat on it first, his smile as bright as beech leaves. “I’m next!” squealed Matt, wrestling Kadin off of the porcelain and taking a seat. I didn’t mind that I had to wait for my turn. I gazed around the clearing and began to notice more remnants of a past life on this land. A fallen-over stack of those black plastic pots that plants come in at the garden center. Linoleum tiles scattered across the grass like stepping stones through a garden. A rotten couch bleeding stuffing and mold and vines. And there, at the edge of the clearing: a dilapidated – no, completely destroyed – double-wide. Its walls were dominos carelessly knocked over, its roof was more hole than shingle. It was like a giant had stepped on the house, quickly lifting his foot back up and saying “oops!” before getting back on his way. I wandered toward the rubble, toilet forgotten. The air was musty with a touch of a chemical you can’t quite put your finger on. Whose house was this? Was it abandoned because it was destroyed, or was it destroyed because it was abandoned? And how long had it sat here uninhabited, giving itself back to the land one toilet at a time?
This clearing was probably once the front yard for this double wide long ago, reclaimed gently by the forest as years crawled by. But yard is only one life lived by this land. These scattered belongings filled my vision and my heart with a sense of forlorn longing, reminding me to remember something forgotten. Standing amongst the pieces of someone's world, thinking of the tenants of this home that I would never know, I realized this land has lived many lives before this one. This land has lived uncountable lives.
The forest was an ancient, immovable entity to me. It was here when I started going to Woods Charter School, nestled peacefully in the embrace of its namesake, so naturally it had existed since the dawn of time. But I remembered the tobacco barn – when had Dave told us it was built, sometime in the 1800s? – and realized this entire forest, this community of plants and animals and bugs and the teeny tiny microbes in the soil, had not always been so. It had been a tobacco farm in a past life, probably (definitely) cultivated by enslaved people, because as I just learned in social studies, tobacco built North Carolina, and slavery built the tobacco industry. I knew tobacco. Driving to the beach every summer, I gazed out the window of my mom’s Subaru at rows upon rows of golden, floppy tobacco plants under the blazing summer sun. I only ever saw those crops stretched out for miles when we were in eastern North Carolina. I had never considered that tobacco could have been grown right underneath my blue sneakers, in this very soil.
My mind continued to wander as I sat in the grass and leaned back against a shortleaf pine – I could tell because its flaky and fragrant bark scales had pitch pockets. This land must’ve had another life before it was a farm. Maybe it was a different forest back then, a forest that European colonizers logged to build Pittsboro, where I lived. Maybe those trees scaffolded the old library in town, or the courthouse that burned down a few years ago. And before colonization, this indigenous land was stewarded by Sissipahaw, Tuscarora, Occonichi, Cheraw, Catawba, and Lumbee people for generations. I dug my feet into the dirt. How many other people have walked on this soil? How many more will? This ancient land carried in its very soil the myriad of identities and lives it has lived, nourishing this forest with its winding histories. The winter wind blew against my cheeks. The forest was letting me in on its secrets, its stories; all I had to do was be still and listen.
“Caroline? Are you ready to go back?” At once I was back in this body, in this moment, in this life, in this forest. “Yes.” I followed the big kids out of the clearing, past that toilet glowing in the winter sun, past the tobacco barn with its whispers of stories long forgotten. I stared long and hard at it, trying to imagine how it would have looked at the edge of a field. I heard the sparkling rustle of beech leaves in the winter wind. If the forest can reclaim a farm and a house into the branches of its welcoming arms, what else could it heal? What is the next life this land will lead?
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Though unassuming, the humble tobacco barn is iconic. You can hardly amble down a country road in North Carolina’s historic tobacco belt without seeing one or two perched at the edge of a golden field. Tobacco is such a pretty plant, with its rosy blooms and elephantine leaves; it’s fitting that for most of this state’s history, tobacco was king. For generations, this cash crop was cultivated by enslaved people, and the success of this industry lined the pockets of predominantly white men with the wealth that built this state. Over years, the industry grew and grew; in 1939, North Carolina tobacco farmers harvested 821 million pounds of the stuff, cured in the lowly hand-built tobacco barn, and passed it off to the likes of RJ Reynolds and Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco to roll it into the lungs of consumers. So many acres of rows of leaves, so many old wooden barns smoking at the seams.
Last year, tobacco farmers were barely able to produce 250 million pounds. It’s still a hefty sum – over twice what Kentucky, the nation’s second place grower, produced last year – but this industry is fighting to stay relevant, and for good reason, since smoking is an extraordinary health risk. Even in its decline, it is impossible to live in North Carolina and escape the shadow of tobacco. It is everywhere. It’s there when we go to see the Bulls play ball games in July, on the aptly named American Tobacco Campus in downtown Durham. It’s there as I bike down the Tobacco Trail with my Dad. It’s there when I visit my Aunt Jane, lingering on her skin as I hug her hello and goodbye.
In 1950, over half a million tobacco barns dotted North Carolina’s tobacco belt. Between the modernization and the decline of this mammoth industry, the worn wooden tobacco barns of this landscape have sat empty for years, crumbling away under the southeastern sun. Only between 25,000 and 50,000 remain, guarding fields and being swallowed whole by forests. More disappear to time every year. I have seen countless tobacco barns in the backroads of my life, and something about their faded facades and warm, weathered wood is an indelible piece of my home. They are memories of this recent but quickly forgotten past, scars from another life.
North Carolina’s forests are disappearing just like its tobacco barns. In my first couple years as an Envirothon student, Dave taught us that North Carolina was ranked fourth in the US in terms of land area covered in forest. But time carried on and forests were slaughtered, for wood harvest or for building yet another suburb. As of 2023, North Carolina ranks fourteenth, and according to the Global Forest Watch, the state has lost nearly a quarter of its forests, our forests, within my lifetime (2000-present). Every time I come home from California, I see another swath of forest leveled on our backroads, and every time, it revives an old wound.
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California is so dry, too warm in the winter and cool in the spring. When I am here, I yearn for the shimmering humidity of 90 degree days, the honeysuckle breezes of spring, the late summer syrup of air that oozes between window frame and pane, the gray skies that give birth to a yearly snowfall. But what I miss more than anything are my trees, my forest. My forest, where the beeches held onto their leaves in the winter. My forest, where at the end of spring, tulip trees dropped their flowers onto the forest floor for children to gather. My forest, which wound and whispered and wandered, where the trees were full of life and sap and growth rings that matched mine. My forest, where a kind, wise man taught me to love the natural world by learning the names of trees, and my life was forever changed.
For a year and a half during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I lived at home again, from the beginning of an early and warm spring until the end of the next year’s sweltering summer. Early in my time at home, when most things were still closed down, I hopped in my blue beetle bug and voyaged down well-trodden country roads back to my little school that was once in the woods. I knew what to expect as I pulled into the parking lot and gazed beyond that grassy hill behind school, but that never made it easier to see.
Long gone are the persimmons fruiting in the late summer sun, the beeches shimmering in the winter breeze, the shortleaf pines standing tall and strong over muscadine and greenbriar vines winding wistfully underneath. There are no trees here anymore. The sky is too big, too bright and blue, like a painting without a frame. I strolled down the sidewalks that were once the soft pine needle lined bed of the forest floor, and wondered to myself if this asphalt overlaid the old dirt road with no beginning or end that I traveled countless times as a child. I wondered if the people who lived in these tightly packed, freshly painted just-so suburban homes knew the lives this land lived before it was a neighborhood. A confused wind whistled between the houses, expecting to blow through branches and brush and only finding the ghosts of long-gone trees amongst the vinyl siding. I wanted to scream into the wind, I remember it too! And I ache and cry for it and it rips my heart to shreds whenever I think about what we lost! But I think the wind already knew, because it recognized my breaths from all those years ago.
Further down the all-too-aptly named Tobacco Farm road is a park. The old tobacco barn is perched on the edge of some green, green grass that leads the way to a jewel-toned play structure. It still looks worn and a little dilapidated, but I can tell someone has been giving it some attention. It’s like it went from digging up weeds in the garden, nails and cuticles brown with dirt in every crevice, to getting a fresh manicure. It was pried out of the arms of the vines and trees that swaddled and swallowed it over many long years, it is now a historical centerpiece that feels out of place in this neighborhood, so shiny and cultivated. The choice to save this barn but not the forest creates a context of confusion, and I lament that the people who see this barn every day will never know its past life. Who used this barn every day? Why was it abandoned, and how long ago? Long enough for a whole forest to grow, swallow it whole, and be slaughtered. They will never know about the racoons that called it home in those days, nor the spiders and birds. They will never meet the post oaks that used to flank its open door or the loblollies that sheltered it from hurricanes and snowstorms. The children who pass by the barn now seek the playground adjacent to it, not the trees that held it.
And of course, that jade toilet sitting in the sunlight is long gone. So are the rest of the scattered remains of the double-wide it used to belong to – those remnants that asked me to remember the uncountable past lives of this land. In its stead are houses full of toilets connected to plumbing. Rows upon rows of the same houses with the same clean, white toilets. A shiny new life for this land I could have never imagined all those years ago, taking a walk in the woods.
Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” It is a privilege that as a child, I had meaningful and frequent access to a wild place, a natural area, to explore and learn from. The time I spent in that forest learning not only the names of trees, but the stories and feelings and loves held by the wild, cultivated in me the passion and care for our natural places that is the foundation of my very world. It is the penalty of this education, this love, that this loss cuts my heart so deeply. But I love nature with my broken heart because I do not know another way.
My forest may be gone, but hope is not lost. Nature and wildness are resilient. They existed long before humans and will surely outlive us, even as we chip away at them, one swath of forest at a time. What remains deserves our broken-hearted love. I will never really know why the people who developed the neighborhood saved the tobacco barn but not the trees. Maybe they only felt it was worth saving the structure that humans built – but as I see it, nature had staked its claim on that barn, wilding it over the years. As humans, as creatures who share our only Earth with the trees and the bees and each other, we must be aware of what we choose to save. We have the agency to make decisions that preserve the places we love while sustaining our lives and livelihoods.
Maybe all we need is more people who love something that’s lost.