{"id":17909,"date":"2016-09-17T11:18:47","date_gmt":"2016-09-17T15:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=17909"},"modified":"2016-09-17T11:36:25","modified_gmt":"2016-09-17T15:36:25","slug":"second-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2016\/09\/17\/second-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"Second growth"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: JON_CF<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p><\/div>\n

Like most people who live outside of North Country villages, I live on what used to be a farm. In our case we own the four acres that includes the original farmhouse of what was once a 59-acre dairy farm. The barn is long gone, but its sandstone foundation, a horse plow, a cartwheel, a grindstone, two dug wells, and the ironwork for a sliding barn door remain. The stone fences are long rounded mounds covered with lichen\u00a0and leaves, broken here and there by the trunks of fully mature trees.<\/p>\n

Second growth forest covers the pasture, and the reservoir behind Sugar Island Dam covers much of where Potsdam sandstone was quarried to build the village four miles north. An old narrow-gauge railbed that served the quarries cuts a straight line through woods towards town. The rails are long gone, along with the bridges that carried the train between\u00a0the islands toward the western bank of the river and the Clarkson stoneyard.<\/p>\n

Out in the river toward town remain other ruins of the pre-hydroelectric era, great cairns of loose stone that once anchored booms to contain the logs that were floated down the Raquette from lumber camps in the mountains during high water, fodder for the sawmills and small manufactories that ran off water power at the foot of Fall Island.<\/p>\n

I suppose we, too, are second growth on this land, living lives very different from the first-growth forest dwellers whose hunting lands these were, who named this stretch of fast water Nihanwate (laughing waters). And very different from the newly-minted Americans who cleared the forests around Hannawa for farming and industry.<\/p>\n

I try to picture sometimes what my patch will look like after another century or two, when time overtakes the fragility of our labors, too. What will remain? What will vanish utterly? And what will linger as a weathered jumble to incite the curiosity of the third growth and the fourth?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like most people who live outside of North Country villages, I live on what used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17909"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17909"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17915,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17909\/revisions\/17915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}