Lessons Learned On Birch Hill

Across the Fence #388

During my walk one weekend in early spring, I left the road and entered the tangled web of vines and brush that led to Birch Hill. I decided to hunt for any remnants of our old ski scaffold before the vegetation of summer made the area impassable. Even then it was a tangled mass of brush and thorns that tried to block my entrance to the past. It almost succeeded. The vines entangled me, the thorns drew blood, but I pushed on, and eventually gained entrance into the heart of Birch Hill.

I finally reached the top of the hill where we had built a rather crude ski jump scaffold around 55 years ago. I searched the area, now overgrown with trees and brush. Large trees also stood in the middle of our ski jumping hill. Trees can get very big after 50 years of growth. As I looked around, everything had changed. The memory that my mind holds of those winter days, skiing with Trygve and Joel Thompson, and my brother, David, is still there, but the physical past is long gone, replaced by the reality of new life and growth all around me as I stood where our ski jump was located. Not a trace of it remained. 55 years of decay had returned the wood to the earth. It was now providing nourishment to new growth.

I thought about the circle of life. Those boards we used to build our scaffold had come from trees. Now new trees grew where the decayed remains of those trees from 55 years ago are part of the soil. The circle of life continues.

The past lives only in my mind. Loren Eiseley said in the Immense Journey, “My memory holds the past, yet paradoxically knows, at the same time, that the past is gone and will never come again. It cherishes the dead faces and silenced voices, yes, and the lost evenings of childhood.”

Another memory of our days playing on Birch Hill also returned as I exited the thick brush. I remembered the great ant war that we witnessed there. Truth be told, we started the war. I think we had been studying about ants in school and knew that red and black ants would fight each other. One day we found several ant mounds on Birch Hill, including a colony of red ants. We decided to have an ant war. I can’t remember how we transported the ants from one colony to the other. We probably gathered up the ants on sticks and quickly transported them to the enemy camp. At that time we hadn’t heard about helicopter assaults, or we could have pretended our sticks were choppers taking the troops to a hot LZ (Landing Zone), where they would engage the enemy. As we arrived over the black ant colony, we swooped down and the red ant warriors quickly exited the choppers, I mean sticks, and we were airborne again and headed back for another load of warriors. After several loads of red ants had been deposited at the entrance to the black colony, we settled in to watch the battle.

It was just as we had learned in school; rival ants really do fight each other. Black ants exited their holes to confront the red invaders in vicious hand-to-hand combat. Or in this case, mandible-to-leg combat? Whatever it was, they were locked in mortal combat. It was a fight to the death. Even though the invading ants were larger, they were greatly outnumbered by the black ants that swarmed out of their holes to protect their territory.

Looking back, I realize it was a cruel thing to do. I can try to justify my actions by saying, “They’re just ants. People poison and kill them every day as a destructive nuisance in their homes.” But we took ants from one colony that were going about their day-to-day business, uprooted their lives, and sent them to fight against another colony of ants. It was a fight where most of them would die in a foreign colony in a fight they didn’t want to be in. It’s much easier being the observer, than the ants on the field of battle that are locked in a fight to the death.

After pausing for a while to remember that ant battle, I left Birch Hill and continued on my walk. I didn’t find any evidence of the ski scaffold from my childhood that I had gone in search of. What I did discover was something deeper and more profound.

Lessons learned on Birch Hill… Some things never change. Ants still go into battle when ants from another colony, that have a different scent, invade their territory. Men still engage in wars with other men over territorial disputes, and governmental, religious, and ideological differences. Just as we did in the ant war, we still send our troops off to fight our wars, while the majority of us sit back as observers, watching the battle from a safe spot, just as we did on Birch Hill. Conflict and death have always been a part of the circle of life. My memory still holds the past, both the good times and the bad. We can’t change the past, but we can try to make the world a more peaceful place for future generations to live.

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