“Pigeon Hill: An Essay,” Daniel Vollaro.
“Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines.”
The trail to Little Kennesaw Mountain starts just a mile from my house in Marietta, Georgia, and I have hiked it often. I park the biggest machine I own in the lot at the base of the mountain, cross the road to the trailhead, and begin the steep uphill walk. My most-used machine sits in my pocket, still warm against my leg, with the notifications turned off. It is a before-sunrise morning in late February, below freezing in that way that makes your sinuses feel dry and crackly. The trail is dark and empty, but the trees are beginning to materialize in the subtle dawn light. I pick my way along the trail mostly by memory. The trail ascends through a landscape of rough-edged gneiss boulders that appear to have tumbled down the mountainside in a great avalanche many centuries ago. The dawn light floods the forest as I near the top of Pigeon Hill. Most of the trees are barren, and their gray trunks slice the view of the mountain into a hundred jagged puzzle pieces. I can see my breath as I walk.
What does it mean to apprentice oneself to nature?
Sometimes I hike with a single quotation at the top of my mind; sometimes, just a single word. Today, it is a snippet from Herbert Read, the English anarchist poet, art critic, and political philosopher who was knighted for his literary achievements. He wanted all humans to practice creativity—to be artists—because he believed this would mitigate the mass neurosis caused by industrialization. Read had seen the worst effects of industrialization up close, in the trenches of France during World War I, where every bullet, artillery shell, mustard gas cloud, machine gun, tank, helmet, mess kit, and trench whistle originated in a factory.
There are trenches on this hill as well. About halfway to the top, I pause at one of them, a shallow ditch dug into the slope. Overlooking this ditch is a wooden plaque with a black-and-white photograph of the same scene taken in 1864. In the photo, the ditch is clearly a trench. The big rock in front of the trench is still there, exactly as it was during the Brother’s War, still, like a weary sentinel from the age of Titans. I stand at the plaque and read the paragraph describing how Confederate soldiers from Missouri faced off against Union soldiers from Missouri on this hillside, the cruelest of ironies, according to the anonymous author of battlefield placards.
Four thousand men died on these ridges on June 27, 1864, a century before I was born. This hill is part of the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, the site of a battle between the forces of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and Confederate General Joseph Johnston, another spectacle of mass death aided by the industrial age, with mass-produced rifles and artillery and railroads carrying food and supplies to the troops, and information about the battle traveling instantaneously along newly strung telegraph lines—the frenzied activity to build this new technological infrastructure, and tear down the enemy’s. In the battle, Sherman tried and failed to power his army up the mountain and its surrounding hills. The Confederate soldiers were dug in well, and they held the high ground. When it was over, the ridgelines were littered with corpses, and most of the trees were shattered and burning.
Whenever I come up here, I always ask myself, ‘Why are the trees all so young?’ But then I remember that the mountain had been extensively logged by 1864, and the Confederate soldiers cut down many more trees to build fortifications before the big battle. After the war, even more trees were cleared in the area for agriculture. Pigeon Hill fits into a larger narrative of Georgia’s trees. The state was mostly covered by forests in 1500. By 1900, the tree cover had been reduced to 25%, through clearing for cotton plantations, logging, and settlement. The trees I see around me are mostly the ones that grew after the area became a national park. Only 1% of Georgia’s trees can be described as “old growth.”
Trees are a marvel to me. These parochial beings sink their roots into the soil and humbly go about their life-giving business, turning carbon molecules and sunshine into oxygen, sharing nutrients with other trees through the mycelial network in the soil, and providing food and habitat for animals, insects, and other biological life forms. Each of the three silver maples in my backyard my property produces enough oxygen in one day to support two humans, and in a single year, each tree will consume 48 pounds of carbon dioxide. Each of these trees does more to protect the environment than even the most environmentally conscious American I know.
The trail winds and zig-zags across the face of a rock outcrop. The hard plastic toes of my hiking boots scrape at the rock as I climb. I am breathing heavily now, straining against the incline. The rosy dawn light has begun to suffuse the forest, and the tree trunks are emerging from the darkness, each one a singularity. In this era, the trees of Pigeon Hill have triumphed in their engagement with human civilization. The evidence is all around me, in loblolly pine, tulip, red oak, and white oak.
***
The sun is up over the ridgeline now, and other hikers have begun to appear on the trail, the fast walkers and runners, some with white earbuds tucked into their ears. The epidemic of multitasking follows people even as they walk in the woods. I pity their inability to disconnect from the hive.
My phone is out of my pocket now, and I am aiming the camera at a patch of moss clinging to the side of a big boulder. You’re no better than the fast walkers, I think. Who are you to tut-tut about multitasking? One of the apps on my phone instantly identifies plant life by simply pointing your camera lens at it. I use it often when I am hiking. The image of the moss comes into clear focus under my eye-like camera lens, and the app makes a positive ID.
This particular moss is a Sematophyllum. How wonderful to be able to learn in this way. Some of the trees up here have moss and lichen clinging to them. Many of the big rocks also. Moss is a time machine that allows you to gaze backward 450 million years, further back than trees, ferns, and grass, before the last five mass extinctions, to a time when the entire landmass of the Earth was covered in it. Much like the boulders surrounding me, moss is impervious to the din of human civilization.
Don’t be a hypocrite. You can’t disconnect from the hive either.
I am thinking about my machines again, the phone in my hand, and the other companion gadgets back home in the hive—the iPad and the iWatch, each one an ergonomically designed, glass-capped portal to digital worlds. They balance perfectly in my hands and feel effortlessly natural touching my skin, but at the far end of all the supply chains, the old industrialism is still there—the deforestation, soil erosion, toxic waste runoff, and water pollution caused by copper, cobalt, nickel, and tin mining; the child labor used in lithium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the Chinese laborers working 60-70 hours a week for low wages in factory towns.
Sometimes when I’m hiking, I try to imagine what Henry David Thoreau or John Muir would have done with a cell phone. Would they have hated the technology for its capacity to distract humans from nature, or would they too have given in to its many pleasures? Would they have found productive uses for social media, to advocate for wildlife conservation, for example? Thoreau certainly would have traced the supply chains back to the sweatshop labor; he would say that we are all implicated in these injustices.
Nevertheless, I am certain that Thoreau would have loved some of my nature apps. I imagine him walking in the woods around Concord, Massachusetts, pausing every few steps to point his camera at some flower or strand of grass. He would also enjoy my birding apps, especially the one that instantly identifies birdsong. I see him standing in a meadow with his phone aimed into the air above his head, recording the chorus of clucks and coos from a flock of passenger pigeons in the trees all around him.
Pigeon Hill received its name because it was a roosting place for passenger pigeons, once the dominant bird species in North America. Passenger pigeons were extremely social birds that traveled in enormous, cloud-like flocks that could blot out the sun. When Thoreau was a boy in the 1820s, there were billions of these birds in North America, but by 1914, they were extinct, killed off by deforestation and hunting. Now, Pigeon Hill is like the hundreds of places in America that are named with bastardized versions of words taken from the languages of indigenous people who no longer live there—a placeholder for something invaluable that was destroyed by greed, profiteering, and bigotry.
The top of Pigeon Hill is an otherworldly garden of large boulders strewn about, some the size of cars or small cabins. Standing there in the dawn light, I can feel the cathedral majesty of this place, the way the still-orange sun slants through the bare branches to the east in fractal shapes, like light streaming through stained glass windows, and the silent, hulking permanence of stone. I remember that the great cathedrals brought the forest into the building with their massive tree-like columns and Gothic vaults branching off through the ceiling. Looking up from the nave, you can almost imagine you are staring skyward through the tree cover overhead.
***
Is there any difference between a war and a war on nature?
When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, they stared into the vast treeline of the North American continent and saw a howling wilderness wherein the battle between God and Satan would be fought. “What could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?” wrote William Bradford. “And what multitudes there might be of them they knew not.” The dark shadow of numinous dread moved in the spaces between trees and zapped the Puritan mind. Once you decide that the land is a spiritual war zone, what happens to the trees is of little consequence. They are pawns in this larger cosmic struggle. You expect them to lie shattered to splinters eventually, smoldering on the horizon, like a scene from the Somme, 1916, or Bucha, 2022.
And maybe this biblically tinged biophobia explains why their descendants were so comfortable clear-cutting forests, strip mining mountaintops, and cordoning off vast swathes of land behind barbed wire fencing and “no trespassing” signs. Even as the Puritan religion faded and their culture gave way to a more secular, mercantilist one, the war on nature persisted. With each new iteration of society on the continent, the old fear and loathing managed to burrow itself even deeper into the collective psyche, the original American mind virus.
In his book The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, John Bellamy Foster introduces the concept of the “metabolic rift,” which he describes as the profound separation between society and nature caused by capitalism. The relentless drive for profit, expanding markets, and continuous growth ruptures the bond between humanity and the natural processes that sustain us.
I see this rift everywhere in the area around Kennesaw Mountain, where humans have terraformed the earth to make way for a habitat that is profoundly disconnected from nature. It is rare for anyone living in the suburbs to grow, hunt, or gather their food, or even know where it comes from. Most people can go for weeks or months before their bare feet will ever touch the unmediated earth of dirt or grass. The average suburbanite spends 5-7 hours indoors staring at screens. The trees outside are merely decorative; it is not necessary to know their names or anything about them. The main ingredient for survival in this zone is money, and everyone knows that if you can’t keep it flowing, you will be unceremoniously exiled from this place.
Herbert Read knew something about exile. His father died when he was ten, and because they were tenant farmers, his family was forced to leave the farm, where he had cultivated an idyllic relationship with nature. His mother then took a job in a factory in Halifax. “I passed from the open fields into the close streets; from the slow, patient rhythm of the seasons into the clock-regulated routine of the factory town,” he wrote. Torn from nature and forced into the belly of the machine—this was the root of his disenfranchisement.
Cast out of the Garden. A story as old as time.
***
On Pigeon Hill, I can begin to locate myself in time and space. I walk off the trail about a hundred feet and stand beneath a big rock overhang, invisible to passersby. It is cool and damp standing here, hidden from the sun. I can smell the mountain, that earthy mingling of damp earth, rock, and moss. The trees are quietly breathing all around me. They can sense my presence. Scientists recently discovered that trees share nutrients along a vast underground network of interconnected fungi, which is a kind of biological internet for flora. If they had eyes, they would be watching me.
Is this what an apprenticeship to nature looks like, immersing oneself in a forest? Is it enough to be out here on the trail a few times a month hoping for some kind of transcendental experience? There must be more to it, but what? How does one close the metabolic rift? John Bellamy Foster’s book recommends broad systemic changes, an ecological revolution, and an end to the capitalist logic of extraction. Lofty goals indeed, but all of it seems abstract and beyond my control.
What would Edward Abbey do, the bearded, sun-weathered environmentalist who once wrote “the most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chainsaws?” Abbey published a practical guide to “monkey wrenching,” which gave detailed plans for how to literally disrupt the machinery of capitalism. I can picture him cheering on the tree sitters at the recent Cop City protests in Atlanta, those fearless people who lived in platforms constructed in the tree canopy of an 86-acre forest and watershed area, trying to prevent it from being bulldozed to create a massive police training facility. Is this what we must do, throw our bodies against the machine?
For his part, Herbert Read imagined the apprenticeship more literally. He wanted to build a future in which there “would be a private art standing over against the public art of the factories.” Humans would learn first how to do things with their hands, and with this conditioning, we would never be disconnected from nature again. In this way, human hands would “never again lose their cunning, nor eyes their delight in color and form.”
The mountain is quiet now. I hear something drop from a nearby tree, the pop of an acorn or a pinecone hitting the forest floor. I hear the call of a red-breasted woodpecker coming from far off. And then nothing.
I am alone. The runners and walkers have passed me on the way to meeting their daily step goals. The man with the Russian accent who was in the middle of a one-sided conversation about a tax lien has also passed me, his voice trailing off as he moves further up the mountain. In these moments of silence, the forest is unsettling. I can feel its primordial indifference settling into my bones.
What if I died here, hidden behind this shelf of rock, brought down by a sudden heart attack? Would the “Find” feature on my phone lead my wife to the grim discovery of my cold corpse, or would it be some kid who left the trail to explore the ancient battlefield as I had?
I play out this scenario sometimes when I am hiking alone: my death in the forest. The black buzzards I have seen all over the park are actors in this gruesome fantasy. A busy road passes through the park, and there is often roadkill in the breakdown lane—chipmunks, squirrels, possums, foxes, and sometimes, a dead deer. The buzzards roost on the cell tower behind my house, so they can survey the road from above, searching for their next meal. They sometimes descend on a neighborhood in the area for no apparent reason. When this happens, you can see them standing along the peaks of roofs and shuffling noisily atop chimney covers like grim harbingers of death. When I hike on the mountain, I see them soaring overhead, graceful in flight—sleek, black, and beautiful. Only viewed from up close can you see their downward-facing beaks, which evolved for tearing at the flesh of dead things, like animated meat hooks. These buzzards descended from the ones that circled over the battlefield long ago. I am sure of it.
I breathe in. I exhale. The air is clean and cold in my lungs. There is bracing honesty here amidst the boulders and barren trees, and for a few moments, I can bear the burden of it—the scars of war on the land, the mass extinctions, the grinding machinery of the Anthropocene, which is slowly suffocating the earth. At the same time, the strange beauty of this place is overwhelming. Here, amongst great boulders that were once chipped by rifle shot from the Civil War, a forest cathedral.
A red-tailed hawk hangs motionless in an updraft overhead, watching me. It is a privilege to be caught even for an instant in its wandering eye.
Daniel Vollaro is a writer from New Jersey who now lives and works in the Atlanta suburbs. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, and his work has been published in Missouri Review, Rise Up Review, Adbusters, The Smart Set, Fairfield Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Thrice Fiction, and Timber Creek Review, among many others. In 2020, he was listed as a “notable” writer in Best American Essays for his personal essay “The Lookout Tree,” which was published in Michigan Quarterly Review and then again in his 2021 memoir, Reservoir: Tales from the Other Jersey. He teaches writing at Georgia Gwinnett College.