How to Walk Into a Forest

On returning to my roots, bringing friends along, and listening to Lore Ferguson Wilbert's new book, "The Understory."

I definitely got the better end of the bargain. My husband, who’s a truly excellent dad, agreed to take all three of our girls (including the not-yet-two year old, who doesn’t exactly love roadtrips) in the minivan for the 400-mile road trip from the heat-wave-ridden Philly suburbs to the cool, shady forests of the northern Adirondack mountains. I drove the sedan, with our dog Hazel napping in the front seat beside me.

After I polished off one audiobook, I impulsively hit play on a new book by a writer I recently discovered via Substack,

Lore Wilbert

. The book is called The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor.

As I listened, I drove northward on 81, toward the little girl scout camp nestled in the woods where my parents had taken my siblings and me every summer since before I was born. Now, now it’s the highlight of each summer for my girls, too. I’ve even convinced some (very adventurous and trusting!) friends to make the trek northwards with us. When the camp isn’t in session, you can rent out the cabins. Not many people know about it, which means we have the place to ourselves. The kids roam the camp in packs, making up imaginary games, gathering cool-looking rocks, wading in the water as one parent or another looks on, and taking out kayaks, canoes, or rowboats whenever they can convince a grown-up to go with them.

I didn’t take many pictures at camp (I try not to use my phone much), but I did snap this one out the car door before I drove away yesterday. Such a special place.

In the book’s opening chapters, Wilbert describes a place that is intimately familiar to me: the little network of interconnected waterways next to Paul Smiths College, just a mile or two up the road from our beloved camp. It’s my favorite canoeing spot. I remember going there as a camper on off-site expeditions from both girl scout camp and nearby Camp Guggenheim. I also remember bringing my now-husband there when he came to visit my hometown for the first time, during the summer after we graduated from college.

As Wilbert beautifully recounts, if you put in at Church Pond, you can silently glide through a verdant series of canals just a few feet wide and a couple of feet deep, which lead you from one little pond to another. Eventually, you come out on Osgood Pond, which is so big and beautiful that it really feels more like a lake. This is where US President Calvin Coolidge used to spend his summers, at the “summer white house” known as White Pine Camp. If you know where to look, you can find one of the Adirondack Park’s distinctive lean-tos nestled on the shore. If you’re lucky, like Anthony and I were that summer, you’ll be the first ones there that day, and you can camp there, making a fire in the fire circle and swimming off the sandy shore.

Parts of Wilbert’s story are strangely familiar to me. I grew up Malone, NY, just forty minutes from the community where she lives. In the North Country, that’s basically next door. Although in the book Wilbert is vague about the details, she has been more specific on social media. Although I’ve never met her, I know the church community she used to belong to. My best friend in high school used to go there, taking part in the large weekly homeschooling co-op. I used to go see the musicals they put on, which often starred the many beautiful and musically gifted daughters of the pastor—the same pastor who has been credibly accused of covering up and enabling sexual abuse. I even took cello lessons with one of his daughters. Last I knew, she was married to a woman, was estranged from her family, and was making a living as a musician, releasing several albums and touring the country playing shows.

The book has a meditative tone, shifting back and forth from detailed descriptions of the ecology of the forest to personal reflections on grief, loss, community, and growth. A series of concrete, living things—lichen, decaying “nurse logs” that nurture new trees, the vast and lifegiving underground network of mycorrhizal fungi—serve as grounding metaphors for intense emotional experiences and spiritual revelations. But they are also fascinating in and of themselves; they make me want to learn more about the forests that surrounded me in childhood. I am guilty of taking them for granted, and for letting my feelings of isolation and high-school loneliness color my emotional reactions to the physical landscape. Now, as the winters get warmer and new species invade my childhood home, I have the sense that I could lose things I never fully knew or loved as well as I ought.

The book is partially a memoir, but the narrative of Wilbert’s life doesn’t emerge in a linear fashion. Instead, we’re only given glimpses. Some of the losses and trials she endures—the tragic death of teenaged brother, the lingering effects of an abusive, religiously fanatical father who uprooted her family and brought them to the North Country in the hopes of escaping the government, refusing to give his children social securities numbers, which he called “the mark of the beast”—are deeply personal and idiosyncratic. But, especially as the book goes on, the losses of relationships and communities start to sound like the trials that many people of faith—and particularly, many evangelicals—have faced in recent years.

I have to admit, reading Wilbert’s book made me grateful, once again, to be Catholic. It’s not that the problems she describes, such as division over COVID restrictions, warring pro- and anti-Trump factions, and mishandling of sexual abuse, are not problems in the Catholic Church, too. But, as a Catholic, I can always return to an enduring and unchangeable foundation of truths that transcend differences of opinion about how best to put them into practice.

Last year, I listened to the entire Catechism of the Catholic Church via the podcast hosted by Father Mike Schmitz. I was struck over and over again by the beauty of both the writing and of the truths contained there. Catholic teaching is just so incredibly, uncompromisingly clear about the deepest truths at the heart of reality: that everything was created out of the generative, fruitful, and dynamic love of our three-person God; that each and every one of us is created in the image of that God and is therefore possessed of inalienable dignity and inherent relationality; that we only become truly ourselves through the sincere gift of ourselves; that the physical world around us incarnates and communicates unchanging spiritual truths; and on and on.

This might all sound rather lofty. But Catholic social teaching also provides us with some clear guidance on how to apply these truths to our political circumstances. It reminds us that all of our politics must acknowledge both the primacy of the human person and the fact of our essential interdependence. It reminds us that we are each responsible for each other (an idea known as the principle of solidarity, including the preferential option for poor) while also maintaining that it is best for this care for one another to happen at the smallest, most personal, and most human level that is able to carry it out (the principle of subsidiarity).

The Church is very, very clear on some things—like the absolute impermissibility of abortion—but is also clear that many matters admit of multiple acceptable answers. Orthodox, faithful Catholics can and do disagree on many political questions. In particular, I think it’s common to disagree about the relative importance of warring goods. There is so much anti-human fear-mongering among progressives about climate change that I have probably been guilty of downplaying the importance of environmentalism, even if I have always agreed in theory about the need to safeguard all of creation. (Stay tuned for an interview with the authors of another recent book, What Are Children For, which tackles the question of whether climate change makes it immoral to have kids—which is a surprisingly common view among people just a decade younger than myself.)

Being married to a scientist, I tend to agree with his assessment that the minor adjustments being asked of us in the name of the Earth (like the use of paper straws, which are just so utterly terrible at being straws that it would be laughable, if it weren’t so annoying) have a miniscule impact on carbon emissions. Large corporations and governments just have so much more power than we do. But, of course, the impact of our repeated choices isn’t only external; they also shape the people we become. So I’m open to the idea that I need to reassess some of my priorities, which now lean more toward convenience than eco-friendliness in many areas. (I must admit that we ate off of paper plates all week.)

In any case, in the evangelical world, it seems that a particular brand of American politics and “orthodox” Christian teaching are much more often conflated than they are in Catholic world (though it does happen here too). It’s true that our faith should inform our politics, and that there’s no such thing as a naked public square. But books like Wilbert’s (and Emily P. Freeman’s latest, How to Walk Into a Room, which I began listening to on my return journey) illustrate so clearly the pain and division that arise not just from our particular cultural moment and the cult surrounding one particular political leader, but the unholy marriage between evangelical Christianity and the GOP.

I can’t relate to the deep sense of loss that many evangelicals are grappling with, because for me, the Church has always scrambled party lines, and political disagreements or disillusionment with a particular pastor have never made me doubt the legitimacy of apostolic succession or the reality of Jesus’s presence in the Eucharist. Yes, I am what’s called a social conservative, but my like-minded friends and I have never been under any illusion that the GOP platform ever fully aligned with the Church’s teaching. Faithful Catholics often find ourselves on the Republican side of the aisle mainly because the Democrats have made support for abortion and—more recently—gender ideology the price of entry to their party. And, as much as I hate to say it, the ascendence of Trump actually made space for a broader variety of economic ideas than was accepted within the longstanding fusionist coalition on the right.

It’s also funny to read this type of reckoning with the losses caused by disagreements over Trump right now. I think Wilbert and I had both hoped that the Trump era was in our rearview mirror—that it was time to rebuild and move forward. But, especially after this week’s debate (which I have not watched but have seen the reactions to), I’m not sure. If Trump becomes president again, will evangelical communities be thrown right back into the same turmoil of 2016?

I don’t have an answer to that question. But another Catholic idea is a comfort to me: the concept that I have the strongest duty to care for those who are closest to me—not just emotionally, but physically. For me, this week, that meant organizing a trip to the mountains for our family and friends and unplugging for a few days. It meant meal-planning and cooking for three families, catering to their allergies and special needs. It meant praying the rosary with my big girls each night to help them calm their bodies, let go of their overwhelming anxiety about bugs, and simply rest. And it means making time for me to simply rest, too.

Summer Vibes

I’ll have (very good!!) news to share with you about my book project soon. But in the meantime, I’m leaning into this season: camping, of course, but also spending time at the pool with my kids, savoring the fleeting toddlerhood of my little one, reading lots and lots, and trying to keep up/catch up on all my editing commitments. I’m anticipating a season of intense writing productivity in the fall, so right now I’m just trying to be fully present to these summer vibes. I hope you can do the same.

Speaking of which - a few things to share!

• First: if you’re not tired of reading about the Adirondacks yet, my little brother wrote a lovely reflection on summer camp last year, which Public Discourse just republished: “Summer Camp: An Ailing American Institution.”

• As a contributing editor at PD, I got the chance to talk with

  Dixie Dillon Lane
  about her recent article on free-range parenting and the parental compass. You can watch our conversation here.

• I haven’t gotten a chance to make a new summer playlist yet, but I’ve resurrected last year’s and am still enjoying it as much as ever. Highly recommended for summer evenings cooking dinner with a drink in hand or as background music for back patio chats with friends. Find it here.