The Rightful Woodsman

Beverly and I took a ride yesterday and stopped at the birthplace of Daniel Webster. It’s a small structure on a back road on the side of a ridge in a still-rural part of New Hampshire. The land is being lost in that state to development, along the lines of Disney. The strip malls and ballooning construction sites are reminiscent of the rural but it ain't. Along those lines I wrote this poem a few years back.

The Maine Woodsman

In upper Maine the locals trek to town
to drink and draw a bead on tourist folk,
who, after shooting rapids, try to drown
their soaking-through in Cuervo Gold and smoke.
They like to speculate, these native sorts,
on where each visitor has traveled from.
"From Massachusetts?" drawls a man who sports
a flannel vest to one that's drinking rum
and coke, and wears a silk Hawaiian shirt.
"You don’t appear as smartly wrong as those
brand-new New Hampshire ones." He forced a curt
but rueful smile, then furthered his complaint:
"They fancy that they live in woods, I s’pose,
but rightful woodsmen I know they sure ain't."

Anyways, it appears that Daniel Webster was the real thing built from the land(although my townsman Whittier may have something else to say.) For those whose history may be a bit rusty, there’s a synopsis of the man and his career here. Emerson said upon Webster's death:

Last Sunday I was at Plymouth on the beach....I supposed Webster must have passed, as indeed he had died at three in the morning. The sea, the rocks, the woods, gave no sign that America and the world had lost the completest man. Nature had not in our days, or not since Napoleon, cut out such a masterpiece. He brought the strength of a savage into the height of culture. He was a man in equilibrio; a man within and without, the strong and perfect body of the first ages, with the civility and thought of the last.

There are times in this nation when nature cuts out such a masterpiece. But there are also folks out there who play at being woodsmen, clear cutting the breadth of the world without thoughtful concern.