A Walk in the Woods

From Norwich it is about a mile to the Connecticut River and a pleasant, unassuming
1930s bridge leading to the state of New Hampshire and the town of Hanover on the
opposite bank. The road that led from Norwich to Hanover was once a leafy, gently
sinuous two-lane affair--the sort of tranquil, alluring byway you would hope to find
connecting two old New England towns a mile apart. Then some highway official or other
decided that what would be a really good idea would be to build a big, fast road between
the two towns. That way, people could drive the one mile from Norwich to Hanover
perhaps as much as eight seconds faster and not have to suffer paroxysms of anguish if
somebody ahead wanted to turn onto a side road, because now there would be turning
lanes everywhere, big enough for a truck pulling a titan missile to maneuver through
without rolling over a curb or disrupting the vital flow of traffic.
So they built a broad, straight highway, six lanes wide in places, with concrete dividers
down the middle and outsized sodium street lamps that light the night sky for miles
around. Unfortunately, this had the effect of making the bridge into a bottleneck where
the road narrowed back to two lanes. Sometimes two cars would arrive simultaneously at
the bridge and one of them would have to give way (well, imagine!), so, as I write, they
are replacing that uselessly attractive old bridge with something much grander and in
keeping with the Age of Concrete. For good measure they are widening the street that
leads up a short hill to the center of Hanover and its handsome, historic green. Of course,
that means chopping down trees all along the street and drastically foreshortening most
of the front yards with concrete retaining walls, and even a highway official would have to
admit that the result is not exactly a picture, not something you would want to put on a
calendar called "Beautiful New England," but it will shave a further four seconds off that
daunting trek from Norwich, and that's the main thing.
All this is of some significance to me partly because I live in Hanover but mostly, I
believe, because I live in the late twentieth century. Luckily I have a good imagination, so
as I strode from Norwich to Hanover, I imagined not a lively mini-expressway but a
country lane shaded with trees, bounded with hedges and wild-flowers, and graced with a
stately line of modestly scaled lampposts, from each of which was suspended, upside
down, a highway official, and I felt much better.
Of all the catastrophic fates that can befall you in the out-of-doors, perhaps none is
more eerily unpredictable than hypothermia. There is scarcely an instance of hypothermic
death that isn't in some measure mysterious and improbable. Consider a small story
related by David Quammen in his book Natural Acts.
In the late summer of 1982, four youths and two men were on a canoeing holiday in
Banff National Park when they failed to return to their base camp at the end of the day.
The next morning, a search party went out looking for them. They found the missing
canoeists floating dead in their life jackets in a lake. All were faceup and composed.
Nothing about them indicated distress or panic. One of the men was still wearing his hat
and glasses. Their canoes, drifting nearby, were sound, and the weather overnight had
been calm and mild. For some unknowable reason, the six had carefully left their canoes
and lowered themselves fully dressed into the cold water of the lake, where they had
peacefully perished. In the words of a member of the search party, it was "like they had
just gone to sleep." In a sense, they had.