Hunting for the endangered National Forest of the Northeast
By: Benje Williams
Tags: New York, Travel, Climate Change, Adventure, Outdoors

Hunting for the endangered National Forest of the Northeast

I see the orange vest announcing itself from at least seven or eight tree-lengths away. The man wearing it looks low to the ground, in between the witch hazel and hawthorn shrubs. I stop in the middle of the trail, on top of a carpet of oak leaves and slippery soft soil. “Don’t shoot,” I whisper to myself, removing my hood and unzipping my all black jacket. I sheepishly lift my right hand, but the hunter doesn’t wave back. Is his rifle pointed at me? Does he at least have a magnifying scope? There’s no way of telling, other than the fact that I’m still standing.

I walk forward, squishing through the soil that the melted snow has softened. With each step, I wait for the man to move. But he is frozen still. A warbler is singing her warnings overhead. The wind is whispering through the barren hardwood canopy. A sheet of clouds is shifting faster than usual in front of another sheet of clouds. The layers of leaves are padding my footsteps. And finally, when I’m only an acorn’s throw away, the hunter’s face rolls towards me, stops, and then drops. His eyes are closed. He’s asleep.

I stand there for nearly a minute, exhaling the breath I was unknowingly holding, and debating what to do next. I’m in the Allegany State Park, and it’s the beginning of bear season. Although no one told me. As no one does in the wild. The signs were all there though — in hindsight, of course. The army of pickup trucks parked next to me in the wooden cabins last night. The absence of a single other hiker along the trail I’m on. The bear roadkill that I had seen off of the highway. Or the amateur fisher I accidentally scared the holy ghost out of a month or so before. He had tried to run when he heard me coming. “Jesus Christ,” he said, unraveling his fishing line from the berry bush he had run into, “I thought you were a black bear.” I apologized and tried not to laugh, but couldn’t help it. Just the day before, I had cycled past a homemade Black Bears Matter sign, which I had many mixed feelings about. Now, standing in front of the entangled fisherman, as an assumed black bear, the irony was too good.

Despite these signs, the Allegany State Park ranger hadn’t said anything about hunting, and the trail he recommended just before I set out somehow sounded hunter-proof. “North Country is the longest trail in the US, over 4,000 miles, from North Dakota all the way to Vermont,” he said. “Just follow it a few miles south and you’ll hit the national forest as soon as you cross into PA.” Which is exactly what I was searching for: the Allegheny National Forest, the only national forest in Pennsylvania, and one of only four national forests in the eleven Northeast states.

I had spent weeks in the national forest in West Virginia, and my entire childhood inside of dozens of national forests that checkerboard California. But Allegheny would be my first on the east coast. If only I could make it there, alive, and in one piece.

Finally, after catching my breath, I tiptoe past the sleeping hunter, along the 4,000 mile North Country Trail. It’s quiet for another four to five minutes, until I turn the corner and see two other orange vests, this time walking directly towards me on the trail. “You better get something orange on, buddy,” the one in front says as I walk up to them. “Some of these jack asses will shoot at anything moving.”

I want to ask him if they would unknowingly or knowingly shoot at anything moving, which seems like a critical distinction, but I willingly assume the former and tell him I was worried about that. “I walked past one guy sleeping just now,” I say nervously. They both look at each other, shaking their heads.

“Oh, he’s one of ours.”

“Sleeping huh?” the guy in the back says, smirking. “Well, we’ll have to do something about that.”

I laugh but don’t ask what that might mean. Instead, I tell them that I’m heading to the national forest and they stare at me like I had said I was trying to make it to Yellowstone or Yosemite.

“The national forest is way out there, buddy,” the guy in front says. “You better get back to the camp and put some orange on there.” Which is exactly what I say I’ll do. I turn around, wish them good luck, and beg them not to tell their friend I had ratted him out.

“Don’t worry, we’ll tell him a racoon told us,” the guy in front says, and I laugh, willingly assuming this wasn’t supposed to be more than an innocent joke.