GUEST ESSAY: Dispatches provide a reality of the world in front of us
Aaron Woolf reports on what he is seeing in the North Country and beyond
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BY AARON WOOLF
I always loved the concept of dispatches in journalism. I am here and this is what I see. Part travelogue and part opinion. Facts, observations and a sense of place. Of course the word is also inextricably linked to Dispatches, Michael Herr’s groundbreaking work on Vietnam, the horrifying and illuminating collection of direct observations that not only propelled a new understanding of our nation’s doomed experience in Southeast Asia, but also a new kind of reporting which became known as new journalism.
When I first became aware of Ken Tingley and Will Doolittle’s Front Page, I thought about the era of new journalism, not only because of the personal and present tone of their writing - but because it felt like, in an era of such decline in traditional journalism, a beacon of hope delivered in a fresh way. Perhaps indeed a new new journalism - accessible, vivid, and when the need arises, urgent.
Ken and Will have invited me to occasionally contribute to their growing project and I’m honored to do so.
My first dispatch is from the Franconia Woods of New Hampshire, a muddy and mossy trail, at once familiar and yet somehow different from our home forest in the Adirondacks.
The weather report promised bright sunshine and blue skies, but the sky is dark and the cloud ceiling is low. The green-scale color space is unworldly. Not just leaves and grasses but rocks and tree trunks and dirt. Everything is green. And in this way the woods here do feel as they have begun to feel in New York - more like a rainforest than the drier trails of youth.
I don’t think this is a subjective observation. This summer in Elizabethtown six inches of rain fell in approximately six hours, and then did so again the following week - nearly as much rain as we had from hurricane Irene- twice. Then as now the brook running past our house jumped the bridge and spilled onto our driveway. A canyon was carved, a few hundred feet long and up to four feet deep.
When hurricane Irene hit in 2011 we were new parents. We panicked when the driveway washed out and a large ash fell across the road. What if we had to get our three-month-old to the hospital? With tractor and saws we managed to make the road passable in the raging night as the driving wind dropped limbs all around. Not wise.
Now our daughter is 13 and we’re way less reactive. This time we stayed indoors until the wind died down. We called Taylor Rental first thing the next morning with road work on our mind. Soon a 12,000-pound, 60-horsepower machine was on its way to Elizabethtown. I hoped our faded old backhoe tractor would not be offended at the appearance of a flashy yellow cousin, but this was a big job. As I surveyed the damage, I suddenly and unexpectedly thought of my father.
Flashback to 1974 at the Essex County Fair. There in the agricultural equipment shed, I saw it - a small farm tractor with a hydraulic backhoe attachment. Quite modest, maybe 24horsepower with a 12-inch bucket. I ran to grab my father, “Dad there’s a tractor here with a backhoe! We could muck out the ditches on the driveway!” That was my job back then - to shovel out the ditches - always a bigger job after a rain. My father looked at me quizzically and tilted his head the way dogs do, “What do I need a backhoe for?” he said, “ I have a son.”
But did it rain in 1974 like it does now? Years after my father died I bought my first backhoe in an act of practicality and defiance.
Operating the controls on the rental excavator was like playing a video game compared to the clunky hydraulics on our old tractor. So smooth. But it cut through decades of compressed gravel and hardpan with dispatch - and on our eroded old bridge the digging became a kind of archaeology of my youth.
Below the gravel were chunks of a reinforced concrete slab we had put in before the easy availability of plastic culverts. I remembered the day when the dump trailer Dad was hauling had cracked the slab. Then when I pulled back the lever to cast aside the crumbling concrete and rebar, the bucket hooked a larger deeper object that was for a beat immovable. The sound of straining metal and for the first time that day the machine jerked and stalled out.
A new angle revealed what was buried - rusty steel grates that were instantly familiar. They had capped the bridge decking back in the 1960s. It was startling to see them in the light of day after so long and they triggered a vivid memory. I must have been 10 or 11. My father and I were clearing some branches and leaves that had dammed the creek just above the bridge. As we stood there, feet in the water and eye lines at bridge level, those grates that we saw every day looked somehow different and they pulled my father back to a different place.
In General MacArthur’s Army Amphibious, Dad had helped link hundreds of those same steel panels to create temporary jungle airstrips. Seeing them that day from a different angle jarred him and I remembered watching his face change, as he blurted out the memory to no one in particular. Would he tell me more of what he remembered? Like so many in his generation the war was buried under a stratification of stoicism and time.
He never talked about it.
He always said we could talk about it more “someday”, but we never did.
Sitting there in the cab of that slick 12,000 pound excavator in 2024 I had a clear window back through 1974 to 1944, conflating my own memory with that of my deceased Dad, and for a moment I saw so clearly the younger face of the father who didn’t need a backhoe because he had a son. Can time be so linear if there are relics that can catapult us so palpably across the decades?
It was in an instant when I realized what made these New Hampshire woods seem different from home. It was the birches. They were old. Much older and larger than ours seemed to grow. Bark peeled than attached, like horizontal hickories. One old birch I came upon was as bent as its bark, radically turned from one right angle to another unable to conceal some long ago scar. It caught me and focused my thoughts.
The bent tree with its injury was like a complete Zen garden all on its own, placed there on that trail to stimulate deep contemplation.
Again, thoughts of my father.
Then of me.
The way he aged, the way I am aging.
Was this twisting old tree teaching flexibility or brittleness? Was it wizened with time or had it become rigid in its beliefs? Had its affliction made it more compassionate or more bitter? Why couldn’t my father tell me what had happened to him in the war?
Growing up I was largely left to fill in on my own the picture of my father’s wartime experiences in the Pacific. Michael Herr’s Dispatches informed me more about how I imagined Dad’s war than anything he ever told me.
True, it was the wrong war and the wrong country, but in my imagining, there was something to be compared between the jungles of Vietnam and the jungles of New Guinea. The stifling and claustrophobic vegetation, the danger behind every tree. Disease and insects as harrowing as the enemy. The near constant rain.
Now the deep and varied greens of the Franconia woods take on a different, more alien tone. I am safe. There is no war here. But I’m definitely not home. And the sense that these faraway forests in my mind and the one before my eyes are jumping their banks and merging. And there’s this way that these flooding forest banks become shortcuts that cut off the bends in the meandering river of time. Is this what lies at the root of a deja vu? Can I have a flash forward as real and present as a flashback?
No, there’s not a war here now. But the line that traces its way from the war in the Pacific through Vietnam to the drum beats of today feels more bent and more blurred than I believed possible. Could war ever come to these trees in New Hampshire? As a teen in the Adirondacks I tromped through the creek in our woods visualizing a scene from Red Dawn where high-school football players like me were on the front lines on our home turf. But while the dramatized Russian invasion felt somehow plausible to my adolescent mind in the 1980s, my adult mind sees this year’s Civil War film as horrifyingly closer, a hellscape of our own making that merely amplifies the violence we’re already seeing.
I inherited a deep patriotism from my parents, along with the belief that the same patriotism that drove Dad to enlist in the war in 1942 could lead him to protest the war in 1972. But where does one’s patriotism lead one today? Who’s called to defend the flag that both sides in this painful national moment call their own? From where I stand in these New England woods not far from from where those first musket cracks sounded in a Massachusetts thicket, there is a clarity.
The forest is a kind of polity in which all systems, even those that compete with each other, depend on the whole. Patriotism in a democracy is loving your country for its whole - its institutions, its values and its people. Even, perhaps especially, the people who compete with you politically. You need them and they you, because your opponents' existence is requisite for a democratic process. You and they both acquiesce to the same deliberative and democratic debate and when your side loses, you take comfort because the institution holds. You will have another chance. And so will they, too.
But like a forest there is an elegant ecological balance, far easier to destruct than to construct. And it fails when your opponents become the “enemy within,” when your patriotism transmutes into nationalism and jingoism and fear. The forest fails when the interconnectedness of the whole becomes subservient to the needs of one species.
May these trees, some of which are old enough to remember when these lands were ruled by a king, keep vigil over a land that is forever ruled by its people, those opposed and those aligned, a system that can bend and flex, but not break into war.
This exercise in writing a dispatch from the New Hampshire forest reveals something: Dispatches written in other places can also lead to a dispatches from other times. And these recalled pasts and these imagined futures are not so extratemporal as they seem. I look forward to the opportunity to share more dispatches before too long.
Aaron Woolf is a Peabody Award-wining documentary journalist (King Corn, 2007) and entrepreneur (Deer's Head Inn) based in Elizabethtown, N.Y. In 2014 he was the Democratic nominee for Congress in New York’s 21st Congressional District and today serves on the town’s planning board.
The writings of Robert Frost came to mind with each of your captivating images and personal reflections. Your exquisite essay would be an inspirational addition to English Lit classes on both a high school and college level. Just as the poem “The Road Less Travelled” led me to a career as a Navy nurse, caring for combat medi-vacs during the tumultuous Vietnam era, it was my Dad’s service as a Seabee in the Battle of Okinawa which created a bridge for us to speak of the previous unspeakable images we both witnessed. It deepened my capacity to listen to vets’ stories as a hospice nurse and chaplain… and to truly appreciate the healing power of nature for their traumas, as well as my own.
May your gift of writing receive an even wider readership in the days and years ahead. It’s a much needed blessing for all of us.
Brilliant and beautiful!