Free I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson Page B

have vanished. As I stood scratching my head, certain that this path I knew well should be right about where I was standing, two other hikers passed by through the trees. They were on the path but twenty yards from where I stood and moving at a completely different angle from what I expected. The woods are like that, you see: an incredible tangle without fixed reference points.
    Knowing this, it’s less surprising to learn that the woods sometimes keep forever people unfortunate enough to get lost in their featureless embrace, or even swallow aircraft whole. New Hampshire is as big as some European countries—Wales, for instance—and is 85 percent forest. There’s a lot of forest out there to get lost in. Every year at least one or two people on foot go missing, sometimes never to be seen again.
    Yet here’s a remarkable thing. Until only about a century ago, and less than that in some areas, most of these woods didn’t exist. Nearly the whole of rural New England—including all the area around our part of New Hampshire—was open, meadowy farmland.
    I had this brought home to me with a certain potency the other week when the town council sent us, as a kind of New Year’s present, a calendar containing old photographs of the town from the local archives. One of the pictures, a hilltop panorama taken in 1874, showed a scene that looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t tell why. It showed a corner of the Dartmouth College campus and a dirt road leading off into some distant hills. The rest was spacious farm fields.
    It took me some minutes to work out that I was looking at the future site of my own neighborhood. It was odd because our street looks like a traditional New England street, with clapboard houses shaded by tall and shapely trees, but in fact nearly all of it dates from the early 1920s, half a century after the photograph was taken. The hill from which the picture was taken is now a twenty-acre woods and nearly all the landscape from the backs of our houses to the distant hills is swathed in dense, mature forest, but hardly a twig of it existed in 1874.
    The farms disappeared because the farmers moved west, to richer lands in places like Illinois and Ohio, or migrated to the burgeoning industrial cities, where earnings were more reliable and generous. The farms they left behind—and sometimes the villages that supported them—sank into the ground and gradually returned to wilderness. All over New England if you go for a walk in the woods you will come across the remains of old stone walls and the foundations of abandoned barns and farmhouses hidden in the ferns and bracken of the forest floor.
    The same path I got lost on follows, for part of its length, the route of an eighteenth-century post road. For eighteen miles the path winds through dark, tangled, seemingly ancient woodland, yet there are people alive who remember when all that land was farmland. Just off the old post road, four miles or so from here, there once stood a village called Quinn-town. It was a reasonably thriving little place, with a mill and a school and a couple of streets of houses. It’s still out there somewhere, or what remains of it.
    I’ve looked for Quinntown several times as I’ve passed, but even with a good map the site is nearly impossible to find because the woods are so lacking in distinguishing landmarks. I know a man who has looked for Quinntown off and on for years and still not found it.
    Last weekend I decided to try again. There was a fresh fall of snow, which always makes the woods agreeable. Naturally the thought flitted through my mind that I might stumble on some sign of the missing jet. I didn’t
really
expect to find anything—I was seven or eight miles from the presumed crash site reported in the local paper—but on the other hand, the plane has to be out there somewhere and it was altogether possible that no one had looked in this area.
    So I went out in the woods and had a good tramp around. I got a