“In childhood the wilds seemed infinite. Along Crooked Creek in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania there was a tract of forest we called the Big Woods. The hemlock, beech, poplar, red oak, white oak, maple, and shagbark hickory grew on slopes so steep they had never been logged… Now I would not care to visit those faraway scenes. The forest which seemed so vast to us was only a small thing after all, as the bulldozers, earth movers, and dragline shovels have proved.”
— excerpt, “Shadows from the Big Woods,” by Edward Abbey
