The Signal Tree
Diah Munson, forty years of age,
believed this was his chance—perhaps his last—
to grow his wealth, just as his father had,
with land. And though it lay three hundred miles
away, through virgin woods and wilderness
so thick with undergrowth as to obscure
at times the narrow path he had to take,
he set out on a bright October morning
in seventeen seventy-one, with heady dreams
of farmland on the Susquehanna’s banks.
Once Diah left Connecticut and crossed
the Hudson and the Delaware, he took
the Minisink, a path the ancient tribes
had trod for centuries. He made his bed
of hemlock boughs, and slept beneath the stars
or canopies of fragrant conifers,
lighting fires to keep the beasts at bay.
Along the trail, a dome-shaped birch bark hut,
long since abandoned by Lenape hunters,
provided shelter on the night it rained.
The Minisink, once it had passed Shohola,
had risen by degrees to such a height
that, after he had ridden fifteen days,
Diah reached the summit of Cobb’s Mountain,
its ridge-top heath so barren that it gave
an unobstructed view of wave on wave
of woodland tree-tops robed in autumn’s hues;
and towering above, the signal tree—
a lofty lopstick pine resplendent in
the final rays of the descending sun.
Coming soon: Part Two, Chapter Four
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