Far-Flung Harvard

TO GET THERE, drive down Mass. Ave, to Lexington Center, and then down Rte. 2A into the middle of Concord. Go to the left of the Colonial Inn in Concord Center, take a right on Liberty St. and a left on Estabrook Road. This last is a dirt dead-end that stretches about half a mile; at its end are a farmhouse, and a sign that says, in the same quaint letters that mark Wadsworth House, or Massachusetts Hall, "Harvard University Forest." You expect a desk, with an old man to check bursar's cards on the way in and to make sure no one takes pine cones when they leave.

The fact--that more of New England is wooded now than 100 years ago--is repeated often enough that it may be true. If so, it seems a good sign. And it helps explain why, in the middle of the Harvard University Forest, there are stone walls, some of them stretching for hundreds of yards beside what are now trails, under what are now pine trees. New England stone walls are marvelously precise, considering. The rocks fit so snugly that a hundred mortarless years have done nothing to displace them. As a reminder of the forest reclaiming the field, they are in one sense eerie. But the thought that others have lived and worked here is reassuring.

Concord has no mountains and this network of trails winds through what are at best hillocks. Half a mile away, on lower ground by the river, the first British dead of the Revolutionary War fell, and if this land was cleared then, you could have seen the brief battle. And if you had stood for a little while after the battle, you would have seen--so legend has it--a young boy, hired hand in a nearby farm, happen by, axe in hand, and dispatch a wounded Redcoat. The excesses of revolutionaries are not peculiar to our day.

But the land has grown out now, and the placid Concord is hidden. There are, however, lots of ferns, rotting logs, pine trees, deciduous trees, and horse-leavings. Once I emerged from the woods to find a familiar red-and-white shuttle bus at the entrance, bearing Biology students out for a serious day's work. But the Forest is big enough to swallow up any crowd; certainly it is among the most peaceable corners of this University.