Swift Corwin always wanted to be surrounded by woods and hills. He longed for it growing up in Northwest Ohio.
There the only things around him were cornfields and more wide open space that was flat and stretched as far as the eye could see.
It was a trip to Hancock, when still in high school, to visit his cousin Marg Link that Corwin saw the Monadnock region for the first time. It had forests, hills and mountains everywhere you looked – just what he envisioned his forever home would look like.
“I really liked the area,” Corwin said. “Because of the visit with my cousin, I thought this would be a really good place to live and work.”
But before he would eventually settle in the area for what is going on 40 years, Corwin went to college at the University of Wisconsin. It’s a good thing he did, because it’s where he met his future wife Beth.
Corwin chose the Madison campus because he wanted to row crew. He had some experience in high school and “they had a fantastic team made up of walk-ons,” he said. Beth was a swimmer and the two hit it off. How a guy from Northwest Ohio convinced a Minnesota girl to move to New Hampshire, a place she’d never been, is something Corwin still doesn’t fully understand. But she said yes.
“It was a complete shot in the dark for her,” he said. “It didn’t make sense then, but we did it anyway.”
Three kids, two grandchildren and almost 40 years in one place and it appears they made the right decision. And looking back it wasn’t the only decision Corwin made that worked out as well as could be expected.
It was during that time at the University of Wisconsin, where another one of Corwin’s intuitions has led to nearly four decades of fulfillment.
“I had a sense I wanted an outside life,” he said. So when it came time to pick a major, he decided on forestry. And when the newlyweds needed a place to go, and hopefully find a new home, New Hampshire seemed like the perfect place to pursue a life in the woods.
“Somehow I chose the right thing to do,” Corwin said. “It worked for me.”
His first job was working for a firewood company in Milford, helping to buy raw materials. It didn’t last all that long, but soon he met some really good people – including John Calhoun.
“He needed a young set of legs,” Corwin remembered. “Then he gave me a lot of opportunity to learn.”
The name of Corwin’s forestry consulting business, Calhoun and Corwin Forestry, is an ode to Calhoun, who founded the company in 1962 and the one Corwin considers his mentor. The two worked together for 15 years, with Corwin eventually buying the company in 2000. But even when Calhoun called it a career, he never felt the need to take his mentor’s name off.
For his entire adult life, Corwin has breathed the fresh air of the backwoods of New Hampshire, walking through plots of land anywhere from five acres to 1,000 to examine tree species and soil makeup. He’s seen coyotes, deer, bobcat, and bears, found stonewalls, cellar holes and old wells. It gives him a glimpse into the past use of the land.
“You can see how the land was laid out 100 years ago, 150 years ago,” Corwin said. “These were some really interesting places to put their farms.”
He looks at how the trees have come up over the years, many times on lands he worked on years and years ago.
“I’ve seen in the places I’ve worked, how the woods respond to what we did,” Corwin said. “And it’s a sense of deep fulfillment.”
But what happens to the land is up to its owner. Corwin is simply there to listen to their thoughts, offer some guidance and then helps execute what comes next, whether it be a timber harvest or a cut of a specific area. He rarely takes trees down these days, instead is more of the overseer of a project, although as long he’s still involved in the line of work that’s all that matters.
“I’m a lucky guy, I’d have to say,” Corwin said. “And I don’t take it for granted.”
Corwin isn’t much of a tree climber, he’ll leave that to his son, also Swift. The younger Corwin is also in the tree business.
“I’d have to say he’s an improved version of me,” Corwin said.
The way he likes to see things from the treetops is with his drone. When his father-in-law Bob Peters retired from a 65-year career as a pilot, he didn’t want to give up flying. So in 2012, they took up flying drones together.
“It was all really brand new back then,” he said.
Soon he started incorporating it into his work, taking aerial photos of the lands he was working on, getting a different vantage point, telling a different story. With the advancements in technology he can take accurate measurements and it’s become another tool in the tool box, likening it to when he first started using a computer.
But Corwin’s photos aren’t just for work. He loves firing up his DJI Mavic just to see what he can see, whether it be fascinating patterns of the local landscape, stonewalls, ice formations or the early morning sky. His work was recently in a show at the Gallery at the Offices at Depot Square.
He’s upgraded six times in the last eight-plus years and got his Section 107 license, which required studying things like weather, air space and the mechanics of flight. Corwin said he thought briefly about getting his real pilot’s license, but decided “I’ll stay on the ground.”
Winter is by far Corwin’s favorite season, and he laments the fact they seem to be getting shorter and warmer. Not just because it’s a prime time for work, but because his love of being in the cold with skis on his feet or an ice boat under his body.
“I love winter, there’s so many good things to do,” he said. “I’d be happy where it was winter for five months.”
On any given winter morning, Corwin can be found at Crotched Mountain. With skins on the bottom of his skis, Corwin will make the 25-minute hike to the top and then ski back down.
“It’s really good exercise,” he said. “I go three to four times a week and I’m happy doing one or two (trips).”
He isn’t alone in this endeavor and his favorite time to get to the top is at day break.
“You should see the people going up,” Corwin said. “It’s an incredible gift to be able to do that.”
He also has a pass to Crotched Mountain and will hit the trails near his Peterborough house, which is close to Sargent Camp.
As for Corwin’s ice boating, the conditions need to be just right and it’s getting close to the time when he heads out for one of his yearly three to five expeditions. He’s been out on Contoocook Lake, Dublin Lake, Nubanusit and Winnipesaukee. He describes the boat as 12 feet long with metal runners, 60 square feet of sail and powered by the wind. The only way to stop is to turn into the wind and do circles. Corwin estimates he’s topped out at 60 miles per hour, “but maybe faster.”
He didn’t experience winter much in Ohio or Wisconsin.
“I needed to go somewhere with real winters,” Corwin said.
A visit to Norway is definitely on the list for potential future destinations, as is Alaska. Luckily his daughters Fern (Bozeman, Montana) and Lucy (Port Townsend, Washington) both live in places that also have good winters and lend themselves to great outdoor excursions when visiting.
For a number of years, Corwin has dabbled in poetry, self-publishing a collection titled “The Problem with Poetry.”
“The poems come to me at odd times,” he said. “They’re snapshots to a particular moment. I definitely have some kind of voice, but they’re all different and different subjects.”
He’s done some readings, as far back as The Folkway and most recently at the Hancock Library.
“I really love to read poetry out in public,” Corwin said.
While he’s not about to look past the next two months of winter, Corwin is excited about the maple sugaring season, where he’s boiled up batches in the sugar house he built on his property for the last five years.
“I sell it to a small and loyal clientele,” he said. Although he admits he probably eats about a third of what he makes.
He’s a long time member of the Peterborough Conservation Commission and spent many years on the board of the Monadnock Conservancy. And it’s easy to see why he’d hitch his wagon to groups that have the outdoors best interest in mind.
It’s been an interesting adventure from the flatlands outside Toledo, Ohio to a forever home in New Hampshire. But Corwin found his place in the world, and it’s brought him more than just the hills and the woods.