12/29 -

I listen to the album “Walella” this morning, a remarkable collection of Cherokee songs my friend and writing mentor, Cindy, gave me last night.

It is perfect timing, a lovely gift, and I am reminded once again to ground and pray, as so many have before us, as so many will when we are gone.  It is beautiful music and settles my heart as I ready to go into the woods again today.

I am not in the same state of shock as I was on previous days, more of a deeply sad resignation.  I re-commit to be there for the trees and walk down to the sound of a chain saw this time.

They have started clear-cutting all of the maple trees down near Little Cedar Creek.  They lay in a pile, littered like white lincoln logs, and shatter when the next tree lands on top of them - so incredibly disrespectful.  Only this fall they were a canopy of gold, now they lie like matchsticks.  I hear the giant firs fall too, they are taking everything.

It is steep where they are clear cutting, and all of the torn up earth is muddy and slick, probably why the red and white machine stays on top today, taking trees near my neighbor’s home.  

I walk into the meadow and see smoke rising from their chimney - incredibly ironic.  I try to imagine how they can sit inside the horrendous shambles they are making of the woods.  I trusted them to come live here as good neighbors, as care-takers of the sacred trees.  They have betrayed that trust.  Doing good work for humankind is not separate from caring for the earth around us, they are connected.  This slaughter of the forest harms us all.

I shoot pictures of the downed trees and broken branches lying across the well-worn padded trail of my many mornings here among these friends, so many gone now, the trail unrecognizable.

I “straighten my spine” again and pray for the ones left standing, lonely for their brothers and sisters, for the ones whose bodies lie in piles, waiting for the lumber mill.  I pray for all of their spirits.  The maples crash below, the wise old firs fall nearby, and I will miss them, all of them my friends for years.  

I hope I learn more of the blessing it is to stay connected to spirits gone before us.  I know it is crucial as our parents age and pass, when our dearest friends fight off cancer and we face the possible early death of loved ones.  I need to trust that we are still with each other when our bodies fail and fall.  Once again, the trees will be my teachers.

I come home and pick up a shovel.  I want to take care of something, to love the land in some small way.  I shovel gravel into holes in the driveway, it is raining again and holes suddenly appear in the midst of downpours.  I pick up wind blown branches in the yard, so different form the littered forest below.  It isn’t much, but it is something, some way to love it here in the midst of the onslaught, in the middle of this heartless storm.

12/25 -

It was good to have a break over Christmas from the incessant sound of machines and “my” beloved trees tumbling down.  I realize that I am weary and will need to find some ways to care for my body, my heart, as the logging continues.  Each day starts so agonizingly down there, but I usually have found some wisdom somewhere in the midst of it all, coming back to pure support for the trees.  It is taking a toll though, I will have to see what I can stand.  Maybe being down there for it all isn’t the best thing.  Maybe I just need to touch in, pray in the meadow, and spare myself the pain of watching it all happen.  I will try to listen to the Grandfather again for what is needed.

12/28 -

I put in earplugs at 5 this morning, hoping to block out the sound of the machines and sleep a little longer, I am exhausted.  I feel it start at 7.  I don’t hear them, but I feel the energy of what is happening once again, and know the killing of the trees is continuing.  I pray for them, and know I can’t go down there today.

Losing the trees yesterday all along the path I used to walk has put me over the top and I cannot sustain this daily witnessing of their deaths.  Those were trees I knew so well, old friends of many, many seasons.  They are gone and I need a break from the relentless plunder.  I will pray for them, and I will go get some tea with my friend.  It is all I can do today, it is enough.

12/27 -

The trail a day before the logging begins.

My trail in the woods is gone, buried under a sea of broken branches, exposed stumps, and shredded earth.

What used to be a friendly forest is now single individual trees 30 - 40’ apart, vulnerable to windstorms.  Intricate and intertwined root systems are torn apart where trees have stood together all their years.  I grieve for the ones who are gone, I worry for the ones who are left with no protection, no shielding friends to stand together in the face of winter winds.

The calm before the storm.

The skidder opens its ugly jaws to take away the trees.

This is not “just a thinning.”  No natural woods look like this, hurricanes cause this type of damage and destruction.  It is now a monument to money.  There are no more sacred blue marked trees.  They were taken today by the skidder, belching out black smoke and hauling off the trees that used to dance along the trail, waving graceful green branches, now strewn on the forest floor.

I am mostly numb as I watch it happen, crying a little, shuddering deep slug in the gut exhalations as the trees of my years here fall like so many toothpicks.  It rains branches after they come down, the trees nearby stripped naked on the sides where their neighbors have crashed through.  Unable to hold them, they give their limbs in offering.

I go to the Grandfather tree, and then I cry.  I weep for such devastation, such cavalier endings for the trees I have cherished.  “You have loved them well, and they have cared for you” the Grandfather says.  I cry my deepest tears, and he listens.

I have thought that I would not go back into what remains of the woods - too hard, too much to hold.  But I hear Him say “The remaining trees need your prayers.”  I know this to be true, stand up straight again, and go back to them.  It is windy today and they sway in big deep arches, no friends between them to limit the whipping they alone will take now.

I pray, I sing, I stare in disbelief as the great tree-cutting machine moves over to another section, clamps its arms around another tree, and the guillotine saw kills it in an instant.

I had maybe held on to some romantic notion that at least the men who wield chain saws and log in the woods must like to be outside, in nature.  As I watch this operation I realize that all of them sit in the cabs of huge machines and clear trees all day, their feet never touching the ground, never breathing the air or the smell of the forest.  They are one step removed from what they do, detached in a wall of steel and barred over windows.

I stay till they are done with the whole section nearest “my” land and “my” trees.  I look over at the woods where I thinned years ago.  There is the deep green shade of canopy, there are ferns and plants for browsing deer.  There is room, but they are close enough to stay connected.  The kind of cutting happening today is heartless, placing dollars over the health and beauty of the forest, the spirit of trees, the peace of the land.

I shoot pictures of it all, some tangible proof that this is really happening.  I take a photo of the slick lines left where they have dragged off the trees.  It is silent here now, all of us in shock.  A tree frog ribbets, once, on the edge of the cutting, and I wonder how many animals have died today.

This is not a forest any longer, it is a graveyard.

12/23 -

Today they started logging down beside “my” trees near the sacred meadow where I sing and pray and do ceremony.  It was heartbreaking once again, every time they fall and hit the ground I ache so deeply.  I cried and cried, then heard the Grandfather telling me to go get my drum.  I did, singing my way down the path from my cabin, praying for the trees in this continual taking of my friends.  I stood on the edge to bid them farewell where the huge machine was cutting them down quickly, praying for their spirits, thanking them again.  He took half a dozen large old trees, all of them at least 75 years old and clustered together as a family.  I drummed and prayed, drummed and prayed.

                                                                                                                                                 

He finished logging this part, turned off the machine, and came walking over to me with another man.  It is interesting to stand firm when you don’t really know who is approaching, and you clearly have different ideas about what should be happening to the trees and the land.  I stopped drumming as he approached and he said “Hi, how are you?”  I said “I am deeply sad that this is happening,  I love these trees.”  

He talked about logging, “harvesting the resource” as he put it, and I talked about the big trees that were leaving that had nothing to do with the health of the forest, just money alone.  I told him I had lightly thinned my own woods when I found out that the trees were all too skinny and had only 10% canopy when they need 30% - 50% to be healthy.  It had been an agonizing decision, but I had learned that there was no undergrowth because the trees were too crowded, and they were growing into tall pencils that could topple easily in storms.  If there is little canopy, there is little root system to hold them to the earth.  I know that stewarding the land doesn’t mean just watching it, it means caring for it, tending it well.  The forest is healthier, the animals have undergrowth and grassy meadows, and it has been an act of love and commitment to care for the land this dearly.

We carried on a respectful discussion, a good conversation, each of us understanding the other and listening to each other.  Then his father, the boss of the operation, walked up.  This was not the same discussion, his father was a jerk.

Clearly looking for confrontation and hammering his point home, I finally told him that we were just never going to agree, that these were living, breathing souls to me, not just “resources,” and that I was extremely sad to see them come down.

After he left the the son said that it WAS hard to take some of those big old trees down and we talked about that for awhile.  It is just such a different world.  We talked about the clear cutting they will do down below and he said “They’re only hardwoods down there mostly,” and I told him that I take photos of those beautiful maples in the fall and as the canopy greens up in spring, they are much more to me than useful lumber or scrap wood.  He said he understood, and we both commented that it was good to be able to talk reasonably with someone when you disagree.  He said they run into all types of folks and wanted to make sure I stayed out of the way and didn’t intend to vandalize their equipment, etc.  I told him that I am a “peacenik” and just love the trees, that’s why I was there.  It was quite a talk, and once again, the world is not as black and white as I choose to paint it when I am angry or in sorrow.  It is important not to demonize him, he is a good man.

I come back home and realize how utterly exhausted I am.  It is hard bearing witness sometimes.  It feels important to sing and drum them out respectfully, and I know my prayers are felt.  I pray now for the straggling ones left behind when all around them are gone.  May they make it through the winters ahead.

12/22 -

The magnificent trees, a week before the logging.

A place of shelter and beauty.

The sound of the machines wakes me at 7 and I am immediately saddened again to face another day of devastating loss.  I dress quickly and walk down into the woods, hearing trees smashing down up above and screaming out once again.  I wail in disbelief that this is happening, and try vainly to pray again for the trees.  I fall short.

A gravel truck comes across the meadow by my neighbor’s home and I watch as they make a roadway for the log trucks that will be coming soon to haul away the trees that have lined my morning walks for all these years.

I cry, I yell out, I cry again.  There is no stopping this nightmare.  I hear the neighbor’s three dogs on the trail and know they are near.  I cannot stand to see them, knowing I will surely say something cruel from the deep well of my anger and pain.  I disappear up into the woods above the meadow, hiding in the trees of my own land, the ones that will never come down like this as long as I live here.

I watch them, trying to understand how two good people do such things, take away these beings from the woods, from our home, from the world.  They stop by a stand of incredible elders and I can’t see them for awhile.  In a bit they walk back up the trail to their home and I am torn, like the trees, impossible to comprehend this decision, their choices.

I go to the Grandfather again, with my anger, with my bitterness and heartbreak as trees still fall above, and He reminds me that “It is about the trees, not these people.”  I have looked to Him to “straighten my spine” as we were taught in the Native American rounds where I studied indigenous ways many years ago.  I have learned since that trees are the great teachers of standing tall, rooted in the midst of storms, bending when needed.  Returning to earth when their time has come, they are home to the next generation, circling round to become the rich loam of the forest floor.

I walk back down along the trail, intent on prayers, and discover that my neighbors have tied bright red tape around the two trees they had offered to let stay when they felt my sadness at the impending logging.  There is more red tape, saving them from logging, around three beauties from that marvelous old stand.  They left a red Christmas bow on one tree, a gift for the forest, a gift for me?  The world is not so black and white, and in the midst of it all, I see them a little more clearly and offer a prayer for their family, for their suffering, as the trees come down around them.

I walk farther down into the woods and discover a tree laying across the trail, a solid 70 year old fir, stripped bare and naked.  I lay down on her, praying, thanking her, still, with her.  I notice an old growth stump nearby serving as a nurse log to another fir, her child, maybe her grandchild, near 50 years old herself.  I remember the many generations who have lived here before, who will live here again.

Walking farther along the trail I sing the words to Libby Roderick’s song “How could anyone ever tell you you were anything less than beautiful, how could anyone ever tell you you were less than whole?  How could anyone fail to notice that your loving is a miracle, how deeply you’re connected to my soul,”  still crying, still praying, wishing them well.  Such deep, deep gratitude for the years I have loved them and lived in their presence.  They have been my steady friends.  I am blessed.

12-20 -

I say to my friend Kate “I used to love blue” until it became the marker of coming devastation and loss.  Two months ago they spray painted blue lines across the bark of trees that will be coming down.  I have wept for them, prayed for them, sung to them, hoping to prepare them, prepare myself, for what lies ahead.

There is no preparing for what is happening now.  They have started above, near my neighbor’s house, clear-cutting one whole section and thinning out all the trees that used to line their driveway.

There is no familiar whine of chainsaws, only the insistent metal sound of steel tracks digging up the red earth of Beavercreek, and the steady, sickening crash of tree after tree falling to the earth.

I am nauseous, I am angry, I am desperate.  I walk into the woods weeping, screaming at them to stop, swearing at my neighbors, my friends, the people I brought out here and encouraged them to buy the adjacent 45 acres, thinking we were like-minded in our love of trees, never imagining this.  Their decision to destroy this forest as we have known it, to change the landscape we have called home for years, is devastating.

It feels like war, the constant falling of trees, soldiers on the battlefield, lost and gone forever from their tall green bodies, only spirits now where once they sheltered raccoons and cougars, and me.

I go once again to the Grandfather, a tree over 200 years old, the guardian of all on this land.  He is my guide as well, where I have gone to pray and ground and listen for over 20 years. 

In the 60‘s Oregon’s famous “Columbus Day Storm” tore the whole top part of the Grandfather away, like the church steeples toppling over in a photo published nationally in the Saturday Evening Post.  He was stripped away to half a tree, open at the top to rain and birds, the remaining branches still photosynthesizing a life, roots still clinging to the earth where the Molalla Indians built their homes, where pioneers passed, and farmers grazed their cows.  Witness to all of us, I have known this tree as the Wise One, and I pray now for the resilience of the forest.

He is a child of the original old growth trees here.  We both dream and remember them as I have found the hollowed out stumps of the ancient ones, 7 - 8 feet across.  I imagine their majesty, and have learned to love the ones here now, so much smaller, starting over again as I did when I moved here at 40.

They have held me through heartbreak.  They have danced with me and offered their smiling selves to my camera, lacy dew-covered spider webs decorating them like Christmas trees in the first frosty days of autumn.

How do I let them go now Grandfather?  How do I find peace in this as my friends are dying?  How do I learn to trust their remaining spirits alone when I have so loved and admired their tall, elegant bodies?  How do I ever trust my neighbors again after the taking of such beauty?

The Grandfather reminds me of my job, my work here.  I am to hold ground as they are coming down, praying for them, honoring them, remembering them always.  I stop crying and ranting at the ones responsible, re-focusing on the trees.

I walk among them for what may be the last time, and finally, blue becomes sacred.  I call out “Blessings on your way” to each blue striped friend, one by one, loving them, stopping to look and memorize the forest as it is.

I think of change and impermanence.  I pray deeply for understanding and acceptance, for courage, for surrender.  It is hard work, this witnessing the dying, hospicing my friends out of this world and staying connected in other realms.  I have loved their steady presence, the sureness of their shelter.  I have great gratitude for their protection of the sweat lodge Cher Bear and I built in the center of the woods, their burning branches heating up the stones that I might pray, cleanse, listen and remember.  They have offered themselves over and over, I walk among them in reverence.

III.  ...and Now - The History of a Changing Landscape

12/19/11 - 

It is 7 am and the machines are moving in.  I hear them rumbling and feel my small cabin shudder, as I am.  They are remarkably, terribly efficient as one man sits in the cab and does the work ten loggers used to do in a fraction of the time.  There is a huge red-colored claw and attachment he brings sideways up to a tree and cuts through decades in seconds.  The claw lays it down where he wants it to go, then strips it bare of branches, measures and cuts it into mill lengths and stacks them.  All of this is done in minutes, turning living vibrant trees into logs - brutal in its perfection.

This is the machine that takes down trees in an instant.

The blade on the left cuts through them in literally seconds.  The two spiked wheels pick up the trees, strip all the branches, measure and cut them into log lengths, and they are living trees no longer.

I have known this day was coming.  My neighbor and I have had several conversations and walked down among the trees together.  I have told him what they mean to me, and what will happen to this habitat for roaming animals who need large stretches of continuous forest for survival, that I know each of these trees by sight, by name.  I have given him the name of other foresters who do not clear cut and believe in sustainable forest practices.  I have listened to his reasons and hoped to change his mind.  He is not a bad man.  He and his wife are kind and do good work in the world, but there is nothing kind about this.

Clear-cutting whole sections of forest, spraying poison onto the earth to kill off ferns and competing vegetation for a new, harvestable mono-culture crop of trees is not my idea of stewardship, of caring for the land and honoring all life here.  In a world where whole ancient rain forests disappear daily, how can we add to the planetary assault, the death of living, breathing trees, housing spirits, home to so many?

On nightly newscasts there are occasional stories of deer wandering city streets, and coyotes killing kitties in manicured back yards.  Every massive logging assault, like the one starting here, in my own “back yard,” destroys the ecological balance of natural life and death and sustenance.  How can I watch this, listen to this, feel it in my heart as the great trees fall?

Later - I stand outside in the evening, after they have left for the day:

It is quiet tonight.

No dozer bullying down the decades

of fir and cedar friends,

no constant engine noise,

the merciless hollow thud

of trembling earth as they land,

their endings audible

a quarter mile away.

Tonight, only stars and tears

and a prayer for the ones

who will lose their lives tomorrow.

II.  Recent History

I have lived out here in the country for twenty two years now, among the echoes of who-whooing owls at night, circling red tails catching drafts, and the occasional bald eagle.  The chittering wake up calls of juncos, jays, and rusty-breasted robins are the harbingers of spring.  Coyotes sing out at night and deer graze their way through the blueberries and down on into the woods of “my” twenty acres and the forests beyond.  It is a shared existence here, even though I have tried to reserve some space of my own, building a deer fence around the garden and clearing trails into the trees for daily morning walks.

I have come to know the nuances of seasons; the first tingling feel of late-August fall in the air, before the maples begin to turn, the sweeping grace of snow on heavy-laden fir branches, and the incredible quiet in the meadows as I snow-shoe down into the woods.  The long gravel driveway turns pink in spring with blossoms feathering down off flowering cherry trees, and the neighbor’s horses whinny as I round the corner in summer with a t-shirt full of apples picked fresh from the orchard.

I do my best to be a steward here; picking up the windfall from winter storms, handy with a chainsaw until a new artificial shoulder ended my she-rah days.  I clear away branches and the trees that have surrendered to ice and wind and soggy Oregon winters.  I mow down scotch broom in the summers (never native here and very pesty) and find the resting places of deer, their soft beds of grass nestled into corners of the meadows.  We all find sanctuary here.  Even the squirrels are comical (when they stay out of my walls) as they chew off cones from the branches of one of the big fir trees close to my house, dropping noisy little bombs down to the deck and raining down their treasure.  We co-exist, the animals, the birds and berries, all of us living here among the trees, grateful.

Woods Witness - Nan Collie

I.  Distant History

I am an unabashed lover of trees.  Running near naked through the firs and alder that ran along the creek behind our home, the little neighbor boy, Jeff, and I tore two squares each of old used white sheets from the rag drawer, using our cowboy belts to hold them in place as loin-cloths.  Wild natives, we ran our seven year old selves in and out of friendly firs, back to well-hidden forts behind the blackberries, and on across the farmer’s field to a tall, willowy tree with long slender branches.

We would straddle and slide out on one particularly limber branch till we got close to the end and could bounce up and down, pushing with our legs like a teeter-totter, hollering “Salami (small bounce), salami (small bounce), salami (small bounce), BALONEY,” launching ourselves high into the air on the wings of this tolerant tree.

I have always known them as friends, kin, a welcoming respite from mean-spirited playground taunting or the lunacies of adults.  It was out among the trees, walking in my father’s green and yellow rubber boots, where I found fresh deer tracks and scat, where I gathered long eastern Oregon pine needles on summer camping trips and made them into wisk brooms for my mother.

I often climbed up among the branches of the round and reaching tree in our front yard, and sat, bird-like, in a nest of safety and security, my legs dangling from this perch, this hidden place of wonder, held as solid and sure as the robins who came to lay their powder blue eggs and nest there each spring.

My brothers and I would use big flat rocks to crack open filberts from the two trees in our yard, relishing the first crunchy bites of whitened goodness.  We picked up walnuts from under the huge old leathered tree by the driveway, spreading them out across the basement floor to dry and later decorate our mother’s confectionary treats.

I knew the treasure of trees early;  from the bitter bite of walnuts to the green summer shade as my neighbors, Barbie and Teresa, and I simply flew on the swing-set behind their home.  Nestled among tall firs, we sang out “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at the top of our lungs, each of us Dorothy, each of us blissed beyond belief, held by the sweet scent of trees and endless summer days.

I have always walked among them.  I have always known to go out into their midst for balance, for breath, for respite.  I am home among the trees.