2/9 -

More writing and photos from a week ago.

This blue striped sentry stands watch over the clear cut.  This was one of the trees saved from the devastation.

                                 



                                          This one didn't survive the cutting.

                              I find bits of blue bark scattered among the branches, reminders of who was here and
                              where they have gone.

               This is the cover of a card sent by a young friend of the family who knew nothing of the logging.  She has known my love of trees for years, maybe this is the intuitive way we can all relate when we care deeply about the land, about each other.  The card was perfect.


More writing from last week:
"Timber Management" it says on the sign that marks the start of the massacre.  It begins with calling living trees "timber," as if their only purpose here was to serve as income crops.  It ends with bare hillsides waiting for winter landslides, brown and gold salamanders smashed into the muddy tracks of men and machines who do not care who is killed, who lies buried under the wreckage left behind.

One day three small little birds chirped sporadically as they foraged into the blanket of branches now covering the ground.  They used to sing from trees, flying from branch to branch.  What has happened to their world?

Farther down the road, around the corner, an orange diamond sign warns of trucks entering the road - trucks, dozens and dozens of trucks and trees have been leaving for weeks.  It is a warning beyond the roadway, a call for something deeper, a call to serve others who live on this land.  The four-leggeds, the winged-ones, the ones who crawl above and below the ground.  What if we cared for the land with their welfare foremost in our thoughts.  What has happened to us, the guardians, that we value the money a forest can bring over the way we feel when we walk among their magnificence, sunlight shining through in God-rays?

Trampled ferns were the green of summer mornings, mossy branches inviting tender touch, softened lace pressed into skin, speaking of dew and rain and the nature of hiding spiders.

A whole ecosystem lies in the shambles of "Timber Management."  We lie in pieces too, those who decide a forest is expendable and the ones who wield the chainsaws, the ones who come to sudden, violent ends, the ones who grieve and mourn the loss.

2/9 -

I spend hours down in the clear cut, sitting at the base of a storm-topped tree, in the midst of the ruins of a forest.  "Come back to the trees" the Mother says, as I struggle to love them more than I hold anger at the losses, at the people who have done this.  Healing will come from love, and I still treasure this land, fiercely.












What to do with the horror of what has happened here.  Grief is palpable as mangled limbs and bark are left lying in the mud, half-burried in the giant tracks of machines and human indifference.

I walk down into the bare valley and come up to two huge old growth stumps, remembered well from walks down in the woods years ago, in search of the creek at the bottom of the valley, finding much more.  I used to lay on their wide table-top trunks, 7 - 8' across, such presence still.  Today their red insides crumble in my hands, their age exposed, a century of seasons going back into a patient earth who waits for life and time, seedlings sure to come with the grace of birds and scattered seeds.

I find a tiny hemlock halfway up the hillside. 3' tall and miraculously intact.  I pray that this little one becomes part of a forest here again.

And later, back home at the great Grandfather tree, I pray again for healing here, for peace in my own sad heart...then in the middle of a prayer, in the middle of a day and the woods I vow to protect, an owl flies across in front of Him, silent, sure.  Death medicine in Native American beliefs, I think she has come as a reminder that there is still life here - all of us flying, singing, crawling, running across the land that has endured for centuries.

I am relieved to see her.  In the death of the trees, I am learning how to hold love above all else, I am learning to trust the resilience of the Mother.  I smile and remember the army of us, the "Keepers of the Trees" in Ann Linnea's book, the friends I know who work to save our forests.  I pray that we some day outnumber the loggers, that we convince them trees are more valuable standing, providing beauty and refuge for all, that there is a balance between we humans in our wooden homes, and the great old soul trees left for our grandchildren.

I will welcome the days when the new seedlings are planted, by the workers, by the grace of birds and the miracle of seeds, all of them the future, each of them exquisite.

2/01 (cont.) -

I can see across the valley now, to the trees that were re-planted 10 years ago after another clear cut.  It is a mono-culture that will be clear cut again in another 30 years, as if trees were rows of corn to be harvested, as if they held no other meaning for us than their monetary value.

The machines have left huge footprints....

...digging deep into dark brown loamy earth, made rich by layers of trees.

Having technical difficulties, will try again later to finish this day of observations.

2/01/12 -

A reflection, what is lost, what still remains.

It was quiet yesterday, for the first time in many long weeks.  No machines, no familiar cutting, limbing, stacking sounds, no log trucks pulling away with the trees of this forest, only the silence of a clear cut.

The last time I walked down here the trees were down, waiting to be hauled uphill and off to the lumber mill in Molalla.  The standing maples left beside their fallen family sing to them, as I do, arms raised in prayer, thanking them for their many years of beauty here on the land.

A couple days of snow silenced the machines for the moment, but no white blanket covers up what has happened here.

                                                               

The hillside down below lies littered with the lives of hundreds of maples, scattered tall fir sentries hide in their midst.  I watched them fall from this very place, and I sing once again in their passing, gratitude in every note, every word, every sound a prayer for the spirits who remain.

I came down the trail yesterday, feeling the deep green shelter of the trees on "my" land, preparing to see what is left where the trees of my neighbors have stood, the hollow, empty space of a vanished forest.

How does anyone call this "thinning?"

This is no trail for roaming coyotes and deer.  No cougars walk through open land like this.  The natural habitat for animals, for all of us here, will never be the same again.