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.