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.