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.