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.