Tag Archives: trees

We Love Trees, and We Live with Their Bodies

A masticator (forestry machines) pulls a pine trunk. A bucket truck is in the background.

A forestry “masticator,” which mulches small trees and large branches, is here used to pull a ponderosa pine trunk off a hillside.

On Thursday, February 27th, M and I went on a city shopping trip, returning mid-afternoon. I heard a chainsaw running and thought it was a neighbor cutting road. Then another saw coughed to life, and another. Three sawyers in red hardhats were working in the pines between our house and the county road.

They worked for the electric co-op whose lines cross our property on the way to the neighbors. Those power poles were erected in the mid-1960s, I assume, when this land changed from scrubby, low-value ranch land to exurban homesites. A photo from our porch taken in the 1970s gives a clear view of another neighboring home with just little pine trees coming up. Now they are not so little.

A pine fell. “Those trees are living beings!” M cried. And they are. But we were standing on wooden floors in a wooden house that is partly heated with wood, for all that I seek out dead trees (victims of mountain pine beetle + fungus) whenever I can for firewood.

The crew was back on Friday. M. took the dog on a longish walk in the national forest while I drove a temporarily incapacitated friend on a series of errands. When I came back the tracks of a masticator ran here and there, that being a machine that “eats” branches, small trees, and stumps and leaves behind a coarse shredded mulch. I know someone who operates a masticator for a private forestry outfit, quickly thinning dense conifers to reduce fire risk around ski areas and mountain mansions.1

The foreman knew that we burned wood—almost everyone around here does—and he had the sawyers cutting logs into rounds and leaving them piled here and there. So fewer trees, but probably three cords of wood, at least.2

M. went off Saturday to see a friend. I stayed home.

Those fresh-cut white stumps. I took some whiskey and honey around to the bigger ones, left offerings, and chatted a little with them. On Sunday I started consolidating some piles, just to keep track of them. The wood is wet and heavy.

The crew returned on Monday, cut some more. On Tuesday a climber went up into the highest pine, probably more than 100 feet tall, with a hand saw to cut a “window” through the limbs. That tree is not coming down, I told the foreman. He agreed.

How do I react? Which “me” is reacting?

The forester’s son?. He automatically wants to thin the pines and to select the straightest, strongest trees for survival.

The sometime wildland firefighter? He’s happy to see fewer trees within 40 yards of the house and is also happy with the thinning. He wants to get cut out yet more small stuff.

The exurban homeowner? He is OK with some thinning, but hates to lose any visual barrier around between house and road and house and neighbors. He wants to sit on the porch and see nothing but green, which is his wife’s feeling too.

The Pagan-animist? Just thanking the trees. The oldest were probably from around 1940. Most of this forest is post-1960s, produced by taking off the cows and keeping wildfire out of a foothills subdivision.

This land then has not always looked this way. In the future it may well look different too. Right now, I step outside grateful to be here on this day.

  1. They also can “treat” the debris left from clear-cutting, instead of building labor-intensive “slash piles” and then burning them when the weather is right. ↩︎
  2. A “cord” is a stack of firewood 4 x 4 x 8 feet. Some firewood sellers may not live up to that though. ↩︎

Getting Lost among the Mushrooms

Boletus edulis (Porcino, Steinpilze, etc.)

There are at least five stages to mushroom-hunting.

  1. You walk in the woods but do not see the mushrooms.
  2. You begin to see mushrooms here and there.
  3. Your unconscious is seeing mushrooms. For example, every reddish-tan thing on the forest floor that approximates the cap of a bolete will jump out and grab your attention.
  4. Even before you see the mushroom, you know it is right around that clump of trees — and it is. (This happens to me rarely, but it has happened)
  5. You have full bags of mushrooms in your pack or in your hands. Then you look around, and it’s “Holy Pan, how did we get to be here? And just where are we?”

That was yesterday, up in the Wet Mountains, a thick fir forest at about 11,000 feet elevation. “Let’s swing around and work back to the Jeep,” I said to M., and she was ready, so we started moving slowly up the broad ridge.

Then I looked around, and there to the north (on our left), was a steep-sided ravine that I had never seen before — any steeper and no trees could have grown on it. Where did that come from? Just where were we?

Oh, we could make it down into it, I figured, but climbing back out would be a struggle. Something was Very Wrong. I decided to move uphill and try to get above it.

“Nice job, pixies!” I said aloud.

I could see daylight ahead, so I hustled to the gentle crest of the ridge. Walking fast at that altitude mixed with just a little anxiety had my heart going thumpety-thump.

“Are we lost?” asked M.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe we are a little south of where we should be.”((Later, at home, she said, “I can read you like a book. You were lost.”))

Far in the distance were were Sheep and Little Sheep mountains. Yes, we were too far south. We just needed to go east to cut the little dirt Forest Service road we had come up on. I got my compass, and saw that East was not precisely where I thought it was.

A few minutes on, we came to a small clearing, and looking downslope to the south, I could see a gravel road — not our road, but one that I knew intersected it. Since I had a clear view of the sky and was high up, I checked the iPhone. Sure enough, three bars.

I turned on the GPS, clicked the  Avenza Maps app, and discovered that I did not have the necessary topopgraphic map loaded. Nor had I brought a paper map. Why should I? Hadn’t we been mushroom-hunting that area since the 2000s without getting lost?

This old hollow fir trunk looked like the mask of a forest god.

But there was a good county road map loaded in the phone, the one that EMS and volunteer firefighters use for navigating mountain subdivisions. Sure enough, the blue dot was close to the road that I was looking for. We would have crossed it anyway, but the high-tech confirmation was comforting, I will admit.

We kept walking, and about half a mile later, there was the Jeep parked in the overgrown old skid road where we had left it.

I think the forest spirits have a message: “Don’t get cocky, kid. The world is a sharp as the edge of a knife.”

But wait, there is more. That night we were busy processing mushrooms, but the next evening I went to Google Earth and looked over the area. That steep ravine? I could not find it.

Google Earth is not perfect though. It used to exaggerate slopes; now it seems to flatten them. So I opened the paper USGS topographic map for that area. (Those are usually based on aerial photos.) I looked carefully. No steep-sided ravine appeared in the area where we were.

That gave me chills. That seemingly bottomless ravine did not officially exist.

Trees, Animism, and Yuletide

Christmas tree discarded on public land in southern Colorado. (Photo: Royal Gorge Field Office, Bureau of Land Management)

Christmas tree discarded on public land in southern Colorado. (Photo: Royal Gorge Field Office, Bureau of Land Management)

I wanted to use the photo of the dumped Christmas tree with two different posts. Then I decided to combine them, so keep reading.

1. “Trees” is the theme of this month’s Animist Blog Carnival, hosted by Australian blogger Jay at naturebum. Tree totems, forest fires, Indo-European cosmology, and more!

2. Is there anything grosser than building up to the orgy of gift-unwrapping on December 25 and then declaring the whole holiday season over?A couple of days after that, and the local newspapers are telling you where you can “recycle” your Christmas tree.

But a book review in the British weekly The Spectator notes that at one time, decorations were left up until Candlemas.

‘The season of Christmastide has, in other words,’ [author Nick Grooms] observes, ‘shifted forward, as if it now expresses an impatient and premature desire for gratification. The result is that there are two cold months of winter following Christmas.’

At the very least, tonight is not quite Twelfth Night, unless like one Wiccan friend of mine, you count your twelve days from the winter solstice. So the colored lights will stay on a bit longer.