THE LARCH

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER HAVING KNOWN THEM, I have been wanting to write about larch trees. I’ve been putting it off for fifteen years, because for one thing, it’s like writing about lichens, perhaps, or a clock which, if not broken, moves its hour hand perhaps only a fraction of an inch each year.

They don’t speak, not even in the wind, really—resolute, unlike the soughing and clacking limbs and trunks of the limber lodgepole, and the playing-card deck-shuffling clatter of aspen leaves in summer and fall—and even their dying comes slow. Sometimes a big larch will remain upright for a hundred years or longer after it’s died—perishing in a huge fire or, occasionally, just dying and finally rotting, having outlived one millennium or another—and even after they fall over, snapping the other trees around them on their way and shaking the earth with their thunder, they remain there, solid and real, for centuries; in many ways, as alive or more so in their earthly slumber and decomposition—possessing, or housing, more writhing life in that rotting than they did even in the upright living days of green and gold.

They are, of course, every bit as glorious in life as in death. While among the green and the living, they possess numerous attributes, one of the most underrated of which is that of water pump: intercepting snowmelt and surface sheet flow that might otherwise drain off to the nearest road and be carried away from the forest, unutilized. But the larches capture and claim and hold within the forest that water which might otherwise be lost, and they convert it to astounding height, and to magnificent girth.

What else is the function of a forest, first and foremost, if not to do this: to capture and filter water, to merge with sunlight, to create intricate being, intricate matter?

The big larches don’t just claim and hold that runaway, slide-away water; they circulate it, too, each tree a miniature weather system unto itself, returning hundreds of gallons of water to the ecosystem each day in the form of transpiration, a fine, even invisible mist emanating from the needles, just as lung-damp breath is emitted from a human; on cold and damp mornings, you can see the same clouds of steam rising in plumes from the larch trees, just as you would see them sifting from the mouths and nostrils of a forest of people.

This is not to say that the larch are gluttons, greedsome water scavengers robbing from the poor and the weak, totally out of control. One of the reasons they can get so big is that they can live so damn long, if you let them—if you don’t saw them down. Around the age of two or three hundred, they really begin to hit their stride, and, having clearly gained a secure place in the canopy, they can concentrate their efforts almost exclusively thereafter on getting roly-poly big around the middle. In this valley, there are larch that have lived to be six and seven hundred years old.

They can prosper with either seasonal or steady access to water, though they can prosper also on the drier sites, such as those favored by the ponderosa pine. When need be, they can be prim and frugal with water, as in a drought, calibrating their internal balances with exquisite deftness to slow their growth as if almost into dormancy, where they hunker and lurk, giant and calm, awaiting only the freedom, the release, of the next wet cycle.

And they tolerate—flourish in, actually—fire, about which we will see more later. Like any tree, they have certain diseases and pests that can compromise their species—dwarf mistletoe, which sometimes weakens them through parasitic attrition—still, the larch keep soldiering on—and larch casebearer beetle, which is kept in check by the fires, and by the incredible battalions of flickers and woodpeckers (pileated, black-backed, Lewis’s, downy, hairy, American three-toed, and more) that sweep and swoop through these forests, drilling and ratting and tatting and pounding, searching and probing and pecking and cleaning and aerating, almost ceaselessly, during the growing months. But for the most part, the larch at present are relatively secure in a world where so many other trees—fir, spruce, dogwood, oak, pine—are undergoing an epidemic of rot and beetles and blight and gypsy moths and acid rain.

Who can say for sure why the great larches are—for now—weathering the howling world so well, in these latter centuries of such intense environmental degradation? From a purely intuitive level, I suspect that the answer has something to do with the larch’s ancient jurisprudence—with the way it has evolved so carefully, so precisely, so uniquely and specifically, to be safe in the world.

The larch is two things, not one—a deciduous conifer, bearing its seeds in cones but losing its needles each autumn, like a hardwood—and has selected the best attributes of each, the ancient conifers and the more recent deciduous trees, to fit into the one place on earth that would most have it, the strange dark cant of the Yaak, tipped perfectly into its magic seam between the northern Rockies and the Pacific Northwest: as if this land, possessing such seething diversity in such random, unmappable mosaics, was nonetheless really created with one perfect species in mind all along, the larch.

Or perhaps their sturdiness in the world, their calm and elegant forbearance in a world filled with drought and fire and disease, comes not from their wise evolutionary strategy of keeping one foot in each world but from the fact that they lie so extraordinarily low, sleeping or near dormant for the eight or nine months of the year when they either have no needles at all (the first little spindly paintbrush nubs not sprouting out some years until May), or when their needles have already shut down production and have begun to turn bright autumn gold, which can happen as early as August. Perhaps, by sleeping so much, they age only one year to other trees’ two or three or even four years.

In this regard, they are like a super-aspen, or a super-oak, calibrating their explosive leap of life to reside perfectly within that tipped thin window of sunlight and moisture in the Yaak, the three-month growing season, and then shedding their needles, just as the oak and aspen drop their leaves, once that period of growth has ended, for there’s no need to invest in keeping them hanging on, dormant or barely alive, through the winter. Better to shut it all down, and sleep completely.

But the larch are like a super-pine, too, or a super-fir, possessing the eager colonizing tricks of the conifers that have flourished for the last eon in the huge landscape-altering sweeps of drama that follow the large fires in the northern Rockies—casting their seed-sprung cones from high above, down into the fertile ash, and in that way stretching like a living wave, or like an animal walking, into new territory.

(In the northern Rockies, some things run from a fire and other things follow it—elk following the green grass that follows the previous autumn’s flames, so that in one sense, and seen through squinted eyes, the elk can be said to be the grass can be said to be the fire, with very little difference in the movements of any of the three of them—all three generated and directed by the same force. To that series of waves can be added the larch, colonizing those new burns and then reaching for the sky, rising slowly into hundred-fifty-foot peaks that can take centuries to crest.)

So the larch, like the Yaak itself, is two things, not one: fire and rot, shadow and light. And in keeping with another of the stories of the Yaak—the fact that what is rare or even vanished from much of the rest of the world is often still present, sometimes in abundance, here—the larch is the rarest form of old growth in the West, though in the Yaak, it is the most common form.

Biologist Chris Filardi has looked at the maps of distribution for larch, as well as the habitat type found here, and has declared that the Yaak is “the epicenter of larch.” This species is the one thing, I think, that is most truly ours. So many of the Yaak’s other wonders are down to nearly the thin edge of nothing—five or six wolves, fewer than twenty grizzlies, a handful of lynx, a dozen mated pair of bull trout, one occasional woodland caribou, a handful of wolverines, fourteen little roadless areas, one pure population of inland redband trout.

The larch, however, are at the edge of nothing. This is the center of the center.

Increasingly, I am convinced that the larch trees possess, more than any other one thing, the spirit of the Yaak. The valley is imbued with a multitude of other spirits, but for me it is in the larch that the Yaak’s greater collective spirit is so often most tangibly felt.

All of my Yaak life, I have been wanting to make an essay about what larch mean to me. I’ve been putting it off, though: procrastinating for fifteen years. (During that time, how much girth has one of the old giants put on? Another half inch? And yet, magnified throughout the forest—millions of such inches—surely the power of glaciers has been equaled, in that incrementalism.)

I’ve been afraid of attempting such an essay, such is the reverence I have for the tree.

Their interior wood, all the way through, is the red-orange color of campfire coals, a darker orange than a pumpkin, darker orange than the fur of an elk, and while I haven’t found a scientist yet who can or will dare guess why the inside of the tree, never seen except when the tops snap off, or when the saw bisects the flesh, should be that fiery color, I think you would not be able to disprove the notion that there might be some distant parallel pattern or connection, out at or beyond the edge of our present knowledge, wherein fire likes, and is drawn to, the color of the larch’s interior orange fire, for the larch is nothing if not birthed of fire.

And again, not just any fire, but the strangeness here, in the Yaak, of fire sweeping through and across a lush and rainy land that, when it is not burning, is rotting, and which is always, even in the rotting and the burning, growing.

Seething, roiling life, and life’s spirits, being released in every moment of every day and every night, upon such a land. A continuous breath of it, upon this land.

I have thought often that the shape of their bodies is like that of a candle flame. Broad at the base, measuring three, four, sometimes even five feet around, they maintain that barrel-thickness for what seems like their entire length before tapering quickly to a tip, not unlike the sharpened end of a pencil.

This phenomenon is even more pronounced when their tapered tips get knocked off by wind or lightning or ice storms, leaving behind what now seems almost a perfect cylinder, and which continues living, even thriving, without its crown—able somehow to continue photosynthesizing and maintaining its vast bulk by the work of the few spindly branches that remain. Sometimes only a couple of such branches survive to nurture that entire pillar, so that one is reminded of the tiny arm stubs of another ancient, Tyrannosaurus Rex.

There’s some deal the larch have cut with the world, some intricate bargain, part vainglorious gamble and part good old-fashioned ecological common sense.

They’ve cast their lot with the sun, rather than the shade, and as such have evolved to colonize new open space, such as that which follows a severe fire, or the slashes of light that infiltrate the forest whenever other large trees fall over. Because of this, they race the other sun-loving trees—the pines and, to a lesser extent, the Douglas firs—for that position at the canopy, where they can drink in all of the sun; where they have to suffer no one’s shade.

But if they expend too much energy in that race for the sun—if they channel almost all of their nutrients into height at the expense of girth—then they’ll run the risk of being too skinny, too limber, and will be prone to tipping over in the wind, or snapping under a load of ice or snow, or burning up like a matchstick in the first little fire that passes through their woods. What good then is it to gain the canopy—to win the race for that coveted position aloft—if only to collapse, scant years later, under the folly, the improvident briskness, of one’s success?

When the two species, larch and lodgepole, are found together, as they often are up here, the larch will have been hanging just behind and beneath the lodgepole, for those first many years, “choosing” to spend just a little more capital on producing thicker bark, both for greater individual strength—greater static strength—as well as to get a jump on the defense against the coming fires.

It’s always a question of when, not if.

As the lodgepole begins to reach maturity and then senescence, however, the larch begins to make its move, and as the lodgepole completes the living phase of its earthly cycle and begin blowing over, leaving the larch standing alone now, the wisdom or prudence of the larch becomes evident even to our often unobservant eyes. The glory of the larch is manifested.

By this point—seventy, or ninety, or a hundred years old—the larch will have developed a thick enough bark, particularly down around the first four or five feet above ground level, to withstand many if not most fires.

And now, with the competition for moisture and nutrients removed, and the canopy more fully their own, the larches are free to really head to the races. They didn’t have to outcompete the lodgepole, for those first seventy or a hundred years; they just had to stay close enough to tag right along behind, right below.

But now they can “release,” as the foresters call it: having the canopy to themselves, they continue to grow slightly taller, but now pour more and more energy into girth and a thickening of their bark: battening down the ecological hatch against all but the most freakish, outrageous fires.

(So deep become the canyons and crevices, the corrugations of that thickened bark, that a species of bird, the brown creeper, has been able to exploit and occupy that specific habitat: creeping up and down those vertical gullies, those crenulated folds a few inches deep, picking and pecking and probing for the little insects that hide beneath the detritus that collects in those canyons, and even building its nest in those miniature hanging gardens.)

Again, fire and rot are equal partners in this marriage, in this one landscape quite unlike any other. Burn or rot, it makes no difference to the larch, really, how the lodgepole dies, for in their close association, the larch is going to feast upon the carcass of the lodgepole, and assimilate those nutrients: either in the turbocharged dumping of rich ash following the fire that consumes the lodgepole but only singes the thick bark of the larch, or in the slower, perhaps sweeter and steadier release of those same nutrients from the same fallen lodgepoles as they occasionally decompose into rot, rather than burning—waiting for a burn that never comes, or rather (for always, the forest will burn again), a fire which does not come again until after that dead and fallen lodgepole has rotted all away, has been sucked back down into the soil and then taken back up into the flesh of the larch, the larch assuming those nutrients in that transfer as if sucking them up through a straw—which, in effect, it does, through the miracles of xylem and phloem.

At this point, of course, it’s off to the races for the larch. They just get bigger and bigger, in the manner of the rich getting richer. And they seem to put all of this almost ridiculous bounty—sometimes literally, this windfall—into the production of girth; they pork out, becoming still more resistant to the perils of fire and ice and wind, so that now time is about the only thing that can conquer the giants, and even time’s ax seems a dull gnawer, against the great larches’ astounding mass and solidity.

If the growth of the lodgepole represents reckless imprudence and a nearly unbreakable flexibility, then the larch is surely solidity and moderation. If the larch symbolizes the dense connections of community, and the notion that when one is hurt or bent, all are hurt or bent, then the larch clearly represents the inflexible and the isolate, the loner, the individual, seemingly independent in the world, and as rigid, in his or her great strength, as the lodgepole is limber—the larch standing firm and planted, almost ridiculously so, in even the strongest storms, while all around the larch, the rest of the forest—not just lodgepole, but all species—is swaying and creaking, waving back and forth like a horse’s mane.

(Sometimes the force will be so great upon the larch that they’ll snap and burst, rather than bending, and their top will go flying off, the top cartwheeling through the sky like a smaller tree itself—the larch shattering, but never bending—and afterward, the hurt larch will set about its healing, sending up a slender new spar or sucker in place of the old top, cautious but determined, and unwilling to cede anything, not even into death—remaining standing for a century or longer, even after the life force has finally drained out of it.)

But the mystery does not go away.

Just across the border into Canada, along the North Fork of the Yaak, grow some of the biggest larches in the world. Grizzlies, wolves, elk, and moose pass through these old-growth forests, and pileated woodpeckers bang like cannons on some of the slowly dying ones. I’m not sure why this region is the epicenter within the epicenter, but it is. Perhaps it’s the heart of fire, in this valley, or once was. Or perhaps it is the heart of ice, in winter. Perhaps both. Whatever the reason, the larch along the North Fork are immense and powerful, extraordinarily free of twist or camber or other defects or weaknesses.

And if you wander over into Canada, lured by the old forest’s siren majesty, you might stumble across some ancient little metal placards tacked here and there to a giant tree, at the edge of a tiny marsh, which, dated sometime in the 1940s (the trees themselves perhaps five or six hundred years old, and still growing strong), inform you that this indeterminate Canadian forest, unbounded by any other signage or perimeters, is a “natural area,” dedicated to the study of larch under natural conditions, and even editorializes that “some places should have value simply by the fact of their graceful existence, and for the lessons they can teach our scientists.”

Our artists and community members too, I’d have hoped they’d add to it someday, though still, I can’t quibble.

There is no similarly protected larch forest over on the U.S. side of the North Fork, though I wish there were. In fact, I wish we would begin managing a system within this forest now that would commit itself to a hundred-year plan of developing more old-growth larch, and reconnecting the isolated patches of existing old-growth larch, so that someday a hundred years from now a traveler—man, woman, child, or moose; bear, elk, wolf, or caribou—could set out on a warm summer’s day and pass through the leafy cool light of an old larch forest, the duff soft underfoot and the air smoky and gauzy with the sun-warmed esters and terpenes emanating from the bark, and the odor of lupine sweet and dense all throughout the grove—and that the traveler could walk and walk, and never leave the old-growth canopy; could walk all day and then into the night, through columns of moonbeam strafing down through the canopy, and still be within the old forest; could pass out of this country and into the next, and still be in the old larch forest.

I’d like for travelers to be able to walk for days in that manner, until perhaps they forgot that this was not the natural condition of the world; until they came to be comfortable with and accustomed to the rhythms of the old larch forest, and knew the world, and this valley, as it had once been.

I know that’s a lot to ask for, but I don’t think it’s too much.

Western larch weighs forty-six pounds per cubic foot, dried, up here; in the Yaak it’s the heaviest, densest wood in the forest. It’s like a cubic foot of stone, standing or fallen.

Often they’re so heavy, so saturated with their uptake of nutrients, that on the big helicopter sales, in places so far back into the mountains, or on slopes so steep that not even the timber industry’s pawns in Congress will have been able to appropriate public finances to build roads into those places, the sawyers will have to girdle the big larch trees a year or more in advance of the logging.

This allows the life, the sap, to drain slowly out of the behemoths, so that when the helicopters do come, and the girdled trees are finally felled, their dead or dying weight is considerably less than if they were still green, and the helicopter companies are able to save money on fuel, and there’s less strain on their engines.

As powerful and unyielding as the larch is, it often becomes even more so as it ages. Silviculturists speak of certain species that will “release” when their competitors die or blow over or are cut down, or are simply outcompeted, and wither away. You can read the stories of these individual competitors, year by year, in the growth rings sampled by an increment borer, or, in the case of one of the giants being felled, in the cross section made by the saw and sawyer.

The spaces between the growth rings expand and contract through the years, charting the individual’s explosive early growth, and then the slowing down, as if for a breath of air, and then, when a fire or wind comes through and cleans out some competitors, an expansion again. To me such tales of thinning and thickening read like the scan of a kind of silent music, not just for larch but for any species being examined—a silent symphony of rise and fall, contraction and expansion, segue and chorus.

When the larch is “released” from its previous competitive constraints, it’s a wonderful thing to see, in that tale of the growth rings. It seems while viewing the ever tightening bunching of growth rings in a cross section, one can almost feel the drought, or absence of sun, or cold weather, or depleting soil nutrients that caused the larch’s growth to be so labored, in that tight or constricted period.

But the larch endures, bides its time. And even when the internal girth is expanding only slowly, the outer bark is thickening, providing further protection against the wind and disease and fire and ice in the world. The tree is still growing, becoming stronger, without appearing to grow.

(Again, because it is a larch, it is two things: secret, in these periods of hard-to-measure growth, but then ostentatious, the most visible tree in the forest, during October, the best and sweetest time of year, with the forests of larch turning the viewscape of entire mountain ranges upside down, from the soothing lull of blue-green to the hypnotic flames of orange and gold.)

Over time, the weaker trees fall away, as they must. The larch takes a deep breath of air, of sun, and stretches again; releases. It’s one of the few words used by industry that I find adequate and fair. Industry views these “releases” simply as an opportunity for the larch to produce more fiber for them, while I view them as powerful expressions of biological glory, and the liberation brought about by the virtues of endurance.

It’s like a kind of dramatic, visual music, and I’m always awed by it whenever I see it; whenever I touch the growth rings with my fingers, and count the scores to that music, that rising and falling and rising power, year by year.

What makes the Yaak so magic? What makes the larch so magic? What makes the Yaak the epicenter of larch? Surely it is in large part due to the incredible confluence, here like no place else, of those three elements, fire and wind and ice: those three forces sawing back and forth across a land scraped thin by ice, with the winds then depositing the dust of that retreating ice, and the early forests that crept in over that dust burning and burning and burning.

In many places in the Yaak, the scientists’ soil surveys indicate that the soils are poor, with nearly zero growing potential. Tell me then how and why the stumps and carcasses of larch four feet in diameter litter the forest floor in a swath that runs from the summit thirty miles north, up the North Fork, and many miles farther, over into Canada. If the soil is so poor, how did those trees grow and prosper, when they started out a millennium ago, and why did we cut them?

I’m convinced there’s a way to represent all this growth as sound—some of it lightning-quick, some centuries-slow—and am convinced too that such music, whether faintly audible or not, lays a balm on any human heart that will stand quietly for a few moments in its presence.

The fire has a sound, too, as does the slow sinking of rot, as does the heavy crashing and clashing of ice storms, their dagger teeth gnawing at and carving this incredible forest.

Fire, ice, and wind: the larches’ response to and shaping by the fires are dramatic, as is the flame-like alacrity with which they leap from dormancy each spring, and with which they retire for winter’s slumber each fall—but I have to say, I think it is their patience by which I am most impressed, and of which I am most envious.

They possess the power of the wind, in resisting the wind—in battling it to a draw—and they possess the power of fire, in not merely surviving the fire, but prospering from it. They possess too the power of the glaciers, in the profound glory of their steady incremental growth, and the sublime power of creep. Grow a while, then rest, in winter’s deep snows. Take a breather, but lose no ground. Leap, then, when energy returns with the sun, and push on.

I love the odor of them, I love the sight and touch of them. I love to lean in against them, to spread my arms against them, to touch the thick laminae of bark, to sit beneath them in storms while all else sways, as branches and streamers of moss whirl through the air.

I love to listen to the pileated woodpeckers drumming on them, and to the scrabble of little clawed animals scrambling up and down the bark of the living, as well as upon the fallen husks of the dead.

I love to see them lying on their sides in the ferns, rotting slowly—resting again, with the rain and sunlight still somehow feeding their magnificent and rotting bodies, even as they continue feeding the forest around them.

They are geological in their immensity, as well as in their natural life span. I want to believe they will be well suited to the coming temperature variations, the dormancy demanded not just by winter’s extremes, but by the coming heat and drought of global warming. I know they lack the pines’ flexibility; they do not know how to sway. Still, I believe in them, admire them, am in love with them, am grateful to them, dream of them.

And I still dream of someone, one day—not me, other than in my old man’s dreams—being able to walk from the summit of the Yaak to the Canadian border, in a swath of uninterrupted old-growth larch, ten miles wide, as once existed, as evidenced by the remnants still present, both standing as well as by their remaining stumps.

The shape and nature and spirit of this land would accommodate such a vision yet: it is only up to our hearts to ask it.

In the Yaak, they are the one thing that is ours. So many of the other elements in our forest are the rich threads of diversity that have arrived here from elsewhere, with those threads then braiding to form our own unique and powerful weave—but with the larch, we are for once not at the edge or in the seam of anything, are not poised tenuously at the edge of anything, nor the fragile margin of any fading distribution, but are instead, for once, the pure epicenter. They are ours, and we are theirs. They have helped shape everything in this valley, and everything in this valley has helped shape them.

Again, they are at least as powerful in their dying and going-away as in the fullness of their life. The long upright residency of a century or longer, even after they have died from a great fire, or old age; the even slower disintegration, once lying back down, earthbound. Even in their yearly death, while losing the gold fire of their needles in autumn, they give back to the soil, particularly if a fire has just passed through, for the myriad wind-tossed casting of their needles acts as a net and helps secure the new bed of ash below, which might otherwise wash downslope and into the creeks and rivers, scouring the watercourse and eroding the soil.

It is a beautiful thing to see in the autumn, after a fire, those gold needles cast down by the millions upon a blackened ground. The two colors, black and gold, seem as balanced and beautiful as gold stars within the darkest night.

Strangely, however, it is perhaps in their absence that they might be most strongly felt. Late October and early November, after they have just gone to sleep, is the time I think of as most being their season. The sky above feels fuller, in the absence of their needles. There is suddenly more space above, in a time when our spirits need that; in the dwindling days of light, with winter’s fog and rain and snow creeping in.

One night a damp wind blows hard from the south. In the morning the hills and mountains are covered with gold. It’s an incredible banquet, a visual feast, and our eyes take it in all at once, and a thing stirs in our blood, a strengthening and quieting down both; and farther back in the forest, the bears begin to crawl into their dens, seeking sleep also.

If the gold needles had stayed up there against that cerulean October sky forever, surely we would have eventually gotten used to it, and taken it for granted.

Now, however, down on the ground, it’s within reach—we’re able to simply reach down and scoop up a handful of that incredible gold, and it’s all around us.

Hiking down off a mountain from far in the backcountry, I stop at dusk, weary. Without shedding my burdened pack, I take a seat on an old fallen larch, one of those ancient giants from the last century, its heartwood finally rotting but with its outer husk still firm.

The immense log is covered completely with the gold confetti of its descendants all around it, and there is no table or other furniture I have ever seen more elegant or beautiful than that impromptu bench, nor more timely—I was tired, and needed a place to rest, so I sat down, and it was there for me—and I sit there resting for a long time, watching the dusk give itself over to dark.

And just as there is no furniture that could be the equal of a fallen larch, wild in the woods to rot or burn at its own pace, or under the pace of this landscape that is so intensely its partner, surely there can be no gold-lined streets of heaven superior to what awaits the residents of this valley, upon awakening on such a fine October morning, after a night when the wind has blown hard, and when our dreams of a night sky filled with swirling, shimmering gold are exceeded only by the beauty of reality, when we first step outside that next day, with one more season being born into a ceaseless and enduring world.