Two inches of hard rain, followed by three mornings of heavy frost, drove the remnants of fall underground. The color green vanished from the landscape except where wheat and clover pushed out of the brown earth in rectangles and rivers of summer intensity. The saturated ground had rotted all but the hardest seeds, stretching the feeding range of the bobwhite quail. Pinecones fell when the wind blew and the damp Spanish moss waved like molted snakeskins from the bare branches of pecan trees.
The deformity of trees, their growths and fungus-related bulges, their scars, burns, and deer rubbings, stand starkly against the gray skyline. At times, confused by a breath of warm gulf air, a riot of yellow butterflies emerges from its cocoon and dances above the benumbed weeds only to die at sunset. The bands of summer crickets have buried their vocal endowments for the winter, and except for a deadly complaint or two the nights are silent.
Profane as it may sound, one can create beauty with a chainsaw. The chaos of a Southern underbrush slowly growing into a hardwood forest has its visual merits, and more practically acts as a refuge for game seeking temporary peace. Accordingly, half a dozen areas on the farm never feel the heat of a spring fire, but from other areas I have removed thousands of trees, cutting those on the slopes—leaving the stumps to fight erosion—and pushing the rest over, roots and all, with gigantic steel machines.
I opened my woods in accordance with an immediate interest in diversification and a subjective twenty-year vision of its future. Young trees with potential are encouraged to grow old and good old trees are given room to expand by removal of the competition. To keep things visually interesting, I leave those trees that have struggled and won their contorted fight for sunlight. The manner in which this land is shaped allows me to see across one, two, sometimes three narrow valleys, on the shoulders of which we plant brown-top millet, sorghum, or corn in rows and at angles one from another to take advantage of as many crooks and crannies as possible. These winter meanderings of food planted under a hot summer sun shed seeds until winter is almost done.
The plots are planted thick to provide cover as well as food. When Jim Buckner taught game management courses, he would tell his students to lie on their stomachs in front of, say, a patch of sorghum, and ask them to describe what they saw, which was exactly how a quail saw things. Kneeling, they saw through the eyes of a turkey; on their feet the students were apprentice managers again. But in the interim they had gained a certain depth of vision. Looking down on another species’s lot is not conducive to empathy. Not surprisingly, just as with humans, survival usually comes down to the basics: groceries and shelter.
The work to produce wild quail is in itself artificial—just as artificial as everything else we do to “improve” nature, a presumptuous concept if ever there was one. In the case of bobwhites, I overfeed and overprotect a population that would otherwise balance itself within the natural habitat. On the other hand, the management gives my life a certain meaning, and creating habitat makes me feel good. In the long run, what I do with these birds will amount to nothing; interest will wane, the land will be sold, the earth will split open, and the floods will come. In the meantime, there is a similarity between my encouraging a population of quail to explode and the socially funded overpopulation of humans in cities. Quail, like urbanites, subsist on allocations.
For a month, late one winter, two large Caterpillars labored through my woods pushing over trees. The first one was a D-6 bulldozer preceded by a glistening, king-sized blade, a gladiator on steel tracks that traveled the softer bottoms devouring shade as it went. The second was a 762 loader guided by a bucket large enough to bury an elephant and propelled by four tremendous rubber tires, each one moving independently. The rubber-wheeled monster’s job was to push the trees over and the crawler’s to herd them into piles; the artistry of the operators was to skin as few good trees as possible in the process. The loader would raise its bucket, rest it on the trunk of its victim, and apply a force the tree had never envisioned. In the case of some black gums and iron-woods the loader would get up on its hindquarters shaking and snorting, occasionally falling back to earth where it would hunker down like a sumo wrestler, regain its breath, and try again. Some hardwoods won the war, returning from battle with scars on their trunks, but most times the tree would give, suddenly, and the monster would rip and snort and dance over its vanquished foe. All this was frightening, both in its physicality and because of the insolence it took to tamper with trees that in some instances were saplings when my children were born. On the other hand, where the machines passed, light followed, and scenes emerged like Dutch paintings appearing from behind the brown lacquer of time, in this case emerging from behind a tangle of fruitless trees.
The man who sat in the cab of the 762 loader was especially quick about moving around stumps and debris, choosing the trees he wanted, planning his shots like a pool player, visualizing the angles of fall and projecting three or four moves ahead. Both operators worked from seven-thirty in the morning to noon and from twelve-thirty to five-fifteen, stopping only for repairs. The man who worked the 762 was kind and cheerful and broad as a beer keg. He drove forty miles to and from work five days a week, and made less money than a city maid. At the end of the day when I’d ferry him back to his truck he would play with Robin and scratch her head with a huge finger, as gently as if she were a baby. “I just love dogs,” he’d say fussing with her ears. “Come to think about it, I love all animals.”
“How about trees, do you love trees?”
“Trees?” he repeated, smiling down at the dog licking his wrist. “You bet I do; they keep my kids in clothes.”
Sculpting the land is not unlike sculpting the body, making it do something it wouldn’t do under normal circumstances. But while the body can gorge itself back to obesity in a matter of weeks, thinning trees mandates a long hard look and some serious planning. Thanks to Bill and the operators I got lucky. The machines worked a total of sixty hours, awakened the forest to sunlight, and disturbed acres of legume seeds waiting for such an occasion to assert themselves. Creatures large and small took advantage of the windfall, and two years later (it takes two years for the earth to heal from such an operation) the understory is clean, the trees are strong, and it would be hard to find a scar.
In a few seasons the pine trees I have planted will take on an air of respectability. The fields will grow old and worn from my fires, the fluctuations of weather, and from hunting in them; the live oaks will assume even greater bearing from standing alone uncrowded. In the meantime, I will continue to push over the poor specimens and plant younger and straighter ones. There may or may not be an artistry to all this, but one thing is certain: the mistakes are memorable. The odds are that when everything looks right to me, I’ll be dead, the rest of the world will be straddling the fence, and all the trees a man could want will sprout out of petri dishes for a lot less trouble.