Chain saws are everywhere now, and there is no getting away from them. Over the past few years the whine and growl of their unfettered engines have become a characteristic sound in our November woods, muffling or shutting out some of the other seasonal sounds, chipmunk calls or the bugling of geese breaking away overhead.
I am as guilty as anyone of adding to this raw fall combustion when I go out to cut next year’s firewood. Once the leaves are off the trees, I head out with my chain saw, gas can, chain oil, socket wrench, safety goggles and ear plugs in hand, ready to confront nature in a manner that often seems as alien and removed as flying a jet plane. For twenty minutes at a time the air is filled with a geared thunder that obliterates all perception, and at the same time spawns a sense of power that is both exhilarating and frightening.
It is, in fact, an incomprehensible feeling, a madness, really, like driving a car or falling in love. You are at once in possession of and possessed by a mighty force that you fool yourself into believing you control. You read the manuals, follow the directions, and in minutes living things which have stood firm and tall against hurricanes, blizzards and gypsy moths for fifty years or more lie about you in heaps like giant crooked veins, and the sky overhead is suddenly, inexplicably open. If I can do this, you think, in less than half an hour, think what ten thousand of these saws, working eight hours a day across much of Maine and the Pacific Northwest, can wreak!
Still, it pays to be practical about madnesses, to drive with consideration and to reserve honeymoon suites. I do most of my cutting in my neighbor’s woods, a large tract of typical Cape scrubby oak, a portion of which he kindly allows me to clear each year. The first year I harvested these trees I asked myself, what was the best way to cut them, both to maximize their yield and improve their quality? Before starting, therefore, I called the state forester in Carver, who drove down the following week and gave me advice on which trees to cut, which to leave, what density they should be thinned to, etc., assuring me that with proper management these woods could yield several cords of oak logs annually on a sustained yield basis.
So I began to thin the woods, and soon found myself a victim of conflicting claims. For these were not only woods from which I sought to harvest firewood, but also woods I frequently enjoyed for their own sake. The problem was, how to take out what I wanted, and yet leave what I wanted? On the most superficial level, some of the most obvious candidates for cutting were the most visually interesting trees. These were the so-called ‘wolf trees’ which, in the forester’s view, took up too much of the forest canopy for the amount of wood they produced. Wolf trees are those with low, wide-spreading crowns, often with multiple trunks and grotesquely warped branches, as opposed to the straight, tall, single-boled, high-branching trees preferred by foresters and, presumably, by me, the woodgatherer.
Such trees, I was told, were ‘bleeding’ the forest, useless not only for lumber but inefficient producers of firewood as well. On the other hand, they possessed to my eyes a valuable character, not only one of natural sculpture, but a concrete expression of survival in the face of past battles – fierce competition, repeated cutting, the loss of leaders from browsing, chronic fires, insect infestations, wind damage – all of which, like stoic soldiers, they did not speak, but mutely bore the scars and mutilations of their endurance. Yet in terms of firewood, which I needed, these were bad trees.
‘Take out the snags,’ the forester said, ‘and watch out for signs of damage, broken or dead limbs. Chances are the rot has spread down through the trunks.’ So the dead, the sick and the dying should be weeded out, to make more room for the healthy. It was not anthropomorphic sentimentality that made me hesitate here, but some knowledge of what role these ‘damaged’ trees play in the broader life of the forest: providing abundant insect food for woodpeckers, nuthatches, warblers and other birds; nesting cavities for chickadees, titmice, screech owls, wood ducks, squirrels and other animals.
One never knows what one is getting into, or getting rid of, with such trees. Once, cutting through a foot-thick oak trunk that proved to be hollow, I sawed right through an occupied mouse nest, severing one of the inhabitants not-so-neatly in two. My cutting partner that day quipped something about ‘If ever there was a mouse whose time had come … ,’ but we were both somewhat shaken by the experience. Even standing dead stumps play unsuspected roles in the forest community. I have found as many as a dozen salamanders hibernating around the base of one old hulk whose bark I peeled off like so much wrapping paper.
There is also something about thoroughly ‘managed’ forests that suggests, if not sterility, at least a certain lack of possibility. I distrust them, and those who assure us we can have wilderness and lumber together forever, in the same way that I distrust ‘reclaimed’ trout ponds. For all the deer in one, or trout in the other, something, some unpredictableness, some variety of experience has been excised in the process of management. The point is, do we want something out of our forests and ponds besides a ‘maximum sustained yield’ of fuel and fish? Through years of benevolent neglect by their owner, these woods have produced something else – call it a certain completeness, for lack of a more precise term – that I was reluctant to remove. There were parallels here with the human community, of course, but the whine of my chain saw would not let me pursue them too far.
There were broader considerations as well, matters of species preference, for instance. The woods I was thinning are largely oak, but also contain some pitch pine, white pine, red maple and small stands of beech, as well as scattered spruce trees which, although planted years ago by my neighbor, are still only a few feet high after several decades. Should I thin out the maples and the pines, both of which have lower fuel values than the oak, thereby growing more BTUs per acre? But the pines support red squirrels and pine siskins, invite hermit thrushes and crossbills, and give the deer a place to bed down in blizzards. The maples give a certain glow to the autumn woods that the duller oaks lack, and also yield me modest amounts of maple syrup in the spring. Besides, a too homogeneous forest, such as this oak monoculture, is one of the primary reasons that it has been so susceptible to insect attacks such as those of the gypsy moth over the years. These other species represent a natural attempt at diversity, nature’s proven strategy against ecological disaster. Shouldn’t I keep them, then? Perhaps even let some sun into the alien spruce trees, which might otherwise sit forever beneath the native oaks, and so encourage artificial variety?
I was suddenly confronted by a wilderness of choices more perplexing than the most pathless woods. By giving me leave to cut selectively some of his woods as I saw fit, the owner had to some degree given me stewardship over its character. What I soon realized was that, in thinning these woods, I might very well be thinning myself.
What, after all, was a ‘good’ tree or a ‘bad’ one? In comparison to what? It depends on what we want from them. Some trees, like the giant Sequoias, are considered best for feeling small next to. Others, like the seas of Douglas firs in Oregon, are generally valued most highly as potential plywood sheets for sheathing our homes. Spruce in Maine are potentially good newspapers. The scrub oak on our ocean bluffs are probably best left as natural erosion controls, as are the mangrove swamps in Florida. About some, like the California redwoods, we may not yet have made up our minds.
But what about these woods right here? How should I handle them, see them? Should I designate certain areas as ‘managed’ and others as ‘wild’? Does that make sense when I am talking half acres instead of square miles? Should I liberate this young white pine from the surrounding oaks because it makes such a handsome shape against the sky, or encourage the beeches for their smooth limbs and their sweet nut crops that the local grouse forage on? This broken-down oak may be a ‘bad’ tree to leave standing, but an excellent one to climb. Dear neighbor, what am I supposed to do with all this?
The problem, you see, is one of proximity. If this were just any woods, I might be able to put on my blinders and see every tree as potential stove logs, and so have no problem. Better yet, if I could afford to have my wood trucked in from some distant wood lot in New Hampshire, I would have to consider these questions even less. Only a few years ago – centuries, it seems now – I could simply have my oil shipped in from some anonymous Middle Eastern country or the Mexican gulf and not have to think about such things at all.
But I can’t. These woods are where I live, and I want so many different things from them – including a certain practical necessity. What is a ‘good’ tree, therefore, depends. It not only depends, it changes, as I do. It is the same with our planet as a whole, and perhaps the best thing to come out of the whole energy crisis will be that we will be forced, in one way or another, back to our sources, away from the isolation and compartmentalization of function that an arrogant, man-dominated view of life has fostered, back to the realization that we all want essentially the same things from the same place, that the earth, like these woods, is where we live.
How did I finally thin the woods? In part I compromised, and in part I was compromised by the woods themselves. I left some of the wolf trees, some damaged and some dead ones, and took others. I liberated some of the white pines and left others to battle for themselves. I encouraged the beeches but decided that the spruces would have to wait for a natural opening. After all, the gods have always been capricious.
As for which areas to thin and which to leave, the lay of the land itself pretty much decided that. Most of the woods grow on fairly steep morainal hillsides. On one side of the road it is fairly easy to cut trees a good distance up the slope and drag or roll them down to my vehicle. On the downslope side, which descends into a deep wooded hollow, I have found it is not usually worth going much more than twenty or thirty feet off the road. Curiously enough, I have found evidence that others before me have reached the same conclusion, for the largest trees on the property tend to be growing on the lower levels of the hollow, though that may have something to do with less wind and more moisture as well. At any rate, since I do not work with mechanized tree harvesters and helicopters, but am still, like previous woodgatherers here, on a one-to-one, albeit more noisy basis with each tree I cut, those in the hollow will remain untouched, an ‘unmanaged’ area where the wood ducks and screech owls may still find trunk cavities in which to raise their young and the woodpecker may tattoo his winter song on the dead but resonant limbs.