An Evergreen and Pleasant Land
AT ANY TIME OF the year and in any weather, my bedroom window frames a green and pleasant country scene. Halfway open, it makes a Kodachrome slide of the bucolic valley below, bordered by white sashes and molding. Timbered hills tumble down to a floodplain pasture valley, bounded below by a limpid river, itself spanned by an old gray covered bridge. Holstein cattle spot the meadows with black and white, and for half the year swallows pock and streak the broad skies.
I came to rural Wahkiakum County, Washington, at the end of the 1970s. This old homestead, known as Swede Park, represented release from the stress and distraction of the city. Gray’s River, the stream and the town, seemed to provide the peaceful setting I needed in order to write full-time. The surrounding Willapa Hills, little studied by biologists, offered a fruitful field of exploration for a too-long-urban naturalist.
For the first few years, I maintained a pattern of commuting to Cambridge, England, for work that supported my writing habit when I was at home. By the time I settled in at Swede Park for good, I had lived in Great Britain four of the past ten years. So similar seemed the British Isles and the Pacific Northwest in some respects that I felt continually disoriented at first. To be sure, the differences are so obvious in terms of hardwoods versus conifers, maturity of landscapes and settlements, culture, architecture, and antiquities, that I soon realized the one will never be the other. Yet certain features remained evocative—chiefly, the climate and the colors. That it rains a lot in England and Washington comes as no surprise to anyone; nor that both mean green, green countryside. Rain makes green, as in Ireland and Oregon also. Both British and Northwest landscapes generate a solid and similar green gestalt. So in my travels back and forth I felt comfortable, jet lag and culture shock alike buffered by the soft mental bed of moss and grass that lay at either end.
William Blake described England as “a green and pleasant land.” Many authors have since agreed. W. H. Hudson expanded on the idea when, in Afoot in England, he wrote of the River Otter in Devon as “the greenest, most luxuriant [place] in its vegetation . . . where a man might spend a month, a year, a lifetime, very agreeably, ceasing not to congratulate himself on the good fortune which first led him into such a garden.” Such are my feelings about Gray’s River.
Yet, as the Old and New World shades of green run together, I find that they are not entirely compatible. Not so far apart as oil and water, still they have some trouble mixing at the edges. This has to do with fundamental differences of ecology and evolution between places long dominated by humans and those only recently wrested from the grip of nature. In this case, it has much to do with colonial removal of resources on a grand scale and in a manner that dictated many decisions of the future.
Beyond my placid valley stretch thousands of square miles of forestlands stripped of their timber. Almost the whole of the Willapa Hills has been logged off during the past hundred years. The same sort of deforestation occurred in Britain but stretched over a thousand years or more. Of course, much of the forest of Willapa comes back in ranks of even evergreens. Yet the signs of heavy-handed use remain the starkest field marks of this land, in elemental contrast to the gentle husbandry that makes the English scene what it is. The comparison shows how a land may be at once both pleasant and ravaged: it all depends on where you look.
As I look out my bedroom window, I see the signs of both. The green velvet meadows run up against Elk Mountain—long ago logged and now forest again but recently marred by an ugly clearcut that sits like a bad scratch in the middle of the scene. When I settled here, I resolved to seek out both the biology and the beauty that must persevere in spite of such scars.
This is the plan of the book: to describe the Willapa Hills and the wildlife they support, both native and alien; to examine the impact of intensive forestry upon the land and its life; and finally, to assay the ability of organisms (including ourselves) to survive in the aftermath of massive resource extraction. Each major topic—the hills, their denizens, human impact, and survival—receives four essays. Throughout, questions of biogeography, ecology, and evolution in the wet, wintergreen world find their way into the text.
As a disclaimer, I wish to be explicit in saying that no part of this book is to be taken as in any way condoning or abetting the sort of steep-slope, clearcut logging that takes place in large parts of southwestern Washington. While much of what I have to say speaks in sympathetic terms of a community based largely on a logging economy, my sympathies lie with the people and the woods, not with the companies that have used them both with equal disregard. When I write of the beauties and biological interest of the logged-off landscape, it is in spite of the devastation that these things exist, not in any way because of it; and much, much more has been lost. Any attempt to recruit portions of Wintergreen in favor of regional timber-stripping practices will be ipso facto misquoting the book and taking the work out of context.
That clear, Wintergreen does tell a tale of resilience and a chronicle of toughness. Like an old forest, the towns of these hills are senescing—growing old, losing vigor. Whether senescence of human communities must lead to extinction or may (as in a forest) forecast regrowth, I do not pretend to know. Resourceful people, loving their land, are capable of much. But when a green and pleasant land becomes run-down and ravaged, evolution takes over.
The decisions being made now will determine whether nature takes back Willapa or agrees to share it with us on more equitable terms than we have accepted in the past. Clearly Willapa is a metaphor for wasted lands everywhere. I hope that by framing some pictures of this green and damaged land, these essays will help a little in our efforts to co-evolve with the rest of the living things of the planet.