As I awoke the other morning to the sound of a giant vacuum cleaner, I knew it was time for the harvest.
It’s been said that trees are not planted for our own benefit, but for that of our children and grandchildren. I have always had a particular affinity for old piney woods, where the straw softens the step of every living creature that moves, and the tall straight trunks reach to Heaven. I have too many times referred to a forest of longleaf pines as a cathedral, but then again I’ve been blessed to stand in a couple of famous cathedrals whose flying buttresses and incredible frescoes; they had absolutely nothing on the towering spires and bas-relief bark of a longleaf pine forest.
Anyone who has ever had the privilege of living next to a cornfield knows the peace and privacy it brings for several months, when the golden stalks are tall and thick and keep both prying eyes and irritating noises at bay. The same can be said of a pine forest, although the peace lasts much longer than from the first June rain to the September’s harvest.
I am a bit of a pine snob, since I tend to look down on the working class white and loblolly pines. I know they too serve an important role, plus they grow faster, making for a quicker harvest than the longleaf royalty. I have some affection for the lower class pines; they too shelter the deer, the turkey and the blue jay, and feed the squirrel and songbird. When properly maintained their floors can also succor the Venus flytrap, the pitcher plant and the wild grape. Turtles and snakes make their homes there as well. The workaday pines have none of the class and romance of the big trees to me, and I won’t apologize for that, even while I respect them.
So when I heard the high-pitched whir, occasionally interrupted by the sound of a brief stall as a blade hit a knot, I felt a little mournful. Like the corn planted every other year in front of our house, the had come, and the harvester was hard at work.
I didn’t know most of these pines personally – aside from the occasional emergency involving runaway animals I hadn’t ventured far from our own property lines very often, since I was raised that way – but it still saddened me a little. I knew very few of the trails that natural residents laid out in shortcuts and detours through Man’s neatly planted rows, trails worn down through expediency or need or whimsy by the deer that occasionally raid my horse’s feed or visit with the goats. There was a single short path I cut through the scrub and trash at the edge, mainly to be able to move faster when one of my malcontents decided to enjoy some unsanctioned freedom. I found an almost-intact, ancient Coke bottle out there once, green glass that was significantly older than the trees themselves, thus proving that I wasn’t the first to follow that trail.
Like every red-blooded male, I was and am enthralled by the big machines that seem to effortlessly yank, cut and bundle trees a man couldn’t move on his own. It’s fascinating to watch how areas that have been in shadows for ten or twenty years suddenly have a green veil torn away and light streaming down on ground the sun had forgotten. I doubt the fellows in the driver’s seats of these monsters think along the same lines, but to many another man and not a few ladies, the drivers have a really cool job, operating machines that can cross ditches that have and do eat unwary cars along the roadside, and effortlessly moving through bogs that suck a tall man down to his knees, just so they can enter woods no one has seriously walked for years and gather trees by the truckload. As far as I’m concerned, they deserve the gold they dig from the equivalent of “them thar hills”, especially since more and more forestry companies have become better stewards of the land they leave behind.
The second morning of the harvest, I was getting a cup of coffee when I saw a bundle of trees as thick as I am tall waving above the others. You couldn’t see the machine cutting ad snatching them. I was amused for a moment, watching the trees “walk” through the woods. It was reminiscent of the Ents in the Lord of the Rings, except these trees weren’t sentient and had no say in their own fate, nor was their inevitable death anywhere near as glorious as dying in battle against the forces of evil.
Instead they were being cut, stripped of branches, loaded onto trucks driven by men who might or might not be trying avoid the DMV scales, all so they could wait in line with dozens of other loggers trying to make a living, who hoped that the quota wasn’t reached that day or a machine didn’t break down or a tire blow or the stock market tumble and drive down the price of pulp wood. Once unloaded, they’d return to the deck, and do it all over again, providing the materials for paper and cardboard and diaper fluff and biofuels and everything else we get from trees. Day in, day out.
I stopped and spoke to one of the men as I was heading for work, just to warn him about our overly-exuberant dogs who would likely climb the fence and chase the machines in the woods, without a thought about what they’d do should they catch one. The fellow I spoke to was friendly, and said they planned to thin 70-75 acres. The dry weather had worked to their advantage and the hope was to reduce the wildfire risks, while giving the remaining trees more room to grow. I agreed that the whole place was begging for a match or a lightning strike, what with years of pinestraw breaking down into resin-rich peat that would burn for weeks if the fire ever went into the ground.
“There’s some good wood in there,” he agreed.
I saw something in his eye that reminded me of Robert Williams, an old friend now gone home to his reward. Mr. Robert was old school, never having seen or used a chainsaw until after World War II. He snaked logs one by one, lashed to a mule that also plowed the family farm. He knew how to sharpen a two-man crosscut, and how to whet an axe so it bit just right, cutting without chewing.
He was an old man in his 80s by the time we became friends, and he spent his entire adult life in the “logging woods” of the Carolinas and Georgia. He loved trees, even while he had a desire to see some of them fall.
We happened to be together one sunny afternoon when he directed me down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, which in turn led to another dirt road on the far edge of nowhere. Far back in the woods, we found a managed cutover. One side had an idle loading deck; the other, tall pines as old as my guide.
We got out of the truck and he leaned on his walker, shuffling through the sugar sand to one of the pines standing watch for nearly a century. Mr. Robert stroked the tree like some men would a horse or a pretty woman.
“Don’t matter how old you are,” he said, “you still see something like this and want to put an axe to it. Farmers love corn. Loggers love trees.”
And just like the farmer has to chop down the corn he has nurtured and loved, so must the logger take down the trees that have reached for the sky.
Sometimes those things we love, we must harvest.
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