I arc my axe upward through the chilly fall air, and let the axehead fall heavily onto the bole of wood. Painful vibrations shimmy through my wrists and forearms as the axehead bounces uselessly to the side. The only damage is a tiny cut in the ringed top of the log. I cringe in frustration and pain at the utter uselessness of my tool and myself. The log before had split beautifully and effortlessly, and I had beamed with pride as a perfect piece of firewood had slipped from the log. Dan Dale, the energetic, whitebearded knower of things on our farm shone light on the mystery: a woodcutter's hubris is brought down by the gods in the heartwood of hickory.
This hard, gnarled, and knotted hickory wood had refused to yield to my axe, unlike the pine that had split so willingly just before. Sweating and sore, I sat down on the rickety bench to collect my thoughts. Two trees, two tall straight trunks, different barks but in the same gray-brown. Hearts of completely different characters.
I work with trees at the Morton Arboretum. I am a degreed entomologist, but my fascination lies in one of the most contentious and most codependent relationships in evolutionary history: plant-insect interactions. My study organisms destroy leaves, defoliate entire canopies, drill below the bark and rob the tree of its lifeblood, tunnel and chisel through the heartwood leading the once solid structure to crumble. And the trees respond by poisoning, making themselves nutritionally useless, forming nasty spikes, trapping in gooey resin, and recruiting other insects to dine on its attackers. Really, the makings of an excellent HBO drama. That being said, most insects that have shared space with their plant counterparts for millennia have reached a sort of balance. Most tree boring insects, besides those that arrive suddenly from far corners of trade routes, can only attack sick or dying trees. They speed the cycle of regeneration and return the fallen tree to the soil. In turn, they transmit the tree's sun-made energy to the other organisms that eat them, moving the power of our life-giving star through the ecosystem. Its only when that most invasive of species, we humans, bring with us non-coevolved insects like the gypsy moth and emerald ash borer, that one insect species can wreak havoc on entire populations of trees.
In my job, I learn about trees. I read about trees. I pick the brilliant minds of my colleagues about trees. I learn to recognize them by their shape and structure from 70 mph on Interstate 57. I gaze at their population patterns from the air. I go to talks on their structure, function, and ecological relationships. Buts it only when I physically feel the jangling nerves in my hands from that stone hard hickory log that I begin to get to know them.
John and I are incredibly fortunate to have The Farm as part of our lives. I could go on at length about this magical place (and I will, at some point!) but in summary, in the early 80s, a group of community-minded folks from the South Side of Chicago acquired a piece of farmland in southwestern Michigan. After realizing that the land could no longer support the demands of crop farming, they planted trees to help return the land to health. Thirty something years later, John and I were introduced to a land of dark pines, towering tulip poplar, adolescent oak, and a cathedral of soaring second-growth beech and maple in the back corner. And we fell in love with it. And because we are among multiple people who own the property, we can actually afford (with our millennial's salary) to make this place ours, to shape the developing forest towards its healthiest state.
I've learned more and more about what our best approximations at health are, recognizing that there is no way we can recreate the healthy balance of a mature undisturbed forest. The dense, fast growing white pines, denizens of a more northerly climate, were used to help the oaks, walnuts, hickories and, sadly, ash, grow straight towards the light. Looking at the yearning vigor of the healthy young oaks, it is clear that the dense pines have done their job, and it's time to harvest them. So we join in to fell, pile slash, haul, mill, plane, cure and build with those pines. From their stumps grow lovingly made cabins, nestled in the shade of straight, healthy oaks, walnuts and tulip poplar.
It's through the exhausting, back straining, sweaty labor made easier only by a chainsaw, a small diesel tractor and a number of ingenious simple machines that I have truly come to know pines. The photos, the books, and the websites mean nothing compared to sap covered gloves and the smell of a freshly cut pine, the soreness in your shoulders after lifting ash versus hauling pine, the quality of sawdust spewing from a sharp chain, the structure of knots under the sawmill. Its here that a tree begins to be revealed. The deep, beautiful colors of the wood, from the purply brown of the walnut, the creamy white of basswood, the unexpected blue stains within a fungus-infested pine. The surprising twists and turns in the grain, the lattice of lignified structural cells working together to hold the thousands of pounds of tree high in the air. The hard knots of wood from which branches thrust themselves into the sunlight.
As we peel away the bark from the weathered trunk, subjected to a season on the ground or in our pile, tiny ecosystems reveal themselves, from the strange hieroglyphics of bark beetle galleries, to the wood-shaving hovels protecting borer larvae, to the wild patchwork of fungus, each of them utilizing the locked up sunlight and redistributing it. My explorations of this community sometimes hold up the milling process, but the chickadees appreciate the fat grubs I pull out for them. Besides an occasional longhorn borer, the members of this community haven't gotten too far before we claim the log for our own uses.
Lacking heavy equipment, we use levers and ramps and all of the strength of our collective bodies, to heave the log from the rickety old trailer up onto the pile with an "un, dos, tres". It rolls until it settles with a reverberating thunk in a low point and we cheer with the accomplishment of our joint labor.
After a communal lunch of farm-grown tomato soup and grilled cheese, we return to the barn to start the milling on our tiny sawmill. After firing it up to full throttle, two people walk the spinning saw down the length of a log. The first pass of our small mill slices off the uneven, wild edged fletches that will warm us around the fire in the winter, boil the maple syrup in the spring, line the garden beds, mulch blueberries, and make coat racks etched by beetles. Then, a second tentative pass, not even close to trimming the log to an even surface. A deeper cut and the log begins to reveal its surprise curves, bends, knots and unevenness as you try to carve it into uniformity. A trunk that appears to be perfectly straight is mysteriously unyielding to the demands of right angles. A tree that looks like it holds within it a stout roof-supporting beam, offers only a few small 2x4s.
A few turns, a few calculations and hopeful guesses and we have a squared off beam before us. But despite our best attempts to straighten and square off, the tree still perplexes us- the top end of the log is still 2 inches wider than the bottom. Good enough for a rustic cabin! We harvest slowly, limited by the lack of efficient machines and desire to be efficient. We fill the shelves with boards tree by tree, and draw them down to build humble, not-quite-square structures that give us a place to connect more deeply with the trees. More boards line the shelves and more light reaches the young hardwoods. More human muscle is built and more sawdust enters the compost for the garden. Pine fletches are cut and stacked, only to disappear quickly in February, boiling maple sap into syrup. Its hard to know sugar maples as well as pine, for they jealously guard their sugary secrets, which we depend on trial and error and luck to unlock.
It may seem counterintuitive that I work hard to conserve trees and preserve the ecosystems they build, yet I harvest and mill and plane them just the same. But humans have a long and strong bond with trees. Strong yet supple, straight and tall, and amazingly varied among species, its no wonder humans have depended upon trees since we came down out of them. Fuel for campfires, building material for shelter and any number of other devices, and endless variety of food and medicine, we have a coevolutionary relationship with trees. And not a relationship of setting aside to gaze upon, but to intimately use to shape our world.
The problem comes when trees are only considered a product- a useful material to be gathered as quickly and efficiently as possible, at the expense of ecological security, measured in short term monetary value alone. Collected using towering, impressively efficient cutting and limbing machines and computers that stare inside a tree and maximize the lumber that will come out. I'm not naive, I know we humans do need wood products and there are so so many of us. But even so, I feel that we smother an important part of our nature when a tree can be measured in board feet alone, when our relationship with wood is the ready-made and un-treelike at Home Depot.
I consider myself lucky to be able to engage with trees differently than so many people who don't have the opportunity or interest to do so. It is also a luxury to be able to harvest trees at a contemplative pace, not counting on the profits to put food on the table (this is a complicated topic I am not ready to tackle in a blog post!) That being said, when we can be present for each labor-intensive step, when the process of harvesting and building drags out into months and years, when there is time to observe and to relate to the pines, we develop a stronger sense of appreciation for their incredible structure and beauty. To me, it seems more like entering into a relationship than of alienated use based solely on maximizing lumber. I've gotten to know our trees individually, not only the ones we use. It's not just any old white oak, but the lumpy and ancient "Grandma Oak", it's the soaring, elephantine beech trees at Three Beech Point, it's the giant red oak, split in twain, that serves as a landmark, it's the paw paws that burst with fruit last summer to our great delight.
A profound way to truly know and understand a tree is to respectfully harvest it and look within. When you engage in this way with a tree, when it becomes your shelter and your heat, you can learn so much more. No textbook can teach you the things that your hands around an axe handle or reaching towards the warmth of a campfire's embers can.
This hard, gnarled, and knotted hickory wood had refused to yield to my axe, unlike the pine that had split so willingly just before. Sweating and sore, I sat down on the rickety bench to collect my thoughts. Two trees, two tall straight trunks, different barks but in the same gray-brown. Hearts of completely different characters.I work with trees at the Morton Arboretum. I am a degreed entomologist, but my fascination lies in one of the most contentious and most codependent relationships in evolutionary history: plant-insect interactions. My study organisms destroy leaves, defoliate entire canopies, drill below the bark and rob the tree of its lifeblood, tunnel and chisel through the heartwood leading the once solid structure to crumble. And the trees respond by poisoning, making themselves nutritionally useless, forming nasty spikes, trapping in gooey resin, and recruiting other insects to dine on its attackers. Really, the makings of an excellent HBO drama. That being said, most insects that have shared space with their plant counterparts for millennia have reached a sort of balance. Most tree boring insects, besides those that arrive suddenly from far corners of trade routes, can only attack sick or dying trees. They speed the cycle of regeneration and return the fallen tree to the soil. In turn, they transmit the tree's sun-made energy to the other organisms that eat them, moving the power of our life-giving star through the ecosystem. Its only when that most invasive of species, we humans, bring with us non-coevolved insects like the gypsy moth and emerald ash borer, that one insect species can wreak havoc on entire populations of trees.
In my job, I learn about trees. I read about trees. I pick the brilliant minds of my colleagues about trees. I learn to recognize them by their shape and structure from 70 mph on Interstate 57. I gaze at their population patterns from the air. I go to talks on their structure, function, and ecological relationships. Buts it only when I physically feel the jangling nerves in my hands from that stone hard hickory log that I begin to get to know them.
John and I are incredibly fortunate to have The Farm as part of our lives. I could go on at length about this magical place (and I will, at some point!) but in summary, in the early 80s, a group of community-minded folks from the South Side of Chicago acquired a piece of farmland in southwestern Michigan. After realizing that the land could no longer support the demands of crop farming, they planted trees to help return the land to health. Thirty something years later, John and I were introduced to a land of dark pines, towering tulip poplar, adolescent oak, and a cathedral of soaring second-growth beech and maple in the back corner. And we fell in love with it. And because we are among multiple people who own the property, we can actually afford (with our millennial's salary) to make this place ours, to shape the developing forest towards its healthiest state.I've learned more and more about what our best approximations at health are, recognizing that there is no way we can recreate the healthy balance of a mature undisturbed forest. The dense, fast growing white pines, denizens of a more northerly climate, were used to help the oaks, walnuts, hickories and, sadly, ash, grow straight towards the light. Looking at the yearning vigor of the healthy young oaks, it is clear that the dense pines have done their job, and it's time to harvest them. So we join in to fell, pile slash, haul, mill, plane, cure and build with those pines. From their stumps grow lovingly made cabins, nestled in the shade of straight, healthy oaks, walnuts and tulip poplar.
 |
| The woodshed, our most recent construction, keeping dry wood for the campfire |
 |
| Logs in line for the mill, sap froze in time |
 |
| See, this post is about insects! |
As we peel away the bark from the weathered trunk, subjected to a season on the ground or in our pile, tiny ecosystems reveal themselves, from the strange hieroglyphics of bark beetle galleries, to the wood-shaving hovels protecting borer larvae, to the wild patchwork of fungus, each of them utilizing the locked up sunlight and redistributing it. My explorations of this community sometimes hold up the milling process, but the chickadees appreciate the fat grubs I pull out for them. Besides an occasional longhorn borer, the members of this community haven't gotten too far before we claim the log for our own uses.
Lacking heavy equipment, we use levers and ramps and all of the strength of our collective bodies, to heave the log from the rickety old trailer up onto the pile with an "un, dos, tres". It rolls until it settles with a reverberating thunk in a low point and we cheer with the accomplishment of our joint labor.
After a communal lunch of farm-grown tomato soup and grilled cheese, we return to the barn to start the milling on our tiny sawmill. After firing it up to full throttle, two people walk the spinning saw down the length of a log. The first pass of our small mill slices off the uneven, wild edged fletches that will warm us around the fire in the winter, boil the maple syrup in the spring, line the garden beds, mulch blueberries, and make coat racks etched by beetles. Then, a second tentative pass, not even close to trimming the log to an even surface. A deeper cut and the log begins to reveal its surprise curves, bends, knots and unevenness as you try to carve it into uniformity. A trunk that appears to be perfectly straight is mysteriously unyielding to the demands of right angles. A tree that looks like it holds within it a stout roof-supporting beam, offers only a few small 2x4s.
A few turns, a few calculations and hopeful guesses and we have a squared off beam before us. But despite our best attempts to straighten and square off, the tree still perplexes us- the top end of the log is still 2 inches wider than the bottom. Good enough for a rustic cabin! We harvest slowly, limited by the lack of efficient machines and desire to be efficient. We fill the shelves with boards tree by tree, and draw them down to build humble, not-quite-square structures that give us a place to connect more deeply with the trees. More boards line the shelves and more light reaches the young hardwoods. More human muscle is built and more sawdust enters the compost for the garden. Pine fletches are cut and stacked, only to disappear quickly in February, boiling maple sap into syrup. Its hard to know sugar maples as well as pine, for they jealously guard their sugary secrets, which we depend on trial and error and luck to unlock.
It may seem counterintuitive that I work hard to conserve trees and preserve the ecosystems they build, yet I harvest and mill and plane them just the same. But humans have a long and strong bond with trees. Strong yet supple, straight and tall, and amazingly varied among species, its no wonder humans have depended upon trees since we came down out of them. Fuel for campfires, building material for shelter and any number of other devices, and endless variety of food and medicine, we have a coevolutionary relationship with trees. And not a relationship of setting aside to gaze upon, but to intimately use to shape our world.
The problem comes when trees are only considered a product- a useful material to be gathered as quickly and efficiently as possible, at the expense of ecological security, measured in short term monetary value alone. Collected using towering, impressively efficient cutting and limbing machines and computers that stare inside a tree and maximize the lumber that will come out. I'm not naive, I know we humans do need wood products and there are so so many of us. But even so, I feel that we smother an important part of our nature when a tree can be measured in board feet alone, when our relationship with wood is the ready-made and un-treelike at Home Depot.
I consider myself lucky to be able to engage with trees differently than so many people who don't have the opportunity or interest to do so. It is also a luxury to be able to harvest trees at a contemplative pace, not counting on the profits to put food on the table (this is a complicated topic I am not ready to tackle in a blog post!) That being said, when we can be present for each labor-intensive step, when the process of harvesting and building drags out into months and years, when there is time to observe and to relate to the pines, we develop a stronger sense of appreciation for their incredible structure and beauty. To me, it seems more like entering into a relationship than of alienated use based solely on maximizing lumber. I've gotten to know our trees individually, not only the ones we use. It's not just any old white oak, but the lumpy and ancient "Grandma Oak", it's the soaring, elephantine beech trees at Three Beech Point, it's the giant red oak, split in twain, that serves as a landmark, it's the paw paws that burst with fruit last summer to our great delight.
A profound way to truly know and understand a tree is to respectfully harvest it and look within. When you engage in this way with a tree, when it becomes your shelter and your heat, you can learn so much more. No textbook can teach you the things that your hands around an axe handle or reaching towards the warmth of a campfire's embers can.
Comments
Post a Comment