The Woodsman: Gut Feelings vs. Facts and Figures

By Steve Wilent, For The Mountain Times

This month, a break from facts and figures on forests. Forest managers rely on facts and figures, of course — data about tree growth, lumber volume and value, the volume of drinking water flowing from a forest, the number of Columbian white-tailed deer found in Oregon, the number of visitors to a campground, lake, or historic site, and so on. Dry statistics, sure, but crucial information that helps guide sound management of our natural resources.

But what about the intangible, the indefinable? Your gut feelings, intuition, or heartfelt senses that are unconnected, at least directly, to data?

I recall one hot summer evening in the Sierra Nevada, in an area where some of the Douglas fir, white fir, and ponderosa pines lay on the ground, recently felled. I was working on a logging crew as a choker setter and was waiting for the tractor to return from hauling a half-dozen logs to the landing and a waiting log truck. My job was to secure steel cables to logs and attach the cables to a much larger cable on the tractor’s winch. I had hooked up the next round of a half-dozen logs and had a few minutes to rest. It was late afternoon, nearing dusk, nearing the end of a long work day. The golden rays of the setting sun, bisected by the still-standing trees, illuminated squadrons of flying insects and dust in the air. The sounds of machinery were distant, the growling of the tractor was growing closer. In those moments, I thought: This is good. These logs will go to a mill to make lumber to make new houses. The remaining trees would grow faster with less competition, and new seedlings soon to be planted would thrive in the sunlight of the new openings in the canopy. Wildlife would find more forage in those sunnier spots. I and my crew could look forward to another decent paycheck, as did the log truck drivers and the mill employees. The logging company would pay its bills and sock some money away for repairing its machines and maybe buying new ones. I thought: This is good. 

Some folks would not see it that way, of course. They might see destruction, painful environmental wounds. I understand! But at the time I felt good about what I was doing. I still do.

Another summer day in another forest, my job was to measure the heights and diameters of certain trees and mark them for cutting. On this day, my fellow crew members and I were marking very large trees along a creek in an area that had never seen logging. Many of the trees were centuries old, four, five, six feet in diameter at chest height. These trees were on a 20-acre harvest unit — the largest area allowed for clearcutting in the region at the time — as well as in the path of a future road to the area and other units beyond. In the middle of this 20-acre unit was a pair of pools the creek had worn into the granite over uncounted seasons. They were nearly perfectly round, almost as if made by a giant drill bit. One was 20 feet across and five feet deep; the other maybe eight feet across and 10 feet deep, and the creek flowed gently into and out of each one, the water crystal clear and cold (we tested the temperature by jumping in during our lunch break). 

I did not feel good about this. I don’t have a problem with cutting large, old trees, where it makes sense to do so. Their wood is often beautiful, strong and useful in many ways. But in this case, I felt that the 20-acre unit ought to be left alone, protected as a natural wonder for people to enjoy, undisturbed, forever. I saw destruction and a painful environmental wound that wouldn’t soon heal.

On a summer evening years later, I walked into an area that had been cleared of trees decades before — a clearcut. What had once been forest was now a pasture where cattle were grazing. I could hear them lowing, munching, belching, farting. Goats, chickens, and geese in a nearby field made their presence known with their own voices, as did the several species of wild birds that flew about. Some of the birds landed on the backs of the cattle, who seemed oblivious to their hitchhikers. All this is good, I thought. Yes, one might count the acres of trees harvested and the wildlife habitat drastically altered, but this farm provided food and income for the farm family and others who would share in the bounty. 

Last month I walked through an area burned in 2020 by the Riverside Fire. Between dead, blackened trees, most now silvery grey where the bark had fallen away, an abundance of green: young bigleaf and vine maples, alders, bracken, sword fern, grasses, ninebark with its showy clusters of white flowers, and thimbleberry, salmonberry, and blackcap western raspberries with small green berries soon to turn red or purple (all are edible, but salmonberry is bland). Standing in the ashes of a newly burned forest, it is hard to visualize its rapid change into another kind of verdancy. While lamenting the loss of so many big trees, I thought: This is good.

Have a question about the emotional impacts of forests? Want to know how to get a natural high? Let me know. Email: SWilent@gmail.com.