Loggers make a mess. If you’ve never seen a logging operation, even a small one, it’s quite shocking. Battered logs, chunks of bark, branches, stumps, smashed ferns, the pungent odor of torn fir, whiffs of diesel fuel and the clank of the metal tracks of the excavator cleaning up the site all shock the senses. This morning we went up to my brother and sister-n-law’s building site to check it out. There’s a half acre clearing in the woods now where alder and an occasional maple and Doug Fir were standing two days ago. It was starting to rain; a good day for a slash burn. Slash, the refuse from the cut, was piled as high and wide as a cabin and was burning brightly, gray-white smoke merging with the low hanging clouds. The excavator operator danced his human-looking machine around and grabbed mouthful after mouthful of tree junk to add to the fire.
I flashed back to my summer with a pulaski the most useful forrest tool ever invented. Edward C. Pulaski, the American forrest ranger who designed it left a brilliant legacy for himself—this tool with an ax blade on one side and an adze on the other. Our Forrest Service fire fighting crew used the pulaski to dig fire line (and trails to trout streams for our crew boss). We went into the woods each day sitting in the back of a windowless van me making breakfast by soaking hard ginger snaps in a metal cup of hot tea. Sometimes we were delivered to a recently logged area. (A real logging unit makes brother Richard’s half acre clearing look like a weeding operation). Where loggers had been cutting big trees in 1962 resembled the end of the world. The stuff they left for junk would be marketable timber today. Our job was to burn the slash and make sure it didn’t get out of control. The good job was using the drip can to start the fire. It was also dangerous as the rejected logs were tossed like pickup sticks. One had to move quickly along the bottom of the unit tight roping along logs hoping not to slip and get stuck as the wind licked the flames and the fire began to move up the hill.
The bad job was wandering through the smoke up wind of the burn with a shovel and a rubber bag of water strapped to your back looking for spot fires to stamp out.
But the damp woods and loamy earth, the nurse logs and ferns always remind me of my pulaski, the way the adze end tore through the woody soil and the insouciant way we all learned to flip it on the backswing to bring the ax head into play to take out a stubborn root. Then we’d flip it back again to dig with the adze without missing a beat. At night, weak with fatigue, I’d close my eyes and see roots and dirt and fallen logs, rotting cedar.
In 1962 I didn’t think twice about the clearcuts we cleaned up with fire. Now it’s a bit painful to see crap alders piled like bodies in a tiny forrest clearing. But here, at least, the scar is small and temporary and will be restored with native plants and new trees. Perhaps there’ll be some trails to build. Perhaps there’s a pulaski summer to anticipate.
Comments