The Forest’s Edge

The doves are gone. I heard them calling out of the cold dawn and came to the deck in my robe. Like many Canadian homes, my house is in the middle of an old clear-cut. I sit on the deck and think of the wild birds. The shadows appear as the sun breaks through the clouds and I am taken back to my boyhood inside an image of light. I am standing in snow and staring out at a lake where a moose is crossing on the ice. The moose is huge in the empty world of winter. Surrounding her is the great forest I wandered in when I was young. The moose throws up splinters of snow as she runs. The ice glints in prisms, bits of light caught for a moment in the sun, and then she is gone into the trees on the farther shore. Once again the forest surrounds her. What remains is the wind. As I sit on my deck, the wind begins to fill in the passage the moose made, snow sifting upon snow. In an hour, it is as if she had never been there, and I rise and go back to my desk.

When I was a boy, the wild world was my great love. The bush began a mile or two from the edge of town and, clad in cotton jeans, a T-shirt, and torn running shoes, I wandered into the backcountry. Almost always alone, I carried across my shoulders the packsack my father brought back from the war. In it were usually a couple of apples and two peanut butter sandwiches made with my mother’s fresh bread, along with a coil of fishing line with a few hooks and some worms I had dug up from the garden and wrapped in wax paper. I had my father’s army water bottle hooked to my belt, and to complete the outfit, a slingshot when I was small, then a BB gun, and later, when I was thirteen, a .22 Cooey rifle.

In the seasons of the forest I was a white hunter, a boy playing at being a man, modelling myself on the books I had read: Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known or R. M. Ballantyne’s The Gorilla Hunters. Movie actors helped: Stewart Granger heroic in Africa or the endless cowboy movies with Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and Lash LaRue sitting alone around campfires staring off at the stars, trusty horse and dog beside them. Equally alone, I sat around my own fires beside lakes, creeks, and isolated meadows staring up at what I knew were the same stars. Sometimes, coming home, I would stop and wait an hour until I had changed back into the boy my mother knew. The bogs and scree, the forest and the desert hills were mine to wander.

There, I followed the tracks of coyotes, cougars, and bears, shot squirrels and chipmunks and hunted willow grouse and blue grouse in the thickets near bogs and fens. I cooked them over an open fire, augmenting the sandwiches I had brought with the meat. Afterward, I would munch a last apple and sit on some rock or stump and stare down at the tributary of a nameless creek I had followed into the bush. If there wasn’t a creek, then I padded quietly along one of the many game trails. They led always to water, a spring, a tiny freshet, the beginnings of a creek, or a bog with its swamp lanterns and fleshy weeds. The tracks of the animals and birds were a language I learned to read and understand. My summer job as a sixteen-year-old was driving a Cat bulldozer, building logging roads in the mountains above Sugar Lake in the North Okanagan region of BC. I learned how to carve rudimentary one-lane tracks in the bush with my ‘dozer, and sometimes, just to pass the time, I would put the steel ‘dozer blade against an old-growth fir or cedar and, rocking it back and forth, push until it fell. The destruction of the tree was unnecessary, but to a boy of sixteen it was an act of immense power. What my father and the other men of his time did for a living was what I imitated. The logging trucks that hauled the forest away to the mills were simply an aftermath to my destruction.

I delighted in the crash of the tree as it fell. The sigh of the branches as they rushed through the air was a breath I loved. The trunk and limbs took with them the smaller trees nearby and left a gaping hole in the forest. I gave no thought to the sun as it poured through and seared the mosses and fragile plants that lived in the shadowed understorey of the trees. The loggers who followed me did far worse to the forest with their chainsaws, cables, and Cats.

The waste of what had once been the forest was left to grow again as best it could from under the trashed and broken trunks of smaller trees. Left behind was the raw detritus of stumps, roots, and branches. Gouts of alluvial gravel and stone were heaved up and small creeks buried. Fifteen years later, I went back to that country to visit my father’s grave. On an impulse of what I know now was loneliness, I drove up into the mountains where I had built those bush roads. Here and there were patches of young trees. Most of what I saw was scrub brush and raw stone. The forest had not returned.

I was still a boy back in the fifties. When I turned eighteen my father told me I was a man and kicked me out of his house. I married my pregnant girlfriend and worked at a large sawmill up on the North Thompson River. After I had worked my way off the mill floor and into the office as a petty clerk and first-aid man, I became privy to the discussions of the bosses when they decided to trash thousands of cedar trees with Cats rather than log them and haul them in to the mill. The market price of cedar was low that autumn and the cost of milling the trees too high. When asked by a man from the Forest Service why there had been such wholesale destruction, the bosses told him it was the result of the cedar trees breaking apart when they had fallen. Brittle trees, the bosses maintained. Nothing more was said as the loggers turned to a new-cut block of prime Douglas fir.

I’ve walked the clear-cuts. I helped make some of them. I know what’s left when the machines and men leave. Everything is destroyed, young trees are broken, and shrubs and smaller plants are crushed by the falling timber and grinding tractor pads. The earth is overturned and the acidic soil beloved of conifers is left bare to be washed away by the rains into the streams where it gluts the water, killing the fish and the smaller aquatic life the fish feed upon.

The natural disaster of a forest fire returns carbon to the soil, enriching it for the new forest to come. A clear-cut removes the trees that are the source of that carbon. To walk there is to see a landscape devastated as if by bombs. Reforestation? It seems that real care is taken only for the hills and mountains that border highways where tourists and people from the cities can see them. Those are the clear-cuts where the corporations put up signs to tell the passing cars when the forest was replanted and how well it is doing today.

The corporations rarely harvest their trees right up to a highway. If you stop your car and walk 300 metres into a forest, you will often stumble across a clear-cut hidden from the cars that pass. The trees you see by the side of the road are the illusion of a forest left there to salve your conscience. Back out of sight, on the plateaus and hills and mountains, the forests are doing poorly. The variety of species is reduced to one of fir, pine, hemlock, spruce, tamarack, or whatever, depending on which of one or two species is likely to return the greatest profit.