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Timberlines I by Richard Denner x Heal your world. Plant a tree. I ran a small, independent bookstore for twenty years, and I subsidized it for fifteen of those years by planting trees every spring. During that time I worked for two companies, Eastern Washington Reforestation and T.G.T.B.T. Eastern Washington Reforestation was structured like a co-op, although legally we were a partnership, and we had to appoint someone from our group to sign our contracts. Davy Simkins signed one contract as Galactic Emperor and another as Galloping Antelope. The name Eastern Washington Reforestation was a bit misleading since most of Eastern Washington is a desert. T.G.T.B.T., Too Good To Be True, was a legal partnership of two, and they picked up the pieces of Eastern Washington Reforestation after it dissolved. For the most part, we contracted with the U.S. Forest Service, and most of our planting was in the state of Washington, in the districts of Ellensburg, Chelan, Okanogan, Entiat, Mt. Baker, and Wenatchee, but some treeplanters planted year round, going east to Utah and Montana and south to Oregon and California. x "Clearcut" Wenatchee National Forest, photo of Bob planting x There is an art to treeplanting. We begin by instructing a new planter that "the green side goes up." Some never get it. It's a mystery, and like any good mystery, there is an inspector and a plot. There are scores for planting too high, too low, too close, too loose, for planting in duff, for how you make a scalp. And then there is the dreaded "J root." The less said about this the better. A low score means no pay. I know in the battle to save the planet, treeplanters are thought to be on the front lines, but actually, treeplanters are the lowliest vermin in God's creation. Many a boss goes down to skidrow to pick up a couple of drunks and takes them into the woods in their street shoes and gives them a bag and a dag and sends them into the slash to prove to the inspector that he has a full crew. Hell, this ain't a forest, it's a toilet paper farm. Nothing really romantic about treeplanting. Ah, life in the woods. I can remember moving camp after planting all day and pitching my tent in an arroyo and waking up with a river running through my sleeping bag, getting up to a breakfast of pine needles in my scrambled eggs, and then fishtailing it up a logging road at dawn with AC/DC blasting from the speakers to slam a few trees into some rocky slope in a downpour, or sitting in a hot springs among ancient cedars and coming back the next year to find a gurgling mudhole in a clearcut. For six years after a fire, we planted Silver Basin in the Entiat Valley. Then, in another eight years, we came back, and for a year we thinned the trees we had planted, and the following year, the valley burned. x
"Bagup" - plumb tuckered and photo of us bagging up from the forest service truck. x Here is a lesson in impermanence, if I've ever had one. I figure, on an average, I planted 500 trees/day for 30 days/year for 15 years. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter million trees. I guess I've helped the planet. I guess I've guaranteed there will be pulp to make paper to replace some of what the book industry uses every day. I suppose a forest planted in rows is better than no forest at all. I look at Mt. Rainier, as I fly over it, and I realize it would be hard to get lost in this "wilderness." You would only have to walk a mile in any direction to find a logging road. Any vision quest is going to be checkmated before it gets started. I have set choker with loggers who want to see the last tree felled. I have hugged trees with environmentalists who want zero cutting. A war between tree huggers and tree cutters serves no purpose. We need a trillion trees to restore the forests, and if we are going to continue to cut, we need to catch up. If you feel nourished by trees, physically and spiritually, heal your world. Plant a tree.
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