The Clearcut (Part 3)

Jack turned the truck off Squaw Creek Road onto a rutted spur that led to the top of the clearcut. As he climbed, he noticed a brushcutter had marauded through since his last visit, mowing down volunteer trees and shrubs at the edges of the road. He also saw other shrubs defoliated, sickly, yellow, near death, victims of herbicide to reduce competition in the plantation. Some other piece of heavy equipment had also trenched the roadway and constructed water bars. They wouldn’t log this unit for another fifty years, but still, some business entity planned well ahead for the possibility.

Jack kept the truck climbing, and the road narrowed to a point where a brushcutter couldn’t follow and that meant passing ripe salmonberries, thimbleberries, elderberries, foxglove, vine maple, and bitter cherry trees.

Finally, the road crested, came to a dead end and Jack stopped the truck. He jumped out, threw down the tailgate, and the dogs flew out. Jack returned to the truck, grabbed the rest of the Hamm’s, and started off to find his favorite place in the clearcut—the super stump. As he walked, he took in the scene around him: the replanted conifers, the charred slash piles, the stumps, the snags, the tires, the beer cans, the multicolored shotgun shell casings, and the makeshift shooting targets, usually empty jugs of bleach nailed to plywood. Jack always tore the targets down and wrote on them with a Sharpie he carried for just such a purpose: “Can’t you enjoy nature without a gun?”

The dogs fanned out ahead of Jack, darting in and out of the undergrowth. How purely and sensuously green it was everywhere, thought Jack. The green, its many shades in many shapes, its many smells and multiple textures, seemed to be exploding all around him. Sometimes, Jack was amazed how a clearcut could regenerate itself after such mechanized obliteration. He often wondered if human beings had the capacity to regenerate after experiencing something as totally destructive as what a clearcut did to a watershed. Of course a forest, like a man, could also be denuded one tree at a time, by one logger, on one job, with one chainsaw, over a long period, and Jack thought about that too.

He walked a mile, maybe more, leaping across rivulets, examining coyote and bear scat, tasting salmonberries, finishing a Hamm’s and then starting another. Some thirty minutes later, Jack arrived at the super Sitka spruce stump, one that bore the notches of many, many years ago, when a plank fitted into the notches bore the weight of two men laboring for hours, days, with a fifteen-foot crosscut saw, to fell the tree.

Jack always used the same notch to step onto the stump. From there he looked around in a three hundred and sixty degree rotation. Nothing but Douglas fir as far as the eye could see. Nothing but densely, unnatural young stands of the plantation conifer species. Nothing but a cell in a spreadsheet.

He sat down and counted, as he always did, the stump’s rings. This afternoon he stopped at two hundred and eighty. Sleep began to undermine Jack’s concentration. He could hear the dogs thrashing in the slash. He shielded his eyes from the sun to survey the sky. He opened the last beer and took off his shirt. Reclining on the stump, he dangled his shoes over the edge. The stump’s surface was level and smooth: decades of one hundred inches of rain washes away all roughness. Well, almost all.

For ten minutes Jack didn’t move and kept investigating the sky. A kestrel zoomed by with a vole in its mouth. He saw a jet’s vapor trail. People were going somewhere. He noticed a couple of Sitka and Western hemlock seedlings sprouting from nearby rotten stumps. Nurse logs they called them, nursing tree species that weren’t wanted in this watershed, wanted by the industry. He saw the tops of Douglas firs at the edge of the clearcut oscillate in the breeze. He shot straight up in bed, his favorite stump—all that remained—from a grand conifer from an epoch when people like him didn’t teach, couldn’t teach, would not teach. Christ, he thought, he had to go back to work in nine fucking weeks!

A few minutes later, the dogs scrambled up on the stump to join him; there was ample room for all. They waited for Jack to get up, and keep heading down the trail or back to the truck, or really, anywhere. They waited for him to move and offer some instruction.