I went to look over the Diamond Grove place. Flooding has knocked down bridges. My road was closed off, thankfully the block was just past the gate to our farms.
It rained a lot and moved a lot of mud. It looks like there is a foot of new mud and sand on my first creek. Not sure where it came from. I cannot find any big areas of erosion on my land, but I suppose each square foot contributes its little part and it ends up big. We have set up rocks and brush to slow the water and encourage it to drop the sediment and that seems to have worked. When we got the place in 2005, there was a lot of steep and eroded banks. That is mostly fixed now.
The storm snapped off the top of a very big tree in one of the other SMZs. It will be interesting to watch developments. We had a big tree uprooted by wind and rain in 2006. It made a big opening and changed the course of one of the streams. It was interesting to watch the fill in. Nature is resilient.
I am very fond of my big beech trees. I expect that sooner or later one or more of them will blow down. One of my favorites is mostly hollow and on a stream bank. There are plenty of little trees waiting to take the place, but I like the old ones.
My first picture shows the snapped tree. It is much bigger than the picture shows. The new green leaves this time of the year filters the light and makes everything seem green, even things that are not really green. Next is the “new” land near my bald cypress. I expect it will gradually move. It must have been one really big storm. I have never seen so much moved dirt, and the bridges have never been undermined like that.
Next is my beech wood. It is a kind of old world look. There are more leaves on the ground now than at other times of the year. Beech trees hold onto many of their leaves all winter. They are pushed off by the new leave in spring, i.e. now. The penultimate picture shows my closed road and last is the path through the 15-year old loblolly. I think we will thin after this growing season.
When you think cactus, you rarely think Virginia, but the prickly pear is native to southeastern piney forests and part of the longleaf ecology. Trees are more than wood and forests are more than trees is well illustrated by a longleaf forest, since much of its diversity rests on the plants on the ground.
I long wanted a prickly pear addition to my longleaf, but they are harder to find than you would guess. The ones you find usually are desert varieties, meant as house plants here, that do not do well in Virginia’s climate.
Chrissy found one for me, along with another interesting native plant, the rattlesnake master. It almost sound like a couple of comic book heroes, “Prickly Pear and the Rattlesnake Master.”
Anyway, I planted them today. This is more like gardening than forestry, but I hope they spread.
When Mike Raney, Scott Powell and others in the hunt club notice, don’t be surprised at the cactus in Virginia.
My first picture is prickly pear and the rattlesnake master. Next is one of the bald cypress I planted a couple months ago. I planted 200. The criteria was that if my feet were dry, I planted longleaf, but if my feet were wet, I went with bald cypress.
Speaking of wet, the next picture is a “vernal pond,” AKA a persistent mud puddle. Vernal ponds are very important for amphibian reproduction. The water must persist long enough for the amphibian life cycle but not long enough that it becomes permanent enough to have fish that eat the amphibian eggs or tadpoles.
Penultimate picture is part of the stream management zone. I took my folding chair down there and had a beer today, between hard work, of course.
Last is a downed longleaf. I have had a problem with them just falling down. Not all, or even a big number, but enough that I notice. The loblolly do not do that on the same piece of ground. Anybody have explanations?
This question comes a little late, but it is something I thought about for a long time and that I am now implementing. I am doing what I wanted to do when I retired.
Knowing when to leave your life’s work I was eligible to retire in 2005. It was nice to know that I could go, but I wanted to stay. I felt unfinished. Career was going okay, but not remarkable. FS has an up or out promotion system. I had until 2009 to get promoted. I had opted to ‘open my window”, early which makes you eligible for senior promotion but risks the boot.I was afraid that I would not make it and they would kick me out, but I didn’t want to take the jobs most “career enhancing.”
Multiple identities I was just confused, but I did have one good plan, a back to the roots plan. I was going to diversify into forestry. If they kicked me out of the FS, I would have another identity as a forest guy. Forests were my first passion, predating FS, predating almost everything after I learned to ride a bike. I dreamed of owing forest land. I deferred that dream. I thought maybe forever, but then I had a chance.
Sweet serendipity Most of my success comes from sweet serendipity. This was no exception. When I was ready to buy forestland, tax law changed to make big paper companies ready to sell. Tracts of land were available all over the South. Chrissy was wonderful. She let me mortgage the house and we got our first forest land. I told her that I could not promise it would be a great investment, but I would not buy unless I could figure out at least how to break even. Who knew how to buy forest land? I guessed that Internet did and started to research. I learned that the difference between having some trees and having timber was distance from mills and that the best place to own timber was in Virginia’s Southside. Much of the land was worn out by generations of tobacco, corn and cotton, but pine trees grew very well. I zeroed in on Brunswick County and went looking.
How silly I must have seemed – a city-boy Yankee who works for the government, driving a Honda Civic Hybrid in the land of Ford F150. But people of the South are very friendly and I am very lucky. One advantage was that I knew a little about trees and soils. I could identify trees and when the real estate agents showed me crap dirt, I could tell that too. They came to give me a modicum of respect.
In retrospect, I see that I paid more for the land than a savvy local would have done, but a lot less than a city slicker like me deserved. I ended up buying the land that the real estate agent really didn’t think I would buy. I am pretty sure that he showed me a cut over rutted place to contrast it with nicer looking places. But I noticed the little loblolly pines were firmly established in good dirt. The internal roads were okay and we had some blacktop frontage. It looked like crap, but I could imagine how it would be in a few years and that was beautiful. I have never regretted it.
Now I had two definers in my life. I was a diplomat and a forest owning conservationist. Proud of both.
Don’t hang around like a fart in a phone booth To my surprise – and likely that of others – they promoted me to senior foreign service and then promoted me again to the next level. That meant I could stay until I was 65. Always leave when they still want you to stay, rather than hang around like a fart in phone booth. I put in my retirement request the same day I got my formal notification of promotion. The HR folks were surprised.
By that time, more than ten years after I was first eligible to retire, I felt I had done what I could in the FS. My last decade was my best one. It would have been a shame to leave with those songs unsung.
I got to do a year in Iraq. An an active war zone is not fun while you are doing it, but it is great to have done it. I was glad that I stepped up when it was my turn. Another factor was my second posting in Brazil. Brazil was my first post. I never felt I did a very good job because of my inexperience and poorly developed skills. Going back a second time let me pay back.
It was also great to relearn Portuguese. I got better than ever and fell in love with that beautiful language. Brazilian Portuguese is subtle and graceful – excuse the cliche – like a samba. Anyway, I felt I did better the second time, closed the loop.
The career capstone was really cool job as Senior International Advisor at Smithsonian. Does it get better? Time to go.
So it goes Retirement has been better than I planned, even better than I hoped. I have been able to keep being a sometime diplomat. I got a temporary assignment in São Paulo and got to use my Portuguese. I got an assignment on the Columbia River Treaty and got to work with water, trees and tribal lands. There are good chances for other such work. I get the satisfaction of diplomacy w/o the anxiety of needing to work toward career goals. My forestry work has been fantastically rewarding. I just feel good in the forest. It is existential. Being in the woods is not a means to an goal. It is the goal. I never get tired of it. Planning for the forest future is an added benefit. Now add on working with others passionate about forestry as president of the Virginia Tree Farm Foundation, member of the board on the Forest History Society, & active participant in our Virginia branch of longleaf restorers. I get to study (and sometimes start) prescribed fires, as well as attend professional conferences and meetings. Lots of the skills I use in the outreach are like those I learned in diplomacy, but now I do it in my own service.
Living in Washington is a big advantage for a gentleman of leisure. There are lots of lectures and events to attend. I attend lectures or events 2-3 times in an average week. Topics and speakers are interesting, and you usually even get free coffee, sometimes a free lunch. Yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch.
Chrissy and I have also set up a “donor advised fund” to plan & regularize our charitable giving. A big part of the good life is giving. It so enriches the life of the giver that it might even be considered a little selfish.
Busier than ever? Retired people sometimes say that they are busier than ever. This is rarely true. But you do need to plan your time better. When you work, you spend 8-10 hours every day working or commuting to work. It sucks your time, but you know where you are going to be most days. Retired people need to plan where they will be. I need a planning calendar more than I did when I knew I would be at work every day.
All good things must come to an end. I know that these halcyon days too will pass. I will not live forever and will likely not be in such good health for all the rest of my life. Sic transit gloria mundi. I hope that when my time comes, I go gracefully, much like my retirement, go while they still want you to stay. I hope that is some distance in the future. Living for now, I am a happy retired man, mostly doing what I think I should, seeking eudaimonia.
My first picture is from 2005. I am standing in front of some tree of heaven, an invasive that I have been fighting ever since we saw them. Notice the hard to see little trees just to the right. They are the bigger trees in the background in picture #2 and #4. The second picture is where the tree of heaven used to be. We made that into a meadow, a pollinator habitat. Picture #3 is the Brodnax place. #4 is Diamond Grove road, We own both sides. On the left side are those little trees from 2005, bigger now. Last is pollinator habitat again.
This was one of the rainiest years ever in Virginia. Our stream management zones were carrying more water than usual. You see in the first picture how high the water was by looking at the sand and mud that the high water deposited. Interesting thing happens with that mud and sand deposits. They form natural levies. When they flood over the levies, as happens in very rainy times, the water is trapped on the far side and encourages a wet forest.
Other two are SMZs that did not flood so much. Last picture is bare ground that was used as logging deck. I planted some wildflowers in the foreground and crimson clover farther in. I expect it will be verdant and beautiful in a couple months.
I attended a talk about the need for white oak for bourbon barrels and decided to do my part for the 2050 class of bourbon drinkers by planting one of my patches with white oak. So I ordered some from Virginia Department of Forestry. My trees came a little early, but I wanted to plant them quick as possible, so I went down to the farms.
It was just right time to plant the trees but a little early to see springtime. However, some things are starting to grow. Some of the longleaf have begun to “candle”, i.e. send up new growth. Some of the seedlings the kids planted are also showing the little buttons of new growth. It seems a miracle each spring, but it happens every year.
First picture shows a 2 years old longleaf candling. Next is a seedling starting out. Picture #3 is the open woods we burned last May. #4 is an odd “laying” longleaf. Look closely and you see that the tree has fallen to the ground and started to grow up from there. Last picture is the loblolly planted in 2016. You can see the trees well with the brown grass. Soon, the grass will be green and the trees will blend in.
People who know me know why we burn and what we are doing, but maybe some people who saw the post about our Brodnax burn don’t know me, so let me explain. Fire is an important factor in southern pine ecology. Too often, we have excluded fire with negative effects. We are burning on our lands in Virginia to restore the balance. It will encourage the growth of understory plants, including habitat for pollinators and wildlife like quail and deer.
We have also thinned our forest, so that the trees are spaced widely enough to allow sunlight to hit the forest floor to allow that growth mentioned above.
You have seen pine forests that are so thick that almost nothing grows on the ground under the trees. This is an efficient way to grow pulp and timber, but produces a mono-culture that does not share the environment.This is not what we prefer.
Trees are more than just wood and a forest is more than just trees. A more complex and complete ecology is a thing of sublime beauty, that has value beyond its “use” to us. On our Freeman unit, we have thinned about 80 acres of 22-year-old loblolly to 50 basal area (trees are far apart). We are establishing pollinator habitat and restoring longleaf pine. Longleaf pine ecology is the most diverse in non-tropical North America. Of course that ecology includes more than just the trees, as discussed above. We also planted some bald cypress in the damp rills.
Our Diamond Grove unit is 178 acres, of which 110 acres are in loblolly pine planted in 2003. The balance is stream management zones, mostly hardwood – a lot of beech,maples & tulip trees. We will thin the pines in 2020. I think will go with 80 basal area, not so thin, but still with some light hitting the ground. I will clear 5 acres near Genito Creek and plant that with bald cypress.
This fire is on our Brodnax property. We are patch burning 45 acres: 15 +/- acres each year in rotation. This provides diverse wildlife habitat.
First picture shows the Brodnax burned section. The loblolly there are about 30 years old. Next is thinned Freeman. Those trees are 22 years old. We will burn in December or early next year. We are planting openings with longleaf. Picture #3 shows newly planted lobolly. There were planted in 2016. They are genetically better trees and have grown very fast. Last two are videos from Freeman. It is not so much what they show but the sounds of the peepers in the first and the running water in the second.
Great fire today. Seems the perfect fire. The rule is that black (char) is good. White (ash) is okay. Red (burned to the clay) is bad. My inspections found all black. And when I kicked under the duff, I found that the dirt under was still moist in most places. We had moderate winds &moderate temperatures, but the big factor was that we had damp and cool soil and dry grass and brush. Perfect. Of course, I will know that for sure only when I see what grows in the spring.
Adam Smith from DoF did the planning and honchoed the operation. I got the easy assignment of laying the fire lines along the roads, while the DoF guys did strips inside the forest. Alex’s friend Colin Michał came down and got to lay a fire line along the stream.
Pictures show Adam, Colin and me. Others are various fire photos.
Busiest year so far in my forests. I am getting to do lots more of the things I want to do and the work is starting to be the way I hoped it would be. I spend a lot of time out standing in my fields and I keep on thinking of the Aldo Leopold essay “Axe in Hand,” about how we affect the landscape and thereby change the future – do, reflect on what you have done & change what you do based on what you learn. Good advice on the land and for life. I read that essay decades ago, but really took it to heart a couple years ago when I got to lead a discussion group at Aldo Leopold Center. Leopold said that it was not enough to read about land ethics, but rather to live it and to learn from interactions with the land. You and your land metaphorically cooperate in writing a land ethic. My land has been teaching me a lot. I only wish I could express it more directly. I don’t have the words. I wish I could phrase it for even myself. The best I can do is tell about the year in the forest. Maybe in the telling, it will better be understood.
A big difference about acting in nature versus acting in among our fellow humans is that nature does not accept excuses. You cannot complain or demand special treatment. Nature cuts you no slack. I identify as a robust young man. Nature constantly reminds me that it does not care what I think. When I go out to plant trees or cut vines, I cannot say I should be able to do more than I can do.
Ecology is all about – only about – relationships
Since I am talking here about my interaction with my forests, I include thinking that I might do far away from my land. You can reflect about the land without having your boots on it. My year in the forest started far away from Virginia. Chrissy & I visited ancient settlements in New Mexico where we learned more about how the ancestral Pueblo had managed fire in the ponderosa pine and juniper forests in those montane forests. I have been studying the Ancestral Pueblo for a while. I want to know more about them because they are intrinsically interesting, but I also want to know more about how they lived sustainably on fire-prone landscapes for more than 500 years. I thought about what we could learn from their experience in general and how I could specifically apply some of their insights to my land in Virginia. The environments are different but some of the principles are the same. Ponderosa pine ecosystem have a fire regime analogous to longleaf pine.
Using tree rings, scientists have mapped the changing climate and conditions in the Southwest with precision going back more than 400 years and make decent estimates farther back.
The tree rings tell a story of wet and dry years and fires that go with them. Not surprisingly, fires are more common in dry years, but fire scars indicate that centuries ago fires were frequent but not very hot. The record of the area around the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico experienced frequent low-intensity burns until around 1680. After that, fires become less frequent but hotter. This fire regime persists until just before 1900, when fires are almost gone, until the serious upsurge a few decades ago. What happened? Spanish and then American settlers moved in and changed the fire regimes. References – Fires Bigger Than Ever
Learning from Native American fire practices
The Pueblo had a yearly routine that served to periodically burn the landscape in patches and to remove much of the denser flammable material. In the summer, they spread out over the landscape to hunt and cultivate small food patches. Fires escaped from campfires and sometimes they set fires to improve hunting.
I could not learn if they specifically did this, but I learned that other native groups set fires in the fall when they left the forest. These fires burned along the ground until extinguished by the snows of winter. In the winter, the Pueblo retired to their centralized settlements. A big part of what we would today call “fuel reduction” in the forest came from the use of firewood for cooking and heating. It takes a lot of wood to keep warm in the winter. None of that wood consumed in that way remained in the forest to stoke hot and destructive forest fires. I think this wood consumption may be one of the missing links in how we manage for fire today. Even if we do periodic burning, if we do so w/o removing some of the dense fuel, the fire will persist too long and kill the trees. We can use this principle by removing some timber from the lands – another ecological argument for sustainable harvests. References – A study of history at Bandelier National Monument
Exchanging lessons from ponderosa to longleaf and back again
I loved the ponderosa pine ecology even before I encountered it physically. I knew it from my studies. It is similar in its fire regime to southern pine and longleaf and the ponderosa pine ecology was a kind of inspiration for my land management this year. I know that we cannot and should not try to reproduce one ecology on a different one, but the general lessons were the same for both. Pine trees should be widely spaced. The forest is more than the trees and so we should look to the total ecology, and fire was the arbiter, even if in thinning I was doing my part to set up the future diversity. Unlike Aldo Leopold, I did not actually have an axe in my own hand, but I was going to make the management work.
A side note on ponderosa pine – it is a simply wonderful ecology, beautiful to look at, productive for wildlife and it even smells good. Ponderosa pine have a kind of vanilla-pine smell. If you were blindfolded and dropping in a ponderosa pine forest, you might be able to tell where you were standing just by the smell. Ponderosa are a common montane species on Sky Islands.
Don’t mimic nature; find & use nature’s principles
My goal is not to restore pre-settlement ecology. Restoration is not possible and probably not desirable. So much has changed and nature is never settled. Embrace the impermanence. A diverse ecosystem that respects and uses natural principles but does not merely mimic nature, that is what I want on my land and what I hope to learn from my land. When talking to people generally, I often use words like “restore.” People like the idea of restoration. I do too, but I know restoration is not an option. We have too many changes in Virginia, too many invasive plants and too much human interaction ever to restore what was once here. Beyond that, there would be no way to know what you should restore. Even with precise (and impossible to obtain) information about what was here and how everything was connected, in what year was everything exactly the way it should be?
The answer is never. Nature is never finished. Virginia of 1608 is different from but not better than the Virginia of 2018 or how it was during the last ice age or when dinosaurs roamed Our beloved longleaf pine ecosystem began its development on coastal plain exposed by much lower sea levels during the last ice age and “invaded” this land as its home range disappeared under the rising seas.
All we can do is move forward using the principles in an iterative way, trying something, learning something and then trying again with the profound understanding that this too is passing, and knowing that much you get from being in nature is being in nature. It is the action and the reward.
As in Leopold’s formulation – do, reflect and then do again at a better level of understanding. The landscape that greeted English settlers at Jamestown in 1607 was appropriate to the time. What I want to restore is not that, but rather my task is to try to determine what is appropriate today and for the next generation, since the trees will live in a changed future landscape. We give the native plants and relationships the benefit of the doubt. They are presumed most appropriate until more information is available. Some relationships have changed, however, well beyond out capacity to restore, so we try what will work today. Native is not always better. Who can say what it even means to be native these days. If the environment is profoundly changed, what was native to that longitude and latitude may no longer have native virtue.
News from the various units Brodnax
We thinned 45 acres on the Brodnax place in 2017. The trees are widely space, about 50 basal area, as opposed to the 80-100 BA normal for commercial pine forests in the Southeast. The plan, in cooperation to NRCS, is to burn around 15 acres every year – a patch burn strategy to create a mosaic habitat that scientists tell us was common in pre-settlement Virginia. This allows wildlife to move out of the way of the fire while it is burning and then take advantage of the difference between the burned and unburned forest when the fire is gone.
We burned in May – a patch burn of around fifteen acres. The fire got a little hot in a few places and killed about two dozen trees. I mourned their loss, but we can move on. I decided to leave the dead trees standing to provide snags for wildlife.
Planting the longleaf plugs
I planted longleaf pine under those dead trees. It should be sunny enough for the longleaf to thrive and I hope that the longleaf roots will have an easier time if they can follow the softer underground paths as the dead loblolly roots decay. This method it follows the natural principle under which longleaf would seed in after a fire. We planted in December. Longleaf should be planted in winter. Longleaf in a natural system start to grow in winter. Taking advantage of winter rains and generally wetter soil, they get a little head start over other vegetation after a fire, and they need it. Loblolly immediately start growing up, growing above the competition. Longleaf spend their first couple years sending down deep roots, growing down first. This gives them an advantage later in adapting to drought or fire, but they can lose the race toward the sun before they get a chance to grow up. One of my tasks over the next years will be to “cheat” to help the longleaf.
Larry Walker and the McAden Hunt Club planted pollinator habitat along the roads. These should reseed themselves next season and some of the seeds will spread into the open forest, including into the areas with the killed pines. Nature is resilient, and we can help it being even more so.
Low survival rates from the 2016 planting
Survival rates for the 2016 longleaf on Brodnax were disappointing. I checked them out in December and found them very thin on the ground. I speculate that they were planted too late in season. They were not in the ground until late March and it didn’t rain much in the weeks after. Since I did not have the time or muscle to plant several thousand trees, I decided to do the easy thing. I planted around 500 longleaf near the roads and paths. Natural loblolly and some shortleaf will fill in the blank areas. Loblolly pines are prolific seed producers. In a natural system, they seed into disturbed areas and quickly establish a pine forests as an early step in natural succession. This is what I have and I will end up with a mixed pine forests, but with rather more longleaf (I hope) than anything else. I got the new longleaf from Bodenhamer in North Carolina and started planting some that same day. So, they were fresh. It was the right season and a rainy day, so they should survive well. I figure that if I am going to plant a limited number of trees, I may as well plant where it is easiest to do and easiest to tend later. I will be able to walk on the paths to spray or just look in on them. Beyond that, the paths will be sunnier.
There is an implied criticism when people say, “you are always looking for the easy way to do things.” Who the heck looks for the hard way. Reminds me of the odd saying that “you always find your keys in the last place you look.” Well … who keeps on looking after they have found them? I took the easy way with my pines and the success will be better for it. At least I think so.
Planting was both hard and rewarding. I have enjoyed being out in the fields, but my progress is slow. I am planting one every five steps. I am planting plugs and I have a plug planter. It is like one of those bulb planters on a stick. It pulls out a plug just a little bigger than the plug we plant. The plugs remind me of carrots. I have been punching the hole and them rotating the planter so that it creates a circle of bare ground. I hope the works. Will see next year.
Contemporary accounts of the burning are included here & here.
Diamond Grove/Chrissy’s Pond I had planned to thin this unit in 2019, but I think now I will delay until 2020. The trees at that time will be 17-years-old. My current plan is to thin to 50 basal area. I think that I am going to make that my signature on my land. I will clear cut an area of about five acres near Genito Creek. It is very we there. The pine trees are not growing as well as elsewhere on the land. I think I will replant with bald cypress, better adapted to that micro-environment. If we do experience global warming, these trees will be well-adapted. Bald cypress occurs naturally in Virginia. There are lots of them in the southeast part of the state and nearer to my land along the Nottoway River, maybe 50 miles away, so I think I will call them native. The McAden Dairy Hunt Club planted pollinator habitat & warm season grasses on the food plots this year. Seeds were expensive, but we got an NRCS grant to help defray the cost. I believe these will become self-sustaining. They will be well-established by 2020 and can spread into the sunny woods when we do the thinning.
There has not been much work to do on this unit, although I have found work to do. I mostly pull vines and try to thin out the invading hardwoods. I am not sure how much good this does, but it gives me a chance to get into the woods with something to do. The Diamond Grove place is still my favorite. It is a little more diverse than the others in terms of topography, streams and steam management zones, but I think I like it best because it was my first piece of land and I have watched the trees grow for going on thirteen years now.
BTW – there is no pond on the Chrissy’s Pond place. I had considered making one, so the name is aspirational. I call it Diamond Grove when describing it to others, since nobody would know what I was talking about if I called it Chrissy’s Pond.
Freeman
This was the unit with the most activity in 2018. We thinned to 50 basal area and made clearings of ¼ acre in every acre. The plan is to plant longleaf in the clearings and under some of the thin loblolly. This year I got around 2800 longleaf from Bodenhamer and we did a planting day. The kids did the planting and managed to get around 1700 in the ground. I plan to go down in the next few weeks and get the rest in the ground. I am glad that the kids are involved. I hope this will strengthen their ties and love of the land. Mariza wrote a nice blog post about her experience. I think they had a good time and bonded a little more with the land. I want them to experience some of the joy I feel in the forests. In some ways, their experience will be even richer, since they will have more time to see the changes and developments.
It is a little selfish, but I hope that when they are walking on the land decades hence that they will sometimes remember me, “and all my grave will warmer, sweeter be.” Department of Forestry was going to burn the cutovers, making it easier to plant and manage, but it has been way too wet this year. They did make some planting grooves that knocked down the brush and made it easier for the kids. We will need to burn every 2-4 years going forward. I think we will do it closer to the 4 years interval. That seems sufficient to keep the hardwoods and loblolly out of the longleaf and it burns out the litter enough. Longleaf are fire adapted, but the fire does not leave all of them unharmed. Anyway, I will observe and try to learn.
Forestry and looking for meaning in life I cannot remember a time when I did not feel balanced & connected while being in forests. I consider myself a resilient person. I can bounce back from most setbacks, but only because I find peace in grove of trees or a patch of prairie. W/o this refuge, I do not think I would last very long. But it is not getting away from civilization and the city that matters. It is getting to, getting to a place where I feel connected. Getting to a place where I can look into the book of life, even if I cannot understand the writing. I take comfort in knowing that so much is unknowable but still feeling a part of it. Interaction with my land over the course of years or decades takes this to a higher level. I enjoy and appreciate the “untouched” land, untracked wilderness, and in some places I enthusiastically support the idea embodied in the signs the says, “Leave only footprints and take only pictures.” But not always.
Humans of nature and wandering in nature I do not hold with the idea that humans and nature are separate or should be kept apart. There are places humans should touch and places that I personally should touch and change.
I have been wandering forests my entire adult life, most of my adolescence and some of my childhood. I learned to identify the trees, soil types, & topography, and doing that gives me great joy. I love forests, but my thinking about ecosystems has changed. I used to like to wander lonely as a cloud. I didn’t want to see the signs of human “damage,” and that is the word I used for any human activity in the forests. Of course, I implicitly made exception for paths and markers. In retrospect, I see that as a little hypocritical.
You cannot step twice into the same forest These were feelings of a young man with more passion for the natural world than experience with it, and maybe I could indulge those passions because I knew I would get my wish. It was an abdication of responsibility. Look what THEY have done to my natural world. If they would just let nature decide, everything would go back into balance. I am different now. To be fair to my young self, I was acting on information that has since been overtaken by events. Scientific understanding of ecology has changed. Back in those old days I learned about the balance in nature, the climax conditions where all nature was inexorably headed absent the damage by human. We now know more about nature’s ephemeral, even effervescence qualities, its impermanence and dynamism. Each moment in the forest’s life (and our own) is unique to be appreciated for what it is. A small alteration may grow into a great change that everybody sees or maybe you won’t perceive it at all, but (paraphrasing Heraclitus) you cannot step twice into the same forest. That is what I love now. But more than that, I came to understand that I don’t really like wilderness in the sense of land without humans.
There was plenty of the human-free planet in the countless eons before man evolved and there will be plenty more after we are gone. Will “time” stop when nobody, no human, remains to count the minutes, hours and years? It might sound arrogant to say that humanity is the measure of nature, but it is even more arrogant and downright ignorant for any humans to say that they can understand nature in any non-human way. Raw nature is nasty, cold and incompressible. No human can respect nature in its natural state and it really doesn’t matter if we do or do not. Nothing the human race can do will add or detract from nature in the big sense.
Far beyond our small ability to add or detract If we managed what we arrogantly believe and self-indulgently fear (but couldn’t really do) – if we destroyed the entire surface of the Earth, would that make any difference to a nature that encompasses a universe and worlds without end, billions of years of time and billions of light-years of space? Is there anything any of us, or all of us collectively could do that will make a difference a billion years hence?
It would make a difference to humans in the here and now. That is why we care. We can add or detract from the human experience and interpretation of nature and this is where the meaning is to be found. I am happy to see signs of “good” human intervention and sometimes even the results of a bad intervention healed. More than a century ago, a great man-made catastrophe transformed Northern Wisconsin. The great Peshtigo fire burned everything from the middle of the state to Lake Michigan. You can still see the signs in the type of vegetation and soils. We now call it old growth, but it results directly from inadvertent “bad” human intervention. The people living now benefit from this tragedy. Most of them are unaware.
You can start down the path w/o seeing the end I have long since given up trying figure the meaning OF life. I leave such speculation to the guys with the 50-pound brains, observing that if any of them have figured it out that they have not informed the rest of us. I have faith that meaning exists. I am sure of that, but it is not within human remit to understand this intellectually. We just are not up to the task. But we are not without options.
Meaning IN life – I think finding or at least seeking meaning in life is in our reach, and I believe I have found the path, even if I cannot see the ultimate destination. For me meaning in life comes from my connection with nature. I don’t know what part I play in the great scheme, but I know I am in the right place.
Chrissy and the kids were down to do some planting. The day was okay, not as warm or sunny as we would like but not very cold. A good day to plant trees.
They got around 1700 in the ground before it got dark. It was hard work, but I think everybody got some good memories. We all stayed overnight in South Hill Fairfied Inn. and had supper at South Cracker Barrel Old Country Store
I stole a couple pictures from Marisa’s post, the planters and boomer. Chrissy tended the fire and Boomer, as you see in the second picture. Third picture shows the boxes of pine waiting to be put in. Last are hunting dogs. The local guys were running their dogs to hunt deer. Bear hunters were out yesterday. They got three bear so far this year. Until about ten years ago, there were no bear around here. Now they have moved in and there are lots of them. The dogs do not pay much attention to people. They are friendly but disinterested.
I spent the day planting longleaf. Professional crews can six trees a minute. I worked all day and managed around 400, or about one per minute. I am a little worried that we will not get them all in the ground. Kids are coming tomorrow to help, but they will not arrive until 10am and it will get dark at 5pm. We have to plant 2000 trees.
On the plus side, they will have an easier time. The Virginia Dept of Forestry made furrows for me, so the kids can just walk down the rows, punch the hole and plant. It will be faster than my Neanderthal method. We had hoped to burn, but snow couple days ago left conditions too wet. The furrows may be easier to plant, although ecologically the fire would be better. Probably will not be able to burn until 2020 now. The little longleaf will need to get rooted.
My goal in the tree planting goes beyond just getting the trees in the ground. I am hoping that everyone will get closer to the land and have fun with each other. Kids will plant only a total of around 4 acres. Their acres will be the ones easier to see, so they can watch their trees grow for the next ten, twenty or more years. I will get the professional crews to do planting on most of the farm.
My first picture shows the Virginia DoF dozer that was making furrows. Next is one the longleaf I planted. Notice that there is a circle around the pine. I do that with the tool to clear a little space. that takes more time, which helps account for my slower progress. It did not matter much in that particular place, but I think it makes a difference in places with more competition. I hope I am doing a good job. I may not know for a season. The professionals do not always do better. One reason I have to plant on Brodnax is that survival was poor. I think that they planted too late. They were not in the ground until late March. Winter is the time. Ecologically, longleaf need a head start. During the winter with its cool weather and rain, the longleaf will spread its roots. That is the theory, at least. The thing I love about forestry is what also what makes me so nervous. I am never sure what will happen. Nature, weather and luck get to vote on my outcomes.
