Notice the difference in the photo, not beer but ice cream. The others are more of the usual.
We had lunch at a place called Union in San Diego’s Gaslight district. Food was good, but we wanted the ambiance of the outdoor seating.
San Diego is very pleasant. It is fairly green in the winter, since the Mediterranean climate here features warm and dry summers and rainy winters. A local friend, Dana P. Eyre told me that this winter was indeed rainy, but not outside the normal. although there have been droughty winters in the last few years.
We go back on Tuesday, not sorry to have missed the snowy weather back home. We also visited the San Diego Botanical Garden, as you can see in picture #4. Last is the entrance to the gaslight district, the San Diego old town.
Despite California car culture, San Diego is a very walkable city. It has a good troll line. We dropped off the car a day early, since we didn’t figure to need it here for the last day.
We had a beer-less lunch today in a little village called Borrego Springs. We drove from Palm Desert to Temecula in a very round about way, first going south the Salton City and then west through Borrego Desert Park.
The Salton Sea was created by accident in 1905 when water from the Colorado River broke through dikes and flooded the flat land below sea level now the Salton Sea. This “lake creation” has happened periodically in history. Water fills the basin and then evaporates. In the deep historical past, this was part of the ocean, the Sea of Cortez reached farther inland during warmer periods. In the much cooler times of the last ice age, it was part of a big freshwater lake. When California became part of the United States, there was no water. It was called the Salton Sink and was like a smaller version of Death Valley.
This incarnation of the Salton Sea is living longer because it is fed by irrigation runoff from the Imperial Valley. For some years, levels were actually rising, but more efficient irrigation has produced less runoff. The Salton Sea is now evaporating faster than it is being filled. It will become an ecological problem, as the salty dust exposed by evaporation becomes dust in the wind.
Salton City is odd. It was platted out in the 1960s as a resort community. The streets are laid out in a grid patter and have names like “Harbor,” “Marina” or “Coastal Breeze”. None of those things apply to today’s Salton City. It is mostly empty. I was surprised to learn that the city is actually growing. New houses are going up. Why not? They already have the grid. It is a depressing place, however, like visiting a Twilight Zone city.
We drove along the Salton Sea and saw parts of the Imperial Valley, the most productive agricultural area in the world. But it is not really pretty. It is like an agro-industrial place, very flat and productive.
As you leave Salton City, you go through some depressing piles of dirt, but these are full of campers. Evidently it is a good place for off-the-road. Borrego Springs is a pleasant little place. I imagine it is pretty hot in the summer.
First two pictures are us at Borrego Springs. Next is CJ driving the convertible. It was a bit too cold, but since we paid the big bucks, we wanted to use it. You can see a lot more from the open car and the mountains past Borrego Springs were attractive. Picture #4 is Salton City. That is the middle of two, really. Lots of lots available. Last is Borrego Springs.
— Okay. A day w/o beer is like a day w/o sunshine. We had the Diet Coke for lunch, we we walked over to place called Karl Strauss not far from our hotel
Had some great beer. I did the flight first and the winner was one called X Rye Zeeb. The X is just for show. The Rye is for one of the big ingredients and the Zeeb is the name of the brew master. It was a very smooth IPA. It would not meet the German purity law (Reinheitsgebot) since includes rye, but it was good beer. Chrissy had an Irish red. Our pictures show the event. In picture #4 I am looking serious. I have been told that I smile too much so people do not take me seriously What do you think of my serious look?
Joshua Tree National Park protects a unique environment where two environments meet. The Joshua Trees grow in the high desert of the Mojave. As you go downhill, you get into the Colorado Desert biome. The Colorado is a subset of the the Sonora Desert, but it lacks the iconic saguaro cactus, which is kind of a big deal, IMO.
The dominant thing here is creosote bush, also known as chaparral. This bush does not play fair. It emits a kind of toxin that inhibits the growth of other places, resulting in widely spaced bushes, each able to get enough water. They look like somebody has planted them in regular rows.
Another common plant in the Sonoran Desert is the cholla cactus. My cousin Carl Hankwitz warned me about them. If you get near, they stick into you. They call it the jumping bush because it seems to jump on you and hold you down.
Joshua Tree was going to be shut down because of the shutdown, but they opened today with volunteers and money from entrance fees paid voluntarily. There was some vandalism a couple days ago. I have trouble understanding the malice that goes into destroying nature. The logic of keeping it open was that visitors would help avoid vandalism by at least providing witnesses to disapprove.
We first visited the park in 2010. I was at Camp Pendleton for a Marine training exercise and Chrissy came after. I rented a car, but it was a piece of crap, so I took it back before CJ arrived. They had a convertible, so we traded up. Since that time, we have really enjoyed convertibles. I don’t think it is worth it to own, but renting once a year it is nice to have. It was not really warm enough to drive with the top down, but we did it anyway, using the heater to make it okay. You really see a lot more.
Joshua trees form a kind of savanna. The little ones look like longleaf pine in the bottle brush phase, as you can see by the second photo. Photo #3 is just a nice sunrise photo. #4 shows me close the the cholla cactus. I did not touch. Last is ocotillo. It is a deciduous tree, but not dependent on season. Instead, it is rain dependent. After it rains, the leaves come out. This can happen five times a year.
A very eventful day. We went to Joshua Tree National Park and visited Palm Springs. I will write about such things soon, but let me start with the usual beer pictures. We went to Babe’s Bar-B-Que & Brewhouse for pulled pork and beer.
I don’t think pigs & beer get the credit they deserve for the advance of civilization. Recent scholarship indicates that beer came before bread in the use of grain. It is an excellent way to preserve the otherwise perishable product and provide carbohydrates into the future. Pigs are one of the world’s most efficient protein machines, and they recycle superbly. They grow fast and they can subsist on garbage that would otherwise just be wasted. Peasants could feed the pigs the slop they no longer wanted to eat and shortly harvest a bonanza of pork products.
I believe it is true that w/o pigs and beer, Western Civilization never would have broken free from the cycle of subsistence.
So let’s toast the wonderful pig with a flight of beer.
We had two sets of beer today. The first group is at Babe’s. The other two are from lunch at an Italian place in Palm Desert. I am not leaning sideways because I am drunk, but rather because Chrissy need me to lean out of the light.
Next note in my story. This one asked about my first big trip alone. It was not a good idea, but did it anyway. I had planned to hitchhike to Arizona over spring break with a couple of young women I knew. I don’t remember both, but I do recall that one was called Sandy, a beautiful blond-haired girl. I had a crush on her and thought the trip would be a good opportunity to get to know her better. Turned out they got a better deal, i.e. a guy who had a car, so I was left forlorn with no place to go for spring break, but an intense desire to go somewhere warm, to escape what passes for spring in northern Wisconsin, winter most other places. I decided to hitchhike to Florida.
You cannot memorize all the details of the map
Lack of planning is a general affliction of 18-year-old boys.I like to think I was just more adventurous, but more likely just less circumspect. I didn’t have much money, only $15 cash, which I did not want to waste on a map, so I went to the library, memorized the road map of the Eastern USA (more on that later) and headed south on US 51 out of Stevens Point with what I thought would be supplies enough for the sojourn. Planning was not one of my skills at that time, but I had already developed the insouciance that would later characterize me. You meet a lot of interesting people hitchhiking. They tend not to be average people. Almost always male, usually generous but iconoclastic. I wanted to avoid Chicago, so I went toward Urbana and then east, ending up the first day in Louisville, KY. Well … not really in the city. It got dark, so I passed the night under a juniper bush near the highway. At first light, I hit the road again.
Sweet Alabama
I was lucky to get a very long ride. They were going someplace in Alabama. My first mistake with my memory map was to confuse I-65 (Alabama) for I-75 (Florida). When I discovered the mistake, I thought I would go east on I-10, as I recalled went to Panama City, Florida. They let me off on Hwy 10, but it was State 10 in Alabama, for reasons never clear to me called the Pineapple Highway. Maybe it is a busy road today, but back in 1974 it was rural and secluded. I stood out for a while until a guy in a pickup truck stopped. I could not understand much of what he said. The accent was impenetrable, but he seemed harmless and seemed to be going my way, so I hopped in. He went only a few miles. I worried. I could not understand the accent. Alabama was a foreign country. A farmer was working the field where I got off. He came by to talk. He had a “Gone with the Wind” accent, but I understood him well and said so. He seemed a little taken-aback. I explained that I had understood nothing from the guy in the truck. He just laughed and said.
“You talked to old James. He’s the town drunk. Ain’t nobody understands old James.”
He told me that the next town was Luverne and from there I should turn south toward Opp. A name like Opp, I could remember. Florida was more of less that way. I got a ride all the way to Brantley when it got dark. I was talking to some old boys at a gas station. They could tell I was not from around there and they were having some fun telling me about the prevalence of rattle snakes in the tall grass. I left town at dark looking for a place to sleep. It was all tall grass, no doubt full of snakes, until I saw some short grass and neat trees. A roadside park, so I slept there.
Sleeping in the graveyard
When the sun came up the next day, I could see I was not IN the graveyard but next to it. Had I known, I believe I would have had some trouble sleeping. As it was, it was nice and quiet. No snakes and no spectral visitors. But I figured I had adventure enough. I was running out of food and I wanted to go home, so I backtracked.
In the words of the old country song
I easily got back to I-65 and then got a ride with a guy on his way from Panama City to Nashville, he said to kill his wife and her no good boyfriend, an erstwhile best friend of his. Evidently, they ran off together. He was not so much concerned about the running off as that they took some cash he kept in an old coffee jar. He did not have a plan on how to do the deed. What he did have was a bottle of bourbon between his legs and he gulped it down the way I drink Coke Zero. His story sounded a little too much like a Hank Williams, Jr song. I also recalled the words of the old Roy Acuff song, “Whiskey and Blood on the Highway” (There was whiskey and blood all together; mixed with glass where they lay; I heard the moans of the dyin’; but I didn’t hear nobody pray). I tried to pay attention to the news the next day and didn’t hear about any spectacular murders, so I figure he was just talking … and drinking. People who picked up hitchhikers sometimes were just looking for someone to talk at and they often are not serious. But guns, booze, anger and cars are not things you should mix or mess with if you can avoid it. Not wanting to be there if he encountered the pair and considering that it is not great to drive with an angry drunk, I told him I needed to meet someone and bailed in Decatur.
A special providence
My next ride was good. Got all the way to Nashville. I figured I would deploy some of my $15 to take the Greyhound Bus as far as I could get, hoping to sleep during the night trip. It was getting cold. I did not know where the bus station was, and neither did the driver, but trusting luck and the benevolence of the good Lord, who protects drunks, children the United States of America and fools like me, I guessed the correct downtown exit. I was in no rush to leave the bus station, where it was warm and reasonably comfortable, so I got a ticket for a late bus. $7, about half my fortune, got me to Evansville. $15 was more in those days than it is today, but it was not that much. From Evansville I thought I could get to Hwy 41, which I recalled went thorough Milwaukee as 27th Street.
Clear & bright and icy cold
Got off the bus just as the sun was coming up. It was a bright and clear day but otherwise not a good day to be out. A winter storm has passed through the night before, leaving that wonderful clear sky, an early morning temperature of -5, ice on the roads and not much traffic. Nevertheless, I got picked up quickly by a nice old guy. He told me that he usually did not pick up hitchhikers but that he thought I looked pathetic in the cold. He drove me to Terra Haute and bought me breakfast. I was hungry, and hunger is the best cook, so I still remember fondly the ham and eggs I had at Waffle House. My next ride seemed a nice guy but was a four-lane a-hole. He drove me not far and then told me to get out in the middle of nowhere. He laughed as he drove off. I looked up to see a sign saving, “Rockville Prison. Do not pick up hitchhikers.” I later found out that it was a woman’s prison, but the sign didn’t specify. I walked back until the sign was no longer casting its dark shadow and got picked up by a couple of young women (maybe from the prison 😊). This is uncommon. They were very nice. I do not recall where they dropped me. Somewhere in the Chicago area, but still Indiana. It was near enough that I saw the signs to I 94 and so I knew which way to go. I didn’t need my memorized map to tell me that I-94 went right past my father’s house in Milwaukee. I got a few short rides though Chicago.Chicago scared me. It was the big and dangerous city.
Chicago
My father told me that Chicago was the friendliest place in the world, an insight as based on his experience after WWII. My old man was among the first GIs to be discharged back to America after the war. They dropped him in Chicago still wearing his Army-Air-Corps uniform. So soon after victory in Europe, his uniform may have influenced people’s generosity and account for the drinks and meals they bought for him. I could not count on that. It was getting dark and it never stopped being cold. I was not optimistic. My special providence stepped in again. Some guy picked me up headed for Kenosha. I had been to Kenosha once for a swim meet. I didn’t know exactly where it was, but I knew that you could get there from Milwaukee in about an hour, and it was Wisconsin, so I was content. It got better. They guy asked where he should let me off. I told him any ramp would do since I was just going north. He told me that it was very cold, as I was aware, and asked me if I had any money. I told him that I had around $7. And he told me that he could not drop me off into that dark emptiness. He drove me instead all the way home to my father’s house.
Life lessons
It is probably not a good idea to depend on the kindness of strangers, but I was glad that I ran into good people. Besides the Rockville Prison guy and the homicidal boozer, everybody I met was okay, some were very friendly and shared lunches with me. I would have been a lot hungrier if not for that. The whole adventure lasted only four days, but it made a deep impression, so much that a half a lifetime later I can still recall details. This was the first time I was really alone and unconnected. I realized that a guy could just disappear. The most disturbing part about wandering is looking around for a place to bed down at dusk, hoping that it doesn’t rain, or you don’t get rolled. It is nice to be able to come & go when you want, but in the words of that great country philosopher Kris Kristopherson, “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” The old man was surprised to see me when I showed up home. He was unaware that we were on spring break. When I told him, he asked me where I’d been. When I told him Alabama, he said that I was stupid. Hard to disagree. But he allowed that he had hopped trains when he was a young man and once ended up in Montana. Young men are stupid. He told me that I should have stayed in Chicago overnight, since people there were so friendly that they would probably buy me drinks and give me a free meal, although he imagined things might have changed since 1945. There is a coda. I went down to the Air War College in Montgomery in 2009 to do some talks about U.S. foreign policy. I took an extra day to drive around. This time I had my own rental car and a hotel for the night. It was better. I wrote a note re at the time.
Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. The guys at Reedy Creek got the bear. They cooked it up and invited me to try some.
I thought I had tasted bear before, but since I could not remember anything about it maybe it is a synthetic memory. Anyway, this time I have it documented.
For the record, bear tastes a lot like beef, maybe with a touch of pork. Of course, a lot depends on how it is prepared. They slow cooked it. I enjoyed the meat and even more ambiance. Alex got to come too. It was good to have him back and the hunt club is the center of a real community. I sold them six acres for their clubhouse, so I feel that I had some part in, was at least present at the creation.
Besides learning what bear tastes like, I learned a few things about soybean and tobacco farming. One distressing development is that fire ants have evidently arrive in Virginia. There are multiple theories as to how they arrived. Most popular and plausible are the they arrived on harvesting equipment or that they are following pipeline construction, also carried on equipment.
Speaking of theories, there was some discussion about how there got to be so many bears around Brunswick County. Until about ten years ago, nobody could remember ever seeing a bear in Brunswick. They suddenly are ubiquitous. Some people think that bears are being captured in other places and released to the “wilds” of southern Virginia.
Natural increase and migration could explain it too. Bears have long been common in the mountains. They are legendary along the Appalachian Trails. Power lines and pipelines create corridors. Wildlife in general can wander along these and cover significant distances. Once established, they are experience something like exponential growth. In these cases, you sometimes do not notice something until they become “suddenly” ubiquitous.
There is an old children’s story about lily pads covering a pond. Their numbers grow exponentially for 30 days until they completely cover the pond, but nobody notices until day 28, when they cover about a quarter of the pond.
My first picture shows the bear ribs cooking. Next is Exit 104, with my new go to gas station, Flying J. Gas has dropped down to $1.85. I think this is the lowest I have seen at Exit 105. After that is tree planting. Took advantage of being on the farms to plant some trees. It was a big advantage having Alex too. He planted many more than I did. The penultimate picture is the plug planting tool and last is last light looking at our trees from the hunt club.
Wildfire is interesting, and images are compelling – brave men and women fighting an implacable foe, exciting machines and aircraft deployed in battle, human anguish, then resilience and rebuilding. What a narrative!
Most of what we “know” is wrong Yet, almost everything the media reports on wildfires and most of what people understand about them is wrong and harmful, starting with the basic battle metaphor and language of war. In fairness, by the time wildfires reach fire-fighting stage, we are at war and losing a battle means loss of life and property.
But fire is not an enemy. Fire is natural. Massive destruction comes from human choices, although not conscious human design; nobody is to blame. A system emerges when people make logical and good individual decisions that taken together and over time produce bad outcomes. We do not address emergent problems well. We prefer a culprit or policy to blame. We hate it that nothing we can demand politicians do immediately will immediately solve the problem. Politicians dislike solutions that produce good only after the next elections. It is encouraging, however, that we can do things today that – over time – will produce a resilient system and improve lives.
Don’t mimic nature; use its principles We cannot mimic nature. Humans are here to stay. We can try to understand and use natural principles to inform human-natural interaction. I like to start by looking at success rather than scrutinizing failure. Some places manage fire well. We do a decent job in Virginia, but the real superstar is Florida. Fires are not prevented. That is impossible. But they are managed, and prescribed fires have kept forests healthy and robust for generations.
Fuel burns, but we have choices about where, when and how How about places with less rain and tougher topography? For hundreds of years, the Ancestral Pueblo lived successfully in mountainous, arid and fire-prone forests of the Southwest. We cannot copy their lifestyles, but what were principles that kept them safe? Put simply, they removed combustible materials by frequent surface fires, that burned brush but left large trees, and by using firewood. This latter factor is so obvious that it is easy not to see it.
Anybody who has fed a campfire or wood stove knows that they consume prodigious amounts of wood. You need a big stack of wood to keep a small cabin warm on a cold night and a surprisingly big fire just to make a pot of coffee. Consider all this heat and that all this fuel has been removed from the forest. What burns in a fireplace, stove or campfire can’t burn in a forest fire.
The principle is that fuel burns, but we have choices about where, when and how. Responsible harvests to remove biomass are one key to forest health, and good fires that burn on the surface but not in the tree-tops are another. They will not stop all bad fires but will produce a system we can live with – over time.
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.
Aldo Leopold is a kind of patron saint for me. I was introduced to his writing when I was in 12th grade. Also important, I grew up near and in Leopold landscapes.
Aldo Leopold got so much right. But in revering Leopold, we are honoring so much more than one man. His genius was to combine his own ideas with those of others and with natural trends. He understood that land ethic is written on the land, by a combination of human choices and natural principle. All of those who work on the land write their own sentences or chapters in combination with the nature on their land. It is a beautiful process, edifying to humanity. The linked article is about ecological restoration. Ecological restoration is not possible. We can use natural principles to regenerate.
From the article – “Ecological restoration, land health, resilience – they are all nouns and as such imply a definitive end-state. Rightly, one could assume we advocate for something both known and achievable. It’s neither. Ecologist Frank Egler said, “Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, but more complex than we can think.” Worse than being accused of longing for the past is being perceived as fixated on a singular expectation that’s nebulous at best and unattainable at worst. This isn’t just academic mire, but it amounts to a fundamental breakdown in communication. How will we ever democratize our ideas among the billions?
“Ecology is all about – or really only about – relationships.”
We grow in relation to the land we work, with each interaction. The land provides the lessons, but reading them requires effort and it requires time.
From the article – “Sometimes recognizing what’s best for the land community is difficult. Our management planning revealed the obvious course correction wasn’t limited by our tools so much as ourselves. More often than we’d like to admit it, probably in more arenas than we’d like to admit, our personal sensibilities, insecurities, and aesthetics heavily influence our thinking. Certainly, not everything in nature is intended to be beautiful to us or to abide by our rationale. Ecologists, of all people, know the importance of dynamic systems in nature, and yet directing such dramatic change as a major timber harvest exposed a threshold of emotions.”
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.
