|
Last Updated:
Apr 21st, 2005 - 21:10:55
Affiliates
Powells.com
Favorite Links
American Friends Service Committee
Friends Committee on National Legislation
National Catholic Reporter
British Broadcasting Company
The Guardian
Christian Science Monitor
LA Times
SF Gate
Oregonian
The Register Guard
Environmental News Network
Sojourners
Orion
Swans Commentary
Federation of American Scientists
Car Free Times
Indy Media
AlterNet.org
Common Dreams
The Nation
Utne Reader
Eugene Weekly
Willamette Week
Portland Tribune
Bitter Lemons.org
The Travels of our First Webmaster
|
|
|
Voices of Spencer Creek
I have always thought about starting a 12 step program for recovering tree planters. I started this disgusting habit decades ago when I was on a federal register for temp jobs and I finally got a response from the Bureau of Land Management's Medford District. Planting trees. I had envisioned some sort of park like setting with trees in pots in the back of a pickup truck and carefully digging holes with a shovel and placing the potted trees in the hole and covering it with the loose dirt. Wrong.
When I arrived in Medford for my first day, I found out that the Medford BLM force account crew planted the nastiest rocky canyons that had usually been planted before where the trees hadn't lived and private contract crews didn't want to mess with. My first day on the slope was a revelation. Myself and a dozen other fools rode out to Quartz Creek and "bagged up." This means that you dip bare root stock in a tub of water and place as many as you can cram in an allegedly waterproof bag with two compartments you cinch around your waist.
The trees come from the cooler at 33 degrees in waxed cardboard boxes or industrial strength paper bags, both of which have plastic straps holding them together. They contain 150 to 200 trees, usually, depending on the size. After bagging up, the crew slides, scrambles and falls to the bottom of of the "unit" and plants its way back to the landing. On steep ground you use a hoedad--a heavy planting hoe with a 17 inch blade which you use to divine stone. After breaking a few rocks and finally driving the steel into some soil, you wrench the tool back and forth until you have a good hole and then select the heaviest tree you have and slide the root mass into the ground and stomp the hole closed as you move to plant the next tree eight feet away.
Clank, clank, clank go a dozen hoedads in the bottom of Quartz Creek Canyon. Every once in a while you find a living tree amongst the poison oak that has survived the fierce summer heat on the rocky slope from a previous winter's planting. Most of the fools with me on this cold January day have never planted trees before either. The strap of the heavy tree bag bites into your hip and the bag leaks dirty water down your ass and you wear the earth as you battle the mud and the brush and the loose burnt slash or logger litter. After a couple of "runs" from the bottom of the unit to the landing we stop for lunch.
We burn the empty boxes and bags on the landing and stand around and warm our hands that are numbed from battering rocks. "Coffee break's over, back on your heads." We bag up again stagger back to the bottom of the hole three more times. As you plant out the bottom of the unit you don't have to go down as far or plant up as high as you did the previous run. At the end of the day, I am stupid with exhaustion. Tree planting is a lot like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer--it feels really good when you stop.
The next morning there are three less people meeting the crummies in the dark parking lot in the rain. They are capable of learning. For many years, anybody with a strong back and weak mind who dug pain could make a living planting trees. When you got out of prison or ran out of money for cheap alcohol and drugs, you could always treeplant. Most tree planters evolved to a higher plane after a while. I went on to become a permanent employee with the Bureau and found myself a "stumplord" overseeing contract planting crews, making sure that they did good good work. A "hippy chick" I had a summer fling with almost 30 years ago is now a registered nurse in Portland. Ian is now a teacher in Eugene. A recovering tree planter was a Lane County commissioner a decade or more ago.
Some fail to evolve. As cutting timber dried up, there were fewer units to plant and they would entail camping out in the rain and snow and planting until you dropped and were living like an animal and sleeping in the dirt. Many tired of this abuse and went on to bigger and better things but some resisted change and continued on to the very end.
I reflect on all this as I plant across the Siuslaw on land formerly belonging to the "evil developer" who sought to turn the end of Fire Road into a house-farm. Some pioneer a hundred years ago had cut the timber and burned the stumps to make pasture out of this flood plain and here I am planting Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine seedlings in the heavy clay for 30 cents a tree.
The land is flat so I use a shovel instead of a hoedad. I feel like Tom Sawyer as I have convinced the new neighbor who lives in the Tobacco Road house next door to dismantle the fallen down fences for the cedar fence posts to cut into firewood. I will be fifty years old in a few days. If I had to plant trees professionally, I would starve to death but I must enjoy the physical abuse in some twisted way. I only take a half bag of trees and plant a line away from the rig and back to it so I run out when arrive at the big paper bags by the trailer. It is satisfying to watch a plantation you planted grow as the years stream by. Stomp the shovel in the ground and rupture the ground one way. Withdraw the blade and turn it ninety degrees and stomp in again and break the soil the other way.
If there is water in the hole, insert a big hairy pine seedling. If not, a Doug fir or a tiny white pine. Stomp the mud closed around it and move 11 feet to the the next site. Karen wants 350 trees per acre--the minimum for a forestry tax deferment. 11' X 11' spacing should yield 360 trees per acre. It is nice going other than the heavy clay. I persuaded Karen to hire Jim to mow the field I am planting with his Bobcat tractor. It is an amazing machine with rubber tracks and a front mounted mowing deck that will pulverize even big scotch broom. Voles like to hide in the scotch broom.
They are rodents, like small rats, that gnaw the bark off the base of seedling trees. I had a hard time with voles in my little stand behind my shop and finally had to wrap tinfoil around the bases of several thousand trees to get the trees big enough to survive. A peregrine falcon cruises by low and slow. Good. It rained heavily this morning but quit around ten and so I am out planting. Not that rain matters. Trees like being planted in the rain. Linda is loading fence posts in the trailer behind the little Bronco II. I drove my four cylinder pickup out here yesterday but it is too muddy for its two wheel drive and bald tires today. I am averaging 300 well planted trees a day. I might be able to do more but I see no reason to push it.
Kevin at the end of the road is a recovering tree planter too. His wife won't let him play today. He has been busting his ass planting for a guy near town in addition to his real job. I like the commute here on this gig. I can see the roof of my shop across the muddy brown Siuslaw. I can see the steep hillside that the "evil developer" cut and Kevin and I planted a couple years ago as part of the settlement where the developer gave Kevin half an acre of land to make his lot legal, at least by Lane County's own standards.
If I squint, I can just make out little green trees on the bare mud slope. Now Linda is wadding up the old field wire after a second load of posts and I am almost planted out. I don't have a problem. I can stop whenever I want to. I have the rest of my trees to plant next weekend in the cooler at the salt mines. Early last week, I drove a company pickup to the tree nursery near Elkton and collected all 2,000 trees for BLM Eugene District. I picked up the 1,320 ordered for my moonlight job while I was at it. I could still see out the cab rear view mirror.
It wasn't that long ago when the District got at least 200,000 trees per season and it took all day to unload a couple of semi-trucks and put them away in rented cooler space down on Seneca Street. Now they all easily fit in the old former truck reefer sitting on rail road ties behind the warehouse. I have planted out and it is starting to rain so I sling the mattresses of rusty wire on top the half load of posts in the trailer and we are out of there. My hands are blistered and my shoulders and arms are sore. Fortunately I married a masseuse. The rain picks up heavy as we flee the scene. You can feel the freshly planted trees grooving on their new home as the rain molds the muddy clay around their roots.
Norm
Copyright © 2004 by Norm Maxwell
Visit Norm Maxwell's pieces about land use, firefighting and life in the country and more at West By Northwest.org:
Take Two: Jackson Road
Norm's Notebook: Battling Broom
Norm's Notebook: A Last Look from the Big Rabbit
Norm's Notebook: From Forest to McMansion, How It Could Happen Here
Norm's Notebook: A Few Acres, a Few Chickens–Who Is Living on the Land Now
Remembering the 30 Mile Fire
Old Men and Fire
The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King
Wee-wee for BB
Norm's Notebook: The Story of the Spruce Tree, and Mosby Creek, a New Land Use Lot Adjustment>
Norm's Notebook: Dead Cars and the Six Million Dollar Manx
(Editor's note–Norm's "Dead Cars" story inspired a feature story in the Register Guard, "Heaps of trouble in the woods.")
Mentoring Military Style
Three Dollar Hammer
Song of the Open Road
Remember Fire Road
Home, Home on Fire Road and more.
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
Top of Page
untitled
|
|
|
