#25 Taking Care of the Forest, the Forest Taking Care of Me

We need the tonic of wildness... We can never have enough of Nature. …

We need to witness our own limits transgressed,

and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Thoreau

Writing projects heat up, and visitors stop by my cabin in the coastal redwoods outside Willits, keeping me busy. A friend just pointed out an interesting article in the New York Times, The Busy Trap on the nature of keeping ourselves busy—and telling everyone we are—to convey self-importance or to reject the validity of quiet and slow activities as pastimes, no matter how rejuvenating and necessary they may be. Since I ended my previous post declaring that I’m still a Type-A personality in the woods, I had to reflect on being driven. I do believe that we can keep busy in positive ways when working for the good of our communities and the earth, but rejuvenation is necessary in all living things.

One of the projects that keeps me busy is tending to the forest around me. I have 23 acres of redwood, madrone, fir, and tan oak. Learning how to conserve the forest’s best qualities while minimizing fire hazard is a job in itself. Even as I agree with Thoreau about enjoying the wildness in these woods, the force of human hands long ago impacted how the forest grows and looks now, and the woods need tending.

Debris in the Forest

To get the picture of what forest stewardship can mean, here is a photo(left) of the woods that were cleared of brush and small trees along an old logging road just below the house. You can see individual trees and some logs lying on the ground.  Compare that to a photo below of woods not yet cleared of brush, an indistinguishable mass of leaves. The old adage should be, “You can’t see the forest for the brush.”

Here is another picture (left) of the trail going down to the creek with Cholo ambling along two years ago, in the fall of 2010. You can see he’s in the midst of a chaos of fallen tree trunks and branches. Most of that debris is from tan oak which grows abundantly throughout these woods, but often in small spindly forms. Here is a photo (below) of Sata on the same trail recently. 

A Brief History of This Forest: Slash and Burn

This whole area was logged thoroughly in 1951, with the bigger redwood trees cut down. Walking through the woods you come upon impressive stumps of 4’-5’ in diameter.Then, in 1952, a huge forest fire spread throughout the Sherwood Valley and surrounding hills where I live (you turn off of Sherwood Road to get to my cabin). All the fallen treetops and “slash” from the tree harvesting made for ripe forest kindling after a year. 

The charred remains are visible everywhere in these woods. Apparently the small town of Sherwood burned completely to the ground and never was rebuilt. 

As the embers cooled, new life eventually regenerated in the forest. The fallen trees you see are mostly tan oak, as in this picture (below) 

I was told that the tan oak quickly sprouted after the devastation. However, over the years as the new redwoods took root and stretched high into the sky, the shorter tan oak below them lost their sunlight and grew weak in the shade.  Also, snowfall in the winter—brief but heavy—leaves branches weighed down and soil soggy.  Hence, trees snap off, sometimes in the middle or uprooted entirely, leaving the forest looking like a battlefield, especially in the steep hillsides of the creek bed.

Present Day Fire Danger 

Even as I write this in July 2012, a forest fire has already burned down 25,000 acres of Mendocino National Forest to the northeast of Willits. A thick haze of smoke has spread for miles, including the Little Lake Valley of Willits and its hillsides. The threat of a fire is all too real.

The California Department of Forestry and our local fire departments find every means possible to get the attention of human forest-dwelling creatures to insure that we follow a few basic rules of forest fire prevention: for 100 feet from the house, clear all brush, all branches up to 10’ on the tree, and any trees smaller than a 5” diameter. For homes sitting on a steep slope, like mine, the danger of a flames racing uphill and consuming a property are even worse. So in the winter when I moved here, 2010-11, I started cleaning up the swath of woods just below me, relying on a crew of men to cut and burn. 

Now I can enjoy feeling a little safer, and the forest provides more of a sylvan glade vista rather than a wall of impassable brush.  But the environmental irony is bitter: creating several roaring fires with their particulate matter streaming into the air in order to reduce fire hazard and improve the environment.

I’ve been learning about building brush piles as a means of continuing to clean up forest debris while potentially making homes for critters. Here is another before (left) and after(below)cleaning at the top of the creek on my land that eventually joins Willits Creek far below.

The Earth Manual

Malcolm Margolin, friend, writer, and publisher of Heyday Books for nearly forty years, began his career as a writer after a stint working on replanting forests in the Olympic Peninsula and leading youth on environmental education hikes in the East Bay parks. In his 1975 book The Earth Manual: How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming It, he describes how to build trails for humans and shelters for small forest animals, recycling branches, brush, and leaves. Guiding my work here is Malcolm’s purpose in caring for the wildland: “how to stop its erosion, heal its scars, cure its injured trees, increase its wildlife, restock it with…wildflowers, and otherwise work with (rather than against) the wildness of nature.”

I’ve been trying to follow some of these lessons, though I have much yet to learn. For example, Malcolm warns about creating a trail down hill that will become a water sluice in the winter. Check! 

 You can see how neatly I dug the steps on this part of the trail, and above to the right are pieces of redwood plank and rebar used for steps. But in the last torrential rain of the winter, I discovered too late that I had not created enough of an outslope to allow for water drain off. Well, there’s always time to try again.

Cleaning up a Mile of Trail

As well as the creek bed, the old logging roads from 60 years ago form the basis for many of the trails I’ve been renovating. I’ve even found remnants of the old logging practices, such as this three-inch thick cable used to haul the logs up skid rows through the forest. 

I’ve been creating trails through these acres for the last two years. I always carry clippers and alternately loppers, a saw, a rake or a shovel to clear the path. 

Hauling logs and branches up and down the steep hillsides is tremendous exercise.

  

My puppy Sata is a little mountain goat, racing up and down the hills, bounding over logs, and trying to bite the piles of leaves I throw on top of my brush piles. 

Various work crews of friends have graced the land over the last years. My friend Nomi with her sons Izzy and Micah helped clear the path.  

My friend Keasley and his two sons Elliott and Emerson helped build steps down to the creek head and clear a half a mile of trail.

Katherine likewise made brush piles and then created an Andrew Goldsworthy type artwork of the curved redwood branches falled to the earth. (Goldsworthy’s River and Tides is an inspiration for making art with nature and in nature.) (YouTube shorts) 

Recently my crew of my two nieces and nephew, Julia, Laura and Kyrae, helped clear the trail. 

The work of cleaning up the forests makes me admire ever more the work of the Conservation Corps during the New Deal, which put thousands of Americans to work in our nation’s parks to build roads, trails, bridges, benches, lodges, and many other improvements to our parklands. As I try to make a mile of trails and sylvan vistas, I see how much vision and hard labor made our forested parks such pleasant glades to wander in.

The forest offers opportunities for giving back to the earth, and sustains us in many ways, from Sata’s little swimming hole  to places for delight and meditation.