Column by Hal Walter
Mounain Life – May 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
IT WAS A VICTIM of the drought. That much must be understood.
The smallish ponderosa pine, maybe 20 feet tall, had turned brown over the last two years, then dropped nearly all of its needles. Its upper branches showed telltale signs of porcupine gnawing. And I had begun to eye it as firewood.
Following the shortest but coldest winter in recent memory, March had been unseasonably warm and dry. Each night when I went to bed I checked the temperature and marveled at temperatures in the high 40s and even low 50s when only a month prior I had seen 20 below zero. My firewood pile, which shrank at an alarming rate in February, had somehow stretched through this March heat wave.
But now it was April and the forecast was for a cold and wet weekend. April always is the cruelest month. And the firewood pile was now reduced to scraps. I hadn’t felled a tree in a couple of years. When things are good in the editing and writing business it makes more sense to just buy firewood. But a recent boom-to-bust cycle in the Walter household economy dictated that the little tree should fall before the cold front arrived. So I fired up the chainsaw the evening before the storm’s arrival and walked out to the standing firewood.
Since this tree stood alone and in the open and there was no danger of hanging it up, accuracy was not a concern. Well, except that I did not want the tree to land on me in full view of the neighbors. I once worked on a trail-clearing crew and I know how to drop trees. I looked up the trunk to see the general direction of its lean, then notched the base and watched it fall right where I wanted it. And it hit the ground in an explosion of tinder-dry sticks and twigs.
On the ground the tree seemed more like a bush atop a trunk. The bottom branches appeared the best place to start and so I just waded on in with the Stihl screaming full throttle. As I carved away at the little tree, blue stains indicated pine beetles. Foresters say during times of drought pine trees cannot produce enough sap to force the beetles out when they bore into the trunk. I would guess a small tree like this probably didn’t have the root system of the bigger trees that somehow have survived.
As the branches became small round woodstove logs, I began to feel sentimental about this little tree, almost remorseful to be cutting it up. It probably wouldn’t have bothered me so much had this tree had company. But for as long as I have lived here it had been a small but lonesome character on the property — a little pine in the middle of my southwest pasture. My animals had stood in its shade. It broke up the landscape that otherwise is quite barren. There was a certain symbolism.
THERE’S ANOTHER DEAD PONDEROSA in this same pasture. On the edge of a stand of larger trees, this big dead tree is a huge gnarled specimen of weathered wood. It flourishes sunsets and houses broods of various birds each spring, included kestral hawks. I would burn my furniture and outbuildings before I would consider making firewood of it.
I finished lopping the branches into small fireplace logs, and carved the trunk into bigger chunks. At last I turned off the saw and piled the slash into one big heap. Then I sat on the stump in the evening light, picked up one of the trunk logs and began to count rings. As I counted, I could see the history of dry and wet years denoted by thin and thick rings. I counted and recounted several times but could not get a firm number because, depending on the radius, some of the rings ran together. I finally decided this tree was older than myself, but under 50. It had probably been a sapling when I was a young boy. It grew into a tree before this ranchland became a subdivision. And for about one fourth of this tree’s life, I had shared this same landscape with it.
I recalled Aldo Leopold’s description of making firewood from a grand old oak in his classic A Sand County Almanac. In his essay “Good Oak,” Leopold recounted the environmental history of a tree and a nation through its growth rings. That tree was 80 years old and had also fallen victim to Mother Nature — killed by a lightning strike. Leopold also expressed sentimental feelings about making firewood of the tree. Leopold had cut the good oak with a crosscut saw and taken a fair amount of effort and time to reduce the tree to firewood. And as a result he had firewood for the better part of a winter.
BY CONTRAST, in just a few minutes I had reduced my little pine to a pile of wood that would barely make a small pickup load and would last only a few nights. Still, the relatively short history represented by the growth rings spanned significant changes in the local environment. When this tree was a seedling, Hard scrabble Canyon had not yet been paved. The tree had stood over this country as it transitioned from open rangeland to subdivision.
Only in this tree’s later life had there been a house nearby, inhabited by myself for the last 13 of those years. In the last eight or nine years of this tree’s life, trophy homes had begun to spring up in the neighorhood and the main employment changed from “miner” or “rancher” to “consultant.” Never in this tree’s life had there been a drought as severe as 2002, the year it died.
With a wheelbarrow full of wood and a mind full of nostalgia, I pushed toward the house. On the way across the field I noticed a tiny piñon sapling about one foot high, sprouting alone in the field. I hoped that it would grow to replace the dead ponderosa I had just made into firewood. Maybe a piñon would be better suited to the drought conditions than the little ponderosa.
Inside, I lighted the small blaze, a mere watchfire by comparison to the great blazes which kept us warm through the icebox months of January and February. I gave thanks to the little tree for the warmth.
The wet spell arrived the next afternoon, with thunder and lightning and alternating sheets of rain, sleet and snow. And it went on for days. Nine days later we had received moisture, more or less, every day. Some days this precipitation was significant.
Hal Walter burns wood, raises donkeys, and constructs prose on 35 acres in the Wet Mountains.
