Last week, I was on vacation, headed for a camping trip on the Oregon Coast. I was riding with a friend from Portland and her daughter, and my husband and son were following in our car. As we neared the coast, and the forest grew more dense, I noticed a smell. It wasn’t offensive, exactly, and seemed organic in nature, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was, though it seemed familiar somehow.
More miles passed, and suddenly, as I saw huge naked patches of land where the forest had recently been clear-cut, I realized with a sinking feeling what the smell was. It was sawdust. Sawdust from the beautiful old trees that until recently grew on that land. We were behind a truck filled with it, and I hadn’t noticed.
Whoever plans the forestry was smart enough to leave a “green belt” along Highway 101, which is the coastal highway traveled by tourists visiting the beautiful Oregon Coast. As my friend Julie said, though, it’s only a thin “veil” of trees. If you bother to look closely, you can see right through to the bare wasteland beyond the trees, where more acres have been clear-cut. In many places, you could have walked through the “veil” in a minute or so. We decided that although we liked having the trees along our drive, we wished the lumber companies had cut all the way to the highway, so that people would have no choice but to see what is happening. No choice but to feel the emptiness, the barrenness, the loneliness of the land without its trees. It was desolate, and it made me cry.
There will probably be a poem or two from this experience, but right now it’s too raw. I enjoyed the rest of the vacation, but much less than if I could have believed that the forests we were camping in extended across the land as they once did. I wondered…by the time my son is old enough to bring his children camping there, will there be trees left outside the state park campgrounds at all? If there are, most of them will probably be the “reforestation” that lumber companies do to salve their consciences and appease the public. But reforestation is not the same as leaving the forest to live its own life cycle. It is not natural for all the trees in a forest to die at one time, for the seeds in the ground to be crushed by the heavy equipment, for the wildlife to suddenly have no home. In a natural forest, at any one time there is a healthy blend of young saplings, mature trees, and fallen old trees that provide habitat for a wide range of wildlife. None of that remains in the empty spaces I saw. Just stumps and torn up earth.
Yesterday, after returning home, I stumbled across the poem “Inventing Sin” by George Ella Lyon, which reads in part:
God is fed up
All the oceans she gave us
All the fields
All the acres of steep seedful forests
And we did what
Invented the Great Chain
of Being and
the chain saw
Invented sin
God should be fed up. I know I am. And I suspect God weeps as she looks at where the forests used to grow. As we all should. We should weep, and then in our outrage we should demand that no one rape our Mother, the Earth that gives us life, in order to slake their hunger for more, more, and ever more wealth.