Ancient Forests of the Far West
Gary Snyder
from A Place In Space
“The human community when healthy,
is like an ancient forest.”
We were walking in mid‑October
down to Sailor Meadow (about 5,800 feet), to see an old stand on a broad bench
above the north fork of the American River in the northern Sierra Nevada. At
first we descended a ridge‑crest through chinquapin and manzanita, looking
north to the wide dome of Snow Mountain and the cliffs above Royal Gorge. The
faint trail leveled out and we left it to go to the stony hills at the north
edge of the hanging basin. Sitting beneath a cedar growing at the top of the
rocks we ate lunch.
Then we headed southwest
over rolls of forested stony formations and eventually more gentle slopes into
a world of greater and greater trees. For hours we were in the company of
elders.
Sugar Pines predominate. There are
properly mature symmetrical trees a hundred and fifty feet high that hold
themselves upright and keep their branches neatly arranged. But then beyond them, above them, loom the ancient
trees: huge, loopy, trashy, and irregular. Their bark is redder and the
plates more spread, they have fewer branches, and those surviving branches are
great in girth and curve wildly. Each one is unique and goofy. Mature Incense
Cedar. Some large Red Fir. An odd Douglas Fir. A few great Jeffrey Pine. (Some
of the cedars have catface burn marks from some far-back fire at their bases—all on the northwest side. None of the other trees show these burn marks.)
And many snags, in all conditions:
some just recently expired with red or brown dead needles still clinging, some
deader yet with plates of bark hanging from the trunk (where bats nest), some
pure white smooth dead ones with hardly any limbs left, but with an occasional
neat woodpecker hole; and finally the ancient dead: all soft and rotten while
yet standing.
Many have fallen. There are
freshly fallen snags (which often take a few trees with them) and the older
fallen snags. Firm down logs you must climb over, or sometimes you can walk
their length, and logs that crumble as you climb them. Logs of still another
age have gotten soft and begun to fade, leaving just the pitchy heartwood core
and some pitchy rot-proof limbs as signs. And then there are some long subtle
hummocks that are the last trace of an old gone log. The straight line of
mushrooms sprouting along a smooth ground surface is the final sign, the last
ghost, of a tree that "died" centuries ago.
A carpet of young trees coming in—from six inches tall to twenty feet, all sizes—waiting down here on the
forest floor for the big snags standing up there dead to keel over and make
more canopy space. Sunny, breezy, warm, open, light—but the great trees are
all around us. Their trunks fill the sky and reflect a warm golden light. The
whole canopy has that sinewy look of ancient trees. Their needles are
distinctive tiny patterns against the sky—the Red Fir most strict and fine.
The forests of the Sierra Nevada,
like those farther up the West Coast, date from that time when the earlier
deciduous hardwood forests were beginning to fade away before the spreading
success of the conifers. It is a million years of "family" here, too,
the particular composition of local forest falling and rising in elevation with
the ice age temperature fluctuations, advancing or retreating from north and
south slope positions, but keeping the several plant communities together even
as the boundaries of their zones flowed uphill or down through the centuries.
Absorbing fire, adapting to the summer drought, flowing through the beetle-kill
years; always a web reweaving. Acorns feeding deer, manzanita feeding robins
and raccoons, Madrone feeding Band-tailed Pigeon, porcupine gnawing young cedar
bark, bucks thrashing their antlers in the willows.
Sugar Pine, Ponderosa Pine,
Incense Cedar, Douglas Fir, and at slightly higher elevations Jeffrey Pine,
White Fir, and Red Fir. All of these trees are long-lived. The Sugar Pine and
Ponderosa are the largest of all pines. Black Oak, Live Oak, Tanbark Oak, and
Madrone are the common hardwoods.
The Sierra forest is sunny-shady
and dry for fully half the year. The loose litter, the crackliness, the
dustiness of the duff, the curl of crisp Madrone leaves on the ground, the
little coins of fallen manzanita leaves. The pine-needle floor is crunchy, the
air is slightly resinous and aromatic, there is a delicate brushing of
spiderwebs everywhere. Summer forest: intense play of sun and the vegetation in
still steady presence—not giving up water, not wilting, not stressing, just
quietly holding. Shrubs with small, aromatic, waxy, tough leaves. The shrub
color is often blue-gray.
The forest was fire-adapted over
the millennia and is extremely resistant to wildfire once the larger underbrush
has burnt or died away. The early emigrants described driving their wagons
through park-like forests of great trees as they descended the west slope of
the range. The early logging was followed by devastating fires. Then came the
suppression of fires by the forest agencies, and that led to the brushy understory
that is so common to the Sierra now. The Sailor Meadow forest is a spacious,
open, fireproof forest from the past.
At the south end of the small
meadow the area is named for, beyond a thicket of aspen, standing within a
grove of flourishing fir, is a remarkably advanced snag. It once was a pine
over two hundred feet tall. Now around the base all the sapwood has peeled
away, and what's holding the bulky trunk up is a thin column of heartwood which
is itself all punky, shedding, and frazzled. The great rotten thing has a lean
as well! Any moment it might go.
How curious it would be to die and
then remain standing for another century or two. To enjoy "dead
verticality." If humans could do it we would hear news like, "Henry
David Thoreau finally toppled over." The human community when healthy, is
like an ancient forest. The little ones are in the shade and shelter of the big
ones, even rooted in their lost old bodies. All ages, and all together growing
and dying. What some silviculturists call for—"even-age
management," plantations of trees the same size growing up together seems
like rationalistic utopian totalitarianism. We wouldn't think of letting our
children live in regimented institutions with no parental visits and all their
thinking shaped by a corps of professionals who just follow official manuals
(written by people who never raised kids). Why should we do it to our forests?
"All-age-unmanaged"—that's a natural community, human or other. The industry prizes the younger and
middle-aged trees that keep their symmetry, keep there branches even of length
and angle. But let there also be
really old trees who can give up all sense of propriety and begin throwing
their limbs out in extravagant gestures, dancelike poses, displaying their
insouciance in the face of mortality, holding themselves available to whatever
the world and the weather might propose. I look up to them: they are like the
Chinese Immortals, they are Han-shan and Shi-de sorts of characters—to have
lived that long is to have permission to be eccentric, to be the poets and
painters among trees, laughing, ragged, and fearless. They make me almost look
forward to old age.
Counterpoint Press
