Word: forester
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years, Dale Page has been a cutter of trees, as was his father before him. He may have cleared as much of the ancient Northwest forest as any man. This day he is clear-cutting a three-acre patch of old growth. The area is designated as a possible spotted-owl habitat, but Page has never seen one of the birds. He stands among rhododendron, sword ferns and buckbrush, his body testimony to the perils of his work. The pitch of his chain saw screaming at 13,000 r.p.m. has left him hard of hearing, an upended log cost...
...another. With a 20-lb. saw hoisted to his shoulder and an ax in hand, he walks on logs with the grace of a gymnast on the high beam. But standing atop the trunk that was a 200-year-old tree, he can still share in the forest's loss. "It doesn't take long," he says. "To think it's been growing for 200 years or better, and then it's down in a minute and a half. It's kind of sad. It affects you. I don't think you'd be human if it didn...
Page counts himself an ally of nature, not an enemy. "An old-growth forest is unique," he says. "There's just something about a big tree that makes you feel kind of small." Like many of the other loggers, his relationship with the forest extends beyond the edge of his saw. "After working in the woods for 44 years, I guess wilderness means a place you can go where you know man hasn't trifled with it, where you can think it's the way Ma Nature wanted it to be." But Page looks beyond the clearing...
...Oregon's Umpqua National Forest, a lumberjack presses his snarling chain saw into the flesh of a Douglas fir that has held its place against wind and fire, rockslide and flood, for 200 years. The white pulpy fiber scatters in a plume beside him, and in 90 seconds, 4 ft. of searing steel have ripped through the thick bark, the thin film of living tissue and the growth rings spanning ages. With an excruciating groan, all 190 ft. of trunk and green spire crash to earth. When the cloud of detritus and needles settles, the ancient forest of the Pacific...
...April 1968, on the eve of Father's birthday, I arrived as usual to spend the weekend at the dacha. Father wasn't inside. Mama said that he had gone to the edge of the forest...