From The Woods

We are continuing our research into the best time/density to thin our 80 acres of Willamette Valley Ponderosa Pine, planted in areas infected with laminated root rot and therefore not suitable for Douglas-fir.

Glenn Kohler, Department of Natural Resources Entomologist, came to give us advice on the California fivespined Ips, a pine engraver bark beetle that can kill Ponderosa Pine. The beetle especially likes to feed on trees that have been thinned and left of the ground. Kohler’s advice is to avoid thinning in the spring. Thinning in the fall gives the downed trees time to dry out (and become less tasty) by the time the beetles hatch again. He also suggested lopping the thinned trees into 2-3 feet sections (up to 3” in diameter) to help them dry sooner. You can read a paper Kohler wrote about the Ips beetle here.

He looked at the bark of a dying pine and found the engravings of a red turpentine pine beetle, but found no evidence of the Ips.

At the moment we’re thinking we’ll thin to about 250-300 trees per acre this fall.

My friend Luci came to walk our trails today and we saw the most hair ice I’ve ever seen. I always thought it was just ice, but it’s actually caused by a fungus Exidiopsis effusa, that forms on dead wood. Ours seems always to be on dead alder trees.

People Older Than Trees

Dad’s friend, Merc, brought three Coastal Redwoods for our ridge above the Cowlitz River. Dad planted two, and Merc wanted to plant the last one. The following is their conversation as the planting progressed:

Merc: I like to plant between roots of stumps.

Dad: Me too—the dirt there hasn’t been compacted.

Merc: Wow! This is nice dirt!

Dad: It’s not Porter, my friend. (Merc lives in Porter, WA and his trees grow in deep, rock free “Porter Gold”)

Merc: Now, if you don’t like the way I’m doing it, go ahead and change it.

Dad: I wouldn’t interfere with this at all. It’s a very personal thing.

Merc: It is personal.

Merc goes on to tell a story about his maternal grandfather who was a timber faller for Weyerhaeuser. When Merc was five, a widow-maker fell on his grandfather’s shoulder and he was out of work for 6 months. During those six months he taught Merc to play chess. It took Merc til age 14 to beat him.

The next tree Merc wants to plant here is a Porter White Fir, which his grandfather called a “piss fir,” because when it is felled, the sap streams out.

What I’m Reading/Writing

Reading

Niall Williams’ The Year of the Child contains the following sentence. “All grief is private, you can only come to the door.” Ahhh.

Ronnie, a character in The Year of Child is reading Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls so I downloaded it from Libby, but the version I got is a disorienting BBC Radio full-cast dramatization. So I switched to another book I’d had on hold for awhile, Siddharth Kara’s The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder that Inspired the Abolition of Slavery by Siddharth Kara. Kara does a good job of showing how regular people got wrapped up in the inhumanity of the slave trade. He paints a sympathetic portrait of the physician on the ship, showing him mourning his infant son’s death. The ugly facts of slavery and its continuity into “modern” day never cease to appall and challenge.

I’ll be happy to find a different version of The Country Girls when I’m finished.

Writing

A poem from this week—thanks to my poetry group friends for making it better.

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 Gratitude to Alexander Fleming in the CVS Parking Lot

Two Amoxicillin down my gullet.
At last.

I am better
before the gel capsule even dissolves.

Ten days, two dentists and a nurse practitioner.
Diagnosis.

Periodontal abscess in the furcation of tooth fifteen.
It will need to go.

For now, bacterial cell walls
are tumbling down.

Because Fleming noticed
some mold is our friend.

Ache. Throb. Stink. Swelling.
It will be gone.

Stumptown

I got to have an adventure with Abby last week while her mama hung out at our place for some child-free time. We rode bus 77 down to Powells, spent a LONG time choosing a toy (a coloring book was the final selection), then rode the bus back.

On the way back, Abby told me her legs were tired. I said, “That’s good, that means your muscles are working.” She scoffed and said, “I don’t have muscles, only Ken (of Barbie and Ken) has muscles.”