Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Cutting

Ok, I know I get obsessive about stuff.  I annoy the crap out of those close to me because I will just not shut up about some things.  Then the same crap will just play over and over in my head, and when I think, "ok, I am going to force myself to distraction and ignore it,"  right away something will happen that will thrust the whole issue back in my face.

I mean, Trump actually used the word "coyotes" last night in his rant about terrible things the country faced. My daughter says it was slang for immigrants, but it was still weird.

The local who owns the large (50+) acres behind me has moved from harassing the neighborhood with coyote "hunters" and bait piles of rotting meat, to having the local Larry logger come in to cut it.

When I bought mine 20 years ago, that piece was supposedly "Resource Protected" between the marshland and the deer wintering habitat.  Somehow it was not marked that way on the newer zoning map, so there goes what should be protected habitat down the road in an 18 wheeler pulp truck.

I recognize that regrowth forest needs to be thinned, so I am not necessary against the cutting of trees.  I have had to take out a couple here, and the others have benefitted.  But I am talking gorgeous more than century old eastern hemlock and white pines, seeming like they are at least 100 feet tall, monarchs of the forest, food and home to dozens of species, gone down the road in a logging truck, beheaded and de-limbed, great red gashes of bark streaking down the sides.  Laying in the back of the truck stacked tight, sawn into lengths, next to their brothers and mothers.

I step outside at twilight and smell resin in the air.  I imagine the great stumps weeping, for it has been well into the 50's during the day and the sap is surely running, running, over the stump and soaking into the ground.  It's the lifeblood of the ancient softwood, pumping water out of the ground to spill back out, like a vision of a headless chicken spurting arterial blood, only this is a tree and it can only lie there and weep.