In response to the fire danger posed by this heavy fuel loading, the Forest Service strategy has usually been to log these areas in order to thin dense forests—which are dense precisely because the natural fire cycle has been interrupted—and eliminate the ladder fuels by which a low-intensity ground fire might climb into the canopy and escalate to become a holocaust. Unfortunately, such logging has often proven to be environmentally destructive. The economic reality is that the trees most in need of removal to reduce the risk of stand-replacing fire—dead and downed trees, ladder fuels, jackstrawed ground fuels, and saplings and young trees, especially white fir—are those with the least economic value. In order to make logging pay, it is necessary to cut larger trees, green trees, and pines as well as firs, an approach that often results in a disturbed and less biodiverse forest of mostly younger trees. Add to this the fact that logging commonly causes soil compaction and erosion, destruction of wildlife habitat, and threats to water quality and that it sometimes leaves behind so much residual slash that fire danger is actually increased, and you can understand why concerned citizens worry that the solution is often worse than the problem.
When Rich finished explaining this environmentally destructive cycle of fuel loading, salvage logging, and habitat destruction, we began to wonder aloud what the forest would look like if the Forest Service could afford to manage these public lands according to their own stated objectives of watershed health, wildlife habitat, and fire control.
“To begin with,” said Rich, “you wouldn’t bring tractors in here. This unit was logged too recently. It’s already taken a beating.”
“And you wouldn’t cut so many big trees,” I added.
“Right, and you’d select for dominant species and thin for diversity,” he continued. “Basically, you’d be removing ladder fuels and reducing ground fuels to mimic the effects of a low-intensity ground fire.”
“I like to close roads,” I added, handing Rich another ice-cold Tahoe red. “Could we obliterate a few skid trails while we’re at it?”
“Why not?” he laughed. “Let’s go ahead and restore those blown-out landing zones too.”
Although the impossibility of the plan was painfully obvious to us both, we continued drinking and talking until we had fantasized a massive volunteer effort to hand-thin this part of the forest, sparing it from logging while also managing for key forest values, including wildlife habitat and fire control. It would be a model forest project combining activism and education—a collaboration between citizens and land management agencies that might result in a healthy forest, one that could also provide a baseline against which industrially logged parts of the basin could be compared.
“No problem,” said Rich as he gazed out over the lake. “All we need is a workable plan, a team of field coordinators, a shitload of free equipment, an army of volunteers, the blessing of the Freddies, and some juicy media coverage.”
That night I had a strange dream. I was standing in a primeval forest in which every tree was marked to be taken—a looming clear-cut with telltale orange blazes on every last trunk—when the markings slowly faded away, leaving a healthy forest of straight, clean, furrowed bark, standing tall and ready to catch the flakes of the first snow.
A tailgate is as good a place as any from which to begin the reformation of the world. Rich wrote an astute proposal, with which he and the League to Save Lake Tahoe succeeded in persuading the Forest Service to remove 240 acres from the planned North Shore timber sale. Instead, we would go in and care for the forest ourselves. From this urge to take care, the Tahoe Forest Stewardship project was born. Collaborating with the league and other groups, we worked out a treatment plan with the Forest Service, begged and borrowed the necessary equipment, recruited a group of team leaders, and had a series of preparatory meetings, usually held out on the forest unit we would be working. All this required a huge effort, but we were buoyed by the fact that so many people were willing to help. My favorite part of the project was working throughout the year with the other field coordinators, a diverse and talented group of foresters, activists, whistle-blowers, fly-fishers, smartasses, ski bums, and rednecks, many of whom combined these various identities to impressive effect.
One year from the tailgate, more than two hundred volunteers participated in the first Tahoe Forest Stewardship Day. Bird watchers, mountain bikers, Boy and Girl Scouts, ROTC teams, teachers, students, and scientists worked side by side to thin dense stands of saplings, eliminate ladder fuels, chip ground fuels, regrade landing zones, obliterate skid trails, and protect wildlife habitat. We had hydrologists, wildlife biologists, and fire ecologists on hand to help volunteers understand forest ecology and to add a crucial educational component to the event. Native Washoe elders also participated, telling their old stories and teaching our kids how to roast pine nuts and how to build a wickiup—an elegant, dome-shaped shelter constructed of arched willow saplings. Even the media coverage was uncharacteristically well informed. As we gathered at the end of the day for hot barbecue and cold beer, there was little left to wish for.
In the intervening thirteen years we have continued our cooperative forest protection work. Indeed, I achieved dubious fame among my fellow field coordinators the year I opted to run volunteer crews at the event rather than go on a honeymoon with my newlywed wife. My rationale, which Eryn agreed with, was simple: What the hell good is a great marriage if you don’t have a healthy watershed to enjoy it in? The success of our initial effort resulted in an expansion of the project, which is now conducted annually at various sites around Lake Tahoe. The Forest Service, at first hesitant to work with us, is now enthusiastic about this project as a model of collaborative, community-based forest management. Sensing which way the wind is blowing, the Freddies often send a film crew to the event, not to mention a guy in a Smokey the Bear costume. Having been forced by my wife to occupy half of a horse costume at Caroline’s last birthday party—the blazing hot ass half, needless to say—I’m always vigilant about slipping poor Smokey a few chilly brewskies. This act of generosity backfired last year when I discovered, too late, that the bear costume was being worn by a very sweet (and also by that time somewhat tipsy) thirteen-year-old Cub Scout. But even the incensed scoutmaster had to admit that at least my heart was in the right place.
For thirteen years I have continued to return to the patch of forest we worked in that first year of the project. Although, as today, I often bring Hannah and Caroline with me, the presence of those volunteers—by now around two thousand of them—is with me whenever I visit. Even at age seven, Hannah can appreciate what has been accomplished here; and while three-and-a-half-year-old Caroline may not yet get the big picture, she has a sense that this place is special to Dad, and she loves to come along whenever I visit. Thanks to the hard work of a lot of determined folks, this site has now become a dot on the map of what western American writer Wallace Stegner once called “the geography of hope.” It is a place that has been given new layers of narrative, and for a change it isn’t the same old story of cut-and-run exploitation. The chill of that long shadow is gone from this one place at least, and the forest here is healing itself and learning to hold water again. I’m especially glad that the girls have come along with me today. Their enjoyment of this place reminds me that our desire to care for the world is intuitive and spontaneous.
For Caroline it is a fun ride into the forest in her three-wheeled off-road stroller, though she climbs out pretty often to investigate pinecones and play in the forest duff. At lower elevations I’m struck by the glowing incense of cedars, their thick, aromatic bark reddish, twisted, and dotted with acorn-sized holes. Chartreuse moss adorns the north side of the trees in symmetrical rings. Hannah notices a pair of Steller’s jays as they flash indigo through the lower branches of the surrounding trees. The trail steepens, and we pause to rest. I point out a noiseless arc of black and gray gliding into the crown of a big cedar below us: a Clark’s nutcracker. Even the girls have a sense that this is a go
od place to be quiet. It occurs to me that silence, so commonly driven from our daily lives, is another balm that the forest produces, that it stores and holds, as it does water.
In following the trail’s grade, we rise above the cedars and into the thick Jeffrey pine forest and then climb higher still, into mixed stands of large white fir and even larger red fir, a tree whose scientific name, Abies magnifica, gives a fair idea of its grandeur. On the way to the former site of our volunteer work we pass the telltale signs of previous logging operations: skid trails that disappear like jagged scars into the forest; landing zones perhaps a decade old that remain lunar and nearly unvegetated; piles of slash that weren’t worth loading; a scrapped skid cable, splayed out like intestines. But even the areas stripped to bare mineral soil have begun to show signs of life, with small sprigs of stunted lupine struggling to colonize this miniature wasteland in the heart of the forest.
As we summit a ridgeline, Hannah asks the meaning of what for me is a too-familiar yellow sign, nailed high into the bole of a big red fir.
“That marks the border of a timber sale,” I reply.
“They’re going to cut them down?” she asks. When I nod my reply, Hannah frowns but doesn’t comment. Much of what we’ve walked through today will be auctioned and logged, even as the forest struggles to recover from having been cut over so recently. As we pause to rest, Caroline gathers pine needles into a pile, then places four cones inside it, like eggs in a nest.
When Caroline has finished playing with her nest, she climbs back into the stroller, and we hike ahead, past the yellow sign and into the unit that is not for sale—into the woods that are the home of our by now multigenerational forest project. A magical line is crossed as we step from a world that is up for sale into a world of trees that will be allowed to stand their ground. The forest looks, sounds, even smells different on this side of the invisible line, and you don’t have to be an enviro-geek—or even a grown-up—to tell the difference between land that’s been abused and land that’s been left to do its natural work. Successive winters have piled snow over the old skid trails we worked so hard to repair, pressing organic material into contact with the ground, building soil, rewilding this place. Each spring this forest gets a little better at holding and filtering water rather than shooting it off the mountain in erosion gullies that carry living soils off to cloud the lake and silt the fish-filled river that runs, invisible, in the valley below. Goshawk, California spotted owl, and other native birds have begun to return to their familiar perches in the canopy. I show the girls the berry-spangled scat of a black bear, which now has a recovering home to return to. We all have a place worth returning to—a place that is healing and in healing can somehow make the world feel right again.
It is a slow process, this work of finding home, and slower still for a stubborn desert rat like me. I suppose we need time to see the wheels within wheels of our home ecosystems turn, to understand these landscapes through the slowly deposited layers of sensibility and perception. Bringing Hannah and Caroline to this place—and knowing that I’ve had the humbling privilege of helping to make it a place worth bringing them to—reminds me that the story of this forest is now braided with the desert strand of our family’s life narrative. The rewilding project has helped me attach to this green place and to attach this place to my desert home below. Now when I gaze up to the Sierra crest during a lizard-blistering summer in the Great Basin I visualize not Lake Tahoe chalets but instead this refreshingly cool patch of forest, this fountainhead of my home watershed.
I hope to return to this place during some hot summer in the autumn of my life, when my girls are grown, and walk them through a forest that feels whole again. By then it may even appear as if our volunteers were never here at all, which would be a wonderful legacy of their hard work. By then the skid trails I helped to repair will also be invisible, and the telltale orange markings on the trunks will have slowly faded away, leaving a healthy forest of straight, clean, furrowed bark, standing tall and ready to catch the flakes of the first snow.
Chapter 10
10. My Children’s First Garden
For several years I had been promising Hannah that we would plant a special garden together just as soon as little Caroline was old enough to be able to share the experience with us. Now that Hannah was eight years old and her little sister was four and a half, it seemed that the time was finally right. I had long wanted the girls to have a garden of their own at home. I wanted to share with them a sustainable practice of labor, meditation, and production that has been essential to my life and that I hoped would become important in their lives as well. I wanted them to experience the miracle of a seed germinating, have the satisfaction of seeing things they planted with their own little hands grow to flower and fruit. I wanted not so much to watch my children’s garden grow as to watch them watch it grow and to see them grow with it. To quote Ken Kesey, I wanted to help Hannah and Caroline “plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.” And even if some of the strange plants in Kesey’s garden were illegal, his admonition to cultivate mysteries speaks directly to the higher law that governs true gardening.
The garden is not only the place where we grow food but also the place where we plant hopes and nurture ideas, where many plans grow from each thought that is sown. The garden is also a metaphor for what is peaceful, harmonious, and productive in our lives, and even our language reveals how deeply our imaginations are rooted in the garden. We celebrate ideas that are seminal, because so much can grow from the seed of a single thought. When we deeply question our culture’s values we are considered radical, because we attempt to address problems at their root. We work hard to bring our projects to fruition, for nothing is sweeter than the fruits of our own labor. The garden is the imaginatively fertile ground where we harvest metaphors along with squash and beans.
Without realizing it at the time, in planning my children’s first garden I had conflated parenting and gardening in my mind. After all, both are practices of love, attention, and creativity that result in healthy growth. Both require vigilance, nurturing, and care, and both yield sustaining harvests. Gardening and parenting are disciplines of sustainability, acts of faith in the future that must be renewed through daily practice. Of course this is the same sort of thinking employed by people who believe they are ready to have children because they managed to own a dog. Be that as it may, a gardener’s universe is all sweetness and light, and the gardener’s mind, like his or her garden, must remain an inviolable space that is impervious to the world’s heartless logic. I had been a good gardener, and now I intended to use a garden to be a good father.
Even in my glowing optimism, I knew that my children’s first garden might present a challenge. In this high-elevation desert we live amid conditions no gardener would relish: short growing season, extreme aridity, severe temperature fluctuations, desiccating winds, ravenous critters of every stripe. This is a place where even our human neighbors sometimes dry up, burn down, or blow away, which hardly bodes well for a pepper. Still, to a true gardener the unplanted garden is ever a canvas before paint, an idea not yet gone wrong, a sweet dream from which he or she has yet to awaken. As with any good idea, the trouble with a garden begins only when we attempt to realize what we have imagined.
As I spent the last nights of winter by the wood stove, sipping bourbon and strategizing to ensure the success of my children’s first garden, I realized that the pressure was on. What if the garden I promised these sweet little girls didn’t prosper? Given the metaphorical and philosophical significance of the garden, what larger, darker conclusions might they draw about their small place in the hard world if their own garden failed to come to fruition? I had to get this one right, and so I planned carefully. First, I would site the garden on the lee side of our big hill, where the hot wind would be more forgiving, and I’d stake and cage everything that grew upright to provide reinforcement against the scorching afternoon wind known locally as the Washoe Zep
hyr. I would also go to the trouble of constructing a large garden box out of railroad ties; this way I could backfill the raised bed with the primo double-mix soil I call “black gold” while also discouraging the desert cottontails and, especially, the big jackrabbits that can graze a bed to its roots in the time it takes to fetch an ale. To be safe, I’d wrap the whole garden in an impervious wire fence. In the interest of ensuring my daughters’ success as neophyte gardeners, I would also set aside my environmentalist scruples and declare the plot a xeric-free zone where the girls could water to their heart’s content. Finally, I would swallow my gardener’s pride and grow only hardy, reliable plants, those that are fast growing, difficult to kill, and, if possible, spicy enough to be unpalatable to rodents. As winter waned, I came to think of my children’s first garden as “the radish plot,” as radishes have long been the mascot vegetable for amateur gardeners: fast, easy, cheap, unfailing, and plenty spicy. In a world of waiting and suffering, the lowly radish signifies short-term gratification and certain success.
When spring came, which it does mighty late at 6,000 feet, I built the garden just as I had designed it. Reminding myself of Rudyard Kipling’s admonition that “gardens are not made by sitting in the shade,” I worked all day in the glaring desert sun, transforming a bare plot of weedy caliche hardpan into my children’s first garden. After the mattock, shovel, rake, spading fork, and field hammer were put up, I grabbed a trowel and hand cultivator and called Hannah and Caroline out to plant their garden. It was a momentous occasion, and I insisted that Eryn photograph this moment for posterity. I still treasure those pictures. In one, Hannah is deep-setting her first tomato plant with all her might; in another, Caroline is broadcasting radish seeds from her little green-gloved hand; in a third the sisters stand together, smiling broadly from behind the frame I built to trellis their beans. Throughout this photo op, though, Eryn’s face wore a look of bemusement that suggested pleasure tinged with concern.
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