Tovar Cerulli

by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance

  What got my attention was the deer. I was reading Richard Nelson’s Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America. Deer, I learned, eat just about everything farmers grow. They eat greens and pumpkins, corn and wheat, cranberries and carrots, avocadoes and wine grapes. They have a particular fondness for soybeans, used to make tofu, soy milk, and many other nonmeat, nondairy products sold in vegetarian-friendly stores around the country. They damage apple, plum, pear, cherry, and almond crops, often killing young trees. Individual farmers can sustain tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of crop damage in a year; in many states, total annual losses run into the tens of millions.

  In states where agriculture is a major sector of the economy, wildlife agencies have to keep the whitetail population down to a reasonable level. Often, that means encouraging hunters to shoot a lot of deer during hunting seasons. It also often means issuing special permits to farmers, allowing them to kill deer in other seasons, day or night. And farmers do kill them. By the thousands.

  This isn’t just out in the agricultural breadbasket of the American Midwest. Nelson interviewed an organic farmer in northern California who grew specialty greens for upscale restaurants and grocery stores in San Francisco. A few times a year, the farmer had to shoot a deer. Because he didn’t like killing, sometimes he would cut the deer open and drag it around the perimeter of the field with a tractor, leaving plenty of blood to scare other deer away. Most years, he didn’t have to kill more than five. In Westchester County, just an hour north of Manhattan, another farmer gave Nelson a more startling figure: On his farm, they sometimes shoot ten in a single night. And still the crop damage continues. Nelson’s summary of the situation brought me up short:

  Whenever any of us sit down for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a snack, it’s likely that deer were killed to protect some of the food we eat and the beverages we drink … Everyone in modern North America who lives each day on agricultural foods belongs to an ecological network that necessarily involves deer hunting.

  Deer are, he reports, “a fundamental part of our personal ecology. In this sense, the blood of deer runs through our veins as surely as we take bread and wine at our table.”

  I tried to keep that knowledge at bay. I told myself that those were bigger farms, far away, and that we weren’t getting produce from those places. I was wrong.

  In the end, I had to consider Joey, the kindly organic farmer whose veggies travel less than a mile to the produce display of the crunchy local food co-op—in whose fields Cath and I have often picked luscious strawberries. You’d be hard-pressed to find a gentler, more conscientious steward of the land. Ask him about deer, though, and he’ll tell you: “I’ve got a few guys on call. When there’s too much damage, they come and plug one and we share the venison.” Or ask about woodchucks: “I smoke-bomb their burrows constantly. Preemptively. A tunnel in a sandy bank right next to a kale field? Someone’s going to move into that!”

  Damn. I didn’t want Bambi and Chuckie getting plugged and bombed as part of my “personal ecology.”

  Before long, though, I began to see that these deaths were among agriculture’s lesser impacts, constituting only a fraction of the story. All it took was a few years working as a logger: work that grounded me in the local landscape and opened my eyes to its history.

  I have always cherished forests, for their beauty—the bright, pale green of the year’s first leaves, the majestic silhouette of big white pines against a summer sunset, the fire of autumn maples, the delicate bones of snow-laden twigs—and for their special places, like the spot in the oak woods near my father’s house where bedrock rose to the surface. Deep, feathery moss and low blueberries grew around the edges of the bare, weathered granite, tracing an outline suggestive of an eagle in flight.

  Yet I have also depended on wood all my life. It framed the houses I grew up in, as it frames this one here on the little sandy plateau above the Winooski River. In most of those houses, the tree-ness of the structure was hidden, clothed outside with asphalt shingles or peeling paint, dressed up inside with plaster and wallpaper. In others—like the low, earth-bermed solar house my father built when I was ten—the nature of the material was more evident. The big exposed rafters for that house had been salvaged from a barn near Quincy, Massachusetts. Though they had been milled clean and square decades ago, thick, sticky sap still oozed from the wood in places, reminding me of its life in a forest somewhere, long before I was born.

  Most of those houses were also heated with wood, usually delivered cut and split, dumped off the back of a truck in sixteen-inch lengths. And the umpteen thousand board feet I’d handled as a carpenter all came from the lumberyard—sawn, planed, and neatly sorted by length, with only knots or the occasional pitch pocket to make me think of a spruce, fir, or oak.

  I had known all along, of course, that one came from the other, wood from trees. But I’d never had a hand in its metamorphosis.

  So I apprenticed to a forester-logger and set off into the woods, intent on bridging the gap between my love of forests and the necessities of shelter and fuel. As with food, I wanted to cultivate a deeper understanding of what sustained me.

  My woods mentor, Paul, wore the nearly constant hint of a smile under his short, graying mustache, as if he had just thought of something amusing. My first job with him was a salvage operation, removing trees that were already down, tipped over the previous September when Hurricane Floyd ripped its way up the coast. On the next job, though, and each one after that, virtually every tree I cut was alive. That took some getting used to. With Cath, I had cut Christmas trees for our living room, selecting ones that—crowded tight together or growing up under the power lines alongside our driveway—would have had to come out anyway. Taking down a mature tree was a different matter altogether. The first time I set my chain saw to the base of a fifty-foot pine, I paused. Though I knew why Paul had selected it to come out, knew that its removal would benefit the trees around it, knew that good use would be made of its wood, I couldn’t lightly kill this being. I said a silent prayer of thanks and apology. Then I unleashed the power of the saw, sending a rooster tail of chips through the air.

  Over time, such fellings became habit. Regrettably, I didn’t have time for elaborate acknowledgment of each death. Why, I wondered, did this bother me? Why should dropping trees seem so different from beheading stalks of broccoli or uprooting the wild raspberries and milkweed that encroached on the garden? Did killing trees feel different merely because they were bigger? Was this why I swatted mosquitoes but live-trapped house mice, releasing them half a mile away? Or was that more a matter of loyalty to my phylum—to Chordata but not Arthropoda, to vertebrate but not insect? I had, at one time, been troubled even by slapping at the latter, but eventually decided I couldn’t worry about such deaths. If insects drew my blood, or threatened to, I killed them.

  As I had hoped it would, logging grounded me in gritty transformation. Before long, I could glance at a tree and estimate how far it was to the first big crook, how many sixteen, fourteen, or twelve-foot sawlogs would come out of it, and roughly how many board feet that would add up to. Thinking that way, mentally converting a part of living nature to a volume of “natural resource,” made me uneasy at first. True, we weren’t using those calculations to make profit-minded decisions about which trees to cut. We were usually leaving the healthiest, straightest ones to grow. But, still, when I looked at a tree, I wanted to value it as a living entity, not as mere lumber. Eventually, I realized that my aim was to hold and see both: tree as magnificent being and tree as vital material.

  Meeting even a tiny fraction of our physical needs directly from the forest gave me simple satisfaction. I enjoyed hauling home the coarse, raw treasure of firewood by the third of a cord in the back of my pickup and stacking it under cover, caching a small portion of the land’s summer warmth for the cold days and nights I knew would soon come.

  Now and then, finer treasures could be gleaned. Once, as we split wood on that first salvage
job, Paul paused to pick up two pieces of maple he had rent apart with his ax. The grain had a serpentine wave to it: the figuring that woodworkers call “curly” or “flame” maple. The next year, for my mother’s birthday and my grandmother’s, I carved two long-handled cooking spoons. Scraped, sanded, and oiled, the golden wood shimmered with iridescent stripes, like the wind riffles on water just before a storm blows in.

  Logging also taught me a lesson in appearances. When we felled a tree, we would take what we could use for sawlogs, firewood, or pulp. That left limbs and tops, and the question of what to do with them. Leaving those downed treetops intact—their branches standing perhaps five, ten, fifteen feet in the air—would closely mimic what happened when a tree blew over in a storm. Wildlife like grouse and hare would find shelter there. But Paul and I tended to work on small woodlots, often near homes or recreation trails, and most landowners disliked the messiness of whole tops. They preferred to have them lopped down into lower, more compact piles. If Paul had offered treetop removal services, as some loggers do, I suspect that people would have taken him up on it, thankful to have everything chipped and shipped. Such removal, unfortunately, prevents that material from returning to the forest floor, where it would normally decompose, feeding the soil from which it grew.

  I sympathized with the landowners’ preferences. Before I started logging, I bristled at the sight of brush cut and left strewn alongside hiking trails; it looked crude, careless. My image of a good-looking forest, responsibly logged, had been one of parklike tidiness. Seeing the remains of trees that had fallen of nature’s accord, thrown by wind or dead of disease or old age, hadn’t bothered me, but signs of human handiwork had. Though my ecological concerns had been sincere, my perceptions of logging had been underpinned by aesthetic discomforts, by an aversion to the evidence of arboreal carnage. Like the landowners I now worked for, I had preferred to stroll through woods that looked undisturbed. I had enjoyed the seductive illusion of having my firewood delivered, of selecting my building materials from orderly, clean stacks at the lumberyard, the messy work done far away. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Not all logging, of course, is created equal. Done mindfully—by conscientious loggers with the financial incentive to do it right—its ecological impacts can be minimized. Under Paul’s tutelage I learned that, with good planning, softer soils could be traversed when frozen solid and the land could be protected from erosion and rutted roads. With appropriate equipment, the soil compaction that harms tree roots could be greatly reduced. With appropriate techniques, the trees we left could remain free of bark damage, which invites disease. With a little thought for our fellow creatures, dead trees could be left standing, providing nesting cavities and sources of insect food for a multitude of wildlife species, including New England’s largest, loudest, and most striking woodpecker, the pileated.

  Perhaps most importantly, working with Paul taught me to think in forest time. In the woods, signs of a past landscape were all around us: old stone walls, rusty barbed wire, the occasional stacked-fieldstone foundation marking an old cellar hole. Bit by bit, I began to grasp the meanings of things that I had seen long ago, but not understood.

  As a boy, I had seen nineteenth-century photographs of Vermont, the hills bare and stark. The pictures looked nothing like the forested landscape I had grown up loving. In combination with other images I had seen—of New England log drives, the rivers packed with wood from shore to shore—they planted the seeds of my earliest, sinister perceptions of logging. The story seemed simple: The forest primeval had been pillaged by men with axes. Like most such stories, this one was mistaken, both in its simplicity and in its narrow assignment of blame.

  When European colonists arrived in present-day New England, the land was already under active management, especially along the ocean and the major rivers. The coastal forest from the Saco River in Maine to the Hudson was, in the words of environmental historian William Cronon, “remarkably open, almost parklike at times.” In some places, there were no trees at all, for the native peoples of the region had pushed the forest back from the Atlantic, sometimes by miles. The site of present-day Boston, for instance, was treeless for thousands of acres and colonists had to harvest wood from nearby islands. The primary cause of this coastal deforestation? Agriculture. In these places, American Indians had established seasonal farming settlements, clearing fields and collecting vast quantities of firewood.

  Parts of the inland forest had long been managed for food, too. Archaeological digs in western Massachusetts suggest that Indians were periodically burning the forest understory as much as five thousand years ago. This burning favored plants, like blueberries, that provided edible fruit, and fire-tolerant trees, like chestnut and oak, that provided edible nuts. As Cronon points out, burning also accelerated the recycling of forest nutrients back into the soil. This, along with the absence of brushy undergrowth and the increased light that reached the forest floor, boosted the growth of herbaceous plants, which, in turn, allowed deer, elk, and other animals to thrive. In his book Reading the Forested Landscape, ecologist Tom Wessels suggests that the fire-swept, grassy earth also made it possible for humans to stalk those animals quietly and take unobstructed shots with bow and arrow.

  Farther north, in what is now Vermont, native peoples’ management of the landscape was concentrated along rivers, where they cleared fields. When colonists arrived here en masse in the late eighteenth century—after the 1760 British victory at Montreal ended the French and Indian War—it was in these riverside fields, and in old beaver meadows, that they built their first settlements. When those were used up, they carved homesteads, fields, and pastures out of the forest. Trees were felled and burned where they lay, the resulting ash used to make potash, in turn used for the production of fertilizer, soap, and gunpowder.

  In the late 1700s, most Vermont farms were small, geared toward producing food for farm families. And commercial logging was concentrated in areas where large white pines, long valued as saw timber and as ship masts, could be easily transported by river. That pattern would soon change, however, and the intensity of the final assault on Vermont’s forests would have as much to do with the market for wool as with the market for wood.

  In 1810 and 1811, taking advantage of the chaos surrounding Napoleon’s ongoing attempt to conquer the Iberian Peninsula, a merchant named William Jarvis, then U.S. consul to Portugal, exported several thousand of the region’s jealously guarded merino sheep, prized for their fine and bountiful fleece. He sold most of them, but reserved a few hundred for himself and brought them to a farm he had purchased in Weathersfield, Vermont, a small town in the Connecticut River valley some fifty miles north of the Massachusetts border.

  With larger political and economic forces on their side—including the War of 1812 and related blockades, tariffs, and embargoes—merinos soon dominated the state. “A wool craze swept the region,” wrote historian David Ludlum, “a mania as powerful as any religious fanaticism.” By 1824, Vermont was home to almost half a million merinos; by 1840, 1.7 million, nearly six sheep for every person. Textile mills popped up everywhere. And Vermont’s remaining forests vanished in a single human generation. Few places were spared, as even steep hillsides went from woods to pasture. By 1840, three-quarters of the Green Mountain State was treeless, most of it grazed by sheep.

  To keep their sheep contained, the settlers needed fences. With wood harder and harder to come by and the invention of barbed wire still decades off, they turned to the material at hand: stone. Between 1810 and 1840, the bare hillsides and valleys of New England sprouted thousands of miles of stone barriers. Tom Wessels suggests that these walls, constructed so swiftly and containing more stone mass than the Great Pyramids of Egypt, could be considered “the eighth wonder of the world.”

  A wondrous feat they may have been, but within just a few years the animals they contained were already devastating the land. By the 1830s, erosion from overstocked hillside pastures was a serious problem. The
pastures themselves became less productive and Vermont’s streams and rivers silted in, causing floods.

  Watching their meager soil wash downstream, Vermont’s hill farmers looked west toward the deep, boulder-free earth of the Ohio River valley. The Erie Canal was open and the railroad was extending its reach. By the early 1860s, tens of thousands of Vermonters had departed and the state’s wool industry was in decline, crippled by its own brutal treatment of the land, by changing tariff laws and tumbling prices, and by fierce competition from states to the west, where production costs were far lower. Those who stayed in Vermont began turning from sheep to dairy cows, working the deeper soils of the river valleys.

  Logging continued—for wood, for charcoal, and for potash—but by 1900 more than half of Vermont’s open land was already returning to forest. Soon the trend would be bolstered by the reduced need for hay as the automobile replaced the horse. Hay fields would lie fallow, waiting to be reclaimed by trees.

  A century later, with Vermont three-quarters forested, Paul and I were working among the sheep farmers’ stone fences and cellar holes. It was dawning on me that although settlers’ axes had felled the trees that once stood here, it was farming, pasturing, and textiles that wrought the real havoc and kept these hillsides raw and bleeding. Freed from the yoke of agriculture and industry, the land had returned to aspen, pine, and maple. Today, with the great flocks of sheep gone, the forest thrived, even with loggers still working the hills.

  After a day in the woods, a day of felling trees this way and that, leaving piles of hacked-off limbs everywhere I went, I would drive home past cornfields. I would return to the clearing where our house stands, to the placid scene of the flower and vegetable gardens Cath and I had built. And I would wonder: Is it neatness—the even regularity of raised beds and tilled rows, of summer corn and autumn stubble—that makes gardening and farming appear so much more benign than logging?