Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. Instead I rerouted the line and cried inside at my weakness. At the timberline where a magnificent fir stood, my shoulders tightened. A curtain of cow parsnip and willows obscured the avalanche track, but the air was still. I quickly hung the pink ribbon so the tree fell inside the boundary. In a week, it would be lifeless. Delimbed, bucked, and piled along a road right-of-way, waiting to be loaded onto a truck. Ray and I rerouted all the borderlines. We condemned another ancient. And another. And another. By the time we were done, we’d stolen at least a dozen elders from the edges of the avalanche tracks. When we took our break, he offered me chocolate chip cookies and said he had made them himself. I declined and wrapped the nylon chain into a figure eight, using my boot and knee as anchors. I floated the suggestion that we could convince the company to leave some firs in the middle of the block to spread their seed. I blurted, “You know, the way they sometimes leave the big seed trees in Germany.” “We only clear-cut around here.” When I tried to explain that where I’d grown up, we’d log small patches, and the dragged logs churned the floor to make a bed for fir seeds to germinate, Ray countered that if we left some lone firs, the wind would blow them over, and the bark beetles would move in. “And the company will lose a pile of money,” he added, frustrated that I just didn’t get it.