When you fly over or drive through Maine, the trees seem ubiquitous, forever, an endless resource. It's hard to believe that there is little old-growth forest left. Almost all of Maine has been logged.
An old-growth forest is usually around 200-300 years old, so any parcels left predate the huge logging operations of the 19th century. I doubt I've ever been in one, but I can imagine the richness. What have we lost?
I cringe, heart aching, every time I see trees cut down, for they have souls that have more value to us, both practically and spiritually, than we can know. Patiently, they supply shelter, oxygen, beauty, and poems; stoically, they give up their lives, some to live on in the paper on which we write poems; then they grow back.
But what they grow back into are woods, not forests: quite tame, utilitarian, beautiful and inspiring and necessary but not fearsome or profligate. I love our woods, but when I walk through them, I can hear only faint echoes of the great white pines, Maine's own ents, that once ruled the land before they were needed for war.
No comments:
Post a Comment