Invasion of the Tree Snatchers

I woke this morning to the sound of chainsaws, apparently about to come through the bedroom wall.

A working forest stays a forest, we tell ourselves, but it's small comfort when it's time for the section of forest nearest you to earn its living by losing its life.

Worse yet is the fact that this is a liquidation cut. My absentee neighbor has subdivided his land. Perhaps he has even died. He was pretty old. I don't think he had any children. I remember something about a niece or nephew.

A real estate sign has appeared, like a melanoma signalling that terminal cancer of the woods has taken hold.

The chain saw noise was replaced by a sound like someone taxiing an airplane back and forth. And it sounded too close. I figured I'd better take a look.

I've had timber thieves before. Actually, my neighbor had them worse. They'd already mowed the back half of his lot back in 1997, cleaning out valuable oak, before I heard them too close, at the wrong compass bearing, and went back to see what was going on. The thief was bold. He was also in a hurry to finish his theft before January 1, 1998, when it became a criminal matter instead of a civil one.

We ran him off eventually, but I don't think my neighbor ever collected on his lawsuit. The timber thief had a lot of practice hiding his assets and changing his address.

The operation this time is too spectacular to be theft. The skidder road goes straight in, not looping sideways from the next lot. So I didn't expect to find anyone surrounded by expensive stumps, claiming his compass didn't work.

What I did see was something like the world's largest brush cutter. It's a yellow monster, half skidder, half tree-eater. Controlled by a skilled operator, it moves as if alive. Hydraulic jaws grip a tree, while a roaring, whining blade cuts it off at the base. The hydraulic jaws then lay the tree trunk aside as casually as a person might put down a pencil.

Logging ends eventually. Silence returns and vegetation blurs the raw scars. But this is cancer. This is real estate. Someone is going to put a house on there, forever changing the character of the woods.

Most of the older houses are fairly near the road. Sometimes I wish I lived further back, but the back land is the back land, merging with the greater forest on the larger parcels all the way up and over peak after peak, to the far end of the range. I wouldn't want to diminish that.

The newer trend is to build further back. That means when I enter the woods, aiming into what had been continuous forest, I may have to walk past someone's side yard. Will they understand what living in the woods is like or will they try to trample out a hunk of suburbia for themselves? Will they understand the tradition around here, that we all use the land and don't abuse it?

So far, all we see is the fresh gash of heavy machinery ripping out trees, and the ominous tumor that advertises the land as available for wish fulfillment. We wait to see what those wishes may be.