Moose thus remembered his childhood in the 1920s....
I grew up on the edge of the Manistee National Forest in Michigan. Back in
the 1800's this was a major timber lumbering region and my hometown of
Whitehall had numerous mills churning out everything from beams to shingles.
In one of the banks in town hung these fantastic paintings of the lumbering
that occured in the area. The logs being dragged out of the forest were
huge. I always thought that there was substantial "artistic license"
involved in the paintings because I had never seen such large trees there.
Of course not--they were all chopped down! My childhood of visiting that
bank with my father while he did his weekly banking was of closely examining
these paintings. I wonder what has become of them...
Nowadays, lumbering in the area has taken on a different characteristic.
When you fly over the forest in an airplane you see that it resembles a huge
checkerboard with each square about a 1/4 mile across. The oldest forests
date back to the 1930's when the state and federal governments reacquired
huge tracks of abandoned farmsteads and otherwise private property that had
been owned by institutions gone bankrupt during the great depression. The
forests were replanted as part of CCC and other programs so they have a
substantial monoculture to them. My father spent much of his own childhood
planting thousands of trees for the state. The sandy soil was worthless for
growing anything but trees.
When a segment of pine forest is cutdown, and they strip EVERYTHING clean,
it is replanted with pine. So they now have a sustainable forest for
constant harvest. Any tree that is large enough to turn into a board is
kept intact, everything else is shoved into a chipper and destined to the
paper mill.
In the immediate area of my childhood home, they have a few hundred square
miles of scrub forest which aren't "forests" anymore. What they do is about
every seven years they go in and turn into chips everything that can be
chipped. These chips go straight to the paper mill. It's a combination of
pine, willow, aspen, ash, etc., even some hated tree-of-heaven. Doesn't
matter too much, as this mixture of wood makes great pulpwood for paper.
Anyway, in this extremely sandy soil, every type of tree grows like weeds,
so in 7 years you've got a decent bit trees standing up to 20 feet high
again.
Those replanted forests from the '30s that haven't been harvested yet are
getting pretty big now.
AG
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