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Easter 2010

We have had high wind warnings and advisories for the past few days and the weather service from has cautioned that the potential for wind damage increases as the trees leaf out. Here in the north half of Whatcom county, the trees are still almost bare. The cherries and pears are in bloom and the big leaf maples are decorated with their creamy yellow bell shaped flowers, but most leaves are still not much bigger than a thumbnail.

Windthrow

Even without leaves, a big leaf maple blew down into the cornfield this week. Foresters call a blow down ‘windthrow.’

Eighty Foot Fallen Maple

The twins and I went out this Easter morning with a tape to measure it. The trunk is about forty inches in diameter at the butt and eighty feet tall. For a big-leaf maple, eighty feet is taller than most mature trees, but sometimes a tall specimen reaches a hundred feet and more.

Stump Rot

This one fell because the stump was rotten. Over three-quarters of the stump was rotted away. All that was left was a few inches of outer shell that conducted water and nutrients up from the root system to the rest of the tree. From about eight feet up, the tree is hard and healthy. Big-leaf maples are subject to fungus attacks. It looks like the fungus entered from a broken sub trunk that died, broke off, and the stub rotted and infected the main trunk. Subsequently, the fungus devoured the interior of the stump. Sometimes those weakened old maples fall over on still days, so I was not surprised to see that this one fell on this windy spring week.

Seventy Years Old

When I was a ten-year-old, I remember this maple as a trunk a foot in diameter that had become rough and fissured as big-leaf maples are when they mature. It had the size and appearance of a twenty year old tree. Since I am sixty, that would make the tree seventy. Also, it grew on the edge of the last acreage that Grandpa and Dad cleared about seventy years ago. Maples often start growing on the fresh edge of the woods after land has been cleared, making a second argument for seventy years.

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Clearing Stumps

When my great grandfather and grandfather were buying their farms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the land had been logged, but not cleared. The loggers left behind brush, stumps, and tall snags.

South loft, pig barn

Although biggest evergreens were gone, the land was still forested with smaller firs, cedars, and hemlocks, and unmerchantable trees like vine maple, big leaf maple, bitter cherry, mountain ash (rowan), cottonwood, and alder flourished where the climax forest had been disturbed.

Judging Farm Land

Dad said that the old settlers judged the quality of land by the trees that grew on it. Land covered with big flourishing cedars and firs was good farm land. Cedars meant that the ground was well watered. Big firs meant the soil was rich and dry enough for early planting. Those were the rules my grandfather used to choose the acreage that became our farm.

The soil underneath the tangle left behind by the loggers was good, but preparing the land for farming was a struggle. Clearing land was hard work. The trees the loggers left behind were cut and hauled to the the mill if the logs could be sold and burned if they could not. The farmers hacked down brush, grubbed out the roots, and burned all the debris.

Daunting Task

Clearing stumps was a daunting task. If you are not from the Pacific Northwest, you may not realize how monumental those stumps were. Stumps big enough to hollow out and drive a car through used to be tourist attractions on the highway, but in the woods, they were not rare. I only watched the stump era end, but the stumps I remember were a dozen feet tall and a good ten feet through at the base. They were all marked by spring board notches that were at least six feet off the ground.

There were different ways of dealing with stumps. A temporary expedient was to plant around them, but that made cultivating and harvesting difficult and wasted good land. Like his neighbors, Grandpa started out as a stump farmer, sowing potatoes and oats between the towering stumps and snags; clearing the farm of stumps was a gradual forty year project. Grandpa bought the farm in about 1909 when my grandparents married and the last field was cleared in the late 1940’s, before I was born. According to Dad, most of the stumps were dug out by hand and pulled with a team of horses into piles for burning. Only the last few acres were cleared by bull dozer. When I was a kid in the fifties and sixties, there were stumps left in the woods and a few left in the semi-cleared margin around the woods.

Blasting

Grandpa blasted some stumps out with dynamite. At first, Grandpa hired an expert, a so-called powder monkey, to set charges and blow the stumps, but he soon learned to blast for himself. When I was a kid, a couple of sticks of dynamite still lurked on a shelf in the tractor shed. In the woods, here and there, powder boxes were still bolted five or six feet above the ground on trees; a large box for dynamite sticks and a smaller box thirty or forty feet away for storing blasting caps, keeping the sticks and caps apart as carefully as fire and gasoline. By the time I was tall enough to look into the boxes, they were all empty and I was never around for a blast.

The havoc after a blast could be more trouble than the stump, so Grandpa only blasted the biggest and most recalcitrant stumps. In his search for a better way, Grandpa invented a tool for burning out stumps. He bought a second-hand vacuum cleaner and fitted it with a set of metal nozzles where the dust bag had been attached, so that he had a blower that he could direct deep in the base of a stump. With forced air, he could start and keep a hot fire burning that would consume a stump in a day or two instead the weeks it would take without air. John Schaefer, my long dead consultant on nearly everything, said Grandpa’s stump burner worked better than anything else, but you had to have a long extension cord.

Effects

Transforming the forests of the Pacific Northwest into farmland released many tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. For decades, there was always a hint of wood smoke in the air and I still treat work that does not carry the scent of wood smoke and sweat as slightly frivolous. Much of the timber that was burned would be used today. Alder, which my grandfather did not even think much of for firewood, is now a premium wood for cabinetry. What is right for one generation, changes for the next.

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Uses of Vine Maple

The day of a fish fry begins with a trip to the woods to cut green vine maple for the fire. My grandpa was not much of a cook. His contribution to a fish fry was a wheelbarrow load of vine maple cut early in the morning while the dew was still on the grass. He also built a fire in the pit where the salmon would roast. Grandpa cut lengths of vine maple two to two and a half feet long, thickness ranging from five inch logs to finger size twigs. vinemapleHe would split the larger logs. In my memory, Grandpa used an ax and a Swedish bow saw to cut fuel for fish fries. He had a bright yellow McCullough chain saw, but I don’t recall him ever using it. After cutting the fuel, Grandpa would start the fire with newspaper, a little kindling, and dry stove wood from the wood shed and later throw on the fresh cut green vine maple. When the fire was going well, sweet and pungent smoke billowing, snow white ashes juxtaposed to black charcoal, flames barely visible in the bright sunlight, responsibility went to the cook, usually my uncle. Grandpa died when I was eight, taking with him, I believe, more secrets about vine maple than I can tell.

Vine maple is harder, denser, and closer grained than big leaf maple, but its trunk does not grow large or straight. There is not much lumber in a vine maple tree. I have seen vine maple grow to a foot in diameter and straight logs ten or twelve feet long but logs like that are exceptions. A typical vine maple trunk is less than six inches in diameter and curves sinuously. Trunks that soar upward twenty feet before branching are common, but they are typically so twisted that you would be lucky to cut straight four foot boards from one of those logs.

I once overheard John Schaefer, who survived treatment in an army hospital ward for pneumonia contracted in the flu pandemic of 1918 and knew something about life in the shadow of Mount Baker, suggest to Dad that he find two curved vine maple logs to replace the worn out runners of a stone boat Dad used for spreading barrels of aged cattle urine over the fields, a nasty job, still nasty but now replaced by more elaborate technology. Dad and John talked it over. Yes, vine maple was the right wood for stone boat runners. It would last forever. But finding two logs with the same curve was too difficult. If I knew what I know now, and had the resources currently at my disposal, I would have proposed that we find one log and rip it down the middle with a chain saw. I could do that. It would have been a perfect solution. But that was fifty years ago and I could not have said that then. Ten years ago, I could have split a vine maple log with a chainsaw, but today, perhaps not.

Vine maple wood is tough, not brittle. When I was a kid, John Schaefer taught us to make bows from vine maple. They were easy to make, find a a nice length of vine maple; a four foot length and three quarter inch diameter would be about right. Cut it green and whittle notches for the string at each end. We used cotton sack tyeing string for bow strings– they wore out quickly, but when we were sacking potatoes to sell in Bellingham every week, replacement strings were always close at hand. For arrows, we used fine-grained first growth cedar. Most were not fletched and had no arrowhead, just a notch for the bow string, although during a period when I was obsessed with Robin Hood, I made a few arrows with chicken feather fletches and arrow heads made from fragments of copper water pipe. The Indians made usually made their bows from yew, like English long bows, but they used vine maple for the bent wood frames of fish and bird nets.

The Indians also wove long thin and tough vine maple wands into baskets for carrying heavy loads like camas roots and clams. My great grandfather wove baskets which he sold in Bellingham in the early days before we had much cleared land and he had to rely on ingenuity instead of farming to buy coffee and pay the property tax. We still have one of his baskets and I think the frame work is made from vine maple wands, although my grandmother said the basket was woven from willow.

Vine maple sap is sweet. One spring, I tried to make maple syrup. I had no luck with big leaf maples, but I gathered a half cup, probably less, of sweet sap from a vine maple by cutting a half dozen vee-shaped gashes in the bark, driving a nail at base of the vee, putting a little wire bail on a tin can and hanging the can on the nail. The sap collected at the base of the vee, ran down the nail and dripped into the can. The sap was clear and colorless as water and tasted distinctly sweet. The sap stopped running before I got more than that half cup, and I did not try to boil the sap down to syrup. My mother was more impressed by the bugs and dirt that collected in the tin can than with the sap, but I drank it and thought it was pretty good, yet I never tried to gather sap again. Still, in the spring, when I think of it, I cut off a vine maple twig with my jack knife and chew on it, sucking out the the sweetness like a farmer chewing on a stalk of sweet grass.