Pepper Trail | Poetry | The Land: Word, Image, and Dream

The second place that stopped me in my tracks was along the Copco Road, a long dirt road that parallels Jenny Creek and is a timber company right-of-way. Along this road private-land industrial forestry is on display. Coming from the bucolic embrace of the Box O valley, the contrast is a visceral shock. We pulled off at an area where recent logging has obliterated the forest, rubbing the red earth bare and raw, piling up enormous mountains of slash. The discarded trees in the pile bleed resin from their severed trunks, and their needles are as red and inanimate as the crushed earth. It is a scene of the kind of appalling, mindless damage that can be inflicted only by impervious machines operated by indifferent men.

Perhaps it is a failure of my imagination, but gazing at this scene, the only dream I can see behind it is . . . money. I cannot imagine that the men who planned and executed this “logging” were thinking about anything else. Any logger with any experience would know that this was not a “harvest.” This forest is not coming back in our lifetimes – as can clearly be seen at many other places along the road, where older logged stands are dominated by the dry brittle spires of alien mullein weed, and precious little else. No friendly TV-ad forester will stroll here for the cameras, lovingly ruffling the shaggy green needles of an adolescent pine and intoning pieties about being in the forest business. This land has been raped and left for dead. It will somehow survive, and on some distant day it will achieve a kind of recovery, but that is a tribute to the miraculous resilience of life, not to the mercy of man.

I was unable to look at this landscape for very long. But I forced myself to look at it for at least a moment. This is part of our place too, and shows what happens when we enact dreams on the land that are totally alienated from the land itself. For all its violence and ugliness, this logging operation is actually a less permanent devastation than, say, putting in a Wal-Mart, or a subdivision, or a paved road. Many, many of our dreams no longer involve the land in any way except as solid ground measuring so many square feet. These dreams may be positive in many ways. But we must be very careful and very self-aware. Every “development” that takes away land erases a piece of our place. Each time, we must stop, think, ask why – and then decide as a community whether the gain is worth the loss.

Finally, we arrived at our last stop, where the Pacific Crest Trail crosses Soda Mountain Road, near the center of the monument. Turning east, we hiked a short stretch of the PCT through oak woodlands and shadowed groves of big old Douglas-firs. The morning rain had passed, and the warming earth released the complex scents of fall, delicious and intoxicating. After a mile or so, we reached the top of Hobart Bluff.