A Great Book and Me w/ a Sitka Spruce

Sometimes we have to kill the golden goose to let everybody know the geese are in trouble. This is the dilemna that writer John Vaillant tackles in The Golden Spruce. The book is about Grant Hadwin, a privelidged son of the British Columbia timber industry. Without graduating high school Hadwin chucks his engineer father's aspirations for him and pursues his interest in becoming a tree faller. He lives and works among the old growth for years, felling hundreds of trees. He eventually gets liscenced as a forestry technician and builds a name for himself as an independent contractor, cruising virgin timber lands, estimating the timber for harvest and recommending routes for building the roads in to extract it after its been cut.
Then Hadwin has an epiphany, religious experience, spiritual event. He becomes combative and unemployable, his wife divorces him and he travels to Russia to hand out clean needles and condoms. Ultimately he finds his calling in drawing the world's attention to the destructive practices of the large scale, mechanized logging industry. To do this he cuts down a 160 ft tall Sitka spruce that has a mutation which makes it have gold needles. The tree is reveered by the native Haida people and has become a tourist stop in the remote coastal outpost of the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Vaillant writes the story of Hadwin, the tree, the Haida culture, and the logging industry with clean prose and occassional, understated wit. His style and his book have been compared to Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild and this is a favorable comparison. One of the most seering insights in the book is made over and over again by old growth loggers who know they are the last generation. Several times a logger will remark how he loves working in the old growth forests and how strange it is that he earns his living by killing what he loves. Eight hundred years to grow, tweny-five minutes to bring down.
I have personally seen alot of the clear cuts in the Northwest. The Olympic Peninsula is scarred with them. Climb up Storm King Mountain and you are met with stunning views of Lake Crescent, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and a clear cut. There are also the monospecies silvaculture forests that were first harvested in the 1930's, cut again in the 1980's, and thinned in the 1990's. The original nutrients of the soil was trucked out in the logs of the first two cuttings so this third growth has to be heavily fertilized which affects area streams and fish populations. I've worked on the lumberyard at Lowes, stacking 2x4's and the more expensive 2x10's and 12's into the beds of trucks. We are a world hungry for wood. But like oil we have had it on the cheap for a long time. Grant Hadwin wanted the world to know that forests are a finite resource.

Rationalizing Country Music

First let me say that I love country music. I like alt-rock and roots rock and some Americana too but I love country. I write country songs and when I can't decide what to listen to I usually wind up listening to some incarnation of country.But man, as a songwriter I analyze some of the songs and when picked apart I find some of them don't hold up to rationalization.The most obvious example of this is the incongruity of a sad, heartbreak message married to a happy, shuffling or even driving melody and tempo. Oddly I think of one just now but they are ubiquitous.Another thing that gets me is the often attempted and occassionally perfect country road song. The best ones match a "to-hell'with-it-all" lyric with pedal to the metal music. In the tradition of Hank Snow's "I've Been Everywhere" many of these songs sound like the songwriter pulled out a road atlas and just picked a bunch of cities that fit the rhyme scheme of the song. Road songs are fun but I doubt many people actually quit their job, get in a car, and start driving. Life is too complicated for that. There are utilities to turn off and leases to terminate.And speaking of complications the favorite thing for most songwriters to do is pen an emotional ballad. Why? Because they are easy to put original sounding music to since they are slow and slow country songs can be more free form than more uptempo ones. And ballads are easy to write. Just tell a story, keeping a decent eye on the meter and not stretching the rhymes too far and you have a song about best friends or dying or that first dance with your wife that will make people cry and feel warm fuzzies. "Butterfly Kisses", "Angels In Waiting", anything by Rascal Flatts...the only thing to keep in mind is people don't want to hear a whole concert of those songs.So the producer and artist pick a few good ballads then some incongruously fast heartbreak songs and a couple road songs and a new country album is born.
If you want to hear the best country album of the past half decade listen toRobbie Fulk's Georgia Hard...its an excellent tribute to the country of the 1970's.

Thoughts On Losing A Good Dog

I gave away my dog today and my girlfriend isn't staying over tonight so I'm blogging to pass the time...again. I hope I do this better this time around.
I'm unemployed which is good because I'm currently researching starting a business and selling my house which is not easy since the market in western WA has...cooled off considerably (don't be too graphic don't be too graphic don't be too graphic). My main job today had to do with my garden. I chopped the weeds and planted two cucumber plants, two pepper plants and three tomatoes. I didn't do it earlier because my dog would have dug it all up. After planting the garden I turned the sprinkler on it and this brought out a big (I mean big) rat. MazeDog must have kept it away but today the rat had free reign and played...until I shot it with my sling shot. Not a kill but a definate hit and I haven't seen the thing since.
Maze Dog was a good dog and I miss the eleven months we shared. I cried like a baby after Mark drove off with her in the car. I know it was silly, but a man can really learn to love a dog.

How To Grill Chicken

I'm not a fan of chicken. When the grill is fired up I'd rather utilize those expensive little charcoal briquettes by cooking steak, hamburger, or pork chops. But sometimes even here at the ranch (-style house in a suburban cul de sac) we need a change of pace. I've found the recipe for the perfect barbecued chicken.
Take chicken quarters (leg attached to half breast), about $3.50 for four {use only chicken with skin and that has no preservatives or added growth hormones}. Rub down with Johnny's seasoning salt and garlic salt. Bake in oven for 35-40 minutes at 350 degrees. Place on hot grill for seven minutes. Turn and baste with a good store bought (and then modified) barbecue sauce. Turn and baste until skin is sufficiently blackened.
Serve with potato salad, garden salad and watermelon.

Guitars and the Validation of Our Identities on the Altar of Consumerism

Just a few more hours to go until I'm out of the Navy...specifically 15 hours and 49 minutes. When you tell people you're getting out the first (and I suppose logical) question people ask is "what are you going to do?" So I've been thinking about the various career incarnations I've had over the past twelve months and the one that sticks most in my mind is the plan I once entertained of becoming a luthier.

The idea started one day sitting in the sunshine outside my barracks in Iceland, drawing guitars while suffering through little pangs of misery that would eventually lead to me having my appendix cut out later that evening. The guitar I drafted up was a cherry sunburst dreadnought with an inlaid sun on the headstock. Simple and cool-looking like a 1960's model Hummingbird. I called it the Cargo.

I came up with the idea for the Cargo guitar after spending months looking through Acoustic Guitar magazine and realizing all the high end, "serious" guitars had two things in common: 1)they were all very good and 2) they were all very boring. All the custom jobs and high end production guitars such as Larrivee, Martin, and Taylor were fine works of craftsmanship with bookmatched tops and backs, precisely cut inlays, voiced, and laquered to perfection. And I think they all look like a set of cabinets or hardwood floors: beautiful wood grains was all the personlity you were going to find, and an almost uniformly thin tone. The one thing to be sure of when talking high end guitars with serious players is that Gibson is not going to get any respect. They'd leave those craily painted, heavily built tanks to the dumb rednecks and aging baby boomers who had the money to spend and didn't know anything about guitars except a brand name.

But Gibson offers a "cool factor" that no other brand can touch. Its a market my guitar design could tap. The bright red cherry sunburst paint job looks great on the old Gibson hummingbirds and J-45's from the 1960's. Today the company's version of cherry sunburst is much dmore of a wine and not nearly as appealing. The Cargo dreadnought would be square shouldered, braced like a pre-war (WWII) Martin to achieve that beautiful bass tone, and painted bright red cherry sunburst, not to hide mistakes as some smug luthiers suggest but because it looks good. The inlay would be the icing on a guitar cake of coolness.

So a few months later I set to work building the prototype and realized I didn't have the experience and/or woodworking talent to build high quality professional guitars. Eventually I identified that What I had was a desire to market rather than a desire to build. Which brings me to the crux of this post:

People don't make purches based solely on the product of the highest quality. They buy based on the product with the most endearing qualities. Thats why how something looks, who made it and where it was made, and the buzz around a product is every bit as important as its functionality. Just ask a Prius owner. This post is about marketing guitars but the truth holds for automobiles, knives, craft beer, and camping equipment.

BTW - my current guitars are a 2005 Gibson J-45, a 2005 Fender American Ash Telecaster Deluxe, a 1964 Gibson Hummingbird, a 1960's Harmony Patrician, and a 1980's Gibson Nouveau. I recently sold a 2004 or 2005 Taylor 310, and an Epiphone LP Junior TV paint scheme.

Japanese Garden Gone Bad - An Anarchist Approach to Yard Work

The other night I drove over to my girlfriend's house for french dip hamburgers and afterwards she and I sat outside watching her mother do yard work. She was trying to keep the Japanese garden at bay which the previous owners had planted 20 years before. Unfortuantely most of the juniper, rhodos and hollies have grown like godzilla on steroids. We sat and watched until conscience got the best of us and I got up and took the hatchet out of my truck and chopped down a rhododenron. It felt good. I thought of that crazy anrachist Bakunin who I'd done a paper and presentation on in college. His big quote is "the urge to destroy is a creative urge". More people should become anarchist when it comes to their yards. One of the best lawn care moves I've ever seen was when my dad cut out over a dozen big pine trees that lined two sides of the yard.
Too often people plant plant and plant and then don't have to the heart or gumption to take out plants that have outlived their use or beauty. Too often people let stuff that has grown way too large for its location remain in place, obscuring windows, blocking walkways, taking up space a new planting would enhance.
So today I went back over to my girlfriend's house while everyone else was a work (its odd to not have a job but thats a different post) and attaked some of the overgrowth. I chopped down a large American holly, three more big rhododendrons, another fat holly tree, and slung a machete around to trim the junipers and a couple of other bushes. Then I dug out a couple of stumps from the fat holly shrub. It was dirty, hot, and sweaty work. It felt good.

Mount St Helens

It's been said that before the cataclysmic eruption of 18 May 1980 Mount St Helens was the prettiest of the high Cascades. Spirit Lake is documented in countless family photo albums and home movies, with families, mountain and lake cloaked in happiness and sunshine. But in a matter of seconds a huge bulge the mountain had formed over the course of a few weeks collapsed in a magnitude 5.1 earthquake and 1300 feet of the summit and northeast flank along with 15 vertical miles of ash were flung into the sky. In the process 230 square miles of forest was leveled by the 300 mile per hour blast and the lake was matted with logs, mud and ash. Over 50 people were killed, including Harry Truman, long time Spirit Lake resident and inn keeper. I remember seeing him on TV when I was a little kid saying he wasn't going to leave his mountain, despite orders from the "authorities" and letters from school children. I guess he never did.
Looking at the north side and south side of Mount St Helens is like looking at two different mountains. In contrast to the destruction and grayness on the north the old growth forests still stand and the mountain is beautiful and somewhat symmetrical on the south side.
Before 1980 the volcano had last been active in 1857 and, based on growth rings in trees, many eruptions of various sizes have occurred in the past 500 years, with evidence of major eruptions dating back for 20,000 years. Unlike mountain chains and other geological formations volcanoes do not need millions of years for perceptible change to occur. A formation inside the crater of Mount St Helens has grown nearly 300 feet in just the last couple of years. And as evidenced by the 1980 eruption, a volcano can destroy itself in seconds. I stopped at the Toutle Trail #238 and walked up to a large field of boulders the mountain had flung out of her bowels in a previous eruption. The area around this boulder field was desert like, mostly grass and rocks, with beargrass in bloom and a few scrubby pine trees. I assume the ash still kept the ground from bearing forth like it did in every other direction just a half mile away. The spot offered great photo opportunities.
The trail cut through the boulders and rose up on to the mountain. Here in the shadow of that old blast stood a traditional forest of hemlock and doug fir. There were a few old growth trees mixed in the forest. The trail crossed over a few raw areas of ancient lava flow but for the most part the substrate was a rocky soil of decaying rock and the detritis of generations of needles, cones, and dead trees. As I climbed patches of snow became more frequent until at last I was stopped by snow just short of Butte Camp. I climbed up on a rocky outcrop and ate a lunch of beanie weenies, potato chips and an orange. The air was warm but the wind was cold where I'd been sweating. I took a few more pictures then headed back down.
That evening I drove out to FS 25 and turned off onto FS 9300 to find a place to camp. Just across the Clear Creek bridge I turned down onto a little dirt path where one truck was already parked and a tent set up. I drove to the end of the path and set up camp. My neighbors for the night were burley men with long beards and axes stuck in the trees of their camp. Someone had shot an arrow into a nearby tree and there were .22 rifle shells lying in the mud. But I didn't have to pay the $15 fee for a camp site.
I sat on the rocky creek bank, thinking it didn't look any different than creeks in Tennessee except there were no little fossils to look for. Just flat rocks to skip and get my dog wound up. At one point I looked up the hillside and through some big cedars I noticed an absolutely huge Douglas fir. I walked up the steep embankment and stood at the base of the tree. Unbelievable. It was eight or nine feet in diameter at its base. Looking around I saw any number of really large doug firs, all with breast height diameters of six feet or more. This was the largest concentration of really big trees I'd seen in Washington and later research confirmed that the Clear Creek and Quartz Creek corridors harbor the largest intact stands of old growth left in the state. There were little pink tags tied to vine maple saplings throughout the understory. I've spent a bunch of time in the national forests of Washington and I know that clear cutting an area is a common practice. You see it all over the Olympic Peninsula and Cascade Mountains. I doubt that is what is in store for this forest of old giants but you never know. I have no problem with timber harvest, I want wood floors and toilet paper but I hate the thought of the remnants of a six hundred year old tree getting jammed in a copier machine or winding up in my mailbox as an unsolicited, pre-approved credit card application. (Actually old growth soft woods are usually used for structural applications but you get the point.)
That evening after dinner I drove farther out FS 9300, going up up up. All along the lower part of the road the massive trees dominated. How they survived the logging of the 1890's and early 1900's I don't know. As the elevation increased the air grew more chill. Three elk does jumped across the road, much larger and heavier than deer and not nearly so agile. At the crest were beautiful views of the sun setting over pointy tree lined ridges to the west. To the east the snowy slopes of Mount Adams glowed in the 9:00 p.m. sunlight. A volcano standing over 12,000 feet, she is what I consider to be the wildest and most remote mountain in the Lower 48. A few years ago naturalist and author Robert Michael Pyle wrote about this area in a book called Where Bigfoot Walks. The premise of the book was not that he was looking for Bigfoot, only assessing if this remote wilderness could hide and sustain such a creature. In the end he decided it could.
If you visit Mount St Helens and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest you may not find Bigfoot, but you will find quiet, solitude, and beauty in a wild country where the power of Nature simmers uneasily near the surface, revealing itself in dramatic displays of destruction and renewal.