Braiding Sweetgrass

missing forest, left over from the first cut more than a century ago.
It was too big to cut through and a long way around, so Franz just
created another bend in the trail.
Today, now that the old cedars are nearly gone, people want
them. They scrounge old clear-cuts for the logs that were left
behind. Shakebolting, they call it, turning old logs into high-priced
cedar shakes. The grain is so straight the shakes split right off.
It’s amazing to think that, within the lifetime of those old trees on
the ground, they have gone from being revered to being rejected to
nearly being eliminated, and then somebody looked up and noticed
they were gone and wanted them again.
“My tool of preference was a Cutter Mattock, commonly known in
this area as a Maddox,” Franz wrote. With this sharp edge, he
could chop roots and grade trail, defeating, if briefly, the march of
the vine maples.
It took several more days of wrangling impenetrable brush to
break through to the ridgetop, where a view of Mary’s Peak was the
reward. “I remember the exhilaration as we reached a certain point
and savored our accomplishment. Also the days when with the
slopes and the weather contributing mightily to the feeling that
everything had gotten out of hand and we just fell down laughing.”
Franz’s journals record his impressions of the view from the
ridge, across a crazy-quilt landscape, the panorama broken up into
forestry management units: polygons of dead brown and mottled
patches of gray and green next to “dense plantations of young
Doug Fir like sections of manicured lawn” in squares and wedges,
all broken up like shards of shattered glass on the mountain. Only
at the top of Mary’s Peak, within the boundaries of a preserve, is
there a continuous span of forest, rough textured and multihued
from a distance, the signature of the old-growth forest, the forest