Braiding Sweetgrass

that used to be.
“My work grew out of a deeply experienced sense of loss,” he
wrote, “the loss of what should be here.”
When the Coast Range was first opened to logging in the 1880s,
the trees were so big—three hundred feet tall and fifty feet around
— that the bosses didn’t know what to do with them. Eventually two
poor sods were told to man the “misery whip,” a thin, two-man
crosscut saw that they pulled for weeks to fell the behemoths.
These were the trees that built the cities of the west, which grew
and then demanded even more. They said in those days, “You
could never cut all the old growth.”
About the time the chain saws last growled on these slopes,
Franz was planting apple trees and thinking of cider, with his wife
and kids on a farm hours away. A father, a young professor of
economics, he was investing in home economics, his dream of an
Oregon homestead, embedded in the forest, like the one he grew
up on, and where he would stay forever.
Unknown to him, while he was raising cows and kids, the
blackberries got started in the full sun above what would become
his new land on Shotpouch Creek. They were doing their work of
covering the stump farm and rusting remnants of logging chains,
wheels, and rails. The salmonberries mingled their thorns with the
rolls of barbed wire while moss reupholstered the old couch in the
gully.
While his marriage was eroding and running downhill on the
home farm, so was the soil at Shotpouch. The alders came to try to
hold it in place, and then the maples. This was a land whose native
language was conifer but now spoke only the slang of leggy
hardwoods. Its dream of itself as groves of cedar and fir was gone,
lost under the unrelenting chaos of brush. Straight and slow has