Braiding Sweetgrass

After the garden and the fruit trees, his next goal was building a
house that would honor the self-sufficiency and simplicity that he
sought. His ideal had been to build the cabin from the red cedar—
beautiful, fragrant, rot-resistant, and symbolic—left behind by the
loggers on the slopes above. But the repeated logging had simply
taken too much. So, regrettably, he had to purchase the cedar
timber for the cabin, “with the promise that I would plant and grow
more cedar trees than would ever be cut for my use.”
Lightweight and highly water-repellent, sweet-smelling cedar was
also the architectural choice for indigenous rainforest peoples.
Cedar houses, constructed of both logs and planks, were
emblematic of the region. The wood split so readily that, in skilled
hands, dimensional boards could be made without a saw.
Sometimes trees were felled for lumber, but planks were more
often split from naturally fallen logs. Remarkably, Mother Cedar
also yielded planks from her living flanks. When a line of wedges of
stone or antler were pounded into a standing tree, long boards
would pop from the trunk along the straight grain. The wood itself is
dead supportive tissue, so the harvest of a few boards from a big
tree does not risk killing the whole organism—a practice that
redefines our notions of sustainable forestry: lumber produced
without killing a tree.
Now, however, industrial forestry dictates how the landscape is
shaped and used. To own the land at Shotpouch, which is
designated as timberlands, Franz was required to register an
approved forest management plan for his new property. He wryly
wrote his dismay that his land was classified “not as forestland, but
timberland,” as if the sawmill was the only possible destiny for a
tree. Franz had an old-growth mind in a Doug Fir world.
The Oregon Department of Forestry and the College of Forestry