Our theme for the month of June is “snapshots.” Writers were asked to submit a piece with a cover photo that they took or created.

The United States had a lot of problems in 1933. A perennial condition of our country to be sure, but that year newly inaugurated President Franklin Roosevelt thought a good way to solve some of them would be sending unemployed men out into the woods to plant trees. The idea was that this would a) improve the condition of state and federally owned land and b) get some guys off of street corners while this whole Great Depression thing was sorted out.

And while short-lived, it worked, more or less. Over the next nine years, the Civilian Conservation Corps built roads, fought forest fires, aided during local emergencies, and grew treeshundreds of millions of trees. In Michigan alone, the CCC planted 484 million (more than twice as many as any other state) to replace tree cover lost to abandoned agricultural projects and lands that had been slashed and burned. Most of those millions were red pines.

Almost a hundred years later, those trees would be the trees of my childhood.

I must have been a particularly incurious child, for while I knew that most trees did not grow in a grid and that the ones surrounding my grandparents’ riverside cottage in northern Michigan did, I never asked why. My grandfather, who was both curious and a keen student of history and the natural world, volunteered the information one day. He told me about the Great Depression and the CCC and probably hoped I would be more awed by the literal living historicalness of it than I was.

It’s not that I didn’t love the red pinesI loved them when they were bocce ball targets and stake posts for hammocks and when the blue jays swooped down for seed from the feeders screwed into their trunks and when the squirrels used even their thinnest branches for high-stakes acrobatics. Later, I did love them a bit for history’s sake, but not as much as I loved them for being the reason I first learned to use a chainsaw.

Because they fall down a lot, Michigan’s red pines. Seemingly every other summer, one or more would end up toppling in the acre around the cottage, and my grandfather, father, and uncle would trudge out the chainsaws and set about dissecting its body for firewood. And seemingly every summer when that didn’t happen, I’d watch Grandpa slowly stroll between the pines, sometimes pausing to squint up against the sun, sometimes putting a hand on flaky bark. The inevitable aftermaths of these excursions were one, two, maybe as many as three trees with new neon neckties, trees too terminal to be left standing for long.

Fortunately, red pines grow straight, with thin trunks and without many branches, except a green puff of needles at their tops, meaning that while felling one is still a capital-p Project, it needn’t be as onerous as taking down a maple of the same size.

Which is another one of those things that I was never that curious about, but then yesterday I stumbled across a picture of a red pine and realized I had never actually seen one before.

Of course, the trees that the CCC planted in Michigan by the hundreds of millions (more than twice in any other state!) are red pines, and they do grow thin and branchless and without undergrowth. They do it because red pines have no tolerance for shade and when packed close togetherin a grid, saythe trees on the inside struggle to photosynthesize, shedding the needles on their lower branches until only those on the extreme top, closest to the sun, remain.

As the trees lose sugar and weaken from the lack of sun, they stretch and thin and break when the wind bends them. One article I found after that first fatal photo contains another, a cube of red pine, fuzzy with needles on the perimeter and matchsticks within, the caption labeling them as “beyond recovery.”

Those trees are the trees of my childhood.

Most of them probably won’t last the next hundred years. Since my grandfather’s death, it’s been up to my dad to watch for the trees that are too weak, or too thin, or caught in each other’s few branches after a high wind. Patches of bramble and oak seedlings knot in the spaces that they leave behind, no longer shaded out or choked by the pines’ numerous and shallow roots. Maybe when my father is dead, when I’m dead, the pines will have thinned out enough to leave room for maples, cedars, and aspens.

The ones on the edge of the grid will probably survive. I like to think of them overlooking the river, a single line in testament to a past where people with perhaps more optimism than sound environmental policy directed scores of unemployed men to spend years planting trees, mostly because the guy in the White House thought it would be a good idea and no else seemed to have any better ones.

It is not the kind of future that inspires awe, but there’s enough optimism for it to be worth something. I look forward to boring future young relatives with it.

2 Comments

  1. Paula Manni-Pohler

    This is gorgeous, Annaka. And now I’ll take a closer look next time I’m headed north. Thanks for sharing:)

    Reply
    • Rae Ann Kluitenberg

      “Monica”, thank you for your stories. They always make me laugh—and that is better reading than the newspaper—or whatever the online version of the Press is called.

      I can recommend lying on your back on the edge of the pine woods in new snow on a day with blue sky and white cottony clouds. That is my memory from the day my grandfather died.

      Reply

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