LETTERS FROM HOME: LISTENING IN THE HALF-LIGHT TO THE GOSPEL OF THE REDWOODS

Feb. 19, 1998

Dear Julie,

An incensed DC just returned from her Rotary Club meeting. The speaker was a woman whose family has a lumber mill in the Bootheel. She joked about environmentalists and tree-huggers and declared that clear-cutting is OK as long as the trees are replanted.

Trees are crops to her, and environmentalists are kooky city people who know what they know about trees because they've been to Yellowstone National Park.

Would you like to invite her to Humboldt County to see down-home environmentalists who live in the woods and defend it from clear-cutting lumber companies and herbicide-spewing helicopters?

A warning was delivered by the speaker that our children are being subjected to pro-environmentalist propaganda in school. I hope so, since this is the propaganda their parents are being exposed to at the Rotary Club.

DC's still mad. Sputtering mad. She wants to locate the photographer who sneaked into the Headwaters Forest to document the devastation being wreaked on the last virgin redwood forest in the name of good forestry practices. Since the speaker's company doesn't clear-cut, DC thinks she must never have seen the moonscape that results.

I would simply take her into the vaporous half-light of an old-growth redwood grove. And on a carpet of fallen needles we'd stand among trees already ancient when Columbus landed in America, their trunks so gargantuan that whole crews of old-time loggers used to be photographed in the cut they'd spent the day making, and their tops 300-feet distant and usually enshrouded by a cloud.

We'd remain there in silence for awhile. Silence comes naturally in a redwood grove. A presence there, a holiness, says, All God's creation is sacred.

We're still learning how to treat it tenderly.

Once I was sent up to the Smith River to interview Richard St. Barbe-Baker. He was an Australian who, back in the '20s, saw that the redwood forests were being wiped out and started work on setting groves aside for preservation. Now he was honored as Redwood National Park was being christened as a World Cultural Site, a designation reserved for the most magnificent places on earth.

St. Barbe-Baker was by then in his 90s, frail and hard of hearing. But his eyes shone like miniature suns. He was surrounded by young environmentalists who treated him with great respect and were mindful of whether he was tiring during the course of our conversation.

He'd fought mighty struggles when younger because most people back then thought the Earth's resources were limitless, the Earth itself indefatigable. Now we have pollution, smog and environmental diseases to remind us of the delusion in those beliefs.

His bearded young friends quickly signaled that St. Barbe-Baker needed to rest for the ceremony the next day. I asked to take his picture standing next to a tree. With great effort St. Barbe-Baker walked out to the yard and, with the last of America's wild rivers sparkling beyond his shoulder, put his arms around a tree. That is the picture I took and the image of him that remains in my head, him gleefully embracing a tree as if it were God Himself. Which I suspect he believed it was.

I had the feeling of being in the presence of a great soul.

The notice of his death appeared some years back. It chronicled the towering legacy of a kooky tree-hugger.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.