And I obviously have fond remembrances of the look, feel, and smell of the paneling and furniture my father made from the beautiful white pine lumber milled from trees not unlike those that grow in this stand. At the same time, I admire the courage and skill of the loggers who felled the pines from Maine to Minnesota and transported them via oxen, horses, and rivers to the mills. I continue to enjoy hiking and canoeing through remaining old-growth pine stands in wilderness areas around Lake Superior and elsewhere. I am happy that the loggers spared this stand and regret that more old-growth stands were not so spared. The images and smells of these big white pines over a maple understory in autumn remain for me the essence of what forest means. Over the centuries, the dead pine needles and sugar maple leaves that fell to the forest floor decayed and built a black humus that smelled faintly sweet and resinous, like my father’s workshop. During autumn, the maple leaves glowed a scarlet red made even more vivid by their juxtaposition with the deep green pine needles above them. The crowns of the pines towered above us and above sugar maples in the understory. And so, these pines have remained untouched to this day.Įvery time we walked into this white pine stand, I felt as if we’d entered a different world. In addition, floating the pines down the Wisconsin River through the canyons and falls of the Wisconsin Dells immediately downstream just wasn’t worth the effort or the danger of logjams. But most likely, the loggers who cut the vast pineries of central and northern Wisconsin in the 1800s did not bother with this particular stand, because it was too small.
Each pine could easily have provided three clear sixteen-foot logs, prime timber for the region’s sawmills.
#Winner of white pines color war free
The huge trunks of these trees, between two and three feet in diameter, were free of branches for sixty feet or more above the forest floor. One stand contained large old-growth white pines. Later, I and my friends and colleagues worked in primeval forests on Blackhawk Island in the Wisconsin River. Each time I went home to visit, I noticed that the panels were slowly and steadily turning a rich burnt sienna, like pumpkin pie. Over the years, the planks darkened so slowly that I didn’t notice the change until I moved away to college and then to grad school and beyond. In my childhood, these walls were a creamy white with a few sepia knots where the branches had once emerged from the trunks. After he returned home from World War II, he framed our house with white pine two-by-fours and paneled the walls in the living and dining rooms with tongue-and-groove pine planks, which he got cheap at the lumberyard because everyone else had switched to using drywall. We had white pine furniture in our living room, slept in white pine beds, and placed our clothes into white pine bureaus. My father carried the resinous scent of white pine sawdust with him. The most abundant sawdust in his shop (and there was a lot of it) was from white pine. Like any good cabinetmaker, he could distinguish different species of wood just from the smell and texture of sawdust in the shop or on the jobsite. My father was a carpenter and a cabinetmaker. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C
From White Pine by John Pastor Copyright © 2023 John Pastor.
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