Spring and fall join hands
May. 31st, 2006 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radfrac_archive_fullSpring is different in Prince George. Nothing was in bloom except the lilacs, which have just finished in Victoria, and the dandilions, which were triumphant.
It was sunny and clear, and it didn't smell like pulp mill, or if it did I didn't notice. It's a different sky there. Even in town, the sky seems higher and paler. It feels like there's more space in the air. In Victoria, even on a bright day, looking out over the ocean, expanding into distance, there's a sense of being held by the brightness and the air that you don't have in Prince George. There it feels like if you let your hold falter on the ground, the sharp trees, the dingy 70's houses, you could float up into the blue-white air and suddenly spark apart to nothing.
Maybe it's the lack of humidity. I don't know. Maybe love is low blood sugar. I was born there, but I haven't been back to Prince George for several years. There wasn't any reason to go any more, since my parents moved down to the Sunshine Coast.
In every town, no matter how economically stricken, the courthouse and the police station are always big, new, and architecturally elaborate.
It's also different because of the pine beetle.
"They can't do anything about it." My dad says. "If there were a good frost early in the fall, it would kill them. If they'd sprayed sooner, it might have helped. Now, there's nothing."
We're eating breakfast in the Denny's attached to our hotel. He blames the triumvirate of global warming, the government, and anti-spraying protestors.
On the glossy dark-green hillside, which has always seemed like a permanent cool shadow, the pine trees die beautifully. They turn rust-red. It's as though they've decided suddenly to become deciduous, and got the knack of it right away. Then they turn gold as the needles fade. Then they turn grey, like trees burnt away in a forest fire. At the end, the branches drop, and the naked spines are left, a brittle pincushion. It looks as though a fire's been through. The contours of the land start to appear for the first time since the last ice age. The knuckles and shoulders of the rock underneath.
They say that eighty percent of the pine trees in BC will die. They say a lot of things, though, including "all the computers in the world will crash on January 1, 2000!" I'm not a scientist or a researcher. I don't know what will happen. Things are usually more complicated than "everything's going to die."
It's all second-growth around a logging town like Prince George. Not the fat huge old-growth stands you see in the south. There isn't that lush wetness to everything, the layers of luminous green moss so alive that they make you a little nauseous.
It's a drier, harsher climate. The trees take twice as long to grow, and they're tall skinny poles with all their green at the top. It's still a good show along the side of Connaught Hill, above the house where I grew up. In summer a dense green, in fall suddenly streaked through with the poplar and birch leaves turning, and in winter full of white and silver emptiness between the dark trees. It's not all pine. PG is, after all, the Spruce Capital of BC. Or so the sign says.
Like most tree-huggers, I have a moralistic speech in my pocket about how logging isn't done sustainably and will eventually run out, but not before the irreplaceable old growth is all destroyed. Boilerplate university student politics, basically.
The beetle crisis may be caused by logging methods, or global warming. I'm sure capitalism is to blame somehow, even if no one is very specific about exactly which bit is at fault.
I'm happy to blame human beings. It's much less terrifying than the idea that things this big and terrible just happen. That nothing is in stasis. That anything you think of as permanent is not only mortal, but fragile and always about to collapse.
I didn't realize until I saw it burning away that I think of the ugliness of Prince George, its scrawny stands of second-growth, as a permanent thing, unloved but reliable.
There's something awe-filled about this process. It's slow, but unstoppable. Tiny and huge. The inevitability of it appeals to my gothic side. It's all just going to die, slowly, beautifully, in front of us, while we eat our Grand Slam Breakfast at Denny's, attend my brother's university convocation at the sports centre, drive back home along the highway listening to the CBC and looking out the windows.
It's convenient, too, since if there's nothing to do, it's okay to do nothing. The government is not immune to irony. When I ask my dad, "So what are they doing?" he says, "Logging what's left as fast as they can." And I can see that. If it's just going to die anyway, what use are arguments about soil cohesion, watersheds, habitat, and so on?
Still. What's going to happen to that landscape, suddenly naked under the dry weight of summer, the snow-burden of winter? What's going to happen to that city, and all the towns around it? What happens to the way we use wood? What changes will happen to us so slowly that we hardly notice them? The death of a town, the price of lumber. I don't even say these are bad things. But how strange to stop and contemplate them in the middle of their happening, not knowing what they'll make of us.
So far it looks like we are going down as obliviously as we can manage, changing nothing until it's changed for us. It's certainly my own favorite strategy.
All the long drive home, even when we'd passed the boundary defined by Hope and its Dairy Queen, I kept looking for that red sheen on the hills, and nothing looked healthy to me.
Recent story about the beetle
David Suzuki Foundation on the beetle (I'm not sure I think much of this. I like the point about the beetles being part of the natural cycle, but I don't see a lot of insight here.)
My family and I drove up for my brother's convocation at UNBC. He's just finished his master's degree in math. We slept four people in one smallish room with a murphy bed and a hide-a-bed, neither of which got folded up once in the four days we were there. I can always tell when my dad's the one who made the reservations. Smart guy. Not so practical.
{rf}
It was sunny and clear, and it didn't smell like pulp mill, or if it did I didn't notice. It's a different sky there. Even in town, the sky seems higher and paler. It feels like there's more space in the air. In Victoria, even on a bright day, looking out over the ocean, expanding into distance, there's a sense of being held by the brightness and the air that you don't have in Prince George. There it feels like if you let your hold falter on the ground, the sharp trees, the dingy 70's houses, you could float up into the blue-white air and suddenly spark apart to nothing.
Maybe it's the lack of humidity. I don't know. Maybe love is low blood sugar. I was born there, but I haven't been back to Prince George for several years. There wasn't any reason to go any more, since my parents moved down to the Sunshine Coast.
In every town, no matter how economically stricken, the courthouse and the police station are always big, new, and architecturally elaborate.
It's also different because of the pine beetle.
"They can't do anything about it." My dad says. "If there were a good frost early in the fall, it would kill them. If they'd sprayed sooner, it might have helped. Now, there's nothing."
We're eating breakfast in the Denny's attached to our hotel. He blames the triumvirate of global warming, the government, and anti-spraying protestors.
On the glossy dark-green hillside, which has always seemed like a permanent cool shadow, the pine trees die beautifully. They turn rust-red. It's as though they've decided suddenly to become deciduous, and got the knack of it right away. Then they turn gold as the needles fade. Then they turn grey, like trees burnt away in a forest fire. At the end, the branches drop, and the naked spines are left, a brittle pincushion. It looks as though a fire's been through. The contours of the land start to appear for the first time since the last ice age. The knuckles and shoulders of the rock underneath.
They say that eighty percent of the pine trees in BC will die. They say a lot of things, though, including "all the computers in the world will crash on January 1, 2000!" I'm not a scientist or a researcher. I don't know what will happen. Things are usually more complicated than "everything's going to die."
It's all second-growth around a logging town like Prince George. Not the fat huge old-growth stands you see in the south. There isn't that lush wetness to everything, the layers of luminous green moss so alive that they make you a little nauseous.
It's a drier, harsher climate. The trees take twice as long to grow, and they're tall skinny poles with all their green at the top. It's still a good show along the side of Connaught Hill, above the house where I grew up. In summer a dense green, in fall suddenly streaked through with the poplar and birch leaves turning, and in winter full of white and silver emptiness between the dark trees. It's not all pine. PG is, after all, the Spruce Capital of BC. Or so the sign says.
Like most tree-huggers, I have a moralistic speech in my pocket about how logging isn't done sustainably and will eventually run out, but not before the irreplaceable old growth is all destroyed. Boilerplate university student politics, basically.
The beetle crisis may be caused by logging methods, or global warming. I'm sure capitalism is to blame somehow, even if no one is very specific about exactly which bit is at fault.
I'm happy to blame human beings. It's much less terrifying than the idea that things this big and terrible just happen. That nothing is in stasis. That anything you think of as permanent is not only mortal, but fragile and always about to collapse.
I didn't realize until I saw it burning away that I think of the ugliness of Prince George, its scrawny stands of second-growth, as a permanent thing, unloved but reliable.
There's something awe-filled about this process. It's slow, but unstoppable. Tiny and huge. The inevitability of it appeals to my gothic side. It's all just going to die, slowly, beautifully, in front of us, while we eat our Grand Slam Breakfast at Denny's, attend my brother's university convocation at the sports centre, drive back home along the highway listening to the CBC and looking out the windows.
It's convenient, too, since if there's nothing to do, it's okay to do nothing. The government is not immune to irony. When I ask my dad, "So what are they doing?" he says, "Logging what's left as fast as they can." And I can see that. If it's just going to die anyway, what use are arguments about soil cohesion, watersheds, habitat, and so on?
Still. What's going to happen to that landscape, suddenly naked under the dry weight of summer, the snow-burden of winter? What's going to happen to that city, and all the towns around it? What happens to the way we use wood? What changes will happen to us so slowly that we hardly notice them? The death of a town, the price of lumber. I don't even say these are bad things. But how strange to stop and contemplate them in the middle of their happening, not knowing what they'll make of us.
So far it looks like we are going down as obliviously as we can manage, changing nothing until it's changed for us. It's certainly my own favorite strategy.
All the long drive home, even when we'd passed the boundary defined by Hope and its Dairy Queen, I kept looking for that red sheen on the hills, and nothing looked healthy to me.
Recent story about the beetle
David Suzuki Foundation on the beetle (I'm not sure I think much of this. I like the point about the beetles being part of the natural cycle, but I don't see a lot of insight here.)
My family and I drove up for my brother's convocation at UNBC. He's just finished his master's degree in math. We slept four people in one smallish room with a murphy bed and a hide-a-bed, neither of which got folded up once in the four days we were there. I can always tell when my dad's the one who made the reservations. Smart guy. Not so practical.
{rf}
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so i married an axe murderer
Date: 2006-05-31 11:24 pm (UTC)The rest - yes, I know what you mean. I'm not there to experience the pine beetle myself but I understand your sentiment. This is actually a wonderful stand alone piece. I want to share it with some people - hope that's okay? You should look at filling it out a bit more somewhere, not sure where, and publishing it somewhere more will see it. Or something. I just feel like people should read this.
Wow, a masters in math - that's spectacular.
Re: so i married an axe murderer
Date: 2006-06-03 07:47 am (UTC){rf}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:09 pm (UTC)The pine beetle ravaged that area many years before arriving in BC, and since then, the pulp mill (Domtar) in town went on what can only be called a rampage, and brought down just about everything with a needle or leaf in the area (which, I might add, is nothing more than one big swamp). The entire expanse along the five-mile-road into town is now a mess of wet black earth and standing pools, just waiting for some unsuspecting motorist to careen off the road and disappear. They've begun to plant grass seed upon it in some vain attempt to replicate the water-drawing effects of the willow that used to grow thickly there.
I miss how that place looked as a child. While I could never live there again, it was still my playground, the place where much of who and what I am was decided.
logging
Date: 2006-06-02 02:54 am (UTC)But willow trees? Who logs willow trees? Or did they just knock them down to get at the pines?
{rf}
Re: logging
Date: 2006-06-02 06:16 am (UTC)