Looking at the forests around us through the eyes of a poet

Our region’s trees have been on my mind lately, partly because their branches have been slapping my forehead a lot (I’ve been bushwhacking to trout streams).

But mainly it’s because I’ve been researching the Big Burn of 1910. Nothing like 3 million acres of blackened forest to make you appreciate a nice green patch.

And it occurred to me that we take our trees for granted in the Inland Northwest. I’ll wager that most people don’t know a larch from a tamarack.

That’s understandable, because a larch is a tamarack. But my point is, most of us rarely take time to learn about these giant beings that provide us with shade, shelter and solace.

I don’t think I fully appreciated our forests either, until I stumbled across the work of Donald Culross Peattie.

What? You’ve never heard of Donald Culross Peattie, the Walt Whitman of the woods?

Neither had I, until I went to a Friends of the Library book sale and found his big 1953 volume titled “A Natural History of Western Trees.” I snapped it up, took it home and my mind snapped open.

Peattie was a scientist with the soul of a poet. His book is full of hard facts and botanical details, but his lyrical descriptions form the heartwood of the book.

Read the following, about our common Inland Northwest species, and tell me if it doesn’t make you want to stand in the middle of a forest and breathe it all in:

Ponderosa Pine (which he calls Western Yellow Pine): “No conifers are finer than these for a walk beneath their boughs – so ample and open the groves, so clean the forest floor of all save needles and grass and pungent sagebrush, with here or there a wildflower red or blue.

“And the voice of these pines (in the wind) is a grand native chanty. … If you have been long away from the sound of the Western Yellow Pine, you may, when at last you hear it again, close your eyes and simply listen, with what deep satisfaction you can’t explain, to the whispered plain-song of this elemental congregation.

“And you will breathe again, with a long, glad inhalation, the cleanly incense of these groves, which is nothing so cloying or seductive as perfume. It is an aroma, rosinous and timbern, that pervades much of the life of all the West. … Many towns, like Bend, Oregon, and Flagstaff, Arizona, are perpetually steeped in its wholesome, zestful odor.”

To which I can only add: Spokane, too.

Engelmann Spruce: “So it comes crowding down to the edge of the meadow where your tent is pitched, to the rocks surrounding the little lake that mirrors its lance-like forms upside down. And when the late mountain light begins to leave the summer sky, there is something spirit-like about the enveloping hosts of the Engelmanns. Always a dark tree, this spruce’s outlines are now inky, and its night silence makes the sounds of an owl, or of an old moose plashing somewhere across the lake, mysterious and magnified in portent.”

Western Larch: “The long, lithe branches of a young tree clothe it to the ground, and the rime of delicate foliage lights the twigs with a soft halo of pale green, paler than that of any other kind of western conifer, so that one can pick Larch from as far away as colors can be distinguished. Then, when autumn comes and the sun shines through the golden foliage, the trees gleam for a while like Aspens in an angelic light.”

Quaking Aspen (which he calls Western Trembling Aspen): “The foliage shines for miles; thus, as you cross the deserts in October, still hot and sere, you can see the gold band of Aspens in the sky, where they top the mountain peaks.”

Western Red Cedar (which he called Canoe Cedar): “Young limbs lift upward joyfully; old ones spread outward and downward with majestic benevolence. And over all glitters the lacy foliage in flat sprays that are forked and forked again.”

Sub-Alpine Fir (which he calls Alpine Fir): “The outline of the Alpine Fir, so outstandingly slender and martially erect and rigid, is the most dramatic statement made by any native tree. Its statement … is that of an exclamation point!”

Western White Pine: “Far removed from the experience and rounds of most of us, the queenly Western White Pine reigns over the Inland Empire, as its inhabitants like to call it.”

Peattie, I have since learned, was from Chicago and then became a nature columnist for the Washington Star (in that other Washington).

Sometimes it takes an outsider to make us look up and appreciate what towers right above us.