Pine Beetle Clearing

I knew I didn’t want to look at the black, spiky forms of dead pines that dominated the view from the deck anymore. They had been green and beautiful a few years ago, but the pine beetle had destroyed many large, lush trees, reducing them to creepy, gnarled sticks scratching at the sky. I just wanted them gone, and with them, the sad memory of how many trees were killed by the pine beetle.

I felt like our beautiful mountain retreat had been ruined by the bugs; the landscape was diminished and unlikely to recover. Those trees had taken a lifetime to reach that size. One of the largest trees still had a tire swing tied to it’s branch, swaying empty in the breeze. Sitting on the deck, we knew which trees were dead, even in the dark, by the way they didn’t move in the wind. They were rigid and unresponsive to the breezes that had the living trees swaying, limbs bouncing. The last pinecones, clinging to the bare upper branches, looked like perched birds, eerie clusters of dark, still shapes.

My sister-in-law and her boyfriend came to visit for a few days, and BF was looking for a project. He may have seen this one listed on a piece of construction paper on the fridge, where I had posted some ideas for the boys to work on. He asked one of them which trees I wanted removed, and then he picked up the chainsaw and started cutting. I didn’t really notice until six trees were already down. He moved to the east side of the cabin, and took down some more large ones–now with the help of Steve and the boys–about 14 trees in all. 

They’re gone. My vision shifts to the distant wooded ridge, and down grassy draws to new stands of trees. The ridge, though it has its own share of beetle-killed trees, is still mostly green and vibrant, with more healthy trees than dead. The meadows and grassy slopes are full of wildflowers and young aspen and pine trees, some of them already 5 or 6 feet tall.

I knew what I didn’t want to see, but I hadn’t considered what I would see when the sad reminders of the plague of tree-killing insects are gone. Recovery is already happening.