There is a technical term we loggers had been using as a euphemism for a clearcut. Over time, we have become defensively self-conscious and sensitized by the “nature” of our work. As if to comfort ourselves, we say, “it is not a clearcut, it is applied ecology,” as if a wildfire had consumed the forest.

This euphemism was first coined by a cat skinner/philosopher setting upon an idling D-6 back in the day, before logging bulldozers had been supplanted by feller bunchers, forwarders and stroke de-limbers, and forests became “croplands,” harvested routinely on 40-year rotations. So much for diversity …

My dearly departed last wife had another view of such doings. She called the silvery stump farms glistening on the hillsides “tree cemeteries,” due to the stumps’ inevitable resemblance to tombstones, and I cannot dispute her apt observation.

It seems it’s just as the sign on the tavern wall portends: “Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder.”

GARY DURHEIM
Seaside