By Rob Woutat as a community columnist for the Kitsap Sun.
Having recently returned to Kitsap County from a trip through the deserts of
the American Southwest, I have a renewed appreciation for trees.
The cactus, even the Saguaro, doesn’t do the trick. Neither do the forests
there, or what they loosely call forests. Some are little more than stunted,
widely scattered vegetation that looks to a Northwesterner more like shrubs,
hardly tall enough to shade a mid-sized guy.
So in a sense, coming home to the Northwest and being surrounded by all these tall green pines and spruces is like coming back from the moon.
There are those, I realize, who don’t see trees as I do. One of them was Ronald Reagan who, 15 years before he became President and had to become a little more careful about how he spoke, said, "A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?" (He later denied having made the statement.)
People like that are incapable of seeing a tree as anything but a certain number of board feet, worthless until metamorphosed into lumber. But in this Arbor Month, it’s worth remembering that because they shield your home from wind and rain, improve air quality, harbor wildlife, add beauty and provide shade to cool your house in summer, they add value to your property and thereby bring benefits without ever having been cut down and sawed into boards.
I wished I could have explained this to the developer who stripped the hillside below my home in Illahee. With his chain saws still whining, I walked down to have a chat with him, naively thinking I might be able to head him off before he could any more damage.
"You must really hate trees," I said.
No, he said, he didn’t really hate trees. But these were not nice trees, he said.
"They looked like pretty nice trees to me," I said.
Besides, he added, if we left any standing, they’d be vulnerable to wind. They’d topple over on this new house we’re going to build.
I invited him up to my house where the front deck was built around two giant Douglas firs that still are standing 33 years after the house and deck were built.
He wasn’t interested.
I don’t have much hope that he’d be interested in the Heritage Tree Program either, a program started locally by Kitsap forester Jim Trainer. When I met Trainer, it was a Sunday morning and while I was out for a stroll, he was working up a sweat planting young trees along Illahee Road to illustrate another benefit of trees: a sound buffer for nearby homes.
Jim Trainer is a tree zealot. If we’re going to have zealots, trees are good things to be zealous about. And if you want to express hope for the future, it’s tough to do better than planting a tree.
Recognizing that trees are organic museums, Trainer has searched the county for trees with historic significance, one of which — a poplar in Silverdale’s Waterfront Park — is a descendant of trees Napoleon planted on St. Helena when he was banished there more than 200 years ago. Like the person who took that cutting from Napoleon’s poplar in St. Helena and brought it to the head of Dye’s Inlet, Trainer is taking seeds and cuttings from culturally and historically important trees in Kitsap County and, with the help of the children at Silverwood School between Poulsbo and Silverdale, propagating them on the school’s 18-acre campus and, at the same time, providing an educational opportunity for the students. (Trees just keep providing more benefits.)
In Jared Diamond’s Collapse, we’re reminded of past civilizations that vanished because of their failure to perpetuate their forests, their failure to recognize that, as the first President Bush put it, every tree is a compact between generations. Jim Trainer and the people behind the Heritage Tree Nursery honor that contract. They, and not the developer who denuded the hillside below my house, are models for the rest of us.
"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do."
— Willa Cather,