MAKING GRASSLANDS, ONE CUT AT A TIME

In honor of National Grasslands Week, here’s another older previously published essay of mine that I was in the process of expanding the words below into a full-length feature story when — as is often the disheartening case these days — the publication that had assigned it announced that it was ceasing publication. I’ll keep working on it and see if it can find a home somewhere else, or maybe it will eventually become a chapter in something a little more ambitious. Who knows? Writing, like cutting cedars on the plains, is a slow and laborious process, but hopefully one day you can look back at all those individual keystrokes (or gallons of bar oil and rolls of chainsaw chain) and see a story start to unfold…

There is a particular ridge somewhere in western Oklahoma that is bound to me by time and memory and marriage.

It was there that I first saw a lesser prairie chicken with my own eyes many years ago — though they were in much trouble even back then — and it was in the weedy draws at the bottom of this ridge where a much-younger version of myself and a long-ago dog chased bobwhites across grass-covered gyp rock hills that — if you listened hard and had just enough imagination — you could hear still crying out for the ancient weight of bison hooves.

Over the better part of my lifetime I’ve watched this ridge change from open prairie to a few trees here and there to a veritable forest of eastern redcedars.

The draws below, where I once could watch a dog run big, are now so choked with cedars that I can’t even make a path through them.

The prairie chickens disappeared decades ago, buffeted by larger issues that continue to threaten their existence. The bobwhites hung on for a while, but eventually they too mostly took their leave, and the whistle of a quail there now is as rare as the booming of a chicken was back then.

Eventually I came to the realization that if I ever wanted to hear quail there again, and someday perhaps even the booming of a prairie chicken on the old lek atop the ridge, I had to do something about the scourge of cedar infestation.

Enter the chainsaw…

Now, before I attempt to rationalize this seemingly anti-environmental behavior for those who automatically assume the presence of trees is always a good thing (Newsflash: It isn’t, and they aren’t) and may be unaware of the profound, landscape-level ecological threat that eastern redcedar invasion and infestation poses to the central and southern Great Plains, rest assured that I will revisit that subject at length in future posts (it’s also a topic I’m working on as part of a larger book project).

But for now, I merely wish to explain the genesis of my obsession for cutting cedars.

Lots of them, and with — to quote the ever-loquacious Jules-quoting-the-bible-quote from Pulp Fiction — “great vengeance and furious anger.”

Now, to be clear for readers, yours truly did not grow up on a farm. I was a suburban latchkey kid raised by a single mom, so I didn’t have much experience running power equipment and losing the occasional digit as a child like many farm kids did.

So when, as a young man barely out of my teens, I acquired my first chainsaw with the intention of cutting cedars with it, not only did I have to learn how to run it, how to fell a tree, and how to not kill myself in the process of doing both, I also had to learn — the hard way — that on a landscape level, there is no way one person with a chainsaw is ever going to make much of a difference. For that you need fire and the commitment to apply it to the landscape on a regular basis.

But damn if I didn’t try.

I wore out my first chain, then my first bar, then my first saw, and then I went on the next saw, and the next, and the next. The smell of cedar sawdust became an intoxicant to me, and I unapologetically slashed my way through generations of cedar trees. I imagined that every tree I cut meant one more whistle of a bobwhite or booming prairie chicken.

It became something of an obsession, both the murder of cedars and collecting the implements of their demise. At one time I went out to my shed and counted seven chainsaws, ranging from tiny little arborist saws with 14-inch bars all the way up to an 81cc Husky with a 32-inch bar and so much cylinder compression I practically had to use both arms just to start it.

Which, by the way, is also a good way to lose one of those arms.

These days my cedar cutting has slowed just a bit, but I haven’t given up on my dream of someday seeing prairie chickens on that ridge. Fire is the next frontier for my habitat improvement obsession, and who knows, I may end becoming a pyromaniac.

But while fire is the more effective and natural tool, there remains something deeply therapeutic about murdering a large eastern redcedar — and large numbers of them — with a snarling high-revving chainsaw.

I know it sounds a bit unhinged that l derive such immense and quite possibly sociopathic satisfaction from murdering and dismembering eastern redcedar trees, but I’m reasonably certain that my propensity for psychotic tendencies is no more or less than the average American (which, if I’m honest, may not be the best yardstick by which to measure).

I just love the feeling of a bar biting deep into wood, and every time I do I remind myself there used to be quail in this draw, and with enough sawdust and cellulosic bloodshed, there will be again.

So I just keep cutting. And I tell myself that with each circle of bare, shadowed earth I expose to the sun, I am, in essence, making what I love. I am making grasslands, making prairie, making plains. And hopefully, making some small difference, and finding some small sense of purpose.