Cedars’ Bark
By Nico Lorenzen. This story was collected as part of a 2023 open call for submissions. It is one of 17 stories that were selected to be published.
There’s a primordial silence below the cedar boughs. One that stands separate from the crunch of trail boots on loam or the distant intrusion of aircraft. The silence rests irresolute in the face of human change but not irreverent. It holds the reverence of eons; the eons those cedars have stood, before mankind, before the first flowers, and before any notion of a revolution, industrial or otherwise.
The solemnity of the primordial descended upon our tents as our trail crew awoke at first light to prepare for a day of caked mud and saw ribbons. One measured in miles of trail cleared beneath an unrelenting cascade of September heatwave sunrays. The stewardship of the wilderness, the state of its treasures, that is what brought me to Montana. Our work requires that we use traditional techniques to preserve access to our untrammeled wilderness areas, our forests, mountains and rivers. Places owned jointly by you and I, by all of the American public. Places reached without mechanization. Save an emergency, the only way to make it to such locales is by trekking by raft, kayak, by way of an accommodating equine or on your own two feet.
On that September morning, as I laced up my worn leather boots in preparation of another day pulling a crosscut saw the distillation of such wilderness spilled itself beneath the boughs. The stillness following the dynamism of bugling elk before sunrise, a restful quiet layered in a way we’ve adapted to know as right in its totality. Yet an ominous portent cascaded into the cedar grove: the knowledge of loss. Ask an expert, a scientist, and then find a hunter or outdoorsman and they will all tell you the same. The cedars are dying. They are receding to the persistent dirge of heat, fire, beetles and the incipient consequences of greater instability.
We are losing these houses of silence to a changing climate, to the ecological alterations of changing wildfire regimes, the loss of snowpack and the march of invasive species to whom our beleaguered forests cannot mount an adequate defense. We can’t turn back the clock but we can talk to one another, to those in power and act everyday to value our natural landscapes. And we as Montanans know how to protect what we cherish.
There’s a palpable irony to the challenge of climate change. We may have to cut down trees to save our forests, yet we have a choice: we may cut them with the signs of the landscape or with dollar signs, but we cannot be wholly beholden to either. We will prove Montanans can hold the line in the face of raging flames and battle corruption in a State House whereupon those who would jeopardize our forests sit upon desks made of their very timber. Montanans can protect our wildlands by measuring progress in resilient forest greens and charred blacks and not in the sterile blacks and reds of corporate coffers.
To save the sanctity of our silent cedars we must speak out.
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Nico Lorenzen is originally from Arizona but now lives with his fiancé in southwestern Montana. He has a background in ecology and evolutionary biology with years of lab experience before transitioning to work on wilderness trail crews with AmeriCorps and the US Forest Service. He spends more time in the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness in the summer than he does in town. (This piece in no way represents of the views of either AmeriCorps or the USFS and are solely my own).