Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River

Chapter 2: River Sticks

chapter 2 River Sticks I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place,—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. —Henry David Thoreau, from “Walking” Folks, we have us a problem. Scientists have spent a long time studying and deduced a fact that any of my neighbors could have told them already—a river is only as healthy as the forests along it. That means the Altamaha is in trouble. Because we’re cutting its forests to death. You know by now how attached I am to this watershed. It created me. Its water flows in my bones, which are composed of minerals the river bore down from the Appalachians. My history is here, as is my present, and likely my future, so when Malcolm Hodges showed me the map that had our forest-blood all over it, like a big blood pudding with a river running down the center, I had to find out more. I tried to find some forest figures that are clear-cut, so to speak. I went first to the US Forest Service, the people some of you might assume would be in charge of keeping our forests in good working order but who are actually the management office for cutting them down, and I asked about statistics. It turns out that the Southern Research Station in Asheville, a unit of the Forest Service, has been counting and measuring trees in Georgia for a few years. The scientists there told me that as of 2004, Georgia had the most forest cover of any state in the South, with 67 percent. Sixty-seven percent of the state is forest. “Something’s not right,” I told one of them. “I live in Georgia, and not in any city, and I bet you my grandpa’s twenty-dollar gold piece that 67 percent of Georgia is not forest.” “Oh, yes, ma’am, it is,” the scientist said. “I’m telling you,” I said, “this state is not two-thirds forest, no matter how you crank the numbers.” “According to our definition, it is.” 111 river sticks “What is your definition?” I asked. And I was referred to a Web site, srsfia2.fs.fed.us—Southern Research Station’s Forest Inventory and Analysis for Georgia. “Forestland,” according to the US Forest Service Georgia fact sheet, is “land at least ten percent stocked by forest trees of any size, or formerly having had such tree cover.” Whoa, stop there. What is 10 percent stocked? Does that mean that if you own ten acres, and one of those acres has trees on it, the entire ten acres is a forest? And excuse me, when they say “stocked,” I think of a fish pond. We’re talking about sacred places where, Saint Bernard promised, wisdom is found. “You will find something more in woods than in books,” he said, and he didn’t mean an empty logging truck. Let’s go back to the tract I asked about. If that one acre in question formerly had trees on it, the entire piece is still a ten-acre forest? All this time I’ve been thinking a forest was something else. I thought a forest was a thick growth of trees covering an extensive tract of land. I thought a forest held trees of all kinds and ages, sapling to old growth, and among those trees grew beaucoup underbrush— shrubs and wildflowers—and among all that flora lived drifts of birds and crashes of animals and ambushes of insects and schools of fish. I was thinking like Rabindranath Tagore, “Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.” And again like Saint Bernard, “Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.” I was thinking about never seeing a poem lovely as a tree. And I’m telling you, 67 percent of my state is not the earth trying to speak to the listening heaven. Most of it is made up of places for the devil to hide. The government (meaning the Forest Service) had more definition . It said that a piece of land, furthermore, must be at least an acre in size to be called a forest, and “forest strips” must be at least 120 feet wide. OK, that’s good...