On Wednesday night a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful friend of mine picked me up and took my to a chapter meeting of my master naturalist group. I was so ready to get out of the house and to talk to other people and to get my mind off my body for a change. On this night Dave Crawford, former park naturalist at Interstate State Park spoke about the harvesting of all the white pine in the Saint Croix river valley. Perhaps the word all is an exaggeration. The lumber companies left a couple white pines because they grew on such a slope harvesting was not worth the effort. Otherwise the lumber companies took them all. At the end of the talk our speaker asks if anyone spoke up for the environment at that time. Hmmm, interesting question as an oil company plans to lay a pipeline under the Missouri River in North Dakota. Perhaps the residents of North Dakota would be more accepting if someone would write a folk lore about an amazing pipeline worker with super human body size and super human abilities; like Paul Bunyan but a pipeliner instead of a lumberjack. Just a thought. I saw a photo of a single board that was 3 feet wide, 2 inches thick and 20 feet long without a single knot in it. Where is that board now? How much would a board like that be worth in today's economy? I don't know the answer but I imagine it would be worth a lot of money. Both horses and ox were used to haul the trees from the forest down to the river. Oxen are stronger than horses and less emotional than horses but because of their cloven hooves, twice as difficult to keep shoes on. I have a granddaughter living in Sicily. I think I should make sure she has a book about Paul Bunyan in her growing library. But wait, yes, Paul is tall, dark and handsome and as Minnesotan as wild rice, but what the lumber companies did to the Saint Croix river valley screams corporate greed and short-term thinking. So now I don't know what to do.
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