Into the Woods

–by Jason

Sailing down Sumner Strait on our second day out of Petersburg, the blue sky disappearing behind a dark gray line of cloud, we saw a dark shape on the water in the distance that didn’t move like whales or porpoises or birds. We squinted and tried to see what it was as it bobbed in and out of sight behind waves. An immense log, waterlogged and floating low in the water, moved heavily and slowly, out of sync with the waves.

Since then we’ve sailed with a lookout all the time. One person is at the helm, another stands forward scanning for wood in the water. It can get thick at times. We’ll slow the boat and weave through the stumps and logs. These waterways of Southeast Alaska are all within the Tongass, the largest National Forest in the country, the largest temperate rain-forest in the world, a dense sea of deep woods almost the size of the state of Maine. Lumber operations in the Tongass lose logs from floating log pens and from rafts of logs they tow from forest to mill.

All that wood rides the strong currents of these inland waterways till they are driven up by tides and waves to get stuck high on the beach.

When we row ashore in Warren Cove, the beach just above the high tide line is piled high with a jumble of weather-whitened, bone-like wood. We climb from log to log, watching our step and watching the infinite variety of shapes: long straight-grained logs, stumps with twisting roots, chunks with dense branches embedded perpendicular to the flow of the grain of the tree, and broken bits of twig and branch and trunk and root filling the spaces among the bigger logs. Walking atop the pile the shapes stand out like animals, like ribs and shoulder-blades, like sinewy muscle, like waves.

On Coronation Island, we walk from the beach back through a margin of alders and devil’s club, into the forest. When we push our way in the trees block out the light, and the forest floor is open and thick with fallen trees rotting back into the earth, all covered in a thick moss. The moss makes the landscape feel soft, as if covered by a thick snow. There’s something in these old growth forests that shows the cycle of life so clearly that we feel we can sense the entirety of it all at once. The ground we walk on isn’t mineral, it’s the lumpy accumulation of centuries of trees, grown through with bacteria and fungi and bugs and grown over with moss. New trees grow out of old logs and stumps and blueberry bushes grow out of the crooks of living trees. Newly fallen trees from this past winter’s storms open up holes in the canopy. Where light comes in, new growth springs up.

The forests here are a mix of spruce, cedars and hemlock. Working as a boatbuilder, I’ve gotten to work with some beautiful western red cedar, Alaskan yellow cedar and Sitka spruce. They’re beautiful woods, and great for boats. The cedars are strong and flexible and rot resistant. They’re used for planking. The spruce is light yet strong. It’s used for masts and booms. Walking in this forest highlights a conflict between appreciating the beauty and quality of the wood while working with it, and feeling the beauty and power of this living forest.

Ashore one afternoon, we stand looking up at a totem, grayed from weather, backed by two enormous spruce and overgrown with a thicket of prickly devil’s club. Our backs are to the beach as we face the totem which looks out from the shoreline over the water. At the top an orca faces downward, large ovoid eyes on either side. We stand in silence. There’s a buzzing hum of bees, a bit of breeze, the distant squeak of an eagle. Tlingit and Haida people, and the people who came before them, have lived from the abundance of these forests for thousands of years. The traditional woodworking arts are being carried on by contemporary carvers. In Kasaan, we talk with Stormy Hamar who’s carving a beautiful Haida canoe in a shed in the woods. At the village carving shed in Hydaburg Matthew and Sonny show us the paddles, bentwood cedar boxes, and totems underway there.

If wood and forests wasn’t the first thing we thought of when we sailed into Southeast Alaska last summer, we quickly learned that the forest that we’re living in here is what makes this place what it is. While we’re spending most of our time on the water, we feel immersed in the forest.