Nine Thousand Firs on the Hill He Cut

Asking the Boys

I asked the boys at breakfast. I did not tell them they had to. I wanted them to choose it.

“I want to replant Grandpa’s hill,” I said. “Every acre that got cut. By hand. Over spring break.”

Tanner set his spoon down. He was fifteen and had just hit the age where everything I said was suspicious.

“All of it?” he said. “Mom, that’s like, thousands of trees.”

“About nine thousand,” I said. “Around four hundred an acre, ten feet apart, the way the state wants it.”

Colby did not even hesitate. “I’ll do it,” he said. “Grandpa showed me how. With the hoedad. He let me plant two trees by the creek when I was eight.”

Tanner looked at his brother for a long moment. Then he looked at me.

“Is Dad going to be mad?” he asked.

It was a fair question. I answered it honestly.

“Maybe,” I said. “But we’re not doing it to make him mad. We’re doing it because the hill needs trees, and because those trees were Grandpa’s gift to you. You don’t let a gift wash into the creek.”

Tanner was quiet. Then he said, “Okay. But I’m not getting up at five.”

“Six,” I said.

“Six-thirty,” he said.

We shook on six-thirty.

The Seedlings

The hardest part was finding the trees.

Most landowners order their seedlings a year or two ahead from the nurseries in the Willamette Valley. By March, most of the good stock is already spoken for and out in the ground.

I spent two lunch breaks on the phone. I called every nursery I knew of from my years of dispatching. Most of them laughed kindly and said I was a year late.

The third day, a woman at a nursery outside Aurora called me back. A big company had cancelled part of an order because one of their units fell through. She had Douglas fir plugs, coastal seed zone, sitting in cold storage.

“How many do you need?” she asked.

“Nine thousand,” I said.

“I can do nine thousand,” she said. “They need to go in the ground within two weeks of leaving the cooler. You understand that?”

I said I understood. The price came to a little over five thousand dollars with the trucking. That was most of what I had in savings, the money I had been putting away for Tanner’s first car.

I told Tanner that. I did not want to hide it from him.

He thought about it for a while. Then he said, “Grandpa would rather I had trees than a car.”

That was the first moment I cried, alone in the bathroom with the fan running, because he was right, and because he had his great-grandfather’s way of saying things plain.