Nine Thousand Firs on the Hill He Cut

The Hoedads

Brody still had the tools in his shop. I did not ask him. I went to Emmett instead.

Emmett Vosburg was seventy-nine years old and had been a faller for forty-one years, back when they still used the big saws and the springboards on the old growth. He had known Grandpa since they were boys.

He lived alone up the road from the land in a little gray house with a woodstove and a porch full of chainsaw parts. When Grandpa was dying, Emmett sat with him every afternoon and read him the farm paper.

He was also the one who had taught both my boys to plant. Every spring when they were small, he and Grandpa would take them up the hill with a bag of seedlings and a hoedad cut down to boy size.

I drove up on a Wednesday after work, in the last of the daylight. He was on his porch with a cup of coffee. He had already heard about the cut. Everybody had.

“I saw the trucks going down,” he said before I even got out. “I figured it was Brody. I was sick about it.”

“I’m going to replant it,” I said. “Over spring break. With the boys.”

Emmett looked at me for a long time. Then he set his cup down on the porch rail and went inside without a word.

He came out with four hoedads over his shoulder. Two full-size, two short-handled ones with the blades worn bright from years of use.

“These two are the ones they learned on,” he said. “I kept them.”

He also brought out two old canvas planting bags, with the boys’ own bags still hanging in his shed, stained dark with years of mud.

“You know how to plant?” he asked.

“I know how it’s supposed to go,” I said.

“Supposed to go is nothing,” he said. “I’ll show you Saturday. I’ll be there at seven.”

“Emmett,” I said, “you don’t have to climb that hill.”

“I climbed that hill before Brody was born, Raelynn,” he said. “I’ll be there at seven.”

Day One

The seedlings came on a Friday afternoon in a refrigerated truck. One of my own drivers had arranged to bring them down from the valley on his empty run back to the coast, and he would not let me pay him for it.

We stacked the boxes in the shade of the standing timber at the edge of the cut and covered them with wet burlap. Each box held a few hundred little plugs, the roots wrapped tight in their soil, the tops bright green and soft.

Saturday was the first day of spring break. It was gray and misting, soft rain that never really fell, just hung in the air over the hills.

Emmett was standing at the bottom of the skid road at five minutes to seven, leaning on a hoedad like a cane.

He showed us everything. How to swing the hoedad and sink the blade, how to rock it back to open the hole, how to drop the plug straight in so the roots did not bend up into a J.

“Roots go down, not sideways,” he said. “A bent root makes a tree that falls over in twenty years.”

Then he showed us how to close the hole with the blade and step the dirt firm with the heel of your boot. He made us tug every seedling gently to make sure it held.

“If it pulls out with two fingers, it was never planted,” he said.

The first hour, I planted maybe thirty trees. My back already ached and my knees were soaked through. Colby planted faster than me. Tanner planted slow and very straight, measuring his spacing with his steps like Emmett showed him.

By the end of the first day, the four of us had planted about eight hundred trees. Emmett had done a quarter of them himself, at seventy-nine, without once sitting down.

When we drove home that afternoon, I did the math again in my head. Eight hundred a day. Nine thousand trees. That was more than eleven days, and we had nine.

And the plugs in the boxes would not wait forever.