I had planned to take a deep dive into getting started with my art making yesterday, instead I puttered around the house, did a lot of laundry, cleaned the cars, and took a nap. I took out my bike with the intent of going for a ride but instead, took a nap. Not great for my diabetes but I think necessary.
I don’t sleep well when I’m travelling, eventually I get to a point where I sleep, usually after 2 or 3 days in, but I think the combination of the work training in Western Mass so quickly followed up by a 6 hour drive to my parents place and then the 6 hour drive home in heavy traffic just drained my energy.
I thought we had left my parent’s place early enough to avoid southern Maine and New Hampshire traffic, but I was wrong. We hit Portland at the mad rush out of Maine on Sunday. I remember now that we always left on Saturday to avoid just such a problem. I hope that I remember this for future trips.
Western Mass was gorgeous while I was out there. I was in Goshen which is what local folx call a “hill town.” Or I was told that anyway. I am planning to go back out to that campsite again next year with my wife. I don’t know that we’ll spend a week but I think a few days out in the woods will be nice. I don’t know that I’ll get to do another training for work at this particular print center, but I will likely put in for it. The whole area is full of nice trails and places to bike and I regret that I was not able to tap into this while I was out there.
Maine was also gorgeous while we were visiting. Balmy 70 degree days and perfect skies every day. Sadly they are under severe drought conditions and while there are restrictions on outdoor fires there aren’t fire bans. My Dad loves a camp fire and cook out over an open fire, but despite his extremely well built fire pit, he would not start a fire. While he doesn’t make a living off the wood on the farm, he does heat his home as do my brothers from the wood on the farm. If a fire started on the farm it would be devastating for the whole family. I believe he said that he and my brothers had cut around 30 cords so far this year. They practice a careful sustainable approach to harvesting the wood. He goes in and harvest out the less desirable wood, then allows the more desirable wood to get to size, then returns to harvest the more desirable wood in 10 years or so. They work in roughly 1 acre squares in this practice. They leave behind trees that are more desirable for wood or burning.
He has several pine trees on the property that are very large around the base and very straight. He always leaves these behind so that they can get bigger. He only harvests those if he is building something specific. There are several acres on the farm that are nearly all maple trees or birch trees. He occasionally decides he wants to open up land to create either more hay field or more blueberry field. At this point he’s be practicing this sustainable harvesting method for close to 60 years and there are still spots he’s not touched.
That said he knows where all the old logging roads are on the farm and he’s been recutting them and as he drove me through them with his UTV I was thinking about how difficult and amazing it would be to ride my bike through some of those trails. Next summer I hope that my knee is good enough that I can attempt some of these trails by bike. I’ll likely need to put some MTB tires on to attempt some of the spots.
I had a conversation with friends recently that you can still see, in some areas of Maine, the damage from the outbreak of them in the 70s and 80s. I remember my family talking about the outbreak when I was a kid. There are areas on the farm where nearly 50 years later you can still see where the forest was damaged from the Spruce Budworm. There are areas where walking through the forest is still pretty dangerous due to downed spruce trees killed by the budworms. I’m thinking about how dry conditions are currently and how those areas with the downed spruce trees are fully of stuff that makes great tinder- dry rotted wood, leaf litter, and pine needles. Fire would spread fast and burn deep into the litter. When it’s been wet enough that litter and rotted wood retain a lot of moisture, you can grab handfuls of rotted wood and wring water out of it. But right now? It crushes down to a fine powdery fibrous mass.
That’s dangerous. Honestly Maine is ripe for a massive wild fire and it’ll be an idiot who starts it.
While we were there a pair of fire trucks and a game warden vehicle went blazing by my parent’s house with lights and sirens, I can’t remember that happening in the 20 years I lived in the town. My father’s cousin is the fire chief and told him later that someone threw a lit cig butt into the dry brush on the side of the Downeast Sunrise Trail. Fortunately the trail is on the opposite side of the river from the farm, but conditions are dry enough that it would not be unrealistic that the fire could make it over the river, all it would take is a spark or one tree falling just right.
On the side of the river where the trail is located it is flanked by paper company land that has been clear cut- probably about 500 acres of land that needs a good burn but would fuel a wild fire and spread it dramatically. Also, there are the balsam fire “farms.” A local dude who owns thousands of acres bought up deforested paper company land and put in balsam fire trees that are harvested for making wreaths. I can’t remember the number of acres of those lots but it’s huge, fire in those balsam fir lots would spread fast and far.
If wild fires hit downeast Maine we’ll see acreage numbers increasing rapidly and be devastating. Given the number of people who live miles out into the woods we’ll see more deaths that we should. In some cases I suspect we won’t even know the full toll for many years.