In defence of snags, the bones of the forest
I wrote this for The Globe and Mail, in a few hours, after returning home from a trip to Mount Ranier National Park
"Not long ago, after a summer of fire bans, browning cedars and dust covered boots, my home received the season’s first drenching rain. I awoke to the sound of it, like a shushing, accompanied by a louder exhale of winds bending the trees, and occasionally, felling them.
My neighbourhood had been preparing. The woods echoed this summer with growling chainsaws, and a new couple went so far as to close the street so their arborists could take down two huge maples. The trees were, they said, diseased, but the stump wood looks healthy enough. It is a perverse incentive when a downed tree yields the arborist several hundred dollars, but a standing tree yields nothing.
They could at least have left a snag. Snags are the conciliatory bones of the forest – what you leave when you wish you could have left the tree. A decaying tree near a home or roadway is a potential hazard, but a snag – too short and poorly branched to shear a roof or down a power line – is a treasure. A snag is a decaying monument, a sculptural element, a teaching tool, a food source, a shelter, a lookout post, a home."
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