Talking About Timber
Who doesn’t love walking aimlessly in the forest with no purpose other than to enjoy it? I mean there’s nothing not to like about it is there? The fresh green smells and earthy early morning mist, the thick carpet of pine needles or autumn leaves (soggy or crispy depending on the weather), the sunlight streaking through the trees, a unique forest rainbow, how much louder the birds sound in the forest and how very very small you feel right in the middle of it. A huge unstructured timber maze decorated with nature’s own adornments. And yet so many of the forests that evoke this kind of romanticized vision and the fond memories some of us have of special forest moments, are in fact as manmade as the car you drove there in. All over the world people plant millions of trees daily to make sure that we have enough timber to sustain us. And yet somehow we forget that when we’re in the forest, that the trees are not there for their own sake or to make us smile, they are there because we need the timber. It’s sort of like saying moo to a cow and smoothing its back and then going out and ordering a steak for supper.
Sometime I think that living in the city, and rushing from work to home, turning on fluorescent lights and air-conditioners as alternatives to a walk in the sun with a light breeze blowing, that we forget where things actually come from. We forget that the wood we carelessly toss on the braai is actually timber that has travelled across the country for our convenience. We forget as well about all the people that spend their days and months producing things we need in order to survive. People like Uncle Tony in the Underberg who farm cattle and fell trees for timber so that they can earn a living and so that we can live. I don’t think it’s something I’ll forget after my last visit to the timber producing area in the Underberg last year.
The last time I was on the farm, Uncle Tony took me along one afternoon when he went out to fell some trees for timber. Looking a little like a lumberjack myself in a borrowed pair of wellingtons to navigate the mud that lay a good three inches thick everywhere, I followed Uncle Tony across the fields, avoiding numerous ominous cowpats successfully for once. We stopped on the perimeter of the farm at the miniature plantation he had planted many years before, and replanted as needed, to make a bit of extra money from selling timber.
I watched attentively, albeit somewhat uselessly, as Uncle Tony and one of his workers laid into a tall pine tree with rather noisy chain saw. They worked at opposite sides of the tree until gradually a very thin point of wood was all that stood between the tree and timber. Obeying his instruction to step back I put my hands to my ears my ears as he shouted “timber” and in one giant crash the tree settled into a lifeless timber form on the ground. There was something quite startling about the transformation, the tree was truly gone, and its place was only timber.
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