The Man Who Planted Trees in a Burn Scar

That's me, in my latest commentary for NPR. WRITTEN, ILLUSTRATED, and EVEN SPOKEN by PETER MOORE

It has been a rough week, here in Northern Colorado. A day after my wife and I emerged from Big Thompson Canyon, after a delirious weekend in the mountains, three wildfires broke out and torched the landscape we’d been enjoying. So it turned out that my latest commentary for NPR had a bit of a prophetic tone, as I looked to landscape reclamation at the same time more acres were about to be scorched. And now we have the smoky skies that go along with that. Maybe Dr. Seuss Could help?

Are your eyes tired from blinking away smoke? You can listen to my commentary here.

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“I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees!”

Personally, I’m only Lorax-adjacent. But I stand proudly next to Dr. Seuss’s tree-loving furball, who also said, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot/Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”

Among the things struggling to get better right now are half a million acres of burn scars straddling the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park, and on both sides of Cameron Pass. The fiery summer of 2020 may simply be an orange-tinged memory for most of us. But the forest is still suffering the consequences, and they’re not pretty. Unless you like skeletal twigs in a hellscape.

In that case, I invite you to the west side of Rocky, which smells like somebody stubbed out the world’s largest cigar in the world’s biggest ashtray.

Years before the fires wiped out the park’s Big Meadows area, I backpacked there. It was then a glorious high-mountain pasture surrounded by conifers, in the shadow of Mt. Ida. I was so struck by the landscape that, when I got home, I pulled out a canvas and painted it. One problem I had to solve with a brush in hand was: How do you paint beetle-kill forests? By interlacing the deep green of lodgepole pines with slashes of gray.

Today, it would be simpler to paint: Black on black, right up to the skyline.

My mother-in-law’s favorite book, after the Bible, was The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono. It tells the story of a shell-shocked World War I warrior who finds a peaceful valley in the foothills of the French Alps. He is nurtured back to health by a shepherd who also nurtured the valley, by selflessly planting acorns and nurturing saplings.

“He'd been planting trees in the wilderness for three years,” Giono wrote. “He'd planted a hundred thousand of them. Out of those, twenty thousand had come up. Of the twenty thousand he expected to lose half, because of rodents or the unpredictable ways of Providence. That still meant 10,000 oaks would grow where before there had been nothing.”

Well, I'm not that shepherd. But I did join a couple of dozen Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado at the start of fire season, to plant 800 Ponderosa Pine seedlings into burned-out hillsides.

The Lorax would have loved it! The scene was mostly desolate, but Rocky Mountain Penstemon, Pasque flowers, and lodgepole saplings were pushing up toward the sun. So, if you concentrated on the first 12 inches above the forest floor, the landscape looked promising.

As the Indian proverb says: “Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit.”

To date this year, the Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado have planted 35,000 trees they’ll never sit under. But their grandkids might.

Giono wrote, “There are times in life when as person has to rush off in pursuit of hopefulness.”

Care to join me, and the Lorax, and plant a little hope? It might just grow taller.

“In 1949 the Smokejumpers were still so young that they referred affectionately to all fires they jumped on as ‘ten o’clock fires,’ as if they already had them under control before they jumped. They were still so young they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.”― Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

Or just, you know…