I have been reading Janisse Ray's, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It is simply beautiful.
Cracker Ecology is the story of Ray's childhood growing up in the upland plains of southern Georgia on the 10 acre junkyard her family called home. It is the story of the 7 generations of family that came to be part of the longleaf pine forests that covered the land - mostly gone now - but still very much a part of her.
Her chapters are short but telling and they alternate between stories of her childhood or family history and the story of the land. In the chapter entitled, Heaven on Earth, she relates her religious upbringing, which was severe in its apostolic fundamentalism, and follows it with a chapter titled, Clearcut.
I was born from people who were born from people who were born from people who were born here. The Crackers crossed the wide Altamaha into what had been Creek territory and settled the vast, fire-loving uplands of the coastal plains of southern Georgia, surrounded by a singing forest of tall and widely spaced pines whose history they did not know, whose stories were untold. The memory of what they entered is scrawled on my bones, so that I carry the landscape inside me like an ache. The story of who I am cannot be severed from the story of the flatwoods.
If you clear a forest, you'd better pray continuously. While you are pushing a road through and rigging the cables and moving between trees on the dozer, you'd better be talking to God. While you are cruising timber and marking trees with a blue slash, be praying; and pray while you are peddling the chips and logs and writing Friday's checks and paying the diesel bill - even if it's under your breath, a rustling at the lips. If you are manning the saw head or the scissors, snipping the trees off at the ground, going from one to another, approaching them brusquely and laying them down, I'd say, pray extra hard; and pray hard when you are hauling them away.
God doesn't like a clearcut. It makes his heart turn cold, makes him wince and wonder what went wrong with his creation, and sets him to thinking about what spoils the child.
I read that three page chapter over and over and was reminded of the future clearcut of the Wayne National Forest we toured at the Chapter retreat last January up in Hocking Hills. We saw beautiful hardwood trees marked with the same blue slash - some of them over 100 years old - that would soon be gone. Sad sight.
But I was also reminded that our tiny Wayne National Forest has some stalwart defenders - Bob, Loraine and the rest of the folks on our forest committee - who are watching and working to save the land. Once again, common people doing uncommon things.
Gives me hope. Especially considering, what spoils the child is being spared the rod. And haven't we clearcut so very much of the planet already.
