Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
After our peaceful stroll through the forest, the racket was overwhelming. To be honest,
I think we were a little freaked out by how industrial it all was. I had expected a sustainable
logging collective to involve a dozen nice folks and a good chainsaw. Instead, the nice
folks had serious machinery and meant business. You could have taken pictures here that
looked like every preservationist's nightmare—a mayhem of logs and mud. Or you could
have taken pictures of the jolly, hardworking crew, and of the communities they supported,
and of the forest that, it was hoped, their logging was helping to protect.
“The skidder is coming!” Gil said. “You can't see this very often! Let's go, let's go!”
We ran to the edge of the clearing and into the forest. A corridor of crushed vegetation
led deeper into the jungle. Something had been through here. Trees were scraped and
bruised where it had passed.
From the forest, we heard the shriek and growl of an engine. It heaved into sight: the
skidder. This was how logs were brought out from the inaccessible interior, where they
had been felled. They were dragged out behind this narrow, streamlined tank, a low, blunt-
nosed hedgehog of a machine that was now headed our way.
Gil raised his iPod to record it. “We want to make sure not to be near it when it passes,”
he said, in the staring voice of the awestruck. The skidder plunged toward us, a colonizing
robot from another world, surprisingly fast, shouldering trees aside as it bore closer, nearly
on top of us.
And then we were running for our lives, screaming with joy and terror, leaping out of
the way. It passed just a few yards from us, wheels grinding, and then it was gone. In its
wake, a gigantic log slid coolly, massively, over the forest floor.
“Fucking
shit!
” Gil screamed. He was waving the iPod in the air. “It wasn't recording!”
His disappointment took the form of an intense, quivering joy. Then we turned, and the
machine was there again, back from the clearing, outbound for another log, bullheaded, in-
human, implacable.
On our way out, we stopped at the
patio
—the storage area near the highway, where logs
awaited transport. They were piled twenty or more to a stack, each log three feet in diamet-
er. We drove over soft ground flooded with rainwater, winding our way through a dozen
stacks, two dozen. Flying ants wavered against the mountainous piles of logs. The purple
stylus of a dragonfly appeared and disappeared. The air was thick with wood and rot.
Gil shook his head. “It's hard to believe this won't fuck up the forest, isn't it?”
