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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gauguin who wrote (39627)	10/15/1999 8:33:00 AM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

.... It's like ritual murder. "Fall," a 12 foot thick two thousand year old Sitka Spruce, "lay down" the last Port Orford Cedar, and tell me it isn't a mental, sexual experience. Bullshit. Your comments about people having to cut things down brought something to mind... When I was a kid, we had a cottage up on the Ottawa River. The Ottawa Valley has always been known for its large stands of various hard and softwoods, so we had a good mixed forest around our place. A couple of my uncles had cottages near our place and we all had quite a bit of forest land surrounding our places. Now, there were a few big trees in the forest... grandfather-type trees older than the rest. One in particular, an immense Northern White Cedar, towered over everything else in the forest. I used to love to run down this one trail that led right by that tree. I ran by it at least one or two times a day. On this one day, I was running along and rounded a bend in the trail and as the big cedar came into sight, I stopped dead in my tracks. Seems that some bastards had taken an axe and tried to chop the big cedar down.... tons and tons of chops in a ring right around the tree.... Right through all of the bark layers and into the wood. But they had finally given up and gone away.... However, the damage had been done... The tree was cut about 1/3 of the way into it, so there wasn't really any hope that it could survive. I was wildly angry and ran home to tell my parents. They came back and looked at the tree and then told my uncles about it. They came up and had a look at the tree too... Everybody was really pissed off about it. In a couple of days time, the perpetrators were caught... two of my male teenaged cousins... Apparently they didn't have any good reason to chop the tree down other than it was the biggest tree in the forest and they just had to try to chop it down... Guess it's a "male thing"... got to chop down any phallus larger than your own... Sort of like that whole thing about the young man who kills the old Corn God to take his place after the harvest, eh? Now... fast-forward to about 3 years ago. I'm out in the forest at the back of my farm. It's a fairly mixed forest, but younger, with a lot of older poplar being the largest trees of all. I'm walking along a seldom used trail that I haven't been on in a couple of months. All of a sudden, I see this big poplar laying across the path... It hasn't been limbed... and it's in a part of the forest that nobody can get into with a truck to pick up the firewood. I get closer and see that it's been chopped down with an axe. Obviously another of these typically senseless "male rites of passage" scenarios... tree chopped down a couple of months ago...left there to rot... no intention of coming back to cut it up for firewood. Still don't know who the hell cut the tree down. Lots of teenaged boys on the farms and houses in several directions around our place.... Just hope they got their bout of penis envy over with and don't come back to chop down more trees next year.... But I guess there will always be new boys....