A Christmas Tree Grows -- and Grows -- in Oregon--he must the conservative REPUBLICAN environmentalist
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 24, 2003; Page A01
BORING, Ore. -- This is a story about a giant outdoor Christmas tree and a penny-pinching logger.
To celebrate the season, the logger turns on the lights in the tree every day at 4:30 p.m. To save money, he turns them off at 11 p.m., when he figures everyone in the greater Boring area is either asleep or darn well should be. (The Portland suburb of Boring, by the way, owes its name not to a pervasive and localized ennui but to an early settler, W.H. Boring.)
This story could begin 50 years before Columbus discovered America. That's when the logger's tree -- a Douglas fir -- was a seedling.
It could also begin in 1949. That's when the logger, Glenn Althauser, then 21, bought a patch of wild wooded land and discovered the big tree on a bluff overlooking the roiling Clackamas River.
"When I first seen that tree, I began dreaming that it could be the biggest living Christmas tree in the world," Althauser said. "I dreamed on that for almost 40 years."
The proper place, however, to start this story is when the dreaming stopped. That was during the Christmas season 15 years ago, when Althauser decorated his tree with the help of a helicopter.
The logger, who is 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighs 135 pounds, really needed a chopper. His tree is 160 feet tall and 21 feet around at the base.
"My wife, Grace, who died of cancer 10 years ago, kind of pushed me to do it," said Althauser, who is now 75 and still takes a chain saw to the occasional tree. "Grace looked into hiring someone to climb that Douglas fir to string up lights. But that was going to cost me $9,000.
"Being a tightwad, I didn't want to do that. So I rented the helicopter. It took the pilot 15 minutes to do the job, but he charged me for a whole hour. I remember very well. He charged me $400."
Althauser had designed an aluminum ring, a kind of cut-rate crown, from which nine strands of lights dangled. Those strands were tied to a much larger ring that the helicopter lowered over the top of the tree -- all the way to the ground. Defying wind and rain, the small ring has stayed put near the top of the tree. The encircling strands of lights still run down to the larger ring on the ground.
This jerry-built decorative gizmo, which cost a grand total of $2,900, allows Althauser to make his claim for having the world's tallest lighted living Christmas tree. It's an unofficial, low-budget, self-policed world record that the logger often frets about.
"I was beginning to get guilty feelings about it, especially when I heard about the giant sequoia down in California that is supposed to be the national Christmas tree," Althauser said.
At 267 feet, the General Grant Tree in Kings Canyon National Park dwarfs Althauser's tree. President Calvin Coolidge designated it the Nation's Christmas Tree in 1926, and there are festivities each Christmas at its hulking base, which measures 107 feet around.
A couple of years after his wife died, Althauser took a nervous road trip, driving south to check out the government-owned competition. He was greatly relieved to see that the National Park Service had not outfitted General Grant with lights.
Althauser pays little attention to the periodic spats that break out among cities and shopping centers over who has the tallest Christmas tree. They are almost always shorter than his tree, though a notable exception was a 221-foot spruce that went up in a Seattle shopping center in the 1950s. In any case, they are one-season wonders bound for the lumberyard and are not part of the competitive world that concerns Althauser.
The living competition, in his view, doesn't amount to much, either.
There's that Johnny-come-lately Douglas fir in Blue River, Ore. It has 50,000 state-of-the-art LED lights on it. (Althauser's tree has chronic light-bulb problems, with about 40 of its 160 lights now on the fritz.) But that Blue River tree, for all its glowing razzmatazz, falls 10 feet short of the record-holder fir here in Boring.
As a matter of principle (and as a way of keeping down his electric bill), Althauser believes that too many lights cheapen the Christmas experience. "I never did like lights that blocked out the actual tree," he said.
Oh, and there's that impertinent eucalyptus in Tasmania's Styx forest. Every year it keeps growing taller. It's now 275 feet tall. And nearly every year, Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society tart it up with tinsel and 3,000 lights as part of their campaign to protect old-growth forests. All very impressive, but a eucalyptus is not an evergreen. As such, it does not qualify, in Althauser's view, as a traditional Christmas tree.
"So, I will continue to make my claim until someone challenges me and proves me wrong," Althauser said. "Then I guess I will have to eat crow. Whatever."
In this Christmas season, as in the past 14, Althauser has stuck to his holiday routine. He plugs in the 1,500-foot extension cord that turns on the tree. Later, he unplugs the cord -- unless, as sometimes happens, he falls asleep and forgets.
That's it. He says he doesn't buy presents for his seven children, 22 grandchildren or five great-grandchildren. They, of course, are welcome to look at the tree, which is visible for at least seven miles in most directions.
"I enjoy Christmas far more than what I used to," Althauser said.
On Christmas Eve, he plans to eat dinner with neighbors. He'll invite them over to watch him plug in the tree. He then plans to throw caution to the wind and leave the lights on all night long.
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he must the conservative REPUBLICAN environmentalist |
