Is this the last autumn when you will see ash trees in their glory? Those subtle and exquisite shadings of gold into purple? Are you looking, really looking at the ashes in your town, knowing that next year there will be no ashes, that for the rest of your life you may never see another ash?
I had never paid ashes much attention. And then, shortly after I moved to a new town, I saw a row of trees with the most amazing show of color. They weren’t flamboyant in way maples can be. But there was something about them that drew my eye. There they were every morning on my commute out of town and again every evening as I returned, their colors enhanced by the low sun in the sky.
And then they were going and gone.
They were cutting them down to try to stop their spread. Warnings were everywhere not to transport wood that might be infested with the emerald ash borer. My once pretty street showed horrible gaps where the ashes had been. There were warnings throughout town that they would all be cut. So every walk I took that autumn was a saying goodby forever to the ashes there, still alive, so beautiful that last autumn of their lives.
The work of the emerald ash borer. I may never see another ash in my life. And in a generation or two they ashes and their beauty, their wonderful wood that baseball bats were made of - all will be forgotten. They will join the lost chestnuts, trees that were the redwoods of the eastern part of the United States, a fact now all but forgotten.
Not too long ago, the American chestnut was one of the most important trees of forested from Maine south to Georgia, from the Piedmont west to the Ohio valley. In the heart of its range only a few generations ago, a count of trees would have turned up one chestnut for every four oaks, birches, maples and other hardwoods. Many of the dry ridgetops of the central Appalachians were so thoroughly crowded with chestnut that, in early summer, when their canopies were filled with creamy-white flowers, the mountains appeared snow-capped.
And the trees could be giants. In virgin forests throughout their range, mature chestnuts averaged up to five feet in diameter and up to one hundred feet tall. Many specimens of eight to ten feet in diameter were recorded, and there were rumors of trees bigger still.
Native wildlife from birds to bears, squirrels to deer, depended on the tree's abundant crops of nutritious nuts. And chestnut was a central part of eastern rural economies. As winter came on, attics were often stacked to the rafters with flour bags full of the glossy, dark brown nuts. Spring houses and smokehouses were hung with hams and other products from livestock that had fattened on the harvest gleanings. And what wasn't consumed was sold. Chestnut was an important cash crop for many Appalachian families,. As the year-end holidays approached, nuts by the railroad car-full were shipped to New York and Philadelphia and other big cities where street vendors sold them fresh-roasted.
The tree was also one of the best for timber. It grew straight and often branch-free for up to fifty feet. Loggers tell of loading entire railroad cars with boards cut from just one tree. Straight-grained, lighter in weight than oak and more easily worked, chestnut was as rot resistant as redwood. It was used for virtually everything - telegraph poles. Railroad ties, paneling, fine furniture, musical instruments, even pulp and plywood.
Then the chestnut blight struck. First discovered in 1904 in New York City, the lethal fungus - Asian organism to which our native chestnuts had very little resistance - spread quickly. In its wake it left only dead and dying stems. By 1950, except for the shrublike spouts the species continually produces (and which also quickly become infected), the keystone species on some nine million acres of eastern forests had disappeared.
And out west now, it’s the pine beetle. Where there was once green on the mountainsides and that piney smell, now there is just death. When the rains come, there will be mudslides.
Gone, gone, gone. Ashes to ashes. Ashes, ashes, ashes.
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