THE BLACKENED FOREST
Rex Burress
I had an occasion to go to the Cherokee Cemetery on February 8, 2019, where my wife is buried, and the blackened woodland from the Campfire fire stood out quite darkly.
The small community of houses and trailers, including the Cherokee Museum, barely escaped the greedy fire, as a large swath of flames had left their mark all around the perimeter of the “ghost town.” Gone was the historic schoolhouse and a new home on the particularly dense forest along the north side. Fortunately, the fire had been stopped at the edge of the cemetery, sparing the numerous homes along Cherokee Road
The little yellow Cherokee Museum contains some marvelous artifacts from the gold mining era, including a petrified 'mammoth' found in Morris Ravine. In reality, the fossil is part of an agatized tree, even though one could imagine it to be a mammal with a leg-like chunk of agate covered with a roughened “skin” that volcanic flow had sizzled some 20-million-years ago. Beneath the surface of solidifying basalt in those fiery times, a hollow tree cast had formed and filled with a silica mineral seepage to become an exquisite giant gemstone.
The little yellow house, painted to resemble gold, stood out brightly in contrast to the blackened
forest a few hundred yards beyond. It appeared that firefighters worked hard to save it. Blackened snags and stumps, the black color intensified by recent rains, eerily resembled a prehistoric landscape of strange creatures.
At one time, I had plunged through those thickets of manzanita and scrub oak exploring disheveled rock formations left behind after the gold miners had ransacked every crevice 150 years ago. Nature had made a comeback, creating delightful new ravines and vegetative arrangements amid the towering rock piles and new pine trees. I didn't find gold but plenty of Cherokee Agate and quartz crystals plus plenty of rattlesnakes and other wildlife to photograph!
New growth and trees will return in time, but presently you can get powdered by black ash or startled by Black-Headed Boobalink snags! The fire-area will soon be a flower-area, as seeds and bulbs and roots concentrate on recovery projects. The woods are full of dead and dying trees yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living, and even blackened tree trunks add an interesting dark design to tree trunks.
There was a particular blackened hollow oak tree that had been toppled by the roadside, and the root section looked like a big black mouth, wide-open and gasping for breath. I had to stop and take a picture, and a gray squirrel went loping through the debris, as if searching for a roasted nut, or maybe a cache of acorns it had buried...or maybe a previous home.
So soon shalt thou have a summer home, and rest among new found boughs. Soon, the insects will return to feed the flycatchers, and surviving trees will lead the way to a new forest. Soon...
“The woods are full of dead and dying trees. Yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living.” John Muir
“Nature is ever at work building up and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.”
--John Muir