The Mendocino National Forest has been a part of my life in some capacity since childhood, so I have on occasion explored its remote forest roads a year or two after a fire passed through and was able to bear witness to its resilience and capacity for self-renewal.
This time was different. For nearly the entire length of my drive all I saw was dead forest—from where state route 162 ends, splitting off into several small, dirt forest roads to well beyond where it reconsolidates dozens of miles later on the east side of the Inner North Coastal Ranges to continue on across the state. The fires that decimated these lands burned through in 2017 and 2018, and yet where I would see regrowth and renewal in the past I now saw only ash and charcoal, stand upon stand, ridge after ridge, vale after vale, from the western boundary on through to the east.
The forest was not showing signs of regrowth, and in some areas I could see grasses sprouting up that grow in the grasslands in the valleys below—but no sapling trees or bushes, not even wildflowers.
The Charcoal Forest
Mendocino National Forest
September 2022
Most of the pines still stood
tall slender shadows lifeless
in the midst of long thin
shadows cast or fallen beneath
the all consuming light of day
a few remaining limbs crudely
sharpened to flintstone javelins
Younger pines curved seared tips
back to the ground or arched
their black carcasses out to form
an eldritch tunnel over the long
and narrow meandering dirt road
Those more mature towered
abruptly devoid of life every
branch burned down to the trunk
so that rank upon rank of giant
obsidian spears lunged out
at harsh unblemished skies
The old madrones loomed
with chasmal cracks revealing
streaks of inmost heart-wood
two to five large barren limbs
tapered to blackened points
no leaf no twig no branch
remaining—great misshapen
wrists and hands reaching up
in prayer from ashen earth
long fingers twisted in their
final moments of torment
The ancient black oaks—
matriarchs of the wood—lay
with their sprawling crowns
reduced to a tangle of broken limbs
broad charred tentacles writhing
out from the ground a mangled
black mass of horror and pain
Mile after mile the scene
played back again and again
sometimes here or there far
in the distance a small island
of still living green nestled
in the curve of a deep ravine
otherwise only the silence
of charcoal ash and death
a massive gravestone raised
at the head of man and his cities
below
Upon reading this poem, a friend of mine commented saying he liked that I only mentioned three types of trees (the pines actually cover a few species thereof) rather than running through a whole catalog as us Western poets tend to do. Truth is, if there was more to observe, I might well have ended up with a longer poem. But there was nothing else left, no manzanita, no birch, no aspen, no scrub oak at the higher elevations, no birds, deer, or rabbits, just quite literally ash and charcoal and a few small, dead strands of valley grasses from seeds blown up the mountain through the leafless, lifeless spires that once had leaves and underbrush to keep those valley grasses in the valley.
In 20 to 30 years I suspect there won’t even be even many hints left of the lush, diverse life that once flourished here. There aren’t many pathways left for it to return. The ground has been baked free of the microbes and fungi that nourished these trees. The seeds have been reduced to carbon dust.
