Mukilteo Musings

TREES

I am about to head over the Cascades and through Idaho (which we always forget about) and into Montana. I'll be picking up half of my son's stuff and attending his final orchestra concert.

It always amazes me how as you travel east on I-90, you leave the land of huge doug firs, hemlocks and cedars. As you approach the Rockies the trees become remarkably smaller--shorter and thinner--and although there are still doug firs, Ponderosa pines become quite evident. The minute you cross the border into Montana--the sky opens up with gorgeous valleys and mountains on the horizon. Big Sky Country deserves its nickname.

However, as you travel up the Pacific Coastline past Vancouver Island and on up to Alaska--it is indistguishable from the Puget Sound area--thousands of miles of huge trees, islands and water. Just a couple of hundred miles east of Seattle and the flora is totally different.

When we first moved to Seattle in 1979, I was totally shocked to see logging trucks with only one huge log per truck. Luckily, today the old growth trees are more protected. Unfortunately, if the current administration gets re-elected, we may see the one log per truck again until there are no more. How horrible and sad that would be. The evidence of huge trees is all over our city neighborhoods. Many yards have gigantic stumps from the past incorporated into their landscaping; golf courses do, too.

Our kitchen table is a part of a cedar stump--picked up at a scrap lumber shack when we moved here without furniture. We could afford a real table but I love this one--all of the years of memories of our kids' friends dropping their juice off the uneven edges. No, we'll keep it forever as a reminder of the land of small trees from which we came to live in the land of giant trees.