Romancing The Tree

They get us where we live

WE FIND TREES first in childhood, a peaceful place to play. We hang from their branches. We carve hearts in their bark. We lean into kisses in the cool of their shade.

In small towns, they are the markers, showing us which path to take. In cities, they signal some haven, where the concrete jungle will end. If we are lucky, we spend a lifetime with them. They stand beside us in back yards and front yards, at birthdays and burials, weddings and welcome homes. If they get sick, we stand vigil. If they are cut down, we cry.

Here, more than elsewhere, these things are true. Half our state is covered with forest, each tree with its own tribe — the Douglas fir, the Western red cedar, the Sitka spruce. They make our land lush with their green, from the streets of Seattle to the forests of Forks.

For centuries, they have served us, carrying Native Americans in canoes, allowing for travel and trade. Our state has made a living from them; tens of thousands of jobs are still tied to timber.

In some ways, though, they are not suited for these modern times. Their roots break through our cement. Their branches block our views. They grow in directions we do not always like.

But they feed our imagination and sustain us all the same. They speak to us in books, guiding us through fairy tales and fiction. They menace us, they mystify us, they make us see love.

And they do all these things in silence, watching us from their space in the sky.

BEN HUFF HAS waited so long for this day. Through the chemotherapy, and the radiation, andthe surgery, he has waited. He wants to know: Will his body let him climb again to the top of a tree?

The tree is rigged and ready. Huff has already sent the fishing line over a limb. His son is tying it now to a climbing rope. They are minutes away from the moment, when Huff will step into his harness and pull himself up the tree.

"Are you ready yet?" he asks his son, Logan. "Are you ready yet?"

"Just a second," the boy says.

"This is so much fun!" Huff cries.

For Huff and his youngest son, the tree-climbing tradition is precious. It's a stress-reliever. A confidence-teacher. The greatest escape around.

Nestled in the highest arms of an old-growth tree, they can see so much. The Peregrine falcon carrying his lunch across the sky. The bent-over biker, whirring down below. The treetops stretching for miles, a forest floor for the sky.

They started climbing two years ago, before the word "cancer" hit. They were dealing then with PTSD, a stress disorder diagnosed more than 30 years after Huff's time in Vietnam. He was out of work and aimless, moving his family from one home to another, looking for a way to live.

Somehow, the trees helped. He spent hours in the forest, his body small under its canopy, and safe. Huff had always found peace in the trees, growing up in Alaska.

"They've stood the test of time," he says. "There's something reassuring about that."

He never really considered climbing trees until that issue of Smithsonian magazine. The cover showed men camping in treetops, the ocean spreading its blue out below. The headline began: "And You Thought Tree-Climbing Was For Kids." Huff did the research, ordered the equipment, joined an online club. He made Logan his partner, and up they went, into the trees.

It was as good for the boy as it was for the man."His attitude was rotten," says Huff, recalling one of their trips together, "15-year-old-boy rotten."

But an hour spent in the treetop, and Logan inched down the cord to the forest floor, his attitude all squared away.

For a while, father and son went climbing every month, scouting for "friendly" trees, with branches like stair steps to the sky. Then the cancer came and put climbing on pause. Huff spent those months on the computer, studying the workings of the forest.

On this summer day, his first day back, Huff stands at the side of a friendly-looking tree in Deception Pass State Park, his shirt lined with images of moose. Logan ties a knot nearby, his face shaded with a Planet Hollywood Honolulu baseball hat.

Out here, there is no hierarchy between them, no place for playing father and son. So many things could go wrong, from the knot coming loose to the sudden snap of a branch.

Huff steps into the harness and starts to pull himself up the tree. He stops after a few minutes to catch his breath. He looks around. He starts again.

He makes it there in the end. Sitting quiet in the arms of a 95-foot tree. There is no feeling quite like it, particularly these days.

These days, Huff cannot hold down a job. He tried to volunteer for the state, cataloging old-growth trees. But even that, he could not do. He could not find the concentration.

So when he reaches the top of a tree, clears a space for his son, it feels like some kind of proof:

"I can do something and be successful."

THERE IS A NAME for the clusters of color on the ground each autumn.

It's called "leaf litter."

And after seasons spent sweating over a leaf-blower, or rooting through gutters on the roof, some homeowners in Bellevue have had enough. They are tired of picking up after that tree. They call the city with a request: Can you please cut it down?

Kevin LeClair is the man who takes their calls. He is the urban forester for the city of Bellevue. He decides the disputes homeowners have with trees in the parks nearby.

Bellevue is a city with more than 2,000 acres of forest. To many people, those trees stand as a symbol of the suburban dream, a promise that something more peaceful and graceful lives outside the city. At the very least, most homeowners consider them pretty.

But pretty is not always practical.

"It comes down to: How is it affecting me now?" says LeClair.

Leaf litter is the most common complaint. But there are plenty of others, from the shade of a tree stifling flowers to the height of it scaring the homeowners.

Back when he started this job, an industry newsletter welcomed LeClair with a list of "true-life" complaints from across the country.

"Citizen states that the large tree across the street, in the park, needs to be cut down," read one. "The tree has given her husband an enlarged heart."

In Bellevue, the most emotional issue is views. Homeowners pay tens of thousands of extra dollars for a clean look at the Space Needle, or Mount Rainier on a blue-sky day. When a tree grows, and intrudes on that view, the desire to cut off its top can turn to desperation."What they want essentially is a butch haircut," says LeClair. "And that's not what we can do."

Bellevue was one of the first cities in the country to pass a critical-areas ordinance protecting certain sensitive natural lands. The city will not cut down trees, or even prune them, just to preserve views.

LeClair is sympathetic. Here he is, telling the people who pay him they can't prune trees near their own property — trees that have taken good money out of their investments.

But his job is to protect Bellevue's urban forest, that delicate spread of greenery that keeps the community healthy. So he gives them the hard sell: Trees are not just decoration. Trees are one of the best assets a community can keep. They freshen the air, cleanse the water, attract more customers to shops. They save the city money, as well as make it.

Sometimes people listen. Sometimes they do not. A few years ago, homeowners cut down or "severely pruned" more than two dozen city trees to preserve their hilltop view. They were ordered to pay the city $150,000, issue a public apology and do 32 hours of community service.

"Sometimes people will just take the gamble," says LeClair. "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than beg for permission."

ONE BY ONE, the logs move down the line. They get flipped. They get shaken. They get sent into 30-foot saws and sliced into threes.

Martin Whitehead has a clear view of it from where he sits, protected in a booth, at the side of the sawmill floor. He is staring straight ahead, waiting for logs to tumble from a conveyor belt into his line of vision.

"You've got to be able to read the wood," he says, controlling the speed of the conveyor belt. "If it's real burly or knotty, I might have to slow it down."

Whitehead has worked here at Portac Inc., outside Forks, for the past decade. In the beginning, the physical labor came as a shock to his system; he lost 50 pounds in two months. Now that he works in the booth, the job takes his concentration, and not much more.

There's a price to pay, of course: He's stuck in the swing shift, which means he misses time with the family. But there are not a lot of options these days for a man who makes his living from lumber.

"I like living out here, and jobs are pretty scarce," says Whitehead, who was raised in Forks.

Nestled on the edge of the Olympic National Forest, Forks is more than an hour away from signs of modern society. To its south is the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the world's natural wonders. To its west is long, wide coastline, with some of the cleanest air in the state.

More than a century ago, it took homesteaders a day and a half to get here from the coast. They cast about for years, looking for crops to harvest. In the 1930s, they settled on trees.

Like any cash crop, the trees were tested by nature — wind and fire and more. But nothing hit Forks quite so hard as the federal government when it declared much of the forest around the town off-limits to logging. It happened in the late 1980s, brought on by sightings of the spotted owl, an endangered species living in the woods nearby.

At the center of town, a sign still stands, declaring Forks the Timber Capital of the World. But these days, only two main sawmills remain.

Most of the loggers have left for Alaska or British Columbia. Some have moved indoors, to work at the local prisons. Others are training in technology.

But the town has not given up on trees. Every year, those trees draw thousands of tourists to the Olympic Peninsula. So Forks is focused now on becoming a destination, not just a pass-through. In the past decade, the town has added two motels and nine bed-and-breakfasts. There is a timber museum now, built by a carpentry class at Forks High School. And residents lead tours through the remaining mills and logging sites around Forks.

Still, if you ask volunteer Stan Fouts, a retired forester for the state, it's a tricky way for a town to make its living.

"Tourists are great," he says. "But we can't eat 'em."

One of the town's biggest draws is the Loggers' Memorial, a monument to the men and women who work in the woods. At the center of it stands an 11-foot statue of a logger, made from Western red cedar.

This is the work of Dennis Chastain. A former logger, he latched onto chainsaw art more than nearly two decades ago, when he was out of work and restless. He started with mushrooms, carved for his wife's garden. Then the tourists started to pull over, asking about them, and there it was: a job.

His son is learning the trade now; his wife is doing promotion. They ship statues across the country and around the world. There is a business card and a slogan: Come See What We Saw.And still he is proudest of that Loggers' Memorial. When Forks put the project out to bid, Chastain knew plenty of outsiders would want a piece of that business.

"I kept it low," he says, "so that I could have the honor of carving it."

A GROVE OF birches stands before the students, stretching their bodies into the sky. They are white trees with black bands across their waists. Their heads are feathered with green leaves, their arms swing thin in the wind.

The students stare, eyes narrowed, their pencils poised and ready. Some sit cross-legged, blowing bits of eraser off the page. Others walk around, tapping branches.

They are here to study light, volume, shadow, proportion, the tools of the artist's trade. But more important for most, they are here to capture the tree. The art of its form is in their minds, called up by so many childhood memories and emotions from other places in time.

The trouble is in the translation: It never quite works. Sheila Siden tried a few times in a grove near her house, where all kinds of trees grew together in a tangle.

"It was so chaotic," Siden recalls. "I didn't know how to start."

So here she sits in the Washington Park Arboretum in a class called "Portrait of Trees." Suzanne Brooker, a teacher with the Seattle Academy of Fine Art, wanders around the grove, leaning into students' sketchpads, whispering words of advice.

"There is no right or wrong," she reminds them. There is only the imagination and what it sees when it looks at trees. Is that a noble elder tree or a creepy Halloween tree? A stone-faced soldier or a weeping saint?

One person might see the moss bleeding in that maple over there. Or the black ring of scars, where it lost some limbs. But when Brooker looks at it, her eye is drawn to the "pom pom" of green, growing where an arm got torn away.

"He's trying to compensate for a lost branch," she says.

Just beyond the green curtain, the sound of the city is humming. But the class is busy being lost in the trees, looking for its next model: the willow.

Merlene Smith travels every week from Port Orchard for pleasures like these. For years, she has wanted to get the power of a tree on the page. She saw an artist do it once, shortly after her husband died. The way that artist drew the tree left her speechless.

"It was like it had muscles," Smith recalls. "Those roots were holding onto those rocks."

The class turns a corner, and there the willow stands, a thick, burly tree, its bark twisted around the trunk. It has heaved its body toward the light over time, touching the slim fingers of its branches to the ground.

"You can now pull out your big, dark, monster pencil," says Brooker.Walter Kappes sits down on his lawn chair. Beside him is his daughter, Heidi Kappes-Belinsky. She tried for years to pull him into an art class. Nothing interested him — until this.It's hard for Kappes to describe just what pulls him so close to trees. For more than seven decades, he has seen them grow. Kappes is silent, looking for the words. His daughter watches him, waiting.

"It's life," he says.

Cara Solomon is a Seattle Times staff writer. Ken Lambert and Thomas James Hurst are Times staff photographers.