Empty the Land
Martha Lundin
If the land is our mother, then the lumber barons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century took a rusty scalpel and performed a double mastectomy and left her body to stitch itself back together. It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that anybody thought it might be a good idea to at least try reconstructive surgery.
The land will never be the same.
My queer body is not the land.
But if I choose to have top surgery, if I choose to remove my breasts, instead of binding them down with Lycra, then that would be the only difference between me and the barons: choice.
My queer body is not the land, but the way people have flattened it is not so different. The result is the same: an empty space.
My queer body is read by others as “woman.”
I don’t know what it means that we name the land “woman” and when we beat her and gut her and spill chemicals into her, the only phrase we come to after is They raped the land. I don’t know which came first: violence on women’s bodies or violence on the land. But, in the end, the violence is labelled with the same language.
I don’t know why we call things that can’t speak “she.”
My great grandfather was a lumberjack. He was also a husband. He also loved horses. And he loved wood-carving. And he loved his only daughter.
But my great grandfather was a lumberjack, and when I, at 25, listen to the tape recording for his town’s celebration of the bicentennial, he sounds as though he is longing for a time that doesn’t exist anymore. Nostalgia for a land that doesn’t exist anymore can never exist anymore; he helped make it that way.
I can know that longing for work he loved is not the same as longing for flattening trees. It is not equivalent. But I could write the essay where I twist those lines into equivalency. I could write the essay where my great grandfather is nothing more than violence-hungry. I never met him—all I have of him are these tapes, the stories my family has passed down to me, and the land I think he loved enough to work in every day. All I have is the wood-carved model camp he created to remember a piece of his life, a piece of history.
We can’t know the future. We can’t go backwards. But we can remember.
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When I was a child, maybe 5 or 6 because it must have been before tee-ball, my dad taught me the right way to throw a ball. He taught me to make an “L” with my arm and “think up on the ball.” When we threw the football, in order to really make the lesson stick, he challenged me to throw the ball over the pine tree in our backyard.
The tree was nondescript as far as pine trees went. It had long, soft needles that, as a child, I ran my fingers through like hair. I think Dad told me it was something like Douglas Fir, but maybe it was a different tree up north. The tree in our backyard had needles that always looked brighter and lighter than “regular” pine trees. This tree was special because this tree taught me how to throw a football.
When the lessons took place, in the mid-nineties, next to our vegetable garden and impatiens, the tree looked huge to me. Like 10 feet tall. When Dad stood on the other side, it would have been easier for me to throw the ball under the tree rather than over it. But Dad was an enthusiastic coach, and as soon as I managed to hurl the ball over the pine, that would be the end of catch. A reward of some kind, reaching the goal of getting the ball to arc over and into Dad’s hands was an accomplishment worth ending on.
Ten years after our initial lessons took place, in 2006, a hail storm ripped through Northfield, and the pine tree in the backyard lost a few of its branches. The more mature trees in our yard survived pretty much unscathed, but the Football Tree ended up looking a little lopsided as it guarded Mom’s roses. For my whole childhood, the tree grew in a straight line upwards with its branches in a tidy teardrop shape starting about 5 feet from the ground; now it had a bald spot on its right side. We all worried the tree wouldn’t survive the shock of losing a quarter of its branches, and that winter after the storm, it looked like it really wouldn’t. Needles turned brown, and the tree looked, if possible, emaciated in the snow.
But then spring came and summer came, and the one-year anniversary of the storm arrived, and our roof was fixed, and our gutters were fixed, and the Football Tree in the backyard was still green. Still growing.
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There is a story in my family about a white pine that grew near the Sturgeon River camp of my dad’s childhood. In the 1970s, my dad’s family took trips during the summer to, initially, a camper in the woods, and, later, a small cabin that may have really resembled a shack more than a cabin, but it was theirs, and my grandpa built it himself.
It wasn’t a beautiful camp, but it was near the river, and the property butted up the Chippewa State Forest, protected land with big trees. Grandma and my uncle Paul took walks during the day while Grandpa and the other boys went off on fishing adventures or hunting adventures. The only other option was staying in the hot camper.
Together Grandma and Uncle Paul found an old white pine. A tree that had, maybe miraculously, survived the lumber barons of the early twentieth century. It was over 80 feet tall in 1976, and today measures probably over 100 feet. My grandma could not wrap her arms around the trunk that day in the woods.
The tree became a beacon of some sort for my grandma. Something to come back to during those long summer days when the sun rose before 6 and night didn’t fall until well after 10. In my family, the tree became legend.
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The Sturgeon River camp was sold in the late 1980s. By 2000, Uncle Rich began the process of building the Lundin family a new camp.
When Grandpa died in the summer of 2003, Uncle Paul went out to the old Sturgeon River property. The outbuildings were all still there, although they hadn’t been used since the mid-eighties. The roof on the cabin was overgrown with moss, and the outside was rotting away. But in the back of the property, on the edge of the state forest, Grandma’s tree was still there. Strong and tall. I imagine the crown of the tree stretching upwards and around in a wide arc starting 75 feet up. The bottom of its trunk wide and the bark coarse against my uncle’s fingertips.
In certain American Indian traditions, the white pine is called the Tree of Peace. They used its bark for medicines.
Grandma’s tree must have provided some steadiness for my uncle. Even though the camp of his childhood could hardly be called a camp anymore and even though Grandpa was gone, the white pine was still strong and growing.
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In elementary school, my brother Peter and I went to our daycare after school to wait for our parents to pick us up. During the summers, we spent all day there, running around outside with the other kids. The school aged kids didn’t nap, so while the little ones were asleep all of the older kids went outside to play under the pine trees. Peter practiced his climbing. He was a fearless boy, and growing up he was all lanky limbs and long legs. Watching him, it looked as if he threw his arms and legs over tree branches and clamored up and up and up until he was at the top of the tree.
He was told not to go so high, but it didn’t matter. Peter was the oldest of the school-agers. And every day during the summer, he climbed his favorite tree, and when he reached the top he shook the branch with his feet, jumping up and down, trusting the elasticity of the branch and the anchor of the trunk.
I was not a climber. Sometimes I held on to the lowest branch, reachable by tip-toe, and climbed my feet up the trunk and hooked them around the branch and hung upside down, but I never learned how to get upright. It looked like it required letting go, and I was too afraid of falling.
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In high school, my brother was voted by his tennis team to be “Most Likely to Become a Lumberjack.”
He liked flannels and he was tall and he did all the things people think lumberjacks would have liked: the woods, hunting, fishing, and singing beer songs.
To my queer body, flannel feels like camouflage.
Camouflage comes from the old French slang, camouflet: a puff of smoke. There and then not. Flannel hides the curve of a bust through an illusion.
In high school, I don’t wear flannel. I’m afraid to ask my mother to buy me anything from the men’s department, so I don’t ask for a flannel shirt. I buy a single pair of men’s jeans when I am seventeen that disappears the curves of my body.
I don’t start wearing flannel until I am 19 and in my first semester of college. On a trip to Wal-Mart, I head towards the men’s department and pick up a gray and navy checked flannel button down. It doesn’t fit me properly; it’s too big. But it is warm and soft, and I feel better when I wear it.
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When my uncle Richard began building his camp in 2000, the property was almost entirely cedar swamp. Cedar is a soft wood, good for kindling, easy to split once it’s been cut down. Cedar thrives in soggy environments, places where the water tables rise to meet their wandering roots.
Uncle Rich had to clear the land; a swamp was no place to build a cabin. Preparations had to be made, and, in this case, those preparations meant chopping thousands of feet of lumber. The cedar and hemlock and jack pine could all be used for firewood, so, once those were cut and collected, they were stacked to season for a year and dry out.
But the stumps of those trees were sometimes large, unwieldy. They fit in a fire pit but were rarely good for firewood. They took too long to burn, took up too much space. Stumps and leafy, spindly branches were collected and pushed together using a backhoe. The sound of the engine drowned out the cracking and snapping of the branches as they broke over one another. In the building of camp, there were many piles of branches.
The piles got burned one by one by whoever visited the camp. One by one, the bright green of soft and flat cedar needles burned an acrid, dark gray color. Stumps and branches and logs that hadn’t dried out hissed and snapped against the heat of the flames. When wood has not had enough time to dry out, it is called greenwood. Greenwood smokes before it burns.
There was no illusion here either. The wood did not puff at all. The smoke lingered in the air; it poured from the center of the stump, through the fingertips of the branches. The trees did not want to disappear.
But the needs of the property had to be met.
Uncle Rich sent photos of the construction site to us in an envelope. I remember the colors red, gray, and brown. I don’t remember the green flashes of healthy cedar leaves. It’s possible they had dried out to the ugly orange of dead pine needles.
We visited the camp for the first time the following spring when I was ten, and all I could see was brown and gray. The cabin looked like a shiny new penny, freshly sealed. The water hand-pump out front was fire-engine red, and there was forest green trim on the outbuildings.
In trying to piece together that first trip, I come back to the image of puddles. So many puddles. It was a wet spring; it must have been. All I can remember is the mud: iron-stained soil making copper-colored puddles around a copper-colored cabin. The grass hadn’t been planted yet, so the only color besides the brown and gray of a wet summer was the man-made parts of camp.
The building of the camp felt like a justifiable destruction as I walked along the porch.
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My queer body can be acted on as if it were inactive. As if my body were somehow detached from my consciousness. As if the two were somehow not affected by one another. It is possible that people see my queer body the way I, at 10 years old, saw the trees that were chopped down at camp: a thing that could be gotten rid of.
I can manipulate my queer body any way I choose. It is possible that for some time when I was 20 I saw parts of my body as temporary. I wanted top surgery, so I bound my breasts flat and relished the feeling of my ribcage expanding against the restriction of the Lycra binder. I researched testosterone injections and saw the way queer bodies changed over time: how jaws squared, brows became thicker, shoulders widened, and the distribution of fat to hips decreased. I reasoned that if I started taking testosterone when I was 21, that by the time I was 23 my body would feel more mine. And would be read by others as not-woman.
But by the time I turned 21, I had abandoned the binary almost entirely and passing was no longer first on my gender priority list.
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During the lumber boom, there was no illusion. There was no camouflage. There were only trees to be cut down and money to be collected. Despite the fact that, in the early twentieth century, the Upper Peninsula’s industry was made up almost entirely of lumber camps and mines, most of the public didn’t know anything about the life those men led either. Sorcery happened in the forests. Men went in to forests and left a landscape that had been gutted from the inside out.
The lumber barons of Chicago and Ohio gutted the state of Michigan. And it didn’t happen in a year. It didn’t happen in ten years. But by 1925, the huge white pines and cedar and oak trees that had made the Upper Peninsula so desirable in the first place to the men in the big cities had been almost levelled.
In 2011, there were finally more trees than there were in 1920. But fewer than one percent of the forests is considered old growth, or virgin, forests. When Grandpa E was in the woods, most of the 300-year-old, eight-foot diameter trees of the late nineteenth century had already been cut down in the Lower Peninsula, but there were still tracts of forests in the Upper Peninsula where virgin stands and old growth stood.
I do not know what a 300-year-old tree looks like. It feels unfathomable. In a photo of a winter logging load, two horses pull a sleigh with fifty logs. The men seem small, perched on top of the logs, but the base of the trees look to be only about four feet across, and I still don’t know how it’s possible that a tree could exist whose base is twice the size of the lumber in the photograph.
Boogerman is the tallest Eastern White Pine in the United States. He is 186 feet tall after a storm blew his 21-foot crown off. He has a four-and-a-half-foot girth and lives in the Great Smoky Mountains. “Boog” is one of the last trees that look like what my great grandfather saw.
The trees my great grandfather was responsible for cutting and skidding and loading were old even before men in Philadelphia signed a declaration. Grandpa E was part of a legacy responsible for the erasure of a landscape, and I am trying to figure out what that means exactly: how a state that completely relied on lumber and mineral deposits could strip a landscape, and leave. The lumber barons flattened her, the miners hollowed her out.
In thirty years, the barons were responsible for stripping 19.5 million acres. They left the land unplanted, moved west, the same way they stripped West Virginia and moved to Michigan.
Michigan still relies on forestry as one of its major industries. In modern forestry, trees are cut down in waves. Instead of cutting everything and leaving nothing, lumbermen cut some, replant, and when the rest of the forest has been systematically harvested, the saplings that were first planted will be ready to be chopped again. By leaving some, there is the illusion that the forest is not disappearing.
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In 2003, when I was 12 years old, I started riding the bus to school again for the first time since kindergarten. The middle school was too far away to walk, and so, at 7:05 a.m., my brother and I walked down to the end of our cul de sac and waited across the street under some pine trees for the bus to arrive at 7:15. There were six trees hiding the apartment complex just behind them. They were stocky pines with long needles that looked fluffy. The trees never seemed to get taller. But maybe the trees and I were just growing at the same rate, and so the perspective was always the same. One died every few years, and they were never replanted, and it seemed to take forever for the stump to be removed and for grass to be seeded.
Thirteen years later, when I turned the corner to my street to visit my parents, I counted the number of trees left: three.
The trees mark a passing of time. I’m waiting for the last one to die. I wonder what it will mark in my life.
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When I listened to my great grandfather’s tapes at 25, it was the second time I was hearing them, but maybe the first time I really understood what was happening. The first time I listened to them, I was 15 and I was sitting with my grandmother, his daughter, at our camp. His voice was tinny on the tapes as they crackled and whispered in the background of his interview. The tape player was sitting next to Grandma on a table beside her dusty gray recliner. It was hard to hear what he was saying from across the cabin, so I just listened to the lilt of his voice. She had a copy of the tape at camp and a copy at home. I liked to imagine that she listened to them a lot, now they were the only place left she could hear her dad.
When I listened to the tapes at 25, I heard her in Grandpa E’s voice. A phone rang in the background of the interview, and it sounded like the red rotary phone in Grandma’s basement.
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Our camp is not like his camp. We have electricity and running water. The closest thing we have to what Grandpa E would have had are a couple lanterns my grandmother bought at St. Vincent DePaul Catholic Charities. She lights them at night. We don’t even have to rely on burning wood during the chilly autumn because we can just turn on the radiator. When Grandma is at camp with us, we usually use both the radiator and the fireplace. The sleeping loft gets hot, but we just open the window upstairs before going to bed.
I never knew my great grandfather. He died before my dad was even married, let alone had children. But we are a family that passes down stories, and we are a family that is most purely ourselves when we are in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It seems right then that the Escanaba historical society, in 1976, would interview Grandpa E. for the bicentennial, a celebration of the history of the Upper Peninsula.
Maybe what I am listening for now is a sign that I am Grandpa E’s great grandchild. I am trying to find what the legacy is. I am trying to find out if the legacy is in the trees he helped cut down.
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Between 2010 and 2014, I try to spend as much time as I can at camp. I am at college in Marquette, Michigan, just a forty-minute drive from the cabin. In the fall, I meet my dad and Uncle Rich there for their annual hunting trip, and as I turn off 480 onto the camp road, I breathe a sigh of relief.
The road is iron-stained sandy soil. Uncle Rich doesn’t own the first stretch of road, so it gets progressively rutted and pot-holed as the years stretch on. But I have driven it so often, I know the zigzag way through the forest to avoid the worst of the holes and rocks.
I drive like my dad toward camp, anxious to arrive and head into the woods. My car goes too fast along the track, and my pulse speeds up searching for the big landmarks: the one stretch of road that opens up alongside the power lines and the prairie of tall grasses where there once used to be trees acting as a scrim, but those got carted out years ago. I slow down along the field, so I can look for deer that sometimes stand in the knee-high dried grass and stare at my passing car. After the power lines, there’s a stretch of road lined by poplars on both sides. In 2001, when the camp was brand new, the poplars were the first trees to sprout next to the newly bulldozed road. But they grow quickly: first one foot, then three, soon 5 feet tall and quaking in the wind with their wrist-sized trunks and spindly branches. In 2013, they are taller than me and tall enough that they arch over the road, nearly meeting in the middle. It’s a magical scene, especially in the spring when the leaves are just popping and they glow like stained glass as the sunlight streams through them.
Then there’s the stand of birches right before the locked gate. The birch bark stands stark in white columns. If I am lucky, I get to see them before their yellow leaves drop to the ground. Scenery in the Upper Peninsula turns brown after the leaves fall as everything waits for the first snowfall.
The last stretch of road before I reach the cabin is lined with tamarack pines. They are pine trees that lose their needles every autumn. The needles turn yellow—the same yellow as the birches—and then drop to the ground one by one. Tamaracks are my mother’s favorite tree, and, as the years go on, more and more sprout until the last image before the cabin is a curtain of golden needles in the fall.
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After finishing my first year of graduate school in North Carolina in May, 2015, I come back to Michigan to visit camp. I reach the stretch of road on the way to the property line where the dirt is copper orange, and poplar trees line either side of the track and arch over, nearly touching treetops. Their leaves should have been bright green: the kind of green that only happens at the very beginning of spring.
But today, there is no tunnel of poplars.
Ten feet on both sides of the road has been flattened. The saplings lie in heaps, waiting for a truck and men to take them away.
Driving past them, the clear sky visible above me, I know that all it took was a chainsaw and a day to do the clearing.
I can know that clearing is necessary. Trees that grow too close to the road can fall, and though they are skinny—barely as big around as my arm—they are heavy, and cumbersome to move. By clearing the edges of the road, it makes it safer. I can know that the absence of the poplars will allow dogwoods to grow and grouse to nest.
I can know it to be a good thing, but still, I can’t swallow the lump in my throat at the way the landscape changed. The trees pile up, and I want the pickup truck to come now, to clear them away so they do not rot and go to waste. I want to watch them haul the trees away; I would watch them burn the piles if they weren’t so close to the forest the trees used to be connected to. I want the poplars to be used so they are not just useless brush piles—trees that are nothing more than a liability to the people who own cabins and use this road to get to them.
But I won’t get to see the truck load the piles up, and I won’t get to see them burn down to a pile of ash. I’m heading to my family’s cabin that is still the color of a new penny.
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It is easy to think the legacy Grandpa E passed down is one of erasure.
My queer body is a thing that can be erased.
When my uncle bought the property that now holds our camp, he cleared most of the trees. The birch, poplar, cedar, tamarack, and jack pines were cut down, chopped, and their stumps hauled from the ground. My uncle filled in the swampy parts first with gravel and then sand and then soil, and then he planted grass. Camp is not so much a cabin in the wilderness as it is a rustic resort. It means nothing that we are a thirty-minute drive from the Tall Pines convenience store on the outskirts of Gwinn, Michigan. The cabin and the property on which it sits is manicured. Tailored.
There is a pump from the river that can be hooked up to a sprinkler so the grass is always lush and green. Camp is our family’s favorite place to gather and circle around the fire pit in our cushioned lawn chairs while we listen to the crackle of fire and the burble of river.
It is our slice of paradise in the middle of the woods: a man-made meadow and cozy cabin and quiet river away from our jobs and cities and obligations.
Our camp is not a lumber camp. We go to leave work behind. But in the fall, when I follow behind my father in a borrowed blaze orange jacket and look at the frost framing the leaves on the floor and marvel at the sky—how everything looks brighter in the cold, I can’t help but think Grandpa E must have thought so too. Must have been awed at the snow drifts in winter. At the sharp smell of sap in autumn. These are things we must share.
Erasure is too simple. My queer body is a body that can be flattened, glossed over, removed from a common vocabulary, but I am not flattening, glossing, or removing my body from this place. Maybe what camp holds is the memories of things passed down, the ability to recognize how some things change and how others don’t. Maybe what I share with my great grandfather is the knowledge that there are things that should not be lost. There are bodies that need remembering.
Martha Lundin lives and works in Minnesota writing children’s nonfiction books. They completed their MFA in nonfiction at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. In addition to Newfound, Martha’s work can be found in Gertrude Press, Ninth Letter, and Fourth Genre among others.