Log Me a River, by Heather Millar, Atlantic Monthly, November 1996

As old-growth longleaf pine becomes scarce, thousands of valuable logs are being raised from riverbeds where they have lain for close to a century.

The asphalt road that leads north to the board launch could be a black hose laid down across a gargantuan lawn. Off the shoulder on either side a narrow “beauty strip” of mature long-leaf pines cases an arc of shade over the state highway. Their tall, straight trunks reach up to green crowns of zigzag branches, each ending in tufts of twelve-inch needles that look vaguely like Christmas ornaments. Beyond, clearly visible through the longleaf, stretch miles upon miles of younger trees, mostly loblolly and slash pine, with upturned, regular branches and shorter needles. These youngsters stand in rows that would do a corn farmer proud. Probably planted on the same day, twenty to thirty years ago, all have grown to roughly the same height, as even as blades of newly cut grass. Though the beauty strip never abandons the line of road, the managed forest beyond disappears every few miles. There the rows of tress have been “harvested,” leaving only a blank square of brambles and red dirt. Industrial forestry dominates this part of southeastern Georgia. Huge timber and paper companies—Union Camp, Georgia Pacific, Gilman Paper—won vast sections of the coastal plan. For many towns in these woods, prosperity can be predicted by the distance to the nearest paper mill. One after another, tractor-trailers rumble along the back roads. Their loads of skinny trees jostle in the trailer cradles like so many handfuls of chopsticks.

Though this scene might disturb those with an affection for wilderness, the timber companies argue that we all use paper and that, as every child knows, trees grow back. If you cut down a tree and process it into a magazine like this one, you can always plant another. In twenty or thirty years it, too, will be jostling along some Georgia back road on the way to becoming paper pulp.

This cycle has meant that for a century wood has been held up as the ultimate renewable resource. In Teddy Roosevelt’s time the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, talked of “sustained yield management” that would administer the wilderness for the betterment of man. This formed the battle cry of that era’s Wise Use movement, which proposed the then-radical idea that resources should be extracted form the earth without raping it. Since the 1992 Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, the buzzword has been “sustainability.” Simply put, this means supporting human society without taking more in resources, or creating more in pollution, than the earth can handle, or “sustain.” Like Pinchot before them, the supporters of sustainability emphasize that efficient use is good business. The Netherlands, New Zealand, and Canada have all launched national “green plans” aimed at making their economies environmentally sustainable. President Bill Clinton has formed a Council on Sustainable Development. Cities from Curitiba, Brazil, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, are trying out sustainability-related regulations and processes. Mail-order catalogues of sustainable products are available, along with enough literature on the subject to break a strong man’s back.

A philosophy by which we take out only as much as we give back is hard to argue with. Parts of the discussion, however, sound as if they had been borrowed from a pitch for a perpetual-motion machine. Experts talk of products that are created without waste, and of “cradle-to-cradle” recovery, in which absolutely everything gets recycled. Indeed, what they are talking about is managing the planet, controlling the use and production of its natural resources, not just in agriculture but also in mining and manufacturing, in fishing and lumbering.

Yet managed nature is a pale copy. Hothouse tomatoes don’t have the sweet, full flavor of vine-ripened fruit. Farm-raised salmon don’t have the meaty texture and refined taste of wild salmon. Mahogany laminate lacks the rich hue and presence of the solid wood. A glimpse of managed nature’s true face comes into view in Georgia as the asphalt road gives way to a muddy track down to the river.

No log trucks use this dirt path, but it leads to what was once the timber superhighway. Before tractor-trailers and railroads, lumberjacks floated timber down rivers. Along the Escatawpa, in Mississippi; the Little Pee Dee, in South Carolina; the Altamaha, in Georgia; and many others, bands of logging land extended three to five miles inland from most riverbanks. From the time of settlement until about 1910 the rivers provided cheap transportation to the mills. Oxen dragged the logs to the water, where iron “raft rings” were driven into them at each end. Chains were threaded through these rings to assemble the logs into rafts. The system worked well enough; although the trip to the mill was often long, perhaps 95 percent of the logs made it through. Some might get snagged in the shallows and buried in mud. Some might become waterlogged and be cut loose to save the rest of the raft. Others might get caught in a bend, or be too full of heavy resin to float for long.

The lumbermen didn’t worry about these “sinkers,” or “deadheads.” The supply of longleaf pine—also called Georgia, yellow, longstraw, or heart pine—seemed limitless. In a swath 200 miles wide, forest of longleaf followed the coast from southern Virginia to eastern Texas. It was once the commonest of woods, covering 75 million to 85 million acres. Longleaf floored the rooms of Thomas Jefferson’s estate at Monticello, built the keel of the USS Constitution (“Old Ironsides”) and the caissons of the Brooklyn Bridge, framed four out of five houses in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. The lumber barons could not foresee that one day this vast forest would be fragmented into a few dozen scattered stands, only two or three of them holding old-growth timber. No one knew how slowly longleaf pine grew, how difficult it was to manage; when these lumbermen learned, more easily managed forests of slash and loblolly pine were planted to feed the paper and particle-board and lumber mills.

The character of the wood changed. Longleaf lumber from old-growth trees, those older than 150 years, has unique qualities. Centuries of slow growth give the longleaf a tighter grain than other pines and, pound for pound, a strength comparable to that of steel. Fast-grown young trees, like loblolly, lack the sturdiness needed for good structural timber; as a result, some varieties of the southern-yellow-pine family have earned a bad name in the construction industry. Craftsmen prize the pale-rose-to-burgundy color of longleaf heartwood, the hard, resin-saturated center of the log. Only trees allowed to mature beyond 150 years have this in any quantity. And of course old-growth timber is bigger; old houses often had boards twenty feet long. Trees that big are virtually nonexistent today.

Indeed, good, solid wood, once as common as dirt, has become something of a luxury. AS a result, contractors in Pennsylvania are dismantling and remilling old pine, chestnut, and hemlock barns. A company in Minnesota reclaims virgin-fir boards from old bridges and factories. In California and Oregon old redwood is being salvaged from defunct lumber mills, refinished, and used again. Almost a dozen companies in the South recycle heart pine from vintage buildings. But though this wood is old-growth, nail holes and cracks mean it’s not exactly “virgin” any longer. The only place to find wood like that is where it was left behind—under water.

Rivers make a latticework through the industrial forests of southern Georgia. Lazily they flow to the Atlantic Ocean, where they empty into the protected waters created by barrier islands. Once, these waterways were busy with logging, but now no one and nothing watches the scuba divers Rick Bennett and Jack Ring. Bennett goes first, jumping over the side of his square-bowed johnboat into the lukewarm water. The early-summer air is thick with humidity, disturbed only by the whirring of crickets and the burble of the diver’s air bubbles popping against the flat aluminum hulls of the boats. Then Bennett’s head breaks the surface with a splash. He pulls the air regulator from his mouth and pushes his diving mash onto his forehead.

“I’ve found a whole pile!” he yells. “Looks to be eight or ten!”

From his own boat Ring calls back, “All right, cuz. Time to go to work in the big creepy.” Ring pulls on his scuba vest and flippers and falls backward over the side of this boat. The water is the color of tea: tannin, leaching form submerged cypress roots, has turned it rust-brown. Forty feet beneath the surface, where the logs are protected in their oxygen-free sanctuary, the color deepens to inky black. Even with powerful hand-held lights the divers can see little more than a foot ahead down there. Less than a week before, a venomous water moccasin struck at the light when it was surprised by Ring. “Damn thing struck three times.” Most of the work must be done by feel, and this has its own risks. Bennett was once running his hand along a log when, suddenly, the log moved. I t was actually the tail of an eight-foot alligator.

“A lot of people don’t like black water,” Bennett says, as he reaches into his boat and feels for ropes and buoys to mark the logs. “And it’s not a good place to let your imagination run away with you. Don’t see Alien 2 before diving in these rivers.” Rope in hand, he descends. Three feet under, he fades form sight, leaving a halo of bubbles behind.

The search for lost longleaf logs begins in small-town libraries and historical societies. At some time in the past century most settlements on southern coastal rivers had a sawmill, even two or three. Bennett and other divers sift through local records and unpublished histories. They have pored over tales of the Suwannee, Satilla, and Flint Rivers, in Georgia; the Apalachicola River, in Florida; and half a dozen more in other states. Where did lumberjacks establish landings in preparation fro floating logs down to the mill? Where were the sawmills? Do local stories mention any disastrous logjams that might have caused a lot of logs to sink? Does the river make any sharp bends that might have been hard to navigate and so might have claimed a few logs? The answers to these questions hint at where logs might be hiding.

Using such general clues, the divers pick a likely stretch of river and divide it into sections. Then they “read” the riverbed by touch. Crossing back and forth, they feel their way along the underwater terrain. Most days they will come across a log or two. If they’re fortunate, they’ll stumble on a pile.

Bennett pops to the surface again. “I found another small pile!” he exclaims, gesturing fifty yards upstream to where a lobster buoy marks his find. One log pile is a windfall; two is almost unbelievable luck. “I knew this was a good spot, could just tell,” Bennett says exultantly, throwing his diving fins aboard the boat and following them in. Though he grew up in the South, he betrays no trace of an accent. Perhaps he lost it while studying tropical-plant botany at the University of Florida, or while running a chocolate plantation in Costa Rica. After a plant-importing business failed, he went to work in a lumber mill and then learned about log diving. Tall, blond, and tanned, he has a soft sport for trendy Oakley sunglasses. At forty-three he could still pass for a surfer, the type that seems never to have had a desk job or a lingering doubt. He appears to thrive on daredevil moments.

Ring soon resurfaces as well. “Well, cuz, whatcha know?” he calls with a twang. Ring took up diving to look for “old-timey artifacts,” using a flashlight in a Ziploc bag to search out bottles, coins, anchors. The two met several years later, when Bennett came across two stolen cars ditched in a river not far from Ring’s house. Bennett’s work intrigued Ring, who has always lived in southern Georgia and, except for a stint in the Navy, had always worked at a paper mill in St. Mary’s. He took a leave to tag along with Bennett; now he regularly takes a vacation or a leave of absence to dive for logs several weeks a year.

The logs they have found fell to the bottom in a jumble like so many pick-up sticks. Once a group is located, Bennett and Ring must get the feel of the pile. They pull themselves along the entire length of each log in order to determine how the pile is structured, which logs are pinning which, and what to pull first.

Coaxing the logs to the surface can be difficult and dangerous. This close to the coast the river is tidal; the divers may have to fight currents exceeding seven knots, or about ten miles an hour. At the same time, they must dig away sand or mud that has built up around the timbers. Each of their air tanks holds eighty cubic feet of oxygen at 3,000 pounds of pressure; on a Caribbean pleasure dive one could last from sixty to ninety minutes at this depth. When Bennett and Ring are working hard, a typical tank lasts only forty-five minutes, sometimes less.

At midafternoon Ring comes up breathless and annoyed from wrestling with the tide. “I’m not doing it any more today,” he gasps. “I couldn’t get a hold down there. I had to jab my knife into the sand just to stay in place.” Bennett pops to the surface. “Boy, the water’s really humping,” he says. “My second wind just went.” It’s time to tie a rope form the first log to the boat, start the engine, and pull.

Sometimes during a pull the rope breaks, and a log gets lost. A greater danger is that one end of the log will snag on the way up, causing the timber to rear up vertically and then come crashing down on the boat. For the most part, however, getting a log up off the bottom is surprisingly similar to getting a water skier in motion.

Bennett opens the throttle wide. His Suzuki outboard motor strains, going nowhere. The average log weighs about half a ton—several times as much as the little dive boat. Then the boat lurches, seemingly set free. “We’ve got it!” Bennett exclaims. Moments later the butt of the log breaks the surface, creating a fan of water.

The five miles to the nearest landing pass slowly. The land on either side of the river is flat and open. Once the core habitat for longleaf, it has been logged over once, perhaps twice, and yet still feels primordial. Now it is dominated by second-growth cypresses festooned with Spanish moss, though a few longleafs and spiky accents of palmetto are visible too. Purple hyacinth, imported in the past century, blooms in the shallows at water’s edge.

The boat passes what’s left of some old slave quarters. Only the foundations remain—cast of a kind of proto-concrete made from sand, oyster shells, and lime. When the slaves weren’t working in fields of cotton, indigo, and tobacco, their plantation masters sent them to the longleaf-pine forests to collect “naval stores.” Navies and merchant fleets needed the gummy resin found in the trees’ inner bark and sapwood. The distilled resin formed the base of turpentine, tar, rosin, and pitch, used to seal hulls, caulk decks, coat riggings, thin paints, coat cuts, even make soap. Tare and pitch were among the colonists’ earliest exports. Longleaf pine put the tar in North Carolina’s “tarheels.”

One of the worst slave jobs was known as “turpentining”; it was filthy, sticky, backbreaking work. Early turpentiners cut deep into the trunk of a tall pine and hung a bucket at the bottom. The gummy fluid would ooze from the cut and run into the bucket. After the Civil War, with the plantation economy destroyed, southerners were forced to rely more heavily than ever on the forests. Turpentining exploded into the cheap lands of Georgia and Florida. Meanwhile, desperate farmers began cutting the best trees from their woodlands, forming them into rafts, and setting off on trips to the nearest large sawmill. Usually made in summer, when the rivers were high, these log runs were notoriously dangerous . Arms, legs, even bodies, were frequently crushed when the rafts crashed into protruding bluffs.

At about the same time, northeastern and Midwestern forests were thinning out, and lumber companies sent “cruisers” south to scout the most promising stands of longleaf. In just a few years millions of acres changed hands. From 1880 to 1920 the annual production of lumber in the South leaped from 1.6 billion board feet to 15.4 billion board feet, most of it longleaf. The scale of the lumbering operations was enormous. On the Escambia above Pensacola, Florida, a river boom—a barrier of floating chained logs—enclosed 50,000 logs until the mills could catch up with the flood of timber floating downstream. Such temporary booms punctuated southern rivers, following the path of the lumbermans’ ax. Another boom, in Mississippi’s Pascagoula River, extended to the middle of the channel and then up the eastern bank for five miles. On slower-moving rivers rafts made up of as much as 50,000 board feet were common.

Most lumbermen believed that the forest was a virtually inexhaustible resource. One 1884 survey predicted that the pine supply in Texas would last 250 years, in Louisiana 100 years, in Georgia eighty years, and in Florida thirty years. In 1909 nearly 140 billion board feet poured out of the southern forest, accounting for 46 percent of all the lumber cut in the United States. Then, suddenly, the supply forecasts began to drop.

By the end of the First World War the old-growth woodlands of the South had shrunk from an area almost the size of Alaska to one slightly larger than Georgia. Forest had covered nearly 300 million acres of the South in 1880. It had been reduced by more than 40 percent, to 178 million acres. By 1919. A scant 39 million acres of virgin forest remained, a mixture of longleaf, other pines, and hardwoods. Already in some areas the only virgin logs left to mill were those that could be dragged from the riverbed. Scavengers began to use long poles to feel for sunken timber.

Bennett slows the boat to steer the log between the piers of a bridge; then he arcs the boat around and guns it toward a muddy riverbank where he’s storing a pile of logs until they can be driven to the mill. At the last minute he swerves; the boat misses the bank, but the log runs up onto the shore. “Beautiful,” Bennett says, “Just like putting a skier on the beach in a water show.”

The next morning a pickup backs a modified boat trailer halfway into the river. Taking turns, the divers use their boats to push the logs into position, and then manhandle them onto the trailer with cant hooks—long bars used as levers, with a movable hook at one end—and winches. The brisk odor of turpentine, from the resin that preserved the wood, hangs in the air.

Before they send their finds off to the mill, Bennett and Ring look them up and down for clues to their history. Most have the V-shaped bottoms of logs cut slowly with axes. One of the logs was squared off in preparation for being used as a ship’s mast. Another has slanted cuts, or “cat’s face,” revealing that the tree was used for turpentining. Most have the triangular gouges left by cant hooks or the narrow rectangles left by iron raft rings.

Ring pauses at the front of the trailer, gazing at a log butt. “Will you take a look at that?’ he says to the driver of the pickup. With his diving knife he pokes at the lighter center area of the soaked log. “That beauty’s all heart.”

“He thinks they’re all pretty,” says the driver who will take the logs to a mill that specialized in the rare virgin wood. “Eh sees green in them.” Each log brings the divers $150 to $200, depending on size. Milled, kiln-dried, and planed, the wood will command $4.00 to, occasionally, $16.00 a board foot—significantly more than oak.

The log truck heads south to the Florida-Georgia line and then through the managed forests that feed the paper mills and past the cattle pastures and racehorse farms that have replaced the longleaf forest in much of northern Florida. About five miles beyond the college town of Gainesville the truck turns onto a gravel road. A large white sign, mounted against a long-toothed circular saw blade five feet across, announces GOODWIN HEART PINE COMPANY. This is the only virgin-longleaf mill remaining in the state of Florida.

The southern lumberjacks of a century ago would hardly recognize Goodwin, set on a mere five acres, as a mill. During the heyday of southern lumbering many sawmills operated on a heroic scale: log ponds stored tens of thousands of longleaf logs, crews of fifty to seventy operated several saws around the clock, twenty-foot-high stacks of boards stretched over clearings the size of several football fields. Obviously, the few longs that today lie submerged in the rivers cannot support operations on such a scale. Even after a planned expansion the Goodwin plant will remain a boutique operation. IT includes two large pavilions, like barns without walls, that house saws and other equipment; nearby stand other utility buildings, a sales office, and a garage-size kiln that dries wood so that it won’t later crack or warp.

George Goodwin grew up in the forests of southern Georgia, where his father, a chemical engineer, worked for various paper mills. George is tall and athletic, and affects a gruffness that masts an intrinsic shyness. He has tried his hand at jobs including antique restoration, carpentry, and antique dealing. About twenty years ago a friend who has tagging river sturgeon for a conservation project mentioned that he kept bumping into submerged logs. He dragged one out of the river and brought it to George, who ran a small mill when he wasn’t managing his antique business. Goodwin Heart Pine largely grew out of that happenstance.

The mills that handled most of the world’s virgin heart-pine logs were set up to saw quickly and in quantity. The Goodwin mill saws a limited amount of wood slowly, with an eye toward conserving as much as possible. Goodwin started out with a vintage circular saw, like the big-toothed disks that torment Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in cartoons. But its thick spinning teeth created vast amounts of sawdust that might have been usable lumber. Goodwin has since switched to smaller machines that peel off boards with a thin band saw, as if using a scalpel rather than a serrated knife.

Goodwin’s life now revolves around this wood. He has sold his house, moved into a doublewide trailer near the mill, and invested everything in the company. He’s stockpiling heart pine for a dream house, but he hasn’t gotten around to building it. The rewards don’t seem to matter. Goodwin is happiest when he’s feeding longleaf, board by board, into the planning machine that smoothes and shapes the wood. He talks with animation about longleaf’s “pizzazz” and “warmth.” “This wood has life and light,” he says. “I don’t see how anyone can help having a passion for this wood once they really understand it.”

Goodwin’s wife, Carol, a computer analyst, has become a crusader for the longleaf ecosystem. For several decades foresters have encouraged landowners to plant slash and loblolly pine, species that grow fast but produce wood some think is fit only to be paper pulp. Carol has begun a campaign to persuade foresters and landowners that longleaf will bring a bigger payoff in board timber, even if a longer growth period is required. Urgency fuels her effort. Though estimates as high as 10,000 acres have been made, known old-growth longleaf forests total only about 2,000 acres. This landscape is more endangered than the prairie, the redwood groves, or the Brazilian rain forest.

The disappearance of longleaf has as much to do with management as with the demand for lumber. To some extent longleaf has been killed by kindness. At the height of southern lumbering, faced with swindling forests across the country, Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s Forest Service chief, decided that the key to conservation was fire prevention. Since most forest in the south was (and remains) privately owned, Pinchot dispatched fire-prevention specialists to spread the gospel. However well-meaning, this management strategy spelled the beginning of the end for what remained of the longleaf-pine forest.

To thrive, longleaf pine needs an open forest floor cleared by sporadic fire. After germination, longleaf seedlings stay close to the ground for several years. At this stage they look like clumps of grass. Meanwhile, the major growth occurs below ground, as the seedling develops an extensive taproot. Then, at about the age of six or seven, the young tree shoots skyward, growing three or four feet in a single season . At the end of this growth spurt the tree looks like a huge bottle brush. None of this can happen unless fires, once started by lightning, clear the forest floor of competing brambles and runner oaks. The older longleaf can survive in the absence of these fires, but when they die, no young trees are there to take their place. The woodland gradually becomes a scrub-oak thicket or is replanted with slash or loblolly pine—cash crops. This is what has happened in most of the South.

William Bartram, an Englishman who traveled through these forests in the eighteenth century, compared them to parks, and that is still the way they look in the rolling red hills of southern Georgia. Sunlight shines through the virgin longleaf onto a soft forest floor of palmetto, grasses, and wildflowers. This 200-acre remnant longleaf forest has none of the grandiose cathedral qualities of the temperate rain forests of Washington State or California’s redwood groves. Its appeal is subtler; it requires contemplation. Then the details emerge: tufts of wire grass, lacy bracken fern, butterfly tea, rayless sunflowers and black-eyed Susans, yellow orchids, purple meadow beauties. The forest floor supports forty plant species per square meter—more than most other ecosystems in North America. It also provides a home for a variety of endangered animals, among them red cockaded woodpeckers and gopher tortoises, which burrow into the soil like rodents. Very old longleaf pines develop flat tops and irregular branches. A Chinese landscape painted could have created the trees in this forest.

Maintaining this oasis requires the careful oversight of Sharon Hermann, a research biologist for the Tall Timbers Research Station, in Tallahassee, and her crew. They must plan what acres to burn. Taking into account weather, geography, and fuel, Hermann must predict how the first will progress and when it should be stopped. To accommodate the life cycles of insects, wildflowers, and animals, she must plan the burn for early summer, when lightning commonly struck old trees in the days before logging. A fire requires constant attention—and this is for only 200 acres.

The Nature Conservancy and other groups have started longleaf-restoration projects in Texas and Florida. Yet at least a century of detailed work will be needed to produce forests like the ones that William Bartram saw. Not for two centuries will any of these forests produce wood comparable to what divers are pulling out of the rivers. “We’re probably not going to see vast forests of three-hundred-year-old trees again,” Hermann says. “but we can maintain the components”—trees, wildlife, grasses, and flowers—“while extracting the product.”

Even if we can coax the longleaf forests back from the brink, they will all be managed forests. Most foresters agree that longleaf reaches “economic maturity” at seventy to eight years of age. These ten-inch trees of the twenty-first century still won’t yield twelve-inch boards like those common in old plantation homes. The longleaf lumber of the future may be stronger than pulpwood, but it won’t have had the centuries of slow growth that make river-recovered heart pine so hard that it bends nails. Without centuries to build up resin, the new longleaf heartwood won’t have the deep reddish hues that emerge in the older wood after million. The last of that breed will have been dragged out of a southern river years before.

[Woods] [History] [Gallery] [Products] [About Us] [How To] [Contact Us] [FAQs] [Sitemap] [Home]