Talk:"Timber"
| Information about this edition | |
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| Edition: | Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1922 |
A note by the author
From "Everybody's Chimney Corner," Everybody's Magazine, Oct. 1921
THERE is something of the unusual connected with "Foraker's Folly," the new serial by Harold Titus, which begins in the November Everybody's. He was moved to write the story as a duty to his country—to the future—because, as he says, "I saw my playground (the great lumber forests) going." He continues:
I have tried in "Foraker's Folly" to show what the Michigan pine belt would have been like if fire had never gone through after the first pine was taken off. It is not too late yet. There are millions of acres that will grow pine in the Lake states if they are given a chance, and although I have localized my story in Michigan, it might as well have been placed in any other state that has been largely cut over; the problem is universal; it should strike home to every one of us.
MR. TITUS'S earliest impressions were of the things that have to do with lumber, for he was born in Traverse City, Michigan (1888), and in childhood he used to sit at a window watching a seemingly endless procession of logs go by.
I was too young to realize that the incredible had happened: that the pine was gone, that there was at last a market for hardwood. The Big Mill was running. I can still see its great burner, the tip a glowing nipple against the winter sky, with the wind from Grand Traverse Bay sending out its spark-hung streamer of smoke. All winter the logs came into town; all summer the schooners stood up the bay to await their place at the docks and be loaded with sweet-smelling lumber and nosed away from the wharves by the Mary MacLean and lift their sails and be gone. And then the Big Mill went and the town commenced to talk of potatoes instead of lumber. The wood-working factories moved their camps farther away and fewer sleigh loads of logs came into town; the railroads yanked endless trains of hardwood to the sidings along the rollways on Boardman Lake, and when the old houses were rebuilt and carpenters ripped off white-pine shingles and looked at the great, pegged sills, they shook their heads and said that such stuff couldn't be found nowadays.
THE author went to university, began writing fiction, then the war and two years away from the section where he had spent his boyhood.
I became very hungry (he continues) for this country during those months of slogging around and waiting to get across or somewhere. I used to dream about the plains: about the Boardman River country, about the upper Manistee, about the Au Sable, Big Creek and the other places I liked. It was in April, 1918, that I made my first trip to the Manistee River after that absence. We crossed Grayling Bridge and swung up-stream through what had been a most delightful forest of jack-pine, one of the spots I could see whenever I closed my eyes and listened to Corporal Potash snore beside me. The trees were not there! They had been cut for pulpwood; their tops littered the ground, drying out, making acres of explosive material!
We stopped the car and damned the men who had ravished that stand of young timber, and that afternoon we saw a doe, swimming frantically down-stream, and far off in the swamp heard the voice of a hound. "They're taking off what trees are left and they're dogging our deer," I said. "What are we, who love to be among trees and animals, going to do?"
HIS indignation was mounting and it wasn't long before Mr. Titus decided to write a novel with reforestation the purpose.
I brushed around in our state forests (he continues), and saw the wonders that have been worked by just keeping fires out and giving trees a chance to rear their families. I saw artificial reproduction working out, and a great many other things. I took my problem to lumber barons; to lumberjacks; to Professor Roth, head of the Forestry Department in our state university; to biological survey men; to ornithologists; to community boomers. I found that it tied up with the problem of keeping farmers off poor land, of making every acre work, but making it work in a way that will show a profit. Twice I started this novel and gave up, because with every fact I learned, an appreciation of my own ignorance became greater; but in December I felt that I had enough to go on, so I whaled out the first chapters and managed to finish the actual writing in a little over four months. That's how it all came about: because I saw my playground going.