Editor’s Note: This week’s blog features the musings of our Executive Director, Walter Medwid.
The package of chestnut lumber arrived. Maybe a dozen pieces of various lengths, all in floorboard width. It came from a barn in Virginia, traveled to become flooring at a good friend’s home in Wisconsin, and eventually the leftovers arrived at my home in Vermont courtesy of the Post Office.
It’s now in the shop of a talented local craftsman, who will slice the pieces to better fit my plans for working the wood into another iteration of its existence. The exact nature of that next iteration will be a function of a conversation between me and that piece of wood, but most likely it will become a one-of-a-kind box in which someone can store their keepsakes.
All wood has its desirable quality and character, be it color, grain, hardness or softness. And there’s undoubtedly a story or two about each particular tree that any stick of wood comes from. But with chestnut, the stories about its rich history, its demise, and the promise of its return, speak louder than the wood itself, at least to this tree hugger. It’s simply not possible for me to work the wood without these stories coming through the grain.
Looking back, the chestnut tree played such a prominent role in the eastern forest, from the regular output of nuts that helped feed natural and human communities to the hundreds of useful products that humans crafted from its wood. I vaguely recall reading a story that suggested that the chestnut was so abundant on the eastern landscape that a squirrel could travel on a canopy of chestnut trees from southern New England down to Georgia. A tall tale, for sure, but it’s still impossible for me to fathom the loss of this once prominent tree species, in an ecological sense and in human terms.
There’s solace in the promise that one day the mighty chestnut, in blight resistant form, may make a return to prominence. (Check out the feature story we did on this subject: Reviving a Fallen Giant). In the meantime, I’ll work this wood with the reverence it deserves while imagining a day when squirrels will again delight in the limbs of an American chestnut.