By Cassie Sevigny
In the spring of 2018, I heard word of a tree-planting operation in Lolo to reforest a woman’s property affected by fires. How do trees get planted? I wondered. Do we use seeds and hope for sprouts? Wait for saplings to reach several feet before planting them? I needed to return to Lolo to find out how to restore trees to the land that protects the water.
Going alone this time, I realized that Lolo was not in some far away, abstract part of Montana. I only had to point my compass south of Missoula and drive for half an hour. I found the woman’s house hidden from the road by trees. The lawn and trees were green, but as I hiked up the property, the lush undergrowth gave way to black spindly trunks erupting from the tawny ground. Volunteers who arrived before me were balanced on steep slopes among these trunks. Some jammed shovels into dry, rocky soil. The shovelers prepared the way for others who walked along with buckets of baby native trees, less than a foot high, to insert into the holes. The tiny needled fronds of larch and pine stuck out of the ground like decorative feathers.
“My land was hit hard by the fires. I bought up all the saplings available from the restoration companies,” the landowner told me. “So if anyone else wants them, they’ll have to wait ‘til next year.”
On the hillsides I could see many areas with small dabs of white poking out of the ground. These were the mesh grazing guards, stretched over the newly planted treelings like tiny fences to prevent animal nibbling while they were vulnerable. Deer would think any unguarded trees were a buffet planted just for them. The mesh breaks and disintegrates over time. As the tree grows taller and more resilient to grazing, it doesn’t need protection anymore, and the mesh would hinder its growth.
I collected some of the biodegradable mesh from a pile on the trail and embarked on a scavenger hunt for treelings missing protection. The landowner directed me to a mess of wood bits on a hillside. Logs and branches littered the ground, leaving the sky wide open. Remnants of a slide. A previous group had already planted there, but finding the living wood of exposed treelings among the scattered dead wood was challenging. While the wood debris protected the baby trees from the sun, it hid them from my gaze, too.
Once I was certain I had found all the trees in the woodslide, I moved to the blackened trunks and trees that survived. Here the needles of the treelings stood out against the smooth dirt. I didn’t find very many, but I did find mushrooms. They were brown with vertical wrinkles, shaped like a shriveled nose sniffing the air. Were these the morels I had heard about? I glanced at my charcoal-smudged palms and clothes. Of course. Morels grow in burn sites. The fire stresses the underground organism, called mycelium, triggering mushroom sprouts. Beneath the morels, the soil glinted.
I caught up with the landowner when we finished scouting for missed trees.
“Why are the rocks and dirt sparkly here?” I asked her. Quartz is a crystal common in Washington’s grey granite, but it doesn’t have such gleaming intensity as the Lolo rocks.
“Mica,” she said.
Mica! Why didn’t I think of that?
I felt like a mystery had been answered, a mystery that had driven so much exploration of beauty that I was let down. If I understood the answer, maybe it wasn’t special. Yet, I am delighted to scoop up caddisflies from mulch or watch them cluster on the shore like dropped beads no matter how many times I’ve seen them before, no matter I am not an expert on their lives. I can marvel at a sparkling stream bed or glinting burn site for its beauty, and the sheer shock that such beauty can exist.
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