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The Binder Tree
Professor Huntington Decatur Caldwell III sauntered home. The opening day of brand new Boise State University had sailed by. Establishing the curriculum for the forestry division of the Biology Department excited and challenged him.
He also had felt the first heady rush of power. One minute he was sitting cross-legged on the floor sorting pencils with his new secretary, the next he was taking a long-distance call from none other than Senator George Norris of Nebraska.
Hunt, as his friends and family called him, had long admired Senator Norris’s struggle to create an autonomous government agency with the authority to build dams along the Tennessee River to control flooding and generate power. In hard times like these, there could be no greater purpose than “the use of the earth for the good of man,” as the senator had so succinctly put it.
Senator Norris also hoped to tame the raging Columbia, which inevitably would mean a flood control dam on the Clearwater River in Northern Idaho, near Hunt’s home town of Bovill and part of the territory Boise State University had been created to study. Before the dam flooded the valley, it only made sense to harvest the vast stretches of prime timber, mostly white pine and Douglas fir, that otherwise would be lost. The timber companies, some of the most powerful interests in the state, looked to Hunt’s department for information about the type and condition of the trees to be cut.
In the sky east of town great ramparts of thunderheads burned red and orange in the sunset. The September evening had cooled after a much-needed rain shower and the hot concrete of the new sidewalks steamed. Hunt tipped his hat to a lady sitting on her porch shucking peas from her garden. She waved but didn’t smile.
He felt a little guilty about being so happy. The nation had been mired in Depression for three years now, and while so many suffered, the Caldwells prospered. His biggest regret was that his father hadn’t lived to see Hunt assume this new and important position.
Hunt Caldwell didn’t look much like a college professor. Tall and lanky with a shock of curly red hair, he was just as old as the century, 32. With his hat perched jauntily on the back of his head he looked like he belonged hip-deep in a trout stream rather than behind a lectern.
As he came up the walk of the new bungalow they’d recently bought he picked a ripe apple from the tree in the front yard. His ten-year-old daughter Jane, the apple of his eye, barreled around the corner of the house, laughing. Close on her heels came her new playmate Louise, the thin, pale daughter of Jane’s Sunday School teacher.
“Hey Papa!” Jane shouted as she ran by. “Louise is staying for supper!”
His wife Olivia, to celebrate Hunt’s new position, had made his favorite dinner: chicken pot pie, Waldorf salad, iced tea, and peach cobbler. She wore her flowered party dress and had her dark hair up in a bun. Her lipstick clung to his cheek after she kissed him.
“How did your first day go?” she asked him, and then called the girls in to dinner.
“It was hectic, confusing, disorganized, and too short,” he said, tossing his hat onto its hook and getting out his father’s pipe and tobacco. “Liv, I’m having the time of my life!”
“I know you are, sweetie,” Liv said as she herded the girls into the bathroom to wash up. “I hope you don’t mind if Louise joins us for dinner.”
“I already heard and I heartily approve,” Hunt said as the girls emerged, still winded and rambunctious but a little cleaner. “Maybe Louise would like to say grace.”
Louise lowered her eyes demurely and shook her head as they sat down.
“I will, Papa,” Jane volunteered.
They all lowered their heads and Jane said, “Bless this bread and bless this meat. Thank you, Lord, for the food we eat.”
Formalities concluded, they dug into their salads as Liv dished up the pot pie.
“Who’s Mom’s package for?” Hunt asked Liv, noticing it on the sideboard. Only his mother still wrapped a package so indestructably in heavy brown paper and twine.
“It’s for you,” Liv told him. “She said so in her letter.”
He took out his pocket knife to cut the twine.
“You heard from Grandma Clara?” Jane asked, whose red-headed tomboy nature loved her grandmother’s toughness. “Did she get my thank-you note?”
“Yes, she did, and she liked it very much. She says she’ll reply soon and to keep up the good work in Sunday School,” Olivia said.
A flood of memories washed over Hunt when he saw the old framed photograph, and his eyes welled with tears.
“What is it, Papa?” Jane asked.
“It’s a picture of your Grandpa Dick,” Hunt said, holding the picture up so the girls could see. A pair of lumberjacks stood at either end of a two-man saw that had cut part way through a huge tree trunk. “That’s Jane’s Grandpa on the left, Louise. But, Liv, why would Mom send me this now? I thought she was moving in here with us as soon as she put up that last batch of apple butter.”
“Maybe she wanted your father to be here in spirit to share your big day,” Liv said.
Hunt looked fondly at the picture. “That was his big day. I’ll never forget it.”
Jane was old enough to be fascinated by family history, and her grandfather’s recent death made stories about him even more special. “Why was that his big day?”
“Do you want the whole story?” Hunt asked as he soaked up the last of his pot pie gravy with a piece of bread.
“If you leave out the big words and the detours,” Jane said, having limited patience and some experience with her father’s stories.
“I’ll try,” Hunt said, pushing his plate away and lighting the pipe. “This photograph was taken, let’s see, just over twenty years ago now, the winter of 1912. Gee, it seems longer ago than that. So I was just a little older than you are.
“Grandpa Dick was a logger back then, a foreman of his own crew. The other man in the picture is Johnny Parker, his partner and good friend. The two of them were the best cross-cut team in the state.”
“What’s ‘cross-cut’?” Jane asked.
“That big saw in the picture is a cross-cut saw. It’s used to cut down trees. But it’s a lot harder than it looks. And it’s even harder if the two men don’t push and pull the saw just right. Grandpa always said that Johnny could read his mind even better than Grandma could.
“Anyway, the day before this picture was taken Grandpa had seen some wolves in the forest where they were working, and back then I loved to hear him talk about the wild animals they saw. So I was anxious for him to get home, watching out the window.
“Well, Grandpa had a routine when he got home. You know the shed at their house up in Bovill?”
“The spider shed?” Jane asked with a shudder.
“Right, the spider shed. Well, Grandpa would hang up that big old saw in the spider shed, stomp all the sawdust off his cover-alls, tap the tobacco from his pipe, put more tobacco in, and light it, all before he came in. It used to make me so mad, and that day it about killed me. I think he did it on purpose just to teach me patience.”
“So anyway…” Jane interjected impatiently.
“So anyway, I could tell he had some kind of big news and I thought it was going to be about seeing more wolves. It turns out he was all excited about that big tree.”
“What’s so exciting about a big tree?” Jane wanted to know, looking at the picture.
“My thoughts exactly,” Hunt said as Liv cleared the table. “But what I didn’t know, and what you don’t know, is that that’s the biggest white pine tree in the world that they’re cutting down. In fact the company brought the photographer, Mr. G. B. Joslin, all the way down from Coeur d’Alene just to commemorate the occasion. A bunch of the big bosses and politicians came too. After all, western white pine is our State Tree.”
“How big was the tree?” Jane asked.
“I know this by heart, because Grandpa told it over and over. Tip to cut it was 207 feet and bigger around than I am tall. There was enough lumber in that one tree to build seven or eight houses like this one.”
“Is that what they use those trees for, building houses?”
“Actually, the eastern white pine, cousin to Grandpa’s tree, played an important role in our country’s history. In colonial days it was known as the King’s tree, because only the big old white pines in New England grew tall and straight enough to use for the masts of English battleships. In fact, the flag the Continental Army used at the Battle of Bunker Hill in the Revolutionary War had a picture of a white pine on it. Maine’s flag still shows one, since it’s their State Tree too.”
“So did they build a great big mansion or something with the tree Grandpa chopped down?”
“I don’t know about mansions, but some white pine is used for lumber, for things like window sashes. Most of it is used for matches though.”
“They cut that great big tree up into little tiny matches?”
“It burns real well,” Hunt exlained, feeling a little sheepish.
Louise finally found her voice. “How old was that big tree, Professor Caldwell?”
“It was 425 years old. It sprouted before Columbus sailed for the New World, as Grandpa always liked to point out.”
“How long did it take them to cut it down?” Jane asked.
“I was curious about that too. I asked my dad if it was hard to cut down, and he said that it was a binder tree.”
“What’s a binder tree?”
“It’s a term that Johnny Parker came up with. A binder tree would rock back onto the sawblade in the breeze. The fresh wood would bind up the sawblade and not let go and the only thing to do was to wait until the wind shifted directions. I guess that tree took three hours to cut down.”
“Was Grandpa tired?”
“Working never seemed to tire Grandpa out. But thinking did. And I made him think that night.”
“How did you do that?” Liv asked, absorbed in the story too, as she dished up the peach cobbler.
“As far as I was concerned back then, trees just got in the way of seeing animals, so the wolves interested me more than the trees. So I asked him what he was going to do the next day.”
“That doesn’t seem so hard,” Jane pointed out.
“I didn’t think so either, but when it was my bedtime that night he was still sitting in his rocking chair smoking his pipe, thinking. Every time he lit his pipe he would stare at that white pine match until it just about burned his fingers. When I asked him what he was doing he said that I’d asked him a binder question and that he was just waiting for the breeze to shift.”
“What’s a binder question?”
“Remember how a binder tree would catch your saw and stop you for a while? I think that’s what he meant: a question that would catch your mind and stop you for a bit, until something changed.”
“What changed?”
“Your Grandpa changed. He sat up all that night, he told me, and decided that, as much as he liked to cut down trees, now that he'd cut down the biggest white pine in the world, spending the rest of his life cutting smaller trees just didn’t challenge him any more. He quit his job as a logger and became a fireman instead. He always talked about how our first cabin in Bovill burned down in the fires of 1910. I think he decided to try to save things instead of destroying them. He went on to become chief of that whole fire district before he retired.
“He made my life miserable after that. Maybe he was still mad at me for asking him that binder question.”
“What did he do to you?”
“He made me do my homework every day after school, for one thing. And then he worked really hard and he and my mom scrimped and saved and he made me go to college too, more school.”
“That’s what you make me do too,” Jane pointed out.
“That’s because it’s good for you. When I was a boy I hated him for making me do schoolwork when I could have been fishing, but now I have a good job and a nice house and a pretty wife and a smarty-pants daughter because I worked hard back then.”
“Your Grandpa sounds nice,” Louise said to Jane. “I hope I can meet him someday.”
An awkward silence fell over the Caldwells. It fell to Hunt to explain. “Jane’s Grandpa Dick died six weeks ago. I’m sorry, I guess we didn’t make that clear.”
“What happened, Professor Caldwell?” Louise asked meekly.
“He was struck by lightning last summer while working on a fire lookout on Bald Mountain.”
“Why was Grandpa Dick up there anyway?” Jane wanted to know. “What’s the lookout for?”
“The lookout is a little house on the top of a mountain they use to watch out for forest fires in the dry season. Grandpa Dick hurt his leg fighting a house fire a couple of years ago and had to retire. But he wasn’t the kind to sit around doing nothing, so he got a job in the summer manning a lookout trying to save trees from wildfires.
“Grandpa loved the woods, even though he spent a long time cutting down trees. He helped me understand that a forest is more than just a place where wild animals roam. We use the trees themselves for masts and houses and matches."
“Would you be scared if you had to go to a lookout?”
“Lightning sure is scary, but I think Grandpa would agree that it’s a good thing to die doing something you believe in. But I hope I live long enough to teach you and all my students at Boise State how important trees are. ‘Boise’ means wood, you know, but in the sense of a forest rather than lumber.”
“Louise’s mommy taught us in Sunday School that God strikes down sinners with lightning,” Jane said. “Did God strike down Grandpa Dick because he cut down the biggest white pine tree in the world?”
That brought Hunt to a dead stop.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said hesitantly. “I think it was just an unfortunate accident that Grandpa was on that mountain when the lightning stuck. I don’t think God would kill someone for cutting down a tree, even the biggest one in the world.”
Jane looked skeptical, and Louise clearly thought Jane’s question made more sense than Hunt’s answer.
“Besides,” Hunt went on, scrambling to allay their fears and to preserve their good opinions of his father, “there’s still a biggest white pine tree.”
“I thought you said Grandpa cut it down.”
“He did, but then the second biggest white pine tree became the biggest white pine tree,” he said, thinking himself pretty clever.
“Is it as big as Grandpa’s tree?”
“Maybe not now but it could be someday. There are some mighty big white pines up along the Clearwater. I could take you to see one someday.”
“I would rather see Grandpa’s tree,” Jane said resolutely.
“Me, too,” Louise chimed in.
“But Grandpa’s tree is just a stump now. The tree isn’t there any more.”
“Maybe by the time we get there the one that’s the biggest tree now will be chopped down too,” Jane pointed out.
How right she is, Hunt thought. If Senator Norris’s plan for the Columbia goes through, many virgin stands of white pine would either be cut or drowned.
“But don’t you see?” Hunt asked. “Even if they cut down that biggest tree, there’ll always be a second biggest to take its place as the biggest tree.” It wasn’t until he heard the words out loud that he realized how wrong they sounded.
“So the biggest tree just keeps getting smaller?” Jane asked.
Hunt knew he was licked, and kept his mouth shut.
Sensing that she had won, Jane said, “When I grow up I want to be a ranger and save all the big trees from being chopped down.”
Olivia blanched at her little girl’s statement.
Hunt knew Jane had inherited his love of the outdoors and he wasn’t a bit surprised. “In any case,” he said, “I hope you have children of your own someday and I hope every one of them asks you those sorts of binder questions every day.”
Jane grinned smugly and said, “Come on, Louise, let’s go climb the apple tree. I’ll show you how.”
The house fell still, the girls’ voices outside and the quiet sounds Olivia made in the kitchen just deepening the peace. Hunt knocked the tobacco from his father’s pipe and refilled it. He struck a match and watched the flame sputter along the white pine wood.
Senator Norris is expecting a call from me in the morning, he thought. How can I tell him that the most compelling argument against the Clearwater flood control project had come from my ten-year-old daughter? How can we “use the earth for the good of the people” and still preserve our natural heritage for future generations? Do we want the biggest to get ever smaller? Questions like these bind the generations together.
The End